Nashville Earth Mom’s Recent Comments

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  Don't miss the point, or you slit all our throats

  Hoorah for Ms. Brown, and for those of you standing up for her! I'm a white, lower-middle-class single parent. I did a short stint as the program director of a small sustainable living group. I have been "oh-god-I'm-almost-out-of-food-stamps, and-I'm-not-sure-I-have-enough-gas-to-get-to-work-until-my-next-paycheck" poor.

  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.On Dramatizing the "death" of environmentalism doesn't help urban people of color, or anyone else posted 4 years, 8 months ago 21 Responses