At the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle last fall, one of the many historic shifts that took place in the relation between capitalism and its discontents was the blossoming of the political alliance between blue-collar labor activists and green environmentalists.

Globalization was the common enemy that united these separate arms of the international progressive movement, who in the past have often been on opposite sides of the "jobs vs. environment" issue. In a recent article in The Nation magazine, David Moberg christened this development as a "blue-green alliance."

Here in the United States, the historical animosity between blue-collar workers and environmentalists has its roots in the Vietnam conflict. Greens were associated with the counterculture opposition to the war ("War is not healthy for children and other living things"); working-class conservatives were in the minority who continued to support US involvement in Vietnam, and served disproportionately in the military. In the wake of the liberal reforms of the post- Vietnam, post-Nixon era, many of these workers became "Reagan Democrats," rejecting their traditional allegiance to the pro-union Democratic Party to express their native social conservatism.

Ronald Reagan’s full-fledged assault on the environment, opening up federal lands to exploitation and overruling many of the environmental gains of the previous decade, and his rhetorical attacks on federal regulatory agencies, hardened attitudes on both sides of the ecology question. Workers were enlisted by industry in the struggle against government regulation—especially environmental regulation.

But Reagan’s union-busting tactics in the air traffic controller strike, trickle-down economics, and the reversal of the wage growth of the postwar decades, gradually drove union workers back to the Democrats, and into the arms of strange bedfellows. Their adversaries in the culture war of the ‘80s—liberated women, uppity blacks and tree-hugging hippies—had also been pretty much driven completely out of the Republican Party, by the Bible-thumping, Confederate-flag-waving, property rights reactionaries who had taken over the GOP.

Finding itself in campaign coalitions with people who had been equally disen- franchised by Republican policies, labor returned to its historic roots in the move- ment for social justice. And with justice and basic human rights as their common goal, labor and environmentalists sometimes joined together against the pro-corporate "Third Way" policies of the Democratic president, especially on matters of inter- national trade. These joint efforts got a boost with the election of activist John Sweeney to the presidency of the AFL-CIO, and reached a culmination in the anti-WTO demon- strations in Seattle.

Following the Seattle epiphany, the opponents of laissez-faire globalization have been reflecting on how to move forward with their successful coalition. Many of the same groups who came together in Seattle are organizing protests against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington DC in early April. And at a February meeting of the executive council of union presidents, Sweeney said, "American unions need to build a new internationalism—one focused on building international solidarity around a pro- gressive, pro-worker, pro-environment and pro-community international economic policy."

These words should be music to the ears of environmentalists, especially here in West Virginia, where organized labor has sided with the coal industry on the issue of mountaintop removal mining. But precisely because the split between labor and environ- mentalists here has been so divisive, West Virginia environmentalists are in a unique position to move this historic process of coalition building forward.

In his Nation article, David Moberg notes that the most problematic issue standing in the way between labor and the environmental community has been global warming. He writes, "No union has a strong self-interest in adopting measures to prevent global warming, and a few didn’t even want labor and environmentalists to talk. The United Mine Workers (UMW), for example, sees reduction of carbon emissions as a death sentence for coal mining and has thus far driven labor policy on climate change." (Italics mine.)

The fact that the policy of the most important labor organization in America on the most critical environmental question of our times is being set by a union with potentially the most to lose from doing the right thing, obviously represents a daunting challenge to environmentalists. But the effort to force coal companies in West Virginia to comply with existing environmental regulations, resulting in federal judge Charles Haden’s momentous decision last October, has brought the whole dynamic of industry, environment and employment into critical focus here. And as the ancient Chinese oracle I Ching recognizes, "crisis" can always be turned into "opportunity."

Coal miners know that even if the government rescinded all environmental regulations tomorrow, the economics of the industry are such that they will still be losing jobs due to changes in technology and mining techniques. Mountaintop removal has done a lot more than the Clean Water Act to shrink UMW’s membership. The record coal production in West Virginia in recent years, with the smallest workforce in nearly a century, bears testimony to that. It’s estimated that almost half the nation’s coal miners will be out of work by 2006.

Facing this dismal future, underground miners are beginning to look at the industry somewhat differently than their strip-mining brethren. These strains are becoming evident, for example, in the lawsuit the UMW filed recently against Governor Cecil Underwood. Underwood had violated legal process by appointing a political ally—an outspoken miner laid off by Arch Coal Co. when it closed its controversial Dal-Tex mine—to the West Virginia Coal Mine Safety Board, without the union’s approval. One of the objections to the appointee was that he lacked deep mine experience.

Other strains are beginning to show, too. When Underwood made moves to shut down all the state’s strip mines to force a crisis in the immediate wake of the Haden decision, miners balked and Underwood reversed himself. The historic split between business and labor is threatening to open up again over the question of health benefits to retired miners, as coal operators, sensing weakness in a declining union, try to renege on earlier promises. And the upcoming state and national elections will align unions against Underwood and his business cronies, and in many races put them on the same side as environmentalists.

Although it sometimes seems like the chasm between the UMW and West Virginia environmentalists couldn’t get any wider, there is also a history of working together (UMW’s endorsement of a national park at Blackwater Canyon, for example) that holds promise for future cooperation. For our part, the key will be recognizing that rapid changes in the global economy have turned things like good-paying jobs, workers’ health and safety, and decent universal health care into truly environmental issues; and con- vincing miners that we want to work together with them to achieve our common goals.

If we in West Virginia can turn that key, it has the potential to open up a whole new era of human-centered politics. And the whole blue green Earth will thank us for it.