I read "The Death..." when it first came out and must say I don't recall any special consideration to the problems remaining for people of color who have been badly discriminated against in the past and, and for those who are still being discriminated against, though not as blatantly so, in the present.  In no area of the environment will the growing disparities between Americans of color and "The Haves" be more apparent that in suffering from the ill-effects of global warming.

Global warming will be most devastating to the poor and unhealthy in America.  It should be no surprise to anyone that African-Americans score highly in both these areas - unfairly so, of course.

The poor are predicted to suffer more from heat waves which will become more numerous, longer, hotter and more humid (more deadly) with continued global warming.  The poor live in housing units without air conditioning, or they can't afford to run the air conditioning even if they have it.  

The poor are also most often located in large cities which more commonly experience heat island effects (from excessive levels of heat-absorbing asphalt), which can cause temperatures to rise 10 degrees F. above the temperatures outside the city.  

Statistics also show African Americans suffer the most often from asthma conditions, heart attack, stroke and many other ailments related to their environment.  

As temperatures increase with continued global warming, air quality will increasingly get worse as well, resulting in more hospitalizations needed for asthmatics and for people with heart, circulation and lung ailments.  The warmer temperatures will also contribute to higher ground level ozone levels, which more frequently causes irreparable damage to small African American babies and young children.

It is a fact that African Americans have knowingly paid the unfair price for being different and singled out for living in America for centuries.  Although it will not be possible to right any of these wrongs, America still needs to make restitution to its African Americans for the discrimination and injustices the country inflicted upon them as a race of people for so many years.  Paying reparations would show them America is still aware of their suffering from the wounds and insults inflicted on their great heritage and ancestry of the past, and that is is well aware of they're having been denied so many economic opportunities over the years, due to ignorance and racial motivations that have been present in the American population and still continue to this very day.

In the city where I live, a petition drive was initiated a couple years ago by a brave leader in the Black community calling on city government to go on record in support of the legislation by Rep. John Conger, which would have authorized a study to look into the feasibility of the federal government paying reparations for slavery.  I actively helped with the petition drive because I agreed that America still owes a tremendous debt to African-Americans - for the numerous generations of abuse and confinement.

Environmentalist organizations could be a natural fit in working for the reparations for slavery. After all, all human beings are also part of nature and the environment, and it is our duty to protect them along with other elements of "nature".

Environmentalist organizations have many good, hard working and caring individuals, most of whom are willing (and do) go to the mat for many good causes, including social causes.  It is time for environmentalist organization to add reparations for slavery to their list of environmental causes.  Just as the harming of the atmosphere and the environment has many long-term negative impacts, so also too has the slavery that was inflicted on the African American population in the past had many long-lasting negative impacts on the African-American population.

It only stands to reason that in order for the traditional environmental organizations (non-Blacks) to gain the cooperation of the African American population in fighting for environmental causes like global warming, they ought first earn that cooperation by supporting reparations for slavery.  Only then will it be possible to move forward into fulfilling Dr. Martin Luther Kings Jr. dream - a dream for prosperity, a good education, freedom from discrimination, and justice for races, creeds and nationalities.

After all, are we not all our brother's keepers?  Then we best all start reducing our fossil fuel emissions - in driving, flying and using energy in the home.  

CONSERVE, NOW! to reduce GHG emissions
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ClimateArchive/message/229

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 http://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/