"Archival Power" and the Future of Environmental Movement History

Abstract

In the spring of 1998, I began work on a history of air pollution control policy, focusing on new mechanisms of local control that more actively included representatives of the public. In Pittsburgh, these new possibilities for local activism had contributed to the rise of the Group Against Smog and Pollution (GASP) in 1969. When I went looking for archival documents that could explain the history, demographics, rhetoric, and strategy of this environmental advocacy group three decades later, I found only strangely scattered pieces. By the late 1990s the leadership of GASP did not know if any material had ever been donated to any local archive; they were several generations removed from the original activists, many of whom had passed on, left the cause, or moved to Florida. Over the next twelve years, I attempted to chase down the records of individuals and the group. I swooped in to claim and sort discarded garbage bags full of paper when the group moved offices, and pursued material that some activists had donated to a library (which did not have any provisions for archival storage) without the knowledge of the rest of the group's leaders (who did not know where the records had gone). The only point in time that all of the records I used to write my dissertation came together in one place, with professional archivists assessing, sorting, and organizing the material, was after I had finished the resulting book—thirteen years after the spring of 1998.

I take this experience as one piece of evidence that the archival records of environmental activism in the 1960s are only now becoming ripe for historians. After all, with the transformation in the archival status of GASP records over the last decade, I can safely say that the book I have just finished would be a very different one if I were to write it today. Simply acquiring and organizing the materials consumed most of my time in the disserta-tion research. Today, with the same materials now located in professionally managed archives, I could spend more time concentrating on the context in which this organization developed its political responses to changing legal and legislative opportunities. I would also have a significantly different perspective on these materials were I to encounter them as a chronologically or thematically organized set of records inside an archive. While these anecdotal observations feel logical, when I began discussing the point with other schol-ars I became unsatisfied with my own limited viewpoint. This article results from an attempt to test out these assumptions through journalistic interviews with archivists throughout the Mid-Atlantic region. In so doing, I hope to consider the ways that "archival power" has shaped, and will continue to direct, the future of environmental history in the Mid-Atlantic.