ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
freedom to a healthy environment wherever you live, work, play, and pray- freedom to move where you please
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE is SOCIAL JUSTICE!
A CALL TO ARMS— A CALL TO CONNECT THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT REVOLUTION OF OUR TIME, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND TO TAKE ACTION NOW TO SHUT DOWN THE CAPITALIST EARTH DESTROYING MACHINE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY! EJ is the people, and the people’s liberation is based in community organizing.
Environmental Justice (EJ) is a BRIDGE between the struggles for economic justice and radical environmentalism. It’s a movement recognizing that PEOPLE ARE INSEPARABLE FROM THE PLANET, and that those most oppressed by environmental destruction are frontline communities: indigenous nations, people of color, the working class, etc., who always seem to be the ones forced to live alongside clearcuts, refineries, and mines. It goes even deeper than Deep Green, building on the popular anti-capitalist movements that have always been lead by oppressed peoples, to form a social ecology that connects the economic oppression of humans to the environmental oppression that we are all going to feel. A “frontline community” is any community that is on the frontlines of this war against the earth— by working in solidarity with these oppressed people to solve the environmental oppression in their lives, we are working to solve the environmental crisis for all of us. Solidarity with all frontline communities!
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EJ: The Radicalization of the Environmentalist Ethic
(images from espora.org/adao & guerrillanews)
Environmental Justice, or “EJ,” as it is referred to by community organizers, is a growing international movement and the future of the environmentalist ethic. It solves the mainstream environmental movement’s two largest problems (exclusivity and ineffectiveness) by humanizing the environmental movement and popularizing radical solutions that address the root causes of climate change. In this paper, I will: 1.) explain the unique characterisitcs of the Environmental Justice/Climate Justice (EJ) ethic 2.) Examine the conditions in which EJ are most and least effective at promoting global environmental ethics, and 3.) show why EJ is the future of the movement.
EJ emerged from the civil rights/labor movements of the 60’s and 70’s, when community organizers agitated for the removal of harmful chemicals from agricultural work and inner-city neighborhoods. They identified the connection between the environment and people by showing that environmentally harmful chemicals such as DDT were disproportionately affecting communities with the least political agency. These affected people became known as “frontline communities,” which grew to include indigenous peoples, working class neighborhoods, communities of color, and any other groups on the frontlines of environmental destruction. Today, the ethic of EJ has expanded globally and been embraced by radical environmental/social movements around the world, with the most expansive and militant activity happening in Latin America.
Followers of EJ believe it is important to global resource dilemmas for a number of reasons. EJ eliminates the problem of conflict between perceived environmental and social interests by identifying people as fully integrated with and equal to the world environment. Working class communities, where EJ is the most popular and militant, embrace the ethic more than other environmental ideologies because they observe environmental destruction though the impacts on human bodies. EJ also goes the furthest in solving environmental problems by facing the “root causes of climate change,” which are the centralizations of environmentally destructive power in the hands of corporations and repressive governments. EJ is the most extensive environmental plan for radical reform—many adherents believe that industrial capitalism is, by its nature, driven to destroy the environment since it must grow infinitely and consume infinitely to maintain itself. EJ has therefore embraced a view that is against the commodification of the environment by industrial capitalism, and the exploitation of people/planet by governments. This is critical to resolving environmentally destructive overconsumption and social conflict perpetuated by centralized power.
EJ holds firmly to social justice for all oppressed peoples, meaning that it is by nature an inclusive and international movement, and therefore more likely to succeed than alienating market and green-capitalist “solutions.” The popularization of EJ can solve global resource dilemmas by shifting society away from an environmentally destructive economic and social system.
EJ organizers hold that real solutions to climate change are built from the local level, in order to confront exploitation at the roots. Unlike other “localization” movements, EJ is committed to the building of international solidarity and mobilizing power between local solutionaries around the world. This is another critical point to solving global resource dilemmas: organizing sustainable communities on the local level, and coordinating these efforts into a unified global movement. In this way, EJ has both flexibility to solve local issues such as energy production and the muscle to face global problems such as climate change.
This internationalism has been important to developing another part of the EJ ethic: collective liberation. This is the belief that since environmental destruction and social inequality come from the same exploitative power structures, all systems of oppression must be dismantled in order to achieve peace between people and the earth. This means that issues such as reproductive, immigrant, and queer rights are held in solidarity.
