1.9: Liberation Theory Part 5

Environmental Justice

There is much important work we can all do to fight for a livable environment. Many people think only of personal lifestyle choices such as recycling or driving less, when they think about the environment, and they often feel discourages about how small those actions are compared to how vast the problem is. It is still possible to keep the world livable for the human species and to keep other species form going extinct. But getting there will require that we challenge the powerful forces that are driving the climate and biodiversity crises. 

Note

The following is a short excerpt from Chapter 7 of the book Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change by Cynthia Kaufman

When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, it got a lot of people to take climate change seriously. In the popular imagination, it bcame clear that on the horizon of our existence horrific things were going to happen. The polar ice caps would melt, coral reefs would die, hurricanes and droughts would become more severe, and the oceans would rise. Gore ended his film with a list of things one could do to address this catastrophic problem: change the kind of light bulbs you use, drive less, write your congressperson. There was something deeply disturbing to many of us who do social justice work about the end of the film. Were those solu-tions really enough to deal with a problem of such apocalyptic proportions?

Many people in the environmental movement feel that their job is to ring the alarm bells and get everyone to see the depth of the problems. The hope is that people will be shocked into action. It turns out that the opposite is the case. Most people know climate change is a serious problem, and the more they get a sense that the things they can do are tiny compared to the scope of the problem, the more disempowered they feel. This all leads to a sense of paralysis that looks like apathy and denial.

I shared in that general sense of paralysis that followed that film, until I read George Monbiot’s book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning.1 In the book, Monbiot shows that the kinds of changes needed to solve the climate crisis are challenging, but within reach. He argues that we need policies to push a shift toward massive investments in public transportation, policies that invest in new energy infrastructure, policies that get people to make their houses more energy efficient, and serious investments in re-newable energy. The main takeaway I got from the book was that there are enough resources for everyone to live well on this planet in sustainable ways, and that the actions needed were more political than individual.

Many people are working on cheaper and better sources of renewable energy, more sustainable processes for making things, and better ways of organizing our cities. Even with existing technical knowledge we could build a world in which everyone has a comfortable life and we stay within our ecological limits. But we won’t be able to get there simply by each of us being green consumers. Rather what needs to happen is the development of policies that promote the use of renewable energy and efficient ways of doing things. That is a political problem. Once I realized all of that, I became a climate change activist.

Currently, I am working to get institutions to divest from fossil fuels. The idea behind the fossil fuel divestment movement is that the main thing blocking a move to the kind of things that are needed to make this massive shift is the power that the fossil fuel industry has over our political systems. And there are reasons for them to push for things to stay the same. If we are to stay within safe levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, then more than 75 percent of the assets of fossil fuel companies will need to re-main unburned.2 Those companies have a lot to lose, and they are some of the most powerful entities in the world, with economies larger than most countries.

In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein writes that dealing with the climate crisis is in alignment with a set of practices necessary for building a more socially just world. She argues that as she came to understand the things needed to solve the problem of climate change, she 

began to see all kinds of ways that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change—how it could be the best argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding of local economies: to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect indigenous land rights—all of which would help to end grotesque levels if inequality within our nations and between them.

For much of the twentieth century, environmental politics were on a different path from the rest of the world of social justice. Many environ-mentalists had argued that people were the problem, and that nature was something to be kept pristine and separate from people who were seen as a scourge. Others were convinced that if we each changed our personal consumption habits the problem would go away. Klein is part of a growing environmental justice movement that sees the deep connections between environmental problems and other problems in the social world.

Environment and race

Many people see Warren County, North Carolina, as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. It was there, in 1982, that the first demonstrations took place that explicitly linked issues of race to the environment. The state of North Carolina had decided to place a toxic landfill in Warren County, which was overwhelmingly populated by people of low income and people of color. 

Over five hundred protesters were arrested in demonstrations led by some of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations. The Congressional Black Caucus, United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and others came together to raise the issues of race, class, and the environment.

While the demonstrations were not able to stop the landfill, the pro-tests had a few successes. They resulted in the Government Accounting Office doing a nationwide study on race, income, and environmental destruction. Residents were able to force the county to monitor the leach-ing of PCBs out of the landfill and into their drinking water. And they forged a powerful coalition that has since been working nationwide to fight against racial and economic discrimination in the impact of environmental destruction.

The environmental justice movement focuses on race and the ways that environmental destruction has disproportionate impacts on people of color. It also focuses on class and the ways that the poor are disproportionately impacted, and on capitalism as an important force in generating poverty and unaccountable corporate behavior.

There is a tradition in the environmental movement of seeing environmental problems as fundamentally about wilderness. This part of the movement was developed by people who liked to visit wilderness and were concerned that it be protected. Thus, they tend to focus on the development of national parks and the protection of endangered species.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Copy and Paste Caption here. (CC BY-SA 4.0; Averyaudio via Wikimedia Commons)

Since its beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, the mainstream environmental movement also focused on issues such as urban air pollution, clean water, and occupational health and safety. Still the image of the movement, and the cultural politics of many in it, led to an impression that environmentalism was something for middle-class white people to pursue. And many of the white and middle-class people in the movement carried their racial and class blind spots into the work they did, often not valuing the different perspectives brought by people of color or their leadership. 

