DPW’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  Soul, Death and Fetish

  Diana Pei Wu
  02 June 2005

  I read Gelobter et al.'s piece "The Soul of Environmentalism" and it resonated deeply with me.

  I am one of many environmentalists of color who left the mainstream environmental movement to move into EJ and other social justice or sustainability work that Gelobter et al. reference in their thoughtful and artful response to "The Death".

  This happened for several reasons, including the always personal but ultimately structurally sanctioned experience of racism in white liberal-dominated environments.

  However, I want to discuss here a different reason that I left mainstream environmental conservation work. This was because of my own experience around the nature of mainstream U.S. and European-led conservation efforts in the international arena.

  From the point of view of someone who is descended from people who were on the receiving end of U.S. and Europeans' colonial activities and imperial aspirations in my generations-removed country of descent, China, most international parks and conservation efforts reproduce structural dynamics that are not different from those of the injustices of colonialism. On the ground, those effects are experienced by people as colonial and imperial effects, from the visual similarity of the colonizers (old colonizers wore khaki, pith hats, leather and fleece, new colonizers wear khaki-colored goretex, pith hats, imitation suede and polartec fleece) to the deeply internalized self-hating effects. No surprise that also intimately and necessarily tied are the creation of internal political and economic colonies, and the creation and extraction of wealth for the colonizers, based literally on the backs of poor men and women of color.

  As a woman of color I could not stand to see those dynamics reproduced, from the marginalization of Camerounian and Panamanian colleagues to the idea that development for local communities was sufficiently met by the wages we paid our porters: $5 a day, to carry 30 to 40 kilo sacs 30 kilometers through the bush.

  If colonialism and imperialism were wrong, then it was wrong to continue to create and reproduce those dynamics. As a person of color in the "post"-colonial world, I expected even the colonizers to act differently. Skin color and language were barriers to those well-meaning white nature-loving biologist and ecologists' abilities to see the people we worked with as fully human.

  Finally, a parting shot. Many have already described the substantive ways in which the report fundamentally misses the opportunity to have learned from the dynamic and successful movements for environmental justice and sustainability led by progressive and radical people of color and anti-racist folks in general.

  As a Chinese-American woman situated in an area of the country where on a near daily basis I experience the exoticizing fetish of white people for many things Asian, even the very cover of "The Death" warned "northern California white liberal post-hippie men" to me. "Shit," I thought. "They can't talk to any living Asians, never mind Asian Americans, but they sure as hell like to put characters on the fronts of things that they publish and post. They'll use Asian things to say what they want, disguised as some ancient truth, but can't hear the truth from other living breathing human beings." Is this really that different from all the porn sites catering to socially sanctioned desires for fetishing Asian bodies? Both are based on fetish, exoticization of Asia, and based on the silencing of the people who have become objects in someone else's fantastic idea of who they are.

  In fact, this falls into another global aspect of racism, tied together with colonialism. It is the often expressed desire to find wisdom in other people who are "from" other places: wise Black men and women in films, wise sayings and proverbs from the Orient on report covers, spices and hallucenogenics that produce wisdom and comfort from Latin America. Not only have the report's authors and producers reproduced the structural and social dynamics of everyday racism in their process and content, they have reproduced its cultural and visual markers in the final physical product. At least the package is complete.

  If the fragmentation of the left is complete, perhaps the folks responding on this blog should take the critiques seriously and listen to the noise to understand why.

  * * *

  "The Soul of Environmentalism" can be read and downloaded at www.soulofenvironmentalism.org

  Ludovic Blain's thoughtful piece, "Ain't I an Environmentalist?" is here: http://www.ludovicspeaks.com/socalled_death_of_environmentalism/index.html

  "The Death of Environmentalism" can be read here: http://grist.org/news/maindish/2005/01/13/doe-reprint/On An environmental-justice advocate insists he's not dead yet posted 4 years, 5 months ago 7 Responses