This piece is excerpted from the essay "The Soul of Environmentalism: Rediscovering Transformational Politics in the 21st Century." The full essay can be found here.
Elvis was a hero to most,
but he never meant shit to me ...
-- Public Enemy, 1989
Activists of color may
not want to stand on
John Muir's shoulders.
Environmentalism in the United States has always been as diverse as our country itself. In the 19th century, for example, African-American abolitionists fought slavery as well as the use of arsenic in tobacco fields. Later, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. were only two of thousands of people of color whose movements for justice set the template for Earth Day. These leaders are part of our soul as environmentalists. The rebirth of the movement depends on being clear about that lineage.
The authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" begin by invoking their ancestors. "Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us," they write. They cite John Muir and David Brower -- and Martin Luther King Jr., too. They quote from interviews they did with 25 senior executives at mainstream environmental groups. History seems duly respected. But we need to stop the music here and make two big points before we leave the subject of ancestry.
First, many environmentalists would rather not stand on the shoulders of certain early conservation heroes. Muir developed his conservation ethic during the Civil War and the expropriation of Native American lands, the two great racial struggles of the 19th century. He pretty much ignored both of them, according to Carl Anthony, a historian and urban planner. After dodging the Civil War draft by going to Canada, Muir walked the occupied lands of the West and the South and saw nothing more sinister than "forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden." Before we sanctify Muir, we need to understand how his racial attitudes affected his commitments to conservation. If the environmental movement is ever going to revive, it must first confront the many ways in which the U.S. has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites.
John Muir's racism is about more than just history. It's about building a new frame for a bigger environmental movement. There are better shoulders for us to stand on. In 1849, Henry Thoreau explained that he was refusing to pay taxes to a government "which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate-house." In 1914, Louis Marshall made the critical argument that saved the Adirondack wilderness, despite the fact that he was a Jew and many of his neighbors in the North Country were rabid anti-Semites. In the 1930s, Marshall's son Robert founded the modern wilderness protection movement. Around the same time, Zora Neale Hurston documented multiethnic America in her many books about people and nature. In the 1960s, Henry Dumas wrote of the healing role of nature in even the most viciously segregated rural areas of the South.
"The Death of Environmentalism" refers often to America's "core values" and cites surveys that show how those values have changed in the last decade. But when people talk about their core values, their words don't always match their meaning. For much of American history, the values of "freedom" and "progress" have been code words for a system that profits by oppressing the poor and communities of color. U.S. rhetoric is taking this charade to new heights globally while masking an agenda that actually celebrates authoritarian control and the decay of civic life.
Denying the racial content of the "values" debate in the U.S. today only deepens the predicament of environmentalism. The work of Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson explores how the idea of freedom has been intertwined with the practice of slavery. From ancient Greece to the United States of 1776, he says, cultures that have theorized and celebrated "freedom" have simultaneously excluded huge swaths of their populations from any shred of it. At the same time, nations through history that profess to love "freedom" have been relentless in promoting heartless geopolitical agendas outside their borders.
Freedom is an important value, and its meaning is an important debate. Denying the links between "freedom" and oppression makes it harder for progressives to articulate a broader vision. The death of this denial is liberating because it links us more fully to our rough and glorious pasts. It also points the way to new choices and a more hopeful future.
Giving a nod to your ancestors when you start talking is a good oratorical trick. It establishes that your ancestors are dead, so you're in charge now. But the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" completely ignore a second set of ancestors who need to be included in our deliberations. We're talking about the people who brought you the civil-rights movement.
Modern environmentalism was, after all, the Elvis of '60s activism. It was a radical and innovative departure from the conservation movement that preceded it. And in almost every way, the politics and innovations of the early environmental movement derived directly from the same era's fight for black power and racial justice.
Norm Collins, the Ford Foundation program officer who first funded the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, and others, wrote in his decision memos that what was needed was "an NAACP for the environment." National legislative victories for the environment depended heavily on a rejiggering of states' rights. This strategy copied one that had already been used successfully by the civil-rights movement. A critical factor in the passage of the Clean Air Act, for example, was to unify and to supersede the patchwork of existing air-quality standards that states had promulgated on their own. And mass mobilizations for the environment depend heavily on nonviolent civil disobedience as popularized by African-American advocates in the 1960s.