People in the environmental justice movement define the environment as the whole set of relations between people and the rest of nature. The environment includes the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ways our cities are designed, the ways food is grown and marketed, etc. By looking at environmental destruction through the lens of the experiences of people of color, the environmental justice movement has forced a major shift of perspective in other parts of the environmental movement.

The environmental justice movement started out in communities of color wanting to challenge the racial politics of the movement as a whole. The organization Urban Habitat, based in San Francisco, is a leader in this movement. It started the journal Race, Poverty and the Environment, which links environmental issues with movements to protect farm workers, immigrant rights organizations, those concerned with the quality of life in urban areas, and struggles against neocolonialism and for the sovereignty of indigenous people in the United States and throughout the world.

The disproportionate impact of environmental destruction can be seen in the following facts, outlined by Mark Dowie in Losing Ground:

More than 200 million tons of radioactive waste lie in tailings piles on Indian reservations. The rate of cancers affecting the sex organs among Navajo teenagers is 17 times the national rate. Every year 300,000 farm laborers (mostly Hispanic) suffer pesticide-related illnesses and disorders. Black urban male children are almost three times more likely to die of asthma than their white counterparts.

People in the movement have found that when whites complain about environmental problems they are much more likely to be taken seriously and have their problems addressed than when problems are raised by people of color.

In 1994, the Sierra Club had a bitter internal fight over these issues. At that time, voters in the state of California were considering a ballot initiative, Proposition 187, aimed at limiting the civil rights of undocumented immigrants. Many members of the Sierra Club supported this move because they believed that as the population of the state increased, there would be an increase in stressors on the environment. One way to protect the environment was to limit population by making immigration less attractive. Many other people inside the Sierra Club supported the politics of the environmental justice movement and promoted the view that the main-stream environmental movement needed to be more hospitable to the interests of people of color. They argued that the population increase caused by immigration was not a significant cause of environmental destruction, and that the proposition amounted to nothing more than scapegoating. The internal fight was intense, and in the end those advocating for the rights of immigrants won.

Environment and capitalism

In addition to the focus on race, and the importance of voices of people from low-income communities of color, environmental justice advocates point to capitalism’s drive for profit as an impulse toward environmental destruction. Capitalism allows producers to externalize many of their costs so that the producers don’t need to pay for the costs associated with what they produce.13 This means, for example, that even though cars clearly create smog, and smog significantly increases the rate of asthma, car manufacturers are not taxed for the cost of caring for people who develop asthma. Cars remain relatively cheap and health care remains a separate, and for many people impossible to afford, expense.

Because of this externalization, the pressures to limit automobile use or lessen the pollution they generate must come from social movements. To some extent, government has represented the interests of those negatively affected by cars, but it often capitulates to the power of the automobile manufacturers and the ideology that they are not responsible for the pollution created by their products. And capitalism has led to a situation where corporations have a disproportionate amount of influence on government policy.

In his book Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, Tom Athanasiou focuses on the drive for profit among transnational corporations (TNCs) as the main engine of environmental destruction. These corpora-tions “play country against country, ecosystem against ecosystem, simply because it is good business sense to do so. Low wages and safety standards, environmental pillage, ever-expanding desires—are all symptoms of economic forces that, embodied in TNCs, are so powerful they threaten to overcome all constraint by the society they nominally serve.”

Solving the climate crisis involves deep challenges to entrenched power. Given the power that fossil fuel companies have over our political system, solving our environmental problem will not be easy. It will require an end to subsidies that make fossil fuel so cheap, strong regulations and planning for improved building and transit practices, massive investment in better energy grids, and massive incentives for renewable energy. But as Naomi Klein argues, dealing with climate crisis “could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well.”15 

As we move to a greener economy, many environmental justice activists are working hard to make sure that the solutions chosen are ones that benefit everyone. Organizations such as Green for All and the Emerald Cities Project are working to get resources to low-income communities of color to get jobs in the emerging areas of solar installation and weatherization of older homes. All of these authors see a transition to a new sustainable and socially just economy as growing from our work to solve the climate crisis.

Conclusion 

The environmental problems before us are immense. Solving them will re-quire a deep transformation of the capitalist tendency to hold no one responsible for protecting the common good. Global survival will require the development of transnational mechanisms, such as the very successful Montreal protocol on ozone depletion, that force national governments to keep companies from producing chemicals that destroy the atmosphere. It will require the phasing out of fossil fuels as the primary energy source for industrial, home heating, and transportation applications. And it will require new ways of meeting the needs of the global population while addressing the economic aspirations of low-income people in the Global South.

Most people are concerned about the environment and want to see policies enacted that will protect it. Environmental issues might serve as an important unifying set of interests for people to work together for a better world for everyone. This will only happen if people are brought to under-stand the ways that their fates are tied together with the fates of those living in the Global South and the nonhuman parts of the biosphere.

People all around the world are fighting against trade deals that favor transnational corporations, against genetically modified organisms, and for sustainable and just economic policies. There is still time to make the transitions required for a sustainable planet, and more people are seeing with more clarity what is needed to get us on that path.

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Reading Response Questions

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. What do you think about focusing on personal lifestyle choices versus focusing on larger solutions to environmental problems?
3. Based on the reading, what do you see as connections between racism and the environmental crisis?
4. Based on the reading, what do you see as connections between capitalism and the climate crisis?
5. What gives you hope for keeping our planet livable for our species?

Attributions 

• Adapted from "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman is copyrighted. It has been reproduced with permission from the author and publisher