Climate Change and the Working Class

I have a piece at Global Comment on how the environmental movement has done a terrible job making climate change about people instead of polar bears and why this matters. Here's an excerpt:

I am volunteering for an environmental justice organization in a large northern city. This group works on environmental health issues with the city’s poor, mostly African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, and has started focusing on how climate change will affect working-class people. Rising temperatures will lead to any number of problems for the economically disadvantaged, including air pollution, higher rates of asthma, greater populations of cockroaches and other unwanted insects, rising food prices, a greater percentage of income spent on energy, and increased mortality rates for people who do not have access to air conditioning.

Climate change has proven difficult to explain to people; scientists’ unwillingness to declare anything a certainty combines with climate change’s complexity to leave people confused. My organization went to its constituents and tried to explain climate change to them. The organizers messaged this campaign in an interesting way: openly attacking the environmental movement’s framing of the issue. They created buttons that featured a crossed-out polar bear. They repeatedly told the attendees that climate change was about people, not bears. And yet, when the question and answer session began, the overwhelming response was, “Why should I care about bears?”


Why should poor people care about bears? That’s a great question. I can’t think of a good reason. Now, I don’t really approve of the anti-bear message. The idea of polar bears going extinct because they lack polar ice makes me want to vomit. However, this scenario demonstrates the horrible job the environmental movement has done in framing climate change.

By focusing on bears instead of people, the environmental movement sends mixed messages. It might reinforce the responsibility humans have to protect other animals and ecosystems, but it also suggests that climate change won’t affect people like bears. Moreover, it creates an image that the poor don’t count in environmentalism, reinforcing the inability of environmentalists to connect with working-class people over the last thirty years.

Diversity and Environmentalists

Ray Ring writes a deeply unfortunate column about President Obama selecting non-whites to fill important environmental posts. He accuses Obama of putting racial diversity over environmental goals. Ring notes that several Obama environmental appointees have not been what environmentalists hoped for.

Well, sure. But that's true of how most progressives how thought about many Obama appointees. It has squat to do with race and everything to do with Obama's governing style.

What's frustrating is that Ring reinforces the long-standing divide between environmentalists and people of color. For more than 20 years, people of color have pointed out the indifference environmentalists have to poverty, to the concerns of non-whites, and to people more broadly. Many in the environmental movement have taken these critiques seriously. Even though environmentalism today is pretty dang white, it's also populated by young people who consistently reach out in solidarity to non-environmental groups.

But there's still a strong current of single-issue people within the environmentalism stream who define their movement very narrowly and blame "social concerns" for their movement's failures. What Ring espouses outside this article I do not know. But he makes a terrible mistake here in blaming diversity for environmentalists' problems and in doing so, places another brick in the wall between the environmental movement and people of color.

More on The Battle in Seattle

To push back a little on Erik's view of the Battle in Seattle, I'm posting the video from GRITtv's discussion yesterday. Don't get me wrong; I think Erik has a lot of valid points (Ann Friedman made some similar ones in this excellent post from the other day at the Prospect).

I think in general that it's often wrong to classify progressivism (and feminism, and many other things) as movements. They're belief systems, often stagnant ones. By comparison, the Obama campaign WAS a movement--a moment where hundreds of thousands of people came together to fight for one objective, even if lots of us did it with clear-eyed knowledge that a year out we'd be disappointed and arguing with the president we gave so much of our time and effort to elect.

We do need movements, though. We need those moments where we can come together and accomplish something, like in Seattle--and we need to extend those beyond moments. How do we turn those moments into sustained pressure? I like what I've seen from the National Equality March, and the fight in Maine (even though it too lost). But I want more. Anyway, I digress.

People asked what the organizers of Seattle would say if they were asked: well, it was only ten years ago. They're still around, and a bunch of them were on GRIT yesterday. You want to know what they think? Here's video.

Racism, The Forest Service, and Environmental History

Oh boy. Via Andrea:

The US Forest Service issued and then retracted a Labor Day warning advising hikers to “beware of campers in national forests drinking Tecate beer, eating tortillas and playing Spanish music” because “they could be armed marijuana growers.” A high-ranking Forest Service official in Colorado also identified people speaking Spanish and eating Spam or Tuna as “warning signs of possible drug trafficking.”