Furthermore, this commitment to collective liberation and internationalism means EJ is rapidly popularizing, as we can see from the release of manifestos, declarations, and other documents from places as diverse as the U.S. Social Forum to the World People’s Climate Summit in Bolivia. Even more exceptional is that its leaders are much more diverse than in the mainstream environmental movement—non-educated people, inner-city folks, indigenous, queer people of color, and undocumented immigrants are all represented.
The EJ ethic is most effectively promoted under certain conditions. We will examine this on 4 fronts: 1.) effectiveness in dealing with different environmental problems 2.) different severity levels of environmental destruction 3.) type of society it is acting in, and 4.) relationship with other environmental ethics such as religious stewardship.
EJ is of course more effective at dealing with certain environmental problems than others. It is most immediately effective at dealing with pollution, especially in areas with human communities, because it mobilizes local resistance by harnessing human interest, in situations that might otherwise be ignored. Likewise, it brings higher profile to human problems like chemical use in the workplace, by highlighting their environmental impact. This creates more unity between human rights and environmental activists against polluting industry. For example, in China, EJ organizers have been successful in working with Chinese villagers against toxic dumping by government-backed corporations, where usually such problems would be ignored by the Chinese government.
EJ is less effective at dealing with pollution when it occurs in areas without organized communities, because it relies on a human connection. However, in most areas where extraction, dumping, or combustion occur, this is not a problem, because they tend to be most concentrated in or near enough to frontline communities that there human effects are visible.
Food production is another area where EJ is useful. Because EJ emphasizes community autonomy, food sovereignty is a major issue to its adherents. This includes opposition to industrial agriculture, genetically modified organisms, and “food deserts.” For this reason, EJ is very popular in urban areas where obesity and other food-related diseases are severe from lack of access to healthy food. These ideas are also popular among small rural farmers and indigenous people affected by corporate agriculture and unequal economic planning. A good example of this is armed Mayan rebellions in southern Mexico, which have embraced EJ networks and organizations as allies, and were represented at the various Latin American EJ international conferences.
On the other hand, EJ faces a roadblock on food issues in communities not affected by food insecurity; and also scientific communities that oppose the EJ stance on genetic modification. These roadblocks to EJ can only be overcome by education to potential “ally” communities not on the frontlines of the food sovereignty struggle. This will become less and less of a problem, due to the increasing struggles over food resources, growing worldwide resistance to industrial agriculture (ex: Haitian rejection of GMO corn in 2011), and the Global Food Crisis declared by the U.N.
Two problems that EJ has not yet had major success with: resource scarcity and rapid population growth. On one hand, the ethic of EJ is purported to solve resource scarcity by deconstructing over-consumption and uncontrollable industrial capitalism, and replacing it with localized and sustainable societies. On the other hand, this has not yet had the sort of wide success needed to confront the deeply entrenched systems of global capitalism. The plan for this has not been articulated, rendering any EJ prescriptions for an alternative society thus far extremely vague. Likewise, with the problems of over-population, EJ folks have yet to address the problems of balancing social justice and human rights with the critical threat of overpopulation. Still, both of these problems are a result of EJ’s relative youth as an international environmental ethic, and will be resolved as more unified and articulate forms of solidarity between frontline communities spring up around the world, in the form of regional and international conferences and summits. Unification of the international movements is the first step towards acting on international problems. Furthermore, part of EJ’s ethic includes reproductive justice, which provides a segue into family planning and discussions on population.
Like any revolution, EJ is dependent on social conditions to be effective. Different social conditions create settings which can make its popularity more or less difficult for organizers to build from.
Geopolitically, frontline communities are the most receptive to the EJ ethic, due to their proximity to environmental destruction and the negative impact that it has on their lives. When climate-changing toxins are spewed out of an oil refinery, frontline communities, which are usually poor or marginalized in society, are the first to take notice of the environmental effects through the impacts on their own bodies. This is a natural progression from the radical liberation traditions of the 60’s and 70’s in working-class/color/indigenous communities, and therefore finds a pre-existing network of support and heritage for EJ to flourish in. Naturally, members from frontline communities make the most driven and radical leaders in EJ organizing, because the effects of environmental degradation are very personal: disease, starvation, housing injustice, lack of reproductive health, collapse of social structures, and other problems which plague marginalized communities can be attached to the destruction of the environment. This unification of grievances into a single ideological ethic directs the resistance movements of frontline communities around the world into a single fist against centralized economic/political power. Furthermore, EJ are much more successful in marginalized communities than other environmental ideologies, because they focus on distant and alienating topics like “saving the polar bears” and “green consumerism” that frontline communities do not find relevant in daily life.
