"Death" is such a harsh term -- can't we say "transition to a happier place"?
Adrienne Maree Brown.
Photo: Sophia Wallace.
Or, how else can I put this ... You don't have to fall out of the tree. Just climb down and join us on the ground. Let's talk.
If you work on environmental issues, chances are you don't know me. I represent the other other side. The one outside the greenhouse. I'm young, I'm colored, I'm female, I'm urban -- and environmentalism isn't reaching me like it needs to.
So I want to add a few thoughts to the "Death of Environmentalism" discussion: first, an argument for why environmentalism cannot die; second, a snapshot of who the environmental movement is missing; and finally, a few of the practical shifts I see as necessary for making this a worthwhile transition instead of a death whose dramatizing serves no one.
We live in the most frightening of times, the most fearless of times. Our president, the leader of the most profligate world power in recent history, opposes environmental regulations at home and multilateralism abroad. The majority of our country's citizens have been successfully lulled into thinking that the environment will somehow sustain itself. We don't have good examples of sustainable culture; instead of taking care of our own waste, we dump it on the rest of the world. Rather than encouraging careful resource use, pushing for more innovative and effective products and technologies, and promoting renewable energy, our government goes to war to hoard the natural resources of other sovereign nations.
We see it. The people you aren't reaching are not blind, we aren't unmoved. More and more young people are realizing every day that the whole world is paying the price for the way we live, and we are waking up to that reality with shame and with a desire to change it. But we often don't connect that desire, or the work we do in our own lives, with the environmental movement.
And with good reason. Come with me on a little journey called: I'm young, I'm colored, and I need a job. I need an education to get that job, and then I need that job to pay off the student loans. I gotta figure out some way to get to and from school or work as gas prices go up and public transportation costs go up. I have to hustle all day long, have to hope I don't get arrested while working for being Arab or black or Latino or Pakistani, have to go home and eat some packaged non-food and then turn and try to love someone when neither of us has access to the condoms and sex education we need to be really safe and empowered in our interactions. If I'm lucky, I'll get to take a minute and dull my mind with some substance and watch a couple of hours of television where humans cut open their skin and try to put someone else's face on, or compete to eat bugs for a million dollars. And at some point I get to sleep in my tiny home with a window that looks into someone else's window.
At the end of that day, I may not separate the glass from the paper, the plastic from the cans. I may not carry my own water bottle everywhere I go. For a lot of young people right now, the environment is an issue for the privileged or the issueless. People who feel they are becoming extinct care less about the extinction of owls and oak trees. We sit on buses that pump nasty black smoke into our air, dreaming of owning SUVs. Many of us don't see real, unfenced trees anymore. We don't see stars -- the blue of our skies is unreal. The natural world is becoming a place to visit or dream of, a privilege for those who can find work outside cities, or a trap for those in the migrant worker population who lack fair wages and work situations.
Overall, too many young people see the struggles of humans as separate from the struggles for a healthy environment. It isn't because we have bad intentions -- it's because a generation that does not care about the impact of its lifestyle on the environment can be easily manipulated for corporate greed. We are getting played out. And unfortunately, the environmental movement has actually helped enforce that disconnect by seeming to draw divisions between the natural world and its human inhabitants -- and by seeming to worry more about the former than the latter.
That is the context for the next stage of environmentalism. You have an oppressed, depressed, furious mass waiting to be mobilized. And sure, some of us eat at McDonald's and wear leather shoes -- but we feel it is possible to demand better from our government and from ourselves for our environment. We feel it is imperative to connect the different survival struggles we are engaged in if we truly hope to sustain a viable movement for change. You will not die if you try to link hands with us in this struggle, if you try to meet us halfway.
We are in a unique organizing space right now, fresh off the election, understanding that it is imperative to combine electoral organizing with community organizing with issue organizing, in new and unique ways. Environmentalists have done groundbreaking work in this arena, getting citizens informed and involved around policies and petitions. But the movement has failed to reach the urban masses, and it has fallen prey to the marketing of the right, which casts caring about the planet as goofy liberalism instead of instinctual self-preservation.