Just as the courts were fertile ground for black liberation, environmental organizations sought standing for nature and human health in ways that deeply challenged business as usual. As historian Roderick Nash pointed out in The Rights of Nature, environmental activists attempted to extend the 1960s legal focus on the rights of oppressed individuals to nature and to people facing environmental risks. Boycotts, consumer campaigns, and labor-environment alliances -- where would these be without the models established by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers?
The environmental-justice movement emerged in the 1980s as a way to revitalize the grassroots activism started by the civil-rights movement. It also offered a home for activists who weren't comfortable separating their concern over the state of the planet from their concerns about social justice. Twenty years later, the mainstream environmental movement has been unable to racially integrate its senior staff, not because of overt discrimination but because of differences in vision. Many environmentalists of color admire the mainstream movement's goals, but they also know firsthand that social justice is routinely ignored in the mainstream movement's decision making.
Despite its limitations, environmentalism as we know it today wasn't just the marriage of liberalism and conservation. It was committed activists, engaged in struggle and riffing on every tool they could see around them. Like Elvis, the environmental movement had soul -- and soul is one thing you can't kill.
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Comments
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jdhlax Posted 3:48 am
28 May 2005
WRONG, WRONG, AND WRONG!!! Open space is reserved primarily for non-humans.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:57 am
31 May 2005
"It was eco..magination..runnin' away with me.."
Antidote to GE "Ecomagination".
Have you seen the GE coalmining bikini team? That ad is part of a $90 million ad campaign touting their energy policy.
90 million might buy 9 20 megawatt wind machines instead, that produce electric power at 2 cents per kwh. This is the antidote to "ecomagination". An extrapolation from present wind power technology ..available from GE?!? ["GE's 3.6-megawatt wind turbines"] , based upon the economies of scale and mass production and installation.
The equivalent in nuclear power generation capacity could cost up to $450 million ($5 per watt of generating capacity)with an unknowable, astronomical cost for waste disposal along with it. To replace the steam turbines alone at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power site is estimated to cost 1 billion dollars! ["In 2004, Pacific Gas & Electric, a state regulated entity who operates the plant, applied to spend around a billion dollars to replace the steam generators there."]
Even one Chernobyl type incident adds an incalculable cost. How can a whole region destroyed by radioactive contamination even be valued in terms of money? There are accidents waiting to happen that could release up to 8 times the radioactive contamination of Chernobyl at each of 68 used nuclear fuel rod storage "pools" all over the US.
By court order the 18 billion collected from nuclear power consumers for waste disposal is evaporating to pay for those storage pool operations.
The cost for Yucca Mountain is maybe 50 billion? [who knows? It's top secret!] Now it seems it may be declared a temporay waste site, due to revelations of whistleblowers who quit their jobs to get around government gag orders on employees at the site. How many more permanent sites will be needed?
Now lobbyists for new nuclear power plants want more funds for more temporary sites until Yucca is done?
If one were to add up all the area polluted by mines, refineries, processing plants, waste sites, generating plants for fossil fuels and nuclear power, and the exponentially expanding plumes of toxins in groundwater, rivers, lakes, and air from these energy sources...
Then compare that to the 50 foot diameter tower footprint area needed for each of the 30,000 one thousand foot scale wind machines needed to equal the present electrical generating capacity of the US, 600,000 megawatts and climbing!
And consider not only rooftops for solar electric power, but also space over parking lots that need shading anyway. And solar cogeneration that produces not only electricity (which absorbs only 10% of the solar power available), but heating and cooling capacity and water/waste recycling or desalinization from the same collectors. Water is the oil of this century.
By substituting heat pumps for heating instead of fuel oil and natural gas, and hybrid plugin vehicles that use mostly electric power on short trips (the vast majority of driving miles), that electric capacity created by wind and solar power can substitute for expensive greenhouse gas emitting inported and other fossil fuels
For instance...20% of oil is burned to provide heat energy for refining oil, an ourtrageous waste. That needless combustion of imported oil ought to be replaced with a combination of clean solar heat and wind and solar electric power driving heat pumps. It should, at the very least, be done for US soldiers, fighting and dying for that "black gold".
But do we really need 30,000 20 megawatt wind machines on the high speed wind areas of the great plains? Yes, because a switch to heat pumps and hybrid plugin vehicles will require even more electric generating capacity.
