What is wrong with the environmental movement

The United Nations came out with yet another scary report about life on Mother Earth.

Up to 1 million of Earth's 8 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, many within a matter of years, because of humans, scientists warned Monday.

The losses are a direct result of human activity and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, according to a global assessment by the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

While the lion's share of the blame for this total failure at preventing the destruction of our planet's environment can be put in the lap of the resource extraction industries and corrupt politicians, some of the blame can be assigned to mainstream environmental groups as well.
You see, the mainstream environmental movement has a Classism Problem. This classism is reflected in both policy and the language they use.

While wealthy white liberals are discussing climate change as something that will hurt their children’s children, low-income communities are already living with the consequences: a largely unseen nightmare of pollution, water contamination, and natural disasters that affects everything from their health to their housing security.

Everywhere that the environment is discussed, the topic is always "predictions". Well, for the wealthy the topic of environmental destruction is a theoretical dystopian thing. For poor people it's a present-day reality.
The reason for this divergence is because many of those mainstream environmental groups only hire wealthy people.

It has become a vicious cycle. Students, even those with advanced degrees, are told that they need more experience, especially field experience, before they can get a job. But just about the only experience available is through unpaid internships or volunteering. Pretty soon one unpaid internship isn’t enough and now two, three, or more has become the unspoken standard.
...
“This is completely unrealistic for most people,” he said.
What happens next? Most people interviewed had not yet secured jobs. Some young conservationists give up and move on to something else.

It's completely unrealistic for working class kids. Trust fund kids are another story.

That's not to say that environmentalism is a rich people's thing, like the right-wing portrays it.
On the contrary, the opposite is true.
What it means is that there are two environmental movements. One for the rich, and one for the poor.

The divide has resulted in two environmental movements. One is white and the other non-white, one rich and the other poor, one devoted largely to advocating on behalf of wilderness areas and the other for "environmental justice" in core urban areas where minorities tend to live.

These two environmental movements have very different focuses, and use very different language. The poor people's environmental movement focus on things like pollution, deforestation, and environmental destruction.
Wealthy people talk about global warming and climate change.
Which agenda sounds more urgent to you, and which one do you actually hear about in the media?
Naomi Klein gives an excellent example.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies. But the fact that it's also ruining the planet adds another layer of urgency.

Almost all of the grassroots energy of the environmental movement is on the side of poor people. Almost all of the media attention is on the side of rich people.
Just look at what passes for Green Tech - energy-efficient light bulbs, hybrid cars, and a mandate requiring that all new homes have solar panels.
There is nothing wrong with these things, except that this modest incrementalist attitude has done absolutely nothing to stop the destruction of the environment.
Consider one favorite environmental "solution" of the wealthy elite - cap-and-trade.

Cap-and-trade programs often lack public disclosure or input and stand to increase the amount of toxic chemicals in the air and water by turning pollution itself into a commodity...
According to Food and Water Watch, “Polluters have long built their facilities in lower-income and minority communities where residents lacked the political muscle to prevent toxic facilities from moving into the neighborhood.”

Their so-called win-win strategy has lost.
So while the agenda of wealthy environmentalists is largely accepted by everyone except for the reactionary right and the oil and gas lobby, few recognize that this is essentially lesser-evilism in action. This has caused a great deal of reputational damage to the movement.

What is needed is radical change. The only people demanding radical change are poor people.
This is true everywhere in the world.

Firstly, if you think today in India we are finding that there are a million pollution mutinies across the country. There are huge protests against pollution, against deforestation, the takeover of grazing lands, of fishing areas, of beaches. But these differently from where environmentalism has come from the rest of the world. These are not protests by middle-class environmentalists who are wanting to save the Earth. These are protests by the very poor. These are protests by people who know that they are not rich. That they are poor. And yet, they are fighting development-- development as you and I know it-- because they believed that development will only make them poorer.

So they know that the factories that we build, the power stations that come up will take away livelihoods. Will destroy life because of pollution. And to my mind, this very fact should force us to rethink what we mean by growth. The fact is that these million pollution mutinies are forcing us to rethink, and to force us to share growth in ways that we have never considered till now.
... The environmentalism of the poor-- and that's the environmentalism of the people who are going out there, fighting against pollution, against projects, against dams, not because, as I said, that they believe in the environment for tomorrow-- for saving the environment for tomorrow-- but because of their livelihoods. This environmentalism tells us that resources are limited, that we need to tread lightly or not. It tells us that there is an alternative way. We can build economies that benefit large numbers of people, that sustainably use water, share the water, and can sustainably use the land.