So I offer three transition steps for the leadership of the environmental movement:
- Change your framework. You have to frame environmental issues in a way that makes sense for us and relates to the issues we care about. But you will have to get closer to us and to the work we're doing in order to make that happen. We're talking about racism -- meet us there. I know the research shows one thing, the statistics make your case; but they also make a case that the most pressing issues in my life should be stopping the prison industrial complex, stopping the HIV that's ravaging my community, stopping the president from cutting Upward Bound funding. There's a place for you in each of those battles, just as there's a place for those activists in the battle for the environment. It is not either/or. The loss of your borders won't mean a dilution of your vision, it will simply mean a larger, greater, more inclusive vision.
- Be easy and appealing. You need to turn up the heat and the appeal for environmentally friendly products and practices, while putting time and energy into bringing down the price. It's not written anywhere that everything recycled has to look used and cost twice as much. Lose that sage color scheme and price your wares to Target. If you aren't willing to be a little savvy for the survival of the world, then how committed are you? Take five minutes and catch up to what appeals to the greatest number. The environmental movement needs to make its home in this real world of ours.
- Stop the environmental evangelism. I say this as a loving criticism of the people who are at the forefront of this work: you often get so caught up in the sky-is-falling mentality of environmental work that you can only see the urgency of your own issue. That's not how to approach folks. Fiscally conservative people of color vote in their economic interest, not because someone approaches them on the street apoplectic about mercury in the water. Mercury in the water is a completely relevant topic for black folks, but not if we can't see our faces on and in that movement, and see our interests as clearly part of the platform. You've got to talk to folks about the things that will move them -- which means you've got to identify how your work relates to the issues that matter to other people.
As a young woman of color who doesn't do environmental work for a living, I believe environmentalism needs to become something that the masses can integrate into how we live our lives. It's nothing personal. Every issue-based movement needs to think in terms of solidarity and collaboration right now.
How this discussion can move forward into worthwhile proposals and actions -- that is the question. Stepping back and thinking about a vision for a movement is absolutely necessary. Dramatizing its slow and agonizing death borders on indulgent. Too often, people rush to say something is dying when it's merely in a period of transition. Be less presumptuous. Shedding an old skin is not death but renewal, and those who follow the life of the planet should grasp that better than anyone else.
Chuck Norris on Copenhagen
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Climate Citizen: Majora Carter
Comments
View as Flat
jdhlax Posted 6:45 am
15 Mar 2005
The problem with arguments like those of Ms. Brown is that they fail to account for priorities, which determine whether a person cares enough about an issue to take any action on it or even vote for someone who will. For example, while I support Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the latter day Malcom X, and the original Black Panthers, their issues take a back seat to environmental issues for me, and I assume for other environmentalists. I would therefore, for example, not support a candidate who was strong on racial issues but was willing to sell the forest to the nearest timber beast. (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and "Lula" in Brazil are perfect examples of leftists who are willing to destroy their ecosystems in the name of egalitarianism. Both of them have lost my support as a result, and environmentalists should not support people like this.)
In contrast, a person of color living in the hood almost certainly does not give any priority to preservation of wilderness or wildlife, even if she supports that preservation. That person would not support a candidate who would preserve trees but is a racist.
The best thing we can do is work together, but continue working on our own issues. I strongly agree that we should make the alliances that Ms. Brown suggests, but we should not change our message, only the rhetoric needed to convince others. While they are far too conservative for me and I rarely sing their praises, Sierra Club is doing just that, with a strong environmental justice campaign and a project to take inner city kids to natural areas to experience what they would otherwise be unable to. This, instead of watering ourselves down, is what is needed.
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Norris Posted 7:20 am
15 Mar 2005
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jdhlax Posted 8:00 am
15 Mar 2005
First about me: I am lower-middle class at best, struggling to start a practice as an environmental attorney. I am not and have never been a mainstream environmentalist, though I have worked with mainstream groups. I've worked with Earth First! and for Greenpeace and on a one-time project for Sierra Club. I'm biocentric, which means that I believe that all forms of life have an equal right to live (i.e., humans are not better or more important), and I'm a deep ecologist, which means that I feel that we're all connected, so that what you do to, say a tree, you do to me.
Second, while there are certainly some rich people who call themselves environmentalists -- I would argue that this is an oxymoron, because in this society one must cause much ecological harm in order to become or stay rich -- the number of people like that who I've met working in the environmental movement can be counted on one hand. The average enviro is of below average income and certainly does not live in a gated community.
