Staying relevant means responding to calls for environmental justice
“You cannot heal ecosystems without ending poverty, you cannot end poverty without healing ecosystems.”
By Greg Gerritt
I
also need to say that you are getting my side of the story this evening.
Everyone would tell this story differently. I also realize that as I shortened
this to fit tonight that some of the pieces that hit the floor were the parts
that discuss how oppressed communities of the world are their most important
advocates and have much to offer to the environmental community. Going forward
their leadership and participation will be crucial to keeping the planet and all
communities healthy.
The
Arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends towards justice is not the
exact quote abolitionist Theodore Parker penned in the 1840’s when speaking of
the inevitability of the ending of slavery, but it later inspired Martin Luther
King Jr and it is how we think of it today.
Clearly most of the environmental groups that popped up in the United States as the passenger pigeons were being wiped out and the Bison slaughtered were founded by people as racist as the general population.
Even if many of their members
were not racists, which is not a given, the tone of the large environmental non
profits was, ‘let us protect land, water, and wildlife’ with no real thoughts
about the people who lived on the land from time immemorial, or the
relationship between long standing communities and the land the invaders wanted
to think of as uninhabited wilderness.
All of North America is stolen land, and it is only now that western thinkers and scholars are beginning to understand that in North America, and actually across the entire world, indigenous communities have developed cultural adaptations that enabled them to harvest more for their communities while still maintaining healthy ecosystems, and have in many cases successfully managed these eco/cultural systems for thousands of years.
The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act have been critical in efforts to clean up our air, waters, and neighborhoods – though how well depends upon whose neighborhood unfortunately. The sins of omission, the refusal to limit pollution in sacrifice zones even as some places got cleaner, clearly is part of the racist and classist trends that American politics has followed throughout history.
The Black, Indigenous, and low income
communities of color that have been the nation’s dumping grounds reflect the
power structure of the United States as well as anything we see today except
for racialized policing and the suppression of the vote. But even from its
beginnings there were many active in the environmental movement that understood
that justice was how we get to a clean environment; even if justice was not
centered in the environmental movement.
The burst of progress beginning with the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and continuing through the passage of key environmental legislation not only brought about the founding of ECRI, it also brought immense pushback, officially beginning with future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell’s Chamber of Commerce memo in which the super rich declared war on progress, and began a massive 50 year PR campaign that is grounded in the racist neoliberal economic plans that came out of universities in Virginia.
The campaign not only
bequeathed to us horrible economic policy, it offered us attacks on democracy,
voter suppression, underfunded infrastructure, and environmental roll backs.
The founders of neoliberalism understood quite well that no one would vote for
their program if it was discussed honestly so they created the Big Lie.
These days almost anyone paying attention realizes that undercutting democracy and legislating injustice is accompanied by an anti-environmental position so as to protect the profits of the super rich, but in the mid 1980’s there was one group that specifically linked man’s inhumanity to man to the destruction of the environment.
While they continue to be a marginal piece of the American
political and environmental story, the Green Party’s slogan of ‘Ecology,
Equality, Democracy, Peace,’ chosen in 1984, reminds us that everything is
connected and shows that even in the dimly lit past many in the environmental
movement have always stood for justice – racial and economic – and understood
that progress on all these issues is intimately connected.
Robert
Bullard really began the process of opening eyes in the environmental community
about environmental injustice with Dumping in Dixie in 1990. I read it and it
opened my eyes.
Democracy
has always been critical to ecological healing. Communities and governments
where the people cannot be heard, where demonstrating is not allowed, where
petitioning the government is stonewalled, never take care of the environment,
never care about public health, never tell people what is poisoning them.
Authoritarians never let community opposition keep them from allowing the rich
to do whatever they want in pursuit of profits.
Communities
need the right to say no. Whether it is RIDOT wasting our money destroying
Kennedy Plaza, Washington Park residents looking to stop the building of a dump,
or the people of Burrillville rising up against a power plant, the right of a
community to say no would save all of us big headaches.
I
want to mention how important the study and discipline of anthropology has been
to the development of some of the good trends we see. Anthropology has roots as
racist as any academic discipline, but even from its earliest periods it had
people that understood that skin color is malleable in evolutionary time in
response to the amount of sunshine a community receives and that under the skin
we are all pretty much the same. In the early 1950’s, a number of
anthropologists were openly condemning racism as an idea with no scientific
underpinnings.
One useful thing anthropologists have been able to do is to offer some intellectual heft and the amplification of indigenous voices around the world on the topic of how good indigenous stewards of the land are when their land base is intact and how important indigenous communities maintaining their control of their land is to the future of the planet.
This meme has radically changed
conservation biology and laws on land tenure around the world and now local
communities are at the heart of preserving and repairing the ecosystems that
sustain them as well as benefitting from some of the tourists who are sustained
by experiencing ecosystems in good hands. Applied locally it means being allies
of the people organizing to protect their own communities.
