santacruzjean’s Recent Comments

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  Rainbow Warrior

  I'm white, I'm female, I'm less urban.

  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
  On Dramatizing the "death" of environmentalism doesn't help urban people of color, or anyone else posted 4 years, 7 months ago 21 Responses