With the added capacity from solar electric panels on rooftops, and over parking lots, wind and solar could economically replace fossil and nuclear power for transportation as well as heating, cooling,refining, and manufacturing.
The old fossil fuel plants would serve as backup and a kind of battery to smooth out variable output from wind and solar and variable loads in the power grid. Eventually they could be replaced by superconducting energy storage rings and maybe someday with fuel cells.
If hybrid plugin vehicles, that averaged 80 miles per gallon, were successful in capturing the US auto market, biofuels could replace most imported oil. As battery technology, backup generators, and eventually fuel cells increase in efficiency and drop in cost, those biofuels, like methanol, ethanol,and biodiesel could totally replace oil.
None of this is as farfetched as a nuclear plant with pebble bed or other research level technology ("next generation nuclear technology", the neoconman talking point phrase) actually overcoming the insurmountable problems of uninsurable risk for siting, fuel mining and manufacturing, and waste transportation, processing, and storage [20 to 30 tons per year per nuclear reactor].
Next generation nuclear power? What about pebble bed? The early design developed by a joint amercian/german team used graphite and silicon carbide coated fuel "pebbles" and hydrogen gas as the propellant for the power generating turbine.
Graphite!?! The neutron absorption material in the first nuclear reactor in that Chicago squash court under the University Stadium. It terrified the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, because graphite is essentially compressed coal. That is what was used at Chernobyl, and it helped feed the fire that spread the radioactive contamination.Can anyone guarantee the coating won't crack? How would one prove it? Decades of testing? That maybe too late.
A reactor that uses superheated hydrogen as a cooling element and propellant for the turbine? One infitesimal leak of that high pressure, superheated gas and its all over, those pebbles would be dust, scattered all over 3 states. The design has since swiched to using helium as the propellant.
Instead I'm proposing larger scale [3 times the size of the GE 3.6 megawatt machines], 20 megawatt, 1000 foot wind machines located on the high wind regions of the northern midwestern great plains. No radiation danger is involved, except maybe to construction and maintenance crews who forget their sunscreen.
Enough capacity to equal the present generating capacity of the US., 30,000 machines (generating 600,000 MW), all connected into an upgraded and extended national power grid, regulated by the government to prevent monopoly manipulation (as happened in California) or power blackouts... and maintain a fair, free market in electric power.This upgrade is sorely needed for energy security reasons anyway, look at the economic devestation of recent power blackouts from storms. Goverenment expenditure on a major public works project to acomplish this would save money from storm outages and increase economic growth. That is an investment, unlike the 500 billion claimed as the total cost of the Iraq War.
It would be a project on the scale of the Tennesse Valley Authority or the Hoover Dam projects in the depression era. A way to get the US manufacturing base back.
A comprehensive plan involving wind, solar, wave and tidal current, biofuel, and plugin hybrid vehicles would be affordable, eliminate imported oil, and revive the US economy providing good jobs for US familes.
Nuclear power is unsafe, way too expensive, and is another monopoly controlled source of power like oil, coal, and natural gas.
Coupled with nuclear fuel expected to triple in price over the next few years, and the fact that wind and solar have no fuel or waste costs...this illuminates the real bottomline of energy policy.
Shouldn't the profits earned on products and services sold to american consumers support US jobs? Or should capital be free to roam at will over the globe to find labor willing to work for the lowest wages?
Shouldn't government of, by, and for we the people instead encourage capital acumulated by profiting from US consumers to be invested in the US economy?
Why give tax breaks to the oil industry for instance..in order to export over 500 million dollars per day of US capital to pay for imported oil?
Why not adopt a tax policy and energy policy for US government needs that instead encourages clean, domestic, renewable energy production and manufacturing of wind, solar, hybrid vehicles, and biofuel plants to replace imported oil? Invest in these systems to provide energy for government use, and the mass production involved would lower costs bringing in power companies to invest the vast majority of capital. Local power companies would own these large scale wind machines and the power would run along the grid back to their area.
These changes are necessary to preserve real competitive capitalism once again. Multi-national corporate power has created energy monopolies that prevent the introduction of cleaner, more competitive technologies in the energy business.
And that neo-conservative corporate power is extending itself to take over all economic power in every area of human endeavor and make government nothing but a figurehead.