In geopolitical settings which are not as visibly affected by environmental destruction (i.e. rich neighborhoods in the Global North), EJ is harder to popularize because it is less apparently relevant to their interests. These sectors of society tend to be upper-class, educated, and with more access to the systems of political and economic power. They also tend to be resistant to EJ because they stand to lose their positions of privilege in the status quo. This is not an immediate problem to EJ, because unlike other environmental movements, it is not built on economic capital so much as it relies on grassroots support in local communities. However, EJ must eventually confront these communities in order to achieve its goals of collective liberation, and to dismantle dominant systems, which these communities guard intensely. The only way to popularize EJ among the non-frontline communities is with education, which is already happening through the insertion of frontline community narratives into the mainstream student environmental movement. College students, who are the next generation of the non-frontline communities, are becoming more desperate as they face mountains of educational debt and a collapsed job market, and are jaded by the lack of unity and effectiveness of the mainstream environmentalists, as exemplified at COP15. These conditions, combined with increased government impunity against corporate interests and environmental destruction, will make college students more receptive to the radical solutions of EJ. This radicalizing affect has precedent in the movements of the 60’s and 70’s, when the problems faced by communities of color with the Vietnam War began to affect students, who then joined marginalized communities to become some of the most militant and passionate leaders of that era. And of course, EJ is being embraced and inserted into these communities by the more radical sectors of the activist intelligentsia, such as white U.S. anarchists, who increasingly see EJ as the most comprehensive and promising move towards radical social change in decades.
In terms of ideological flexibility, EJ has the advantage of being able to embrace both “progressive” and more conservative “traditional” communities. Once again, this is due to the inclusiveness of the EJ movement and its dedication to collective liberation. EJ satisfies the needs of both ideological communities by emphasizing the importance of individual autonomy/small government and human rights, along with community welfare and social equality. This has been exemplified by the unprecedented diversity (in the environmental movement) of EJ leadership. Both very conservative traditional indigenous communities and radically progressive intelligentsia are represented in EJ networks. Furthermore—and this is critical—EJ has resolved many of the ideological conflicts between these different communities, i.e. queer/feminist and working-class white Appalachians, by uniting their interests into a single narrative and against a single enemy (centralized power).
The one place where EJ has faced monumental resistance and crippling wariness is in the mainstream environmental movement itself. This is due in large part to the leadership and membership of the mainstream environmental movement: it is overwhelmingly ruled by middle to upper-class white Americans/Europeans, the very same communities that present problems to popularizing EJ. The mainstream environmental movement is controlled by a very narrow sector of the global society, which is in turn entrenched in the cutthroat world of international politics and competing business interests. The leaders of the mainstream environmental movement are highly resistant to EJ, because their view of environmentalism is one that is fundamentally opposed to EJ’s ethic of anti-consumerism, local solutions, decentralized control, and international solidarity. These leaders practice what the EJ movement calls “false solutions”: greenwash consumerism, market initiatives, greenwash technology, and government controls. Of course, these solutions are highly appealing to the kingpins of industrial capitalism, because they provide an expanding niche market for consumption and another key through which to influence international politics. This has made environmental reforms proposed by the mainstream groups very weak, since business interests depend on the expansion of resource-consuming industry to make a profit. Furthermore, the presence of business interests in the mainstream environmental leadership and government has entrenched guards to expansive and radical solutions, or even comprehensive reform. These organizations and networks are not shifting power so much as they are painting the dominant systems of power in neon green.