Finally, your post shows that leftists can be just as bad as right wingers when it comes to the environment. Neither of you give it any priority, which is just as bad as not caring about it. What is your rationale for saying, as all of those who espouse your position have without any articulated reason, that environmentalists have an obligation to work on issues that are not our priority?
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Randy Olson Posted 8:31 am
15 Mar 2005
Wanting to add a little diversity, I asked a young African-American filmmaker friend, Ifeanyi Njoku, to recruit a few black comics. He called a week later and said none of them were interested -- they felt the whole subject of conservation (particularly ocean conservation) was too much of a white people's issue.
So I asked him to show this a little more clearly by going down to Crenshaw in L.A. and doing some person-on-the-street interviews, which he did with comic actor Alex Thomas. His 4 minute film ended up being one of the 7 winners (of 42 contestants) and serves as just sort of a comic representation of how distant these issues that some of us assume are universal can be to other folks who, as Ms. Brown noted, "have to hustle all day long." To many of them the word "greenpeace" means literally only money or something to smoke which just illustrates that we don't all live in the same world of communications and priorities. And by the way, I staged the same film the next year in Kansas with white people at a country western music festival and got even more unenlightened replies.
You can view Ifeanyi's film at: http://www.shiftingbaselines.org/comedy2.html
- Randy Olson, Director
Shifting Baselines (http://www.shiftingbaselines.org)
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Kristin McGuire Posted 8:33 am
15 Mar 2005
It may sound good -- in sound bites and in theory -- not to "water down" the movement or its message, but are you willing to forsake larger-scale action (and impact) for the sake of the message? What good is the message if it fails to resonate with (or worse, it alienates) the masses who can actually make a difference and accelerate achievement of our end-goal? Do you want to stubbornly hang on to a "message" that isn't working, or get real results?
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Emily Cunningham Posted 9:09 am
15 Mar 2005
For example, while I support Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the latter day Malcom X, and the original Black Panthers, their issues take a back seat to environmental issues for me, and I assume for other environmentalists.
You assume incorrectly. Racial justice does NOT take a back seat to environmental issues for me. Can't you see that racism is intimately connected to environmental degradation? Don't you think poverty-- people struggling for resources, people struggling for their very survival-- is a huge hindrance for "environmental" welfare? This unwillingness to work to end racism, to see its quite obvious connection to the "environment," and to give it the priority it deserves in the mainstream environmental community is exactly why enviros are seen as (and are) out of touch. It's a ginormous reason why we're being ineffective. To permanently create a healthy place "where we live, work, and play" (language stolen from the environmental justice community to describe the environment) we MUST fight to end racism. Yes, we can each work in our corner and do our piece, but we must work side by side those working to end racism. Indeed, we must realize that what we're doing as part of creating a sustainable planet is creating a planet where each person's life is treated as just as valuable as any other person's life. We cannot create the world we want any other way.
Oh and another thing about this sentence,
In contrast, a person of color living in the hood almost certainly does not give any priority to preservation of wilderness or wildlife, even if she supports that preservation.
Jdhlax, this is because of racism. If you were worried about crime, your friends and brothers getting locked up or killed, finding a job, making sure your kids are getting a fighting chance in school- things you have to deal with because of racism- saving some trees in a far away place is not going to be the first thing on your mind. Even though you may want to make a difference. You're especially not going to want to be involved if the people leading in green organizations seem to care more about the trees than you and your family.
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Norris Posted 11:04 am
15 Mar 2005
I was not referring to you. I was referring to the $6 billion per year inside the beltway, blue-state-foundation-funded BANANA NIMBY mainstream environmental movement.
They do not cross the Anacostia River except to visit for an occasional protest that supports one of their issues.
Of course, there are strict limits to integration and I support freedom of association. That is why I formed the African American Environmentalist Association 20 years ago. Again, in terms of the needs of the black community, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are right.
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Nashville Earth Mom Posted 12:24 pm
15 Mar 2005
In other words, I have lived the life Ms. Brown describes. I'm still mostly in it. I know the environmental issues, I want to live more sustainably than I am, but it's a struggle out there!