Turning we the people into chattel of multinational feudal corporate power, and the US government into an entity of, by, and for that corporate power.
The all too brief few centuries of US freedom, a mere instant in the history of human kind, could wink out like a candle in a tornado.
Where ever the corporate boardroom rules over government, we the people become chattel. Serfs of corporate feudal multinational fiefdomes like Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, and Walmart.
Consumers, taxpayers, soldiers, labor...not citizens of a nation of, by, and for we the people.
Lobbyists write the laws and bought and payed for shills disguised as legislators and regulators rubber stamp these documents in return for bribes.
Real capitalism includes the forces of competition and fair and free markets.
That creates healthy corporate entities and a healthy economy. And that in turn makes the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness actually possible to fullfill.
The sickly version of capitalism now in existence, due to corporate corruption of our legal system, has destroyed free and fair markets in many of the main commodities...capital, currency,energy, transportation..
This diseased status of economic freedom is corrupting our political system and our culture. It has US headed to second rate super power dome, just like the UK experienced before US.
Economic considerations are at the base of this jihad/krusade. It is all about oil, and the wealth and power that comes with the control over that resource.
Right wing religious groups are payed and supported by the oil tyrants of the middle east in order to deflect the poor, downtrodden, hopeless masses of the arab street from demanding oil revenues be used to improve their economic situation.
They scream about jihad instead of economic justic. Hate and fear over ancient religious, culutural feuds is used to maintain the hold of corporate feudalism over the oil tyrannies.
The neoconservatives respect and admire the Saudi system of governance, they long for the absolute power that men like "prince" Bandar have over their people.
The Rovian big lie machine uses the same kind pandering to religious and national hatred and fear that the Saudi rulers do, here in the US, to steal elections and maintain power.
Politically free societies cannot long endure under economic tyranny, under the rule of corporate feudal monopoly.
Free markets featuring fair trade create the economic foundation for political evolution.
Government of, by, and for we the people follows the principle that we all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That cannot exist without fair, free market capitalism. And the individual incentives and protection for individual economic rights, built into the US constitution, go right along with that.
Stable, honest monetary policy that maintains a strong currency, anti-trust laws well and constantly enforced, and a government that represents the best economic interests of we the people is a necessary condition.
Without it, corporate power corrupts absolutely.
Teddy Roosevelt was the last president to really stand up against it for US.
The way to win these oil wars is with manufacturing power. Unless we catch this new energy manufacturing wave, Russia will be the next OPEC, and Asia will be the next US style economic engine.
Will the corporate/government leaders of those nation states be friendly towards government of, by, and for we the people? They haven't in the past.
Can the american workforce produce millions of plugin hybrid vehicles and 100s of thousands of solar, wind, and biofuel plants needed to win these wars and save planet earth from global climate disaster?
Look to the WW 2 war production for the answer... millions of planes, tanks, ships, guns...all produced by american workers..and that reinvigorated the US economy.
This time around no shooting war need be engaged, only the manufacturing effort.
And a revived US manufacturing and tax base, that will save US families from economic devestation...through export of these energy products worldwide....will be a major side benefit. This will provide good jobs at all skill levels, from high school and techical school graduates just entering the workforce..to experienced engineering and scientific research personnel.
We need to push hard for a new renewable, green energy policy that would revive the US manufacturing base and tax base, and provide good jobs for american families.
The export markets created for our clean energy technology would power an economic boom based on real productivity increases, rather than an economic bubble from speculation. Energy product manufacturing, wind, solar, hybrid plugin vehicles, heat pump heating systems, biofuel plants...could reclaim our technological supremacy.
But all the neoconmen concentrate on is benefitting their multinational corporate partners in oil and defense. And bankrupting the US government in the process.
We need manufacturing that supports millions of good jobs, like the auto industry used to. Energy products can do that.
100's of thousands of megawatt wind, biofuel, and solar plants are needed here in north america, and millions of these units are needed worldwide.
Let's have an ENERGY revolution!!!
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hank2138 Posted 9:33 am
30 Jun 2005
I argue that land itself is chief amongst stuff that is the commonwealth. To recognize that and to oblige all users of commonwealth to pay rent to society for commonwealth that is privatized would be to place all human beings upon the same level as earthlings, regardless of affinity group or biological association.
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