Corporations now partner with environmental groups to greenwash their products.
This can only work when the pollution and environmental destruction happen "somewhere else", because if it was happening in your backyard then no amount of greenwashing would ever work.

As Naomi Klein puts it, "when it comes to climate change, there's a dual denialism at work – conservatives deny the science while some liberals deny the political implications of the science."

I go back to something even like the fight over NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Big Green groups, with very few exceptions, lined up in favor of NAFTA, despite the fact that their memberships were revolting, and sold the deal very aggressively to the public. That's the model that has been globalized through the World Trade Organization, and that is responsible in many ways for the levels of soaring emissions. We've globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It's now successfully spreading across the world, and it's killing us.

It's not that the green groups were spectators to this – they were partners in this. They were willing participants in this.

A lot of people like to point out how much the environmental agenda costs. None of these people point out how much environmental destruction is costing us.
Like just about every political issue today, the problem is class.

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I certainly think it's the ultimate expression of a desire to avoid doing the hard work of reducing emissions, and I think that's the appeal of it. I think we will see this trajectory the more and more climate change becomes impossible to deny. A lot of people will skip right to geoengineering. The appeal of geoengineering is that it doesn't threaten our worldview. It leaves us in a dominant position. It says that there is an escape hatch. So all the stories that got us to this point, that flatter ourselves for our power, will just be scaled up.

[There is a]willingness to sacrifice large numbers of people in the way we respond to climate change – we are already showing a brutality in the face of climate change that I find really chilling. I don't think we have the language to even describe [geoengineering], because we are with full knowledge deciding to allow cultures to die, to allow peoples to disappear. We have the ability to stop and we're choosing not to. So I think the profound immorality and violence of that decision is not reflected in the language that we have. You see that we have these climate conventions where the African delegates are using words like "genocide," and the European and North American delegates get very upset and defensive about this. The truth is that the UN definition of genocide is that it is the deliberate act to disappear and displace people. What the delegates representing the North are saying is that we are not doing this because we want you to disappear; we are doing this because we don't care essentially. We don't care if you disappear if we continue business-as-usual. That's a side effect of collateral damage. Well, to the people that are actually facing the disappearance it doesn't make a difference whether there is malice to it because it still could be prevented. And we're choosing not to prevent it. I feel one of the crises that we're facing is a crisis of language. We are not speaking about this with the language of urgency or mortality that the issue deserves.

This is where capitalism is leading us.
This is capitalism Red in tooth and claw.
This is the real history of capitalism, where the Free State of Congo made severed hands a currency. Where the Dutch East Indies company committed genocide for the crime of trading outside of the monopoly. Where the Atlantic Slave Trade ran on free market profits.

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@gjohnsit I have a real hard time believing that Armageddonists really give a shit. If they did, we would have had molten salt cooled reactors by now.

I did a post on that here about a year ago and the response was ho-hum.

People are not going to give up washing their clothes in a washing machine, and 5 billion people, who don't have one yet, want to wash that way. And that is just a smidgen of the things most of the world wants and has never had. WE can't keep the rest of the world from getting what they want.

Renewables will not get us there. It is fossil fuels until they run out, or it is nuclear. Or maybe future generations will figure something else out.

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Hawkfish's picture

@davidgmillsatty

that the renewable math works out. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

@Hawkfish It doesn't work out. And you will always need a backup for solar and wind. And any back-up system that has to start and stop is analogous to a car's city mpg which is never as good as highway mpg. And starting and stopping any system usually makes its lifespan much shorter.

So the back-up system ends up being far more costly to run per kw than if it was running all the time.

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Hawkfish's picture

@davidgmillsatty

That bothers me is the ongoing maintenance costs. All the projected solar panel deployments I’ve seen will require replacing every panel on average every 20 years - forever. That works out to more than we currently produce annually every year. It’s an industrial and resource extraction treadmill we can never get off.

Batteries and renewables can work for following load and maybe peak, but base has to be something less flaky. Right now renewables are backed by gas, which is not really progress.

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We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg

@davidgmillsatty Al Ed and I did a post in tandem. He introduced me since I was not known here. He posted first to introduce me and I posted my "OP" second. You can read all about the nuclear power we could have had and never got here:

https://caucus99percent.com/content/power-power

Perhaps I should do a real OP now and update this a bit with actual video from Oak Ridge at the time.

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snoopydawg's picture

While wealthy white liberals are discussing climate change as something that will hurt their children’s children, low-income communities are already living with the consequences: a largely unseen nightmare of pollution, water contamination, and natural disasters that affects everything from their health to their housing security.