The environmental movement doesn't need to "change its cause," and that's not what Ms. Brown is suggesting. What it does need is to learn how to help people like me understand why they should give a darn, and then help them figure out how they can help do something about this mess--while helping themselves.
The first part's really fairly easy. As noted, many environmental issues are also economic justice issues (no matter what color is on the face of the poor this week).
If I could just expand on that list:
Clean water: we need it for the sake of the water and wildlife, but also so that the impoverished humans have a better chance to be as healthy as those who can afford water filters.
Clean air: for the sake of the air and the birds, but also to cut down on the asthma that is so frustratingly expensive for the working poor to treat.
Access to condoms and decent sex ed: to keep the human population down, surely--but also to cut down on HIV, and to break the cycle of unwanted early pregancy that keeps families locked in poverty.
The list of common causes goes on and on. But the disconnect between environmentalists and the working poor is often huge.
A case in point:
Last year I saw a listing for a quarterly "environmental living on a budget" magazine. I was interested--until I learned that it cost $15 per issue (not per year). To me, this was a ridiculously prohibitive price.
And then, I saw it was a startup project by someone living in a small town in a small northern state--a state that the media depicts to me as nothing more than a wealthy bedroom community for a larger urban area.
I'm afraid my immediate reaction was, "Stupid yuppie suburbanites. They don't have a clue how real people live, or what 'budget' really means!"
If I was thinking it, others are thinking it.
Environmentalists have got to get that clue, and show they have it. Or they will be written off as part of the problem.
When that happens, we all lose--but our planet, and the working poor struggling to survive on it, lose the most of all.
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jdhlax Posted 1:56 pm
15 Mar 2005
Emily, you have started in the middle of the problem and confused it for the root. The causes of the problems you describe ("poverty-- people struggling for resources, people struggling for their very survival") are overpopulation and overconsumption, not racism, which is another problem entirely. Of course white people can try to prevent non-whites from getting what the latter groups need to survive or thrive, but what does that have to do with environmentalism or environmentalists? Racism is a different problem that, for its victims, exacerbates the problems caused by overpopulation and overconsumption. (And, BTW, white people are overpopulated, too, just in case you were going to argue that raising that issue is racist.)
If, as you say, "[r]acial justice does NOT take a back seat to environmental issues" for you, I seriously question whether you are an environmentalist, because that label is reserved for those of us who give priority to the environment. Exactly what priority do you give the environment when you say that an issue that affects some members of just one, overpopulated species is just as important?
"Can't you see that racism is intimately connected to environmental degradation?" Nope, because the former is simply not a major cause of the latter, regardless of how much those whose priority is racism would like to believe that it is. This is not to say that environmental harm is not sometimes exacerbated by racism or poverty, but those problems are far from the root cause.
Environmentalists' "unwillingness to work to end racism, to see its quite obvious connection to the 'environment,' and to give it the priority it deserves in the mainstream environmental community is exactly why enviros are seen as (and are) out of touch." Huh? Out of touch with whom? The majortiy of Americans are racist! The cops who beat up Rodney King were not convicted even though there was a video of the beating. Those cops would probably still be in prison if the beating victim had been white. No, the reason we're seen as out-of-touch, is that most people in this society, while espousing to be environmentalists, care very little about the environment unless they're personally poisoned by the air, water, or food. And sure, they don't want cute animals or their nice views destroyed, but they don't give any priorty to those concerns.
The reason that "a person of color living in the hood almost certainly does not give any priority to preservation of wilderness or wildlife" is the same reason that the vast majority of people in this society don't (see preceding paragraph). Yes, they're even more unlikely to give those issue priority than people of greater means who are not repressed by racism or poverty, but those problems are far from being the reason that issues concerning non-humans get low priorty in this society. Look at the Native Americans who survived the European genocide. Most live in abject poverty, yet they still treat the land, air, water, plants, and other animals with proper respect. The Onondaga are a perfect, recent example. Read this short article http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=7318 and specifically notice this quote by the tribe's spiritual leader: "Our concern is for the water, the land, the air. They are not well." Native Americans are the poorest ethnic group in the U.S., yet they still give the environment priority. Seems it's time to rethink your conclusions.
Finally, I suggest you read Paul Watson's perfect reply to the bunk that environmentalism is dead. It is far from it, environmentalists are more IN TOUCH with the Earth and what's really important than are leftists who think that humans are the end all and be all of creation, and we real environmentalists refuse to give priority to any issue above, or even equal to, that of the environment.