We might want to chock this up to a single Forest Service employee. I'm sure that someone (if not more than just one) lost their job over this. But while especially egregious, this incident reinforces long term racism revolving around who gets to use the environment. Who belongs in nature? The idea that seeing non-white people in the forest is somehow a threat comes straight out of a racist playbook in the environmental movement that's been around in one form or another for the last 120 years or so. Today, nature is for play. Work in nature is considered a bad thing. People who work in nature are raping the land or whatever. Never mind that Latinos form a huge percentage of reforestation and fire fighting crews. Since brown people are not supposed to have time to play, they must be growing drugs if they are in the forest. Now, it is somewhat rare to see non-white people in the forest. This is related to the fact that whites have more money and leisure time that they choose to spend in the forest.

Environmentalism and play in nature is associated with elite white people. Moreover, it has been for a long time. Since at least the 1880s, non-whites in the outdoors have been viewed with suspicion. Early environmentalists tried to separate working-class people from nature as much as possible, particularly those from non-desirable ethnic or racial groups. They cracked down on Italians because of their poaching (i.e., subsistence hunting so their families could eat) of songbirds and deer. Native American hunting was particularly looked down upon as wasteful, even though these same environmentalists romanticized Native Americans in their search for a more active and robust lifestyle. African-American hunters in the South were also seen as a menace who did not respect hunting laws and poached game that sporting whites should be allowed to kill. Early environmentalists like Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant (writer of the notorious eugenic book The Passing of the Great Race) saw race and nature as closely connected; game animals needed preservation in order to provide something for wealthy whites to kill. That killing was central to preserving the Anglo-Saxon masculinity that had supposedly been central to the nation's rise during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The United States Forest Service exists in no small part off land stolen from people of color. For example, the entirety of northern New Mexico forests exist of land stolen from New Mexican Hispanos who inherited that land through land grants that American courts refused to recognize despite promises they would do in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican War in 1848. In the 1960s, Hispanos fought back, leading to the 1967 raid by Reies Lopez Tijerina and his followers upon the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico to free people imprisoned for fighting to take back the stolen lands. Much other land of course once belonged to Native Americans and they certainly weren't welcome to use it in traditional ways after the arrival of the USFS.

These connections between race and nature have changed over time of course. In the late 1960s and 1970s, whites who continued to dominate all things conservation found room in nature for Native Americans through a new chapter in the history of whites romanticizing them. In this case, the anti-pollution Crying Indian ads are the most famous artifact. Native Americans took advantage of this in all sorts of ways, but when they didn't act toward nature in the ways that white environmentalists wanted (like developing their land or using their fishing rights), they were basically accused by whites as not being real Indians. This latest chapter in environmentalism that continues today hasn't found any room for other non-whites, thus their existence in the forests must mean they are doing something illegal.

Finally, tuna eater=Mexican? I did not know this. Nothing like a new stereotype... Also, I like Tecate, tortillas, and Mexican music. Does this mean that I am growing drugs? If so, why aren't I making any money?

Van Jones in the White House!

Obama has just recruited environmental justice activist Van Jones to join the Council on Environmental Quality as a special advisor for green jobs.

I cannot overstate how much I LOVE this man.  He has been an advocate for green jobs as a solution to the environmental crisis and the growing economic inequality in the U.S. since before the economic crisis, but his work is even more important now.  He is the founder of the advocacy group Green For All, which advocates for government commitment to creating jobs and providing job training - especially for people from disadvantages communities - that will move the US toward a clean energy economy.  He is also the author of the New York Times best-seller, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.  To top it all off, he is also an amazing and inspirational speaker.  

Most importantly, I think Van Jones and Majora Carter and other activists like them represent the beginning of the end of the racially-exclusive environmental movement.  Up until very recently, the mainstream environmental movement has been very limited to upper middle class white people, and some would even argue that women were kept out of the leadership of the movement as well.  Now environmental leaders like Jones and Carter (both black) are changing all of that.  Van Jones advocates changing the whole system - not just the pollution.  Taking the pollution out of a broken (read: racist, sexist, violent, etc.) system will only leave a racist world with solar-powered wars fought over the lithium for batteries.  ...And yeah, it's really easy to recognize that we have a lot of problems, but Van Jones also has a solution, which is why I'm glad he's starting at the White House next week.