Given my background in anthropology maybe it is not surprising that for about 20 years I have used the slogan “You cannot heal ecosystems without ending poverty, you cannot end poverty without healing ecosystems.”
I came up with it
based on my understanding of how the poorest people live in the most degraded
ecosystems, whether it is gatherers and swidden farmers in West Papua displaced
by an iron mine, dump pickers in the Philippines, the residents of cancer alley
in East Texas, or residents of Southside fighting natural gas expansion and
dumps on Allen’s Ave. The converse is also true. People living in healthy
environments, if they have access to the resource base, have better nutrition
and are healthier.
ECRI has not in the past been an outlier on issues of justice. Many ECRI activists care deeply about justice and have included justice advocacy in their lives. But we swam in the cultural stream as an organization. I do not think since 1990 we have shied away from environmental justice, it is just that we did not center it.
About 12 years ago, to give a boost to work on environmental
justice, ECRI was a part of group that created the Environmental Justice League
of RI, which as much good as it did, did not do all we had hoped precisely
because it was created by well meaning outsiders rather than arising from the
community. A lesson to us all.
Recently,
with the wave of issues around climate justice, fossil fuels and the port, a
rooted EJ movement has started to take hold in Providence. Like many of these
things, it was not any generic organizing that got it moving, it was a reaction
to very specific threats to communities that activated people and
organizations. ECRI has welcomed this organizing but there has been some
tension over what ECRI brings to the table, the nature of the challenges, and
what community groups would like to see from ECRI.
ECRI
always has capacity issues, it mostly works on what its members want it to, so
newcomers may find less than they wish in the way of support, often not
understanding how few resources ECRI has, which are mostly the energy and
knowledge of the advocates of the various member organizations that work
together at ECRI. Sometimes it is hard to ponder how slow a coalition of 60
member organizations changes. These are the issues we have asked Resolve
Conservation to work with us on.
One
thing I have been pondering is that often, the misunderstandings we encounter
are with organizations very involved in elections, and using legislation to
push an elections agenda rather than good governance. ECRI has been wise to
stay out of the endorsements and elections business, as that allows us to focus
on the work that goes on no matter who is in office.
The
boost that Black Lives Matter has given to the movements for justice is immense.
The push has permeated nearly every part of the environmental movement, adding
to the pressures the climate justice movement of the youth was starting to
generate. We can see it in all the large national environmental organizations,
such as the National Wildlife Federation, which is proactively pushing its
staff, board, and affiliates to center justice. We can see it in the ECRI
membership with those organizations that clearly see justice in their mission
moving faster than those with a little distance from these issues due to
geography or topics of interest.
Sunrise
has been important. Especially in its beginning phases it electrified the
climate movement, expanding it, demanding that it center justice and demanding
that communities and politicians rise up to actually meet the challenges of the
climate catastrophe. And for the first time the climate/environment movement
had a segment that reflected the diversity of America.
The
work of the community groups focused on the Port of Providence and the environmental
mess there has been fabulous. The People’s Port Authority and all of its
predecessors and allied neighborhood organizations have changed the discussion
in the city and contributed to real changes in city ordinances. The
Conservation Law Foundation has been a resource for the neighbors, and other
ECRI organizations and members, especially those based in Providence, have
deepened connections with residents and expanded their activism along Allen’s
Ave.
If
we honestly assess ECRI’s contribution to forward progress, it is on a variety
of fronts. We have recently been more ready to respond to calls for help and
resolutions in support of front line urban communities. We have been more ready
to support legislation of interest to EJ groups. We have taken it upon
ourselves to help the environmental community in RI and in our networks address
these issues even as we work on ourselves. Often this work is facilitated by
ECRI connections, even if it is not officially an ECRI project. Just do not ask
us to endorse half-baked bills.
I
also hope that as people focused on ecology that we remember how important
diversity is to environments and ecological stability and that all of us woven
together are stronger and make more progress than all of us working alone. On a
personal note I relish the idea that the next person in the ECRI office will
reflect the changes in the environmental movement in ways that a dinosaur like
me cannot and therefore help us connect better to the future movement.
Could
ECRI do better? Sure, everyone and every organization can do better. But we are
moving forward, and are now trying to speed up the process with the help of
experts. Whether the experts provide us with things we can use or not, the arc
of the moral universe is bending toward justice and we are consciously trying
to flow with it. We shall find new ways to bind our community together, we will
better incorporate justice into our understanding of environmental issues, we
shall better understand how issues are connected, and we shall be better
neighbors and allies for front line communities. It will be a bit messy,
misunderstandings and history will make it a bit bumpy. But we are all aware
that the issues we all care about will only be resolved if we pay attention to
the moral arc and move consciously towards justice. I look forward to a better
ECRI.