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jdhlax Posted 2:09 pm
15 Mar 2005
The reason we should support poor people and people of color is that it's the right thing to do, not because it could gain victory on certain issues. The alliances proposed here would make all of us stronger, but don't delude yourselves into thinking that these alliances would put us in the majority.
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Emily Cunningham Posted 6:21 pm
15 Mar 2005
We come to environmentalism from fundamentally different perspectives and I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. However much I might disagree with you, I do appreciate the care you have for the environment and the passion in which you stand up for your beliefs. I think your post speaks for itself, but I'll respond to a couple of points.
Have you seen all the data connecting poverty with race? Try googling "poverty and race." You say the problem is over consumption and overpopulation. Well, one huge, if not critical, factor in overpopulation is poverty, which is linked to race. The world's poor are having more children to help them deal with the effects of poverty. More children = more workers = more people to take care of parents as they age.
You "question whether [I am] an environmentalist, because that label is reserved for those of us who give priority to the environment." I disagree with your assessment of what it means to be an environmentalist. In order to properly diagnose the root problems of environmental destruction it is critical that we understand its connection to institutional racism (and other isms). I don't think we need to make problems hierarchical and find one more important (i.e. "prioritize" it more) than another. Rather, we need to see how they reinforce and compound one another. If being an environmentalist means narrowly defining my issues as those subjectively labeled as "environmental" while refusing to see its connection to other issues, than you're right, I'm not one. And I wouldn't want to be. And neither would scores of others (that's what I meant about being out of touch).
However, like you, I care about our environment and want to make things right in the world. It seems we have different frameworks on how to best be effective. Hearing about deforestation, specie extinction, and pollution literally pains me just as AIDS ravaging Africa, world poverty, and war break my heart. How we treat each other and how we treat Mama Earth are not so different, eh?
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wallrock Posted 3:33 am
16 Mar 2005
This is exactly the kind of thing we environmentalists (if I am allowed to use that term) need to avoid if we ever want to be anything other than a small core of dedicated but irrelevant activists. Being an environmentalist isn't some equivalent of a 32nd level Shriner. There's not a test you have to pass. Jeff, I understand that you are a committed deep ecologist, and I applaud you for the veracity of your beliefs, but how do you believe your cause will prevail if you insist on discrediting anyone who doesn't live up to your level of piety?
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lucas Posted 5:08 am
16 Mar 2005
The only quibble I might have with Adrienne's piece is when it comes to the pricing of supposedly environmentally (and worker) friendly products. Telling folks to bring down prices is obviously easier said that done. The fact that crappy, harmful food is often cheaper and more readily assessable, or that buying recycled toilette paper (again, for example) costs more than double the tree-destroying kind is a central dilemma of capitalism itself. For one, the capitalist producer is always looking for ways to privatize the profits (earnings for the company) and socialize the environmental and social costs (considerations often left out of the pricing of goods... and left for the public to redress in terms of pollution clean-up or providing health care for uninsured employees, etc.). Lowering the retail costs of goods, even for eco-friendly products, either means cutting the profit margin, reducing wages or material costs, or producing a more inferior product.
And secondly, the individual consumer will almost invariably (and understandably) tend to buy the cheaper of the goods out of self-interest over long-term ecological concerns. There is a case to be made to convince people that it is an ethical responsibility to only buy goods that aren't exploiting workers or destroying the planet. But focusing on the consumer end is mostly a mistake, I think. The more money you have, the more you can "afford" to purchase do-gooder items. This is a patronizing, and often a paralyzingly moralistic form of social change. It also tends to relegate one's environmentalism to a private expression, rather than as a political public domain where it belongs. The emphasis should be more on empowering workers to change the power relations in the productive process, to organize communities to mobilize to improve various facets of community health, and to demand government enforced policies that require firms to adhere to strict social and environmental regulations (essentially forcing "externalities" back into the pricing mix). In the long-term, as wild-eyed as it always sounds, I'm obviously for replacing capitalism with a system (democratic socialism) that doesn't subordinate human rights and the environment to the enrichment of the few or short-term "gain" trumping long-term ecological sanity.