Think that the Koch brothers could have built their petcho trailings dump on the north side of Chicago? Or chevron building a refinery in the middle of Berkeley or any landfills in an affluent white neighborhood? Not a chance and that's why they are built in poor neighborhoods.

A lot of people like to point out how much the environmental agenda costs. None of these people point out how much environmental destruction is costing us.
Like just about every political issue today, the problem is class.

Another great point. When the Richmond chevron refinery has a safety issue and releases lots of toxic crap into the air the poor don't have money to go to hospitals and get checked out. Chevron might say that they will reimburse people who do, but how long will they fight it or the amount before they do?

But there's that one thing that most climate change groups never discuss and that's how much the world's military excursions contributes to it.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

wendy davis's picture

@snoopydawg

"But there's that one thing that most climate change groups never discuss and that's how much the world's military excursions contributes to it."

do any except the US greens?

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

What the hell ever happened to eco-terrorism???

Why, just for example, is the Koch family still alive? They believe themselves to be more valuable than 8 million plant and animal species...and we're implicitly validating that conceit.

Oh, the cruel and gruesome fantasies I compulsively cleanse myself with every time I'm shown one of their photos....

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Song of the lark's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat Ecotage.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@Song of the lark "Eco-peacekeeping"?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Meanwhile there are reports that the wealthy elites are buying land in New Zealand and building bunkers in hopes of weathering the coming "storm", with elaborate plans including how to deal with hired security in case the help (who will have guns) rebel against their masters in the dystopian future. We're at a stage where all of this argument may become moot. First there will be such things as global food shortages due to widespread crop failures, which will be mild in the beginning, but worsening over time. If abrupt climate change (due to reinforcing feedback loops) kicks in with a vengeance as some scientists predict, the changes will occur too quickly for us to adapt. At this point, those guilty of inaction may one day face something akin to Nuremberg trials if people are still in the mood for due process. We all should be out in the streets.

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The Sixth Mass Extinction is occurring now, in our time. The situation is dire. We must act to avert the worst of what is to come, and it may already be too late.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@sixthmassextinction In the homes and offices of those responsible.

Mass violence is less than worthless. We need precision violence: Kidnappings, assassinations, and small-scale raids, as well as "lesser violences" like sabotage and heists.

Don't just target "the rich", either: Do the research (which we've done to death and a half already), find out who is TRULY to blame, go after them and them alone.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

snoopydawg's picture

@sixthmassextinction

with elaborate plans including how to deal with hired security in case the help (who will have guns) rebel against their masters in the dystopian future

The elites are worried that the hired help will turn on them when they go to bug out to their hidey holes so they are hiring security goons to protect them from the help. But who's going to stop the security goons from turning on the elites? I really don't think they have thought that through unless they plan on taking the goon's family with them. Stay tuned this could get interesting...

Smile

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg Yes, elites are already having these discussions about how to control their security personnel. They are trying to devise some sort of fail-safe situation to deal with security. It may not be easy to accomplish! It's a mind-bending scenario they face. But it won't stop the worst of the horror that is coming if humanity fails to act. They can only overcome so much of the harsh environmental affects by going to areas that may be less impacted. It's a throw of the dice.

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The Sixth Mass Extinction is occurring now, in our time. The situation is dire. We must act to avert the worst of what is to come, and it may already be too late.

Wink's picture

@sixthmassextinction

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

The Aspie Corner's picture

Nothing we do matters. Nothing we say matters. As long as the pigs control every aspect of the conversation and activism, we're fucked.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

@The Aspie Corner "We're fucked". Yes, it appears we are fucked, barring some sweeping new ideas. It doesn't look good.

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The Sixth Mass Extinction is occurring now, in our time. The situation is dire. We must act to avert the worst of what is to come, and it may already be too late.

wendy davis's picture

While wealthy white liberals are discussing climate change as something that will hurt their children’s children, low-income communities are already living with the consequences: a largely unseen nightmare of pollution, water contamination, and natural disasters that affects everything from their health to their housing security.

and that's globally true. a commenter at the Café had offered this: 'An open letter to Extinction Rebellion' redpepper.org.UK, may 3

This letter was collaboratively written with dozens of aligned groups (ses the list below). As the weeks of action called by Extinction Rebellion were coming to an end, our groups came together to reflect on the narrative, strategies, tactics and demands of a reinvigorated climate movement in the UK. In this letter we articulate a foundational set of principles and demands that are rooted in justice and which we feel are crucial for the whole movement to consider as we continue constructing a response to the ‘climate emergency’.

