Both the labor and environmental movements have recently experienced significant crises of faith in their ability to mobilize enough popular support to carry on with their respective missions. At a 2004 meeting of the Environmental Grantmakers Association, a report entitled “The Death of Environmentalism” proclaimed that environmentalism as a special interest group had accomplished its goal of raising awareness but had ultimately failed to galvanize a sustainable social movement. Mirroring that debate within the environmental movement, in 2004 the Service Employees International Union called for major reforms within the AFL-CIO; demanding that the labor federation focus on organizing new workers rather than defending its existing members. This divide within the AFL-CIO ultimately led to the formation of the Change to Win coalition, with several other major unions joining the SEIU in a new reformist coalition federation.

For some scholars of these two historically powerful social movements, including myself, crises such as these signal a need for a new approach for acknowledging the limitations of the past and identifying a route moving forward. In Blue-Green Coalitions, I argue that one possible solution to faltering memberships and political roadblocks is coalition building. And as Laura Henry is so careful to point out in her review, the potential for coalition building largely depends on the interests of labor, as the environmental movement has made several attempts to capitalize on shared interests that have failed to result in cross-movement solidarity. Are shared concerns with protecting human health the common ground that these blue-green coalitions can be based on? Perhaps I am optimistic about the future of coalition building, but Henry's call for attention to the national debate around green collar jobs is appropriate. I believe the question that must be raised while that public's attention is focused on the promise of a green economy is whether these ‘green’ jobs should also be ‘blue’ jobs. This potential shift in the framing of how policymakers and advocates define green collar jobs is the next challenge for proponents of blue-green coalitions to address.

The role of political opportunities in both the formation of blue-green coalitions and their capacity for political success is important. Past research on labor-environmental alliances found that the idea of progressive movements uniting when threatened by a common enemy was false. Blues and greens actually were more likely to fight each other during a limited political opportunity environment. While acknowledging the significance of this trend, I argue in Blue-Green Coalitions that this negative effect of political opportunities is relevant only when blue-green coalitions are based on unsound foundations. The relatively novel approaches of articulating a health-based coalition collective action frame opened up new political opportunities, but in nontraditional manners. Hence the somewhat contradictory effects of political opportunity. I agree with Henry that more can be done to situate the future of labor-environmental coalitions and hopefully as we move forward into an era of the green economy, we see more organizations work together and are able to learn from those coalitions as well.