Adrienne's central point in "Be Easy and Appealing" is correct, however. The niche marketing of most environmentally sustainable (or less harmful) goods is often targeted to a highly educated, white, upper middle class audience. And yes, there's nothing that requires our responsible products to look drab (in Ithaca where I come from, a lot of the people who buy this stuff wear these awful burlap sack-looking "natural fiber" clothes). No need to trade in style for functionality.
I very much enjoy the way Adrienne writes (people should check out her other writing). We need a style of advocacy story telling that isn't the tired old leftist academic approach that I find myself replicating.
On a side note... I would point to the Apollo Project as a initiative that can unite environmentalists with the trade union movement... and groups like the L.A. based Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros that mobilizes for environmental justice and better transit policies by combining race, gender, class, and immigration status concerns in a way that naturally reflects the communities they work with and are comprised of. It's only out of ignorance, discomfort, anti-urbanism, and a lack of imagination that prevents the mostly white environmentalist movement from taking up these and other critical struggles.
peace
Lucas
http://www.ydsusa.org
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la vida Posted 6:46 am
16 Mar 2005
For more of Adrienne's writing click here. Lucas, I couldn't agree with you more about her writing style. We need more writers with flav'a.
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jdhlax Posted 5:20 pm
16 Mar 2005
Wallrock, I am not trying to discredit "anyone who doesn't live up to [my] level of piety," as you put it. In order for a conversation to have any meaning, words must have definitions. This is not just theoretical. Members of the Bush administration have been saying that they're "environmentalists, too" in order to convince the public that it should support their regulations, legislation, or other agenda. This false claim has no doubt caused many ill- or uniniformed Americans to support policies that they would not otherwise support. If environmentalism is just another issue for you, call yourself a leftist, liberal, progressive, radical, whatever, but please don't call yourself an environmentalist.
This does not mean that environmentalists don't care about other issues -- ask my wife or my friends who have to listen to me rant, I care about all of them. But at the end of the day, the Earth and all life on it are my priority, not humans or their anthropocentric issues.
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Emily Cunningham Posted 2:42 am
17 Mar 2005
Again, I think we think about the environment in fundamentally differently ways. I don't think of the environment as this thing, "out there" that needs to be protected. It's all around us, inseparable from our existence. We are- along with land, water, air, and other life forms-- the "environment." We can't take humans out of the picture. Human issues are environmental issues. The way we organize ourselves and treat one another have huge ramifications for the Earth. So we really have to look at human issues if we want our planet to survive.
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jdhlax Posted 7:20 am
18 Mar 2005
I fully agree that we are all part of the environment. (The part of the environment humans occupy is, unfortunately, as a cancerous tumor on the planet.) That's why I said "what you do to, say a tree, you do to me." However, your argument is an extreme perversion of that concept. If we are all part of the environment and it's all part of us, you should support giving priority to protecting non-humans, as they are actually in need of our support, whereas humans as a whole are not (see first paragraph).
I've your argument before, including on this site, and it's always used in an attempt to convince environmentlists to become leftists. Sorry, that's not where my priorities are. As I said above, fixing social issues will not fix environmental or ecological ones.
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santacruzjean Posted 4:22 am
19 Mar 2005
And I grow weary of the naysaying of preservation of the wild by urban city dwellers.
Environmentalism means environment...and it does not matter where the environment. The environmental movement is not missing anything. If Ms. Brown wants inner city young people involved in their own healthful communities, then preach to them, not to me.
There are no "sustainable cultures" in this country, either white rural or black inner city. All communities today are predicated on 150 years of available, cheap oil. All are unsustainable. Get prepared.
As for where "we" dump our waste in this nation, look first to one's own home, whether that home is an apartment or a monstrous & obscene 5,000 square foot home in rural Vermont. Litter and graffitti are the signs of humans who do not care about anything, including their own backyards.
Why do young colored students have to eat "packaged non-food" or eat at McDonalds instead of eating fresh fruits, veggies, rice, beans, potatoes? The packaged non-food costs more that the nutritious food. Why do they not have access to condoms when every community has a free condom program? How many condoms could be purchased with the money paid for those substances that "dull their minds" so they sit and watch "a couple of hours of television?"
Don't see trees anymore? How about planting some, right their in their neighborhoods. Then caring for them, as they learn to care for themselves?
