Abstract

Excerpted From: Jonathan Choi, Right Wing 'Environmentalism’ and Asian America, 33 Asian Am. L.J. 55 (2026) (174 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In 2019, I attended a training for environmental organizers by the Sunrise Movement. It was an emotional and exhausting weekend, full of both the anxiety of the 2020 election and the promise of a Green New Deal. We held on to the belief that our work might lead to economic prosperity and a serious effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, Sunrise was coming to grips with issues of race. It was a new movement filled with people trying their best at a time when race relations were changing rapidly. Internally, there were discussions about privilege, race, inequality, as well as how to enable more Black, Indigenous, and people of color to take leadership roles in the movement. We did not know it then, but the global COVID-19 pandemic and the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd would happen just a few months later and permanently change the movement.

Years later, I think about one exercise from that weekend. The organizers placed us into groups by race to talk about our experiences before coming together to share. Most of the group was White, but there was a sizeable group of Black participants including many of the training leaders. As a Korean American, I began to move toward other people of color before noticing that I was the only Asian American in the room.

That moment stuck with me. Over the next few years, whether I was sitting in my environmental law coursework, working as a teaching assistant in my environmental science courses, or attending events with local environmental groups, I noticed that Asian Americans were conspicuously absent. Though there have not been systematic studies of Asian American environmental attorneys, studies show that Asian American ecologists are consistently underrepresented and fail to reach positions of leadership in the field. While some of the barriers for Asian Americans are likely systemic and perhaps related to familial pressures to pursue higher-paying careers or lack of opportunity, those explanations seem overly simplistic and potentially rely on stereotypes.

While trying to figure out why there was a lack of Asian Americans in the field, I learned about Indigenous and Black critiques of conservation. For example, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass explores Indigenous ways of understanding nature as a way to supplement and expand the tools of Western science, noting how a narrower view of nature can fail to acknowledge the importance of nonhuman life. Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces uses tools from critical geography and critical race theory to discuss Black Americans’ relationship with 'the great outdoors,’ noting how slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of overt violence shape Black Americans’ perception of nature. Finally, Dorceta Taylor’s The Rise of the American Conservation Movement uses an intersectional approach to understand how race, class, and gender were instrumental in shaping conservation in the early 20th century. This wealth of scholarship demonstrates how historic conservation was deeply intertwined with genocidal, racist, and exclusionary ideas and how those ideas can creep into modern environmental efforts.

However, while this existing scholarship is grounded in the distinct histories of Indigenous peoples’ resistance to genocide and Black peoples’ resistance to slavery and Jim Crow, comparatively little scholarship has examined the interplay between environmentalism, immigration, race, and Asian American identity. Yet, including the Asian American perspective is important to understanding how environmental narratives have both shaped and been shaped by American imperialism. Given that significant Asian immigration happened in the early 20th Century as the United States was emerging as a global power, the Asian American story provides a useful recent chapter to the story of race in the United States. This is particularly true now, as understanding how environmental narratives have historically reflected attitudes about eugenics and immigration may help us navigate the current anti-immigrant political climate. By developing a more honest and complete understanding of our movement, we can do our part in building the multi-racial democracy that we have dreamed of.

This Article aims to explore the Asian American perspective through the lens of Asian American Critical Legal Studies. I argue that certain 20th century environmental narratives reflect racist and xenophobic trends in society that were echoed in concurrent animus towards Asian Americans and immigrants. Specifically, I explore how the Asian American experience moved in parallel with major developments in conservation throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. In Part I, I begin with the first half of the 20th century, discussing the eugenics and White supremacy that fueled the conservation movement alongside Asian American immigration, the consequences of Western empire building, “Yellow Peril,” and Japanese Internment. In Part II, I then turn to the second half of the 20th century, discussing overpopulation fears and the splinter ideology of ecofascism with Asian American immigration after 1965. Finally, in Part III, I end with a discussion of the Stop AAPI Hate movement during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impact on modern Asian American advocacy.

Finally, I’d like to include two prefatory notes. First, I discuss conservation and environmentalism throughout this piece. These are two distinct but closely related movements. Conservation specifically refers to the social movement that begin in the late 19th century and advocates for the protection of landscapes and wildlife. In modern times, it is primarily concerned with the protection of biodiversity and ecosystems. In contrast, the environmental movement extends to public health-adjacent measures, including reducing water and air pollution and promoting recycling; its modern iteration emerged after World War II. Though the environmental movement does have roots in much older public health measures, this piece does not discuss those extensively.

Second, much of the focus of this piece is on immigrants from East Asia. This focus mostly reflects my own biases as a Korean American, shaped by my greater familiarity with the experiences of those whose histories mirror my own. Further, given the broad diversity of the Asian continent, a full discussion would necessarily need to include everything from the partition of Palestine to the colonization of the Pacific Islands. As such, I hope you will forgive my decision to limit the discussion primarily to a subset of Asian American experiences. For a more complete treatment of Asian American history in general, I highly recommend Erika Lee’s excellent text, The Making of Asian America (2015).

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Ultimately, the stories of conservation, imperialism, immigration, and the rise of ecofascism parallel each other. When seen through the experience of Asian Americans, the language of scientific management deployed to advance conservation aims was also weaponized to justify the expansion of Western influence across the globe while excluding Asian American immigrants from the country. Nevertheless, shaped by exploitative labor markets, Asian Americans made their way to this country in the face of immense hostility. With the end of World War II, new narratives related to overpopulation emerged, just as the demand for skilled labor and the desire to win the Cold War lifted immigration restrictions. These simultaneous developments led to a growing concern that overpopulation would not only lead to environmental ruin, but social ruin. Specifically, the overpopulation narrative fed a sense of scarcity, arguing that new immigrants would take scarce jobs and otherwise strain the environment. As a result, this narrative led to a rise in right wing extremism against Asian Americans culminating first in the targeting of Vietnamese fishing communities along the Texas coast in the 1970s and, later, in bouts of ecofascist violence.

This history of race-based exclusion has shaped the history of the environmental movement and the experience of Asian Americans in this country. Despite strides to overcome this narrative of exclusion, the exclusion of those deemed “other” persists, as witnessed through the COVID-19 pandemic and current immigration enforcement.

However, our history does not dictate our future, whether that is as environmentalists or Asian Americans. Embracing our history in its full complexity and nuance is vitally important for a richer understanding of our present. Too narrow of a narrative can, in the words of Carolyn Finney:

limit both our understanding and ability to build meaningful relationships by premising our action on stories that only address one perspective or experience. We are at risk of drawing flawed conclusions that do not consider the legacy of a past that provided a different starting point for particular cultural groups.

Addressing our present democratic and environmental crises requires reckoning with the true history of our exclusion. For Asian Americans within this movement, understanding how our very presence in this nation has been shaped by both historic narratives and American imperialism is crucial to understanding our positionality. As we work to build a better world, understanding how we, Asian Americans, got here is a vital first step.

Jonathan Choi earned a Ph.D. from the Duke University Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab and graduated magna cum laude from Duke University School of Law in 2021.