Again, the solution to this resistance is education, insertion of EJ narratives into the mainstream, and the failure of the environmental movement itself. The mainstream environmental movement has been entirely impotent when it comes to making any progress on comprehensive government control on pollution, environmental degradation, species extinction, etc., and has been shown again and again to be incapable of achieving critical victories in the fight against climate change. National governments are too constrained by corporate power, which can now commit massive environmental destruction almost entirely unimpeded by government. On the international level, the problem is even worse, because governments are constrained by their own political conflicts with one another and their dedication to advancing their economic interests. There is also no hope for reform, thanks to an international legal system that has no real control over state actions, and the rise of powerful non-state actors for which there are almost no international regulations. Students especially are increasingly seeing these failures in the mainstream environmental movement, and are thus becoming more receptive to the radical solutions of EJ. They are also more likely to join as they begin to recognize the alienating inequalities of the environmental movement, observable in the fact that most of the EJ movement is brown and lower class, while the mainstream environmental movement is almost entirely white. And again, radical white groups that embrace EJ are crucial in funneling these white students out of the reactionary “coffee-table” organizations into solidarity with frontline communities.
In terms of its relations to the other environmental ethics, EJ inclusivity is once again its strongest advantage. It serves as an umbrella movement to absorb the other ethics, because its narrative of decentralizing and equalizing power is purposefully adaptable to diverse communities. Eco-feminism, which has historically been restricted to the intelligentsia class/educated white females, has found a very receptive international following among the frontline communities. This is due in large part to the identification of eco-feminism with indigenous traditions of the Pachamama “Earth Mother” and paralleling narratives of anti-commodification found in both eco-feminism and EJ. An important piece of this unity is the welcome received by queer/intersex communities in EJ. Because these marginalized sexual communities are well-represented in eco-feminism, the EJ embracing of eco-feminism has created a strong niche for sexual minorities in the movement. This has also fostered strong solidarity between sexual minority communities and historically patriarchal communities, such as in black neighborhoods.
Similar unities have been created with the “deep ecology” movement, because EJ has fit the intellectual observations of that ethic firmly into the realities of frontline communities. The dedication to dismantling industrial capitalism is very much in line with the deep ecology narrative of finding the root causes of environmental destruction and creating societies that live in “balance with nature.” Many members of frontline communities that are historically centered around subsistence-agriculture, and less consumption due to economic realities, find affirmation in deep ecology.
The only environmental ethic that has potential roadblocks for absorption into EJ is “Religious Stewardship.” This is due largely to the Protestant Christian religions embraced in the U.S. and Europe, many of which identify with corporate capitalism and the notion of having “dominion over the earth” found in Genesis. On the other hand, this problem has the potential to be overcome, due to the deeply religious tradition found in many frontline communities, which has historically been a source of strength in their social movements. Furthermore, many of the EJ narratives of “respecting Mother Earth” are built on spiritual undertones that are receptive to religious communities.
Environmental justice unifies the increasingly radical spirit of today’s global resistance. The core ideas of EJ have been around since the 70’s, but it has not been until very recently that they have found fertile ground. Social struggles against exploitative power have made settings ripe. First, the structure for international solidarity was laid out in the global networks of the alter-mundialist/anti-globalization movement that was born in the EZLN rebellion of 1994, and culminated in the 1999 WTO resistance. Second, the popularization of climate change as a global crisis built the groundwork of terminology and knowledge around environmental problems. Third, the radical environmental and “eco-terrorist” movements that exploded in the 90’s created receptive allies and analysis among white academic activist communities (deep ecology). Fourth, economic collapse, corporate environmental disasters, and destruction of the labor movement stoked the fans of rage against industrial capitalism and corporate power. Finally, the heritage of resistance among marginalized working class and communities of color made a synthesis of these narratives and attached them to their own identities. These moments in history catalyzed a peak in politicization and gave birth to a new generation of working-class struggle. This is what makes EJ fundamentally different from the heretofore environmental movement: it is a social revolution from the bottom-up.
And it is only beginning. The seed of success in environmental justice is found in its stipulation that people and planet are not only connected but equally important in creating global justice. The bottom line is that the vast majority of society may recognize climate change and environmental destruction as a problem—but they are not going to care about polar bears and trees unless it affects them. The mainstream environmental movement cannot jump this hurdle while they place exploitative power systems and ideologies over people. Only environmental justice smashes the false divide between the environment and people. It is a broad-based movement that is at once flexible and inclusive, but also militant and unified. It is inevitable that the mainstream environmental movement will embrace (or be replaced by) the radical ideologies of environmental justice, because that is the only way that it can survive as a popular movement.