I do agree that the environmental movement has made a grave mistake when it has separated the "natural" world from human inhabitants. The fact remains, however, that wherever "civilized" humans have gone into healthy, undeveloped landscapes, they have destroyed their "natural" world. After the end of the Age of Oil, perhaps this tendency may be diminished.
The environmental movement has not "failed" to meet the urban masses. The urban masses have failed to empower themselves to say enough is enough, we want a healthful life. If the goal is to have money and the things it buys (like SUVS), that is not the fault of environmentalism. If the goal is to have health in inner cities, then work toward that goal, one step at a time.
Environmentalists have always been called elitists. By industry, by developers, by right-wing politicians, by logger's families. And now by inner city colored young people's spokespersons. As for what Ms. Brown tells us to do:
> 1. Change your framework.
Stopping racism, the prison industrial complex and HIV are social issues. Let environmentalists do environmental work. Challenge the social groups to do those things!
> 2. Be easy and appealing. You need to turn up the heat
> and the appeal for environmentally friendly products and practices,
> while putting time and energy into bringing down the price.
Bringing "down" the price? Wrong. Cheap stuff is part of the problem. Cheap & disposable. Every product that is cheap is a function of oil and industrial subsidies that harm other workers in other nations. Recycling and re-using are free actions. Does Ms. Brown know where Target products are manufactured and by whom? Over-sized, baggy pants and huge Nike shoes take more energy and materials than are necessary for clothing. More waste. More pollution. More ill-health.
The environmental movement does not need to make its home in the real world of inner city dwellers. We would only be seen, and rightly so, as evangelicals. This work belongs to the people who are already there. Help give a voice to those who reside there and who are probably too afraid to say anything for fear of being different in their views or unpopular or worse, as corny environmentalists.
> 3. Stop the environmental evangelism.
Ms. Brown, the sky IS falling. Environmentalists do not care about "our" issue. We care about the environment, every environment. Life on this fragile planet. Clean air, land, water. Non-human species as well as our own.
We are not apoplectic about mercury. We are gravely concerned. It is a poison. It affects all life and does not distinguish skin color.
If you want to see your faces in and on a movement that cares about those faces, then get busy and become informed. That is your job; it is not ours. As for solidarity, how about the fact that humanity is all one species? Though of a multitude of different cultures, we are all affected by the same poisons. As for murder & torture & abuse, this environmentalists hates all three, no matter the poor critter targeted, human or non-human.
Amazingly, the young colored city dwellers you have described fit the description of the majority of the people in my predominantly white community of northern coastal California. The apathy and ignorance, born of either no information or misinformation is appalling. We have it all, right here, everything that you demand of the environmental movement. And it is not worth a fig in terms of changing anything, really.
Jean Brocklebank
Monterey Bay, California
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jdhlax Posted 11:39 am
20 Mar 2005
Jeff Hoffman
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Riannan Goath Posted 6:20 am
22 Mar 2005
Bravo Adrienne. We do need new words, words that have not been coopted, words that do not polarize or alienate others, words that bring together, that acknowledge common interests, that recognize the diverse groups both the "right" and "left" whose power together seems improbable and would be unstoppable.
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ronniehoresh Posted 8:07 pm
24 Mar 2005
There are other worthwhile points in this essay, but to me this is what counts. In the environment, and with much social policy, the issues are framed in ways that can be understood only by policy wonks, specialists and lawyers. Take climate change: we all know it's going to be disastrous, but the policy discussion is all about compliance, or not, with Kyoto, which may or may not do something to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which may or may not change the composition of the atmosphere, which may or may not do something to stabilise the climate.
This is too tenuous and too esoteric for normal people to follow. My suggestion is that we frame our environmental policy in terms of broad outcomes. Instead of micro-managing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, we should be specifying a climate stability target, and rewarding people for achieving it, however they do so. Similarly with other environmental bottom lines: air and water pollution, etc. Outcomes are something that everyone understands. Frame our environmental (and social) policy in terms of targeted outcomes. This would clarify what the government is or is not doing, and also the trade-offs involved. Transparency would go with greater public participation, understanding and therefore buy-in. (My website suggests how this can be done in ways that inject the market's incentives into the achievement of social and environmental goals.)
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