sexist/racist environmentalism

I wanted to be an environmentalist at one point in my life: romantic aspirations of saving the planet inspired me, at one point, to consider (double) majoring in environmental studies; but, when I took my first college course in environmental science, something seemed wrong. It wasn't the subject matter itself, which I had already studied in high school and really loved learning about. My excuse was that double majoring would have been too restrictive on my electives, but in reality I knew it had something to do with the other students in the class, the other people in the major. Was it that they shared the same dreams, thought they could save the world too, but that their dreams seemed superficial, phony even, and made me doubt my own?

I think, after reading Andrea Smith's chapter "Rape of the Land," I have realized at least partially the answer: sitting in a classroom of mostly well-to-do, white students, I understood to some level that "environmentalism" to a certain extent meant privilege. For example, the privilege of industry leads to lower birth rates; pre-industrial and developing countries have high birth rates (and of course "developing country" is code for non-Western). The privilege of industry also leads to astronomical increases of pollution and actually, in the short term, population bursts (here's the timeline: a pre-industrial nation has a high birth rate but also a high death rate. First come medical technologies that lower the death rate; the birth rate is still high, leading to high populations. Eventually contraceptive technologies and sex education lower the birth rate, but slowly and only after the population boom). Indeed, Smith confirms that "the population of India was stable until the advent of British colonialism" (70).

I understood that many of my classmates, and myself included, came from privileged backgrounds, could afford to go to NYU, could afford to discuss things like food chains and strip mining, could afford to say we'll protect the environment when really we had no idea what protecting the environment really meant. We came from suburbia, did not grow up next door to a nuclear power plant, were not subjected to the effects of atomic bomb testings. We grew up eating meat and throwing away too much trash and leaving the light on too long, and only cared when we found out it was "wrong," or, more accurately, that it was supposed to be "wrong," i.e. that we were supposed to care.

The sensationalization of the environment and environmental problems has turned it into such a fad, an easy way to "do something right" without understanding the deeper implications or more institutional causes. For example, one time in Midtown I saw a giant, electric billboard that tallied the real-time production of carbon dioxide; but how much waste and pollution was created in producing and constructing that sign, how much energy wasted keeping it running 24/7? The environment has become the go-to cause for all kinds of pseudo-political celebrity activism, a way for people to be recognized for their "noble" efforts while glossing over what is really at stake. Take, for example, the Aryan Women's League (a white supremacist and homophobic organization): "The way to [gain public legitimacy] is to make ourselves known as environmentalists and wildlife advocates" (quoted in Smith, 77). The thought of hate groups using environmental activism as a facade to gain recognition is sickening.

Yet embedded into much of the discourse of environmentalism is hate, "what Betsy Hartmann calls 'the greening of hate'" (quoted in Smith, 69). Though we have already looked at the ways in which communities of color are disproportionately targeted for environmentally dangerous facilities, Smith reveals the marginalization of women and people of color in environmental activism. Specifically (and this is why I brought up earlier the relationship between industrialization and birth rate) the rhetoric of overpopulation as a major environmental problem belies male- and white-dominated politics: immigrant women from third world (and thus inherently racialized) countries are often cast as the problem population in such discourse, seen as "having too many children." Thus they become vilified when they are in fact disenfranchised people, the victims (not the culprits) of national and global structures of inequality and colonialism. Third world nations are, in the view of some populationist groups, responsible for overpopulation; but, Smith points out, these views ignore the giant disparity between the over-consumption of developed, post-industrial nations, and the much more modest consumption of developing nations: "there is actually enough food produced in the world to sustain every person at a 3,000-calorie-per-day diet. However, land is used inefficiently in order to support livestock for environmentally unsustainable Western meat-based diets" (71, emphasis added). Furthermore, "poverty, starvation, environmental degradation, and overpopulation are the direct result of specific colonial practices" (71).

The title of the chapter, "Rape of the Land," acts to draw a parallel between land and the environment with the body as a kind of space. Smith discusses specific, and more literal, ties between the land and the body in the form of the radiation of bomb testing, which pollutes both land and body; thus the physical body and the physical land become intertwined, so that, cliche as it is, "Rape of the Land" is a surprisingly apt metaphor to describe the multiple ways in which pollution and other environmental problems affect people and their property. When the land is violated, so is the body.

I end with a quote that continues to haunt me, though it is mostly irrelevant to the rest of my response: discussing the effects of severe atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands, which have caused extreme birth defects and health issues, "Some communities have decided to stop reproducing and go extinct" (69).