"Another truth is that for many, the bleakness is not something of “the future”. For those of us who are indigenous, working class, black, brown, queer, trans or disabled, the experience of structural violence became part of our birthright. Greta Thunberg calls world leaders to act by reminding them that “Our house is on fire”. For many of us, the house has been on fire for a long time: whenever the tide of ecological violence rises, our communities, especially in the Global South are always first hit. We are the first to face poor air quality, hunger, public health crises, drought, floods and displacement.

XR says that “The science is clear: It is understood we are facing an unprecedented global emergency. We are in a life or death situation of our own making. We must act now.” You may not realize that when you focus on the science you often look past the fire and us – you look past our histories of struggle, dignity, victory and resilience. And you look past the vast intergenerational knowledge of unity with nature that our peoples have. Indigenous communities remind us that we are not separate from nature, and that protecting the environment is also protecting ourselves. In order to survive, communities in the Global South continue to lead the visioning and building of new worlds free of the violence of capitalism. We must both centre those experiences and recognise those knowledges here.

Our communities have been on fire for a long time and these flames are fanned by our exclusion and silencing. Without incorporating our experiences, any response to this disaster will fail to change the complex ways in which social, economic and political systems shape our lives – offering some an easy pass in life and making others pay the cost. In order to envision a future in which we will all be liberated from the root causes of the climate crisis – capitalism, extractivism, racism, sexism, classism, ableism and other systems of oppression – the climate movement must reflect the complex realities of everyone’s lives in their narrative.
*
As XR draws this period of actions to a close, we hope our letter presents some useful reflections for what can come next. The list of demands that we present below are not meant to be exhaustive, but to offer a starting point that supports the conversations that are urgently needed.

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@wendy davis I have this picture in my head of Nancy Pelosi standing next to the police as we rabble come down the road. We're yelling "save the earth" and Pelosi is yelling "OMG what are you waiting for? Shoot them! They're destroying the environmental movement!"

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@Snode

We have fire alarms going off everywhere. The environment, healthcare, poverty.........massive institutional failure everywhere we look. And while we wrestle with the monsters we can see, lord knows what evils billionaires and governments are cooking up that we can't see. We are looking at massive devastation from the collapse of empire and the planet. If I were Russia, China, Iran - I wouldn't hesitate to destroy the US dollar and the smug American bastards behind it.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Pricknick's picture

will only work when everybody, regardless of race or living standard, commits to making changes of their own footprint.
I can preach to the choir about sustainable living but I can't enforce it. Until a majority give two shits about what's coming, nothing will happen.
Not to worry. Mother Earth and Mother Nature will balance it all out once humans are dust.

Someday you will die and somehow something's gonna steal your carbon
Parting of the Sensory
Modest Mouse

[video:https://youtu.be/4Y3ObJm0m9w]

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

WaterLily's picture

@Pricknick @Pricknick I:

- Recycle
- Compost
- Grow some of our food, buy organic for the rest
- Use reusable shopping bags
- Turn off extraneous lights (and use CFL bulbs, though I don't know anymore if these are helpful)
- Keep the house at 63 degrees for high, even when it's below zero out
- Purchased high-efficiency appliances
- Drive less, walk/bike more
- Etc. etc. etc.

Many, many other people I know are doing the same. Some are doing more, like solar and wind power (neither of which is currently feasible for us). These are the right things to do, but really -- do they even matter? I understand what you're saying, but I simply see no way that our collective actions can, or will, cancel the destructive effects of Big Ag, Big Oil, Big MIC.

Blaming individuals seems to have been another effective psy-op on these industries' parts. By making us feel like we can actually effect meaningful change ourselves, they can continue raping and pillaging the planet.

[Edited for extraneous 'n'.]

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US farmers/ag big business (middle class whites in flyover country) are responsible for incredible environmental degradation of our streams, rivers, lakes and coastal areas, including fish. It is a major environmental vector that is killing off insects (seen many honey bees lately? Or butterflies) with insecticides and habitat change. Nitrogen fertilizers and soil runoff are killing our waterway ecology and coastal waters. It is killing off fish. It is killing off waterfowl and songbirds.

I studied all this in college back in the early 1980s. Nothing got done since then on these issues because FREEDOM! We can't have the government telling us what to do with our land. Last year in Minnesota regulators are finally talking about regulations (with teeth) ag setbacks from streams to protect ecology.

And don't get me started on all the damn corn and soybean acreage. (It's our meat lovin' ways!)

The answers are too unpalatable to US society. I don't think it's rich v. poor but rather culture. Can we change our bedrock cultural values? Make maximum profits quickly Live the good life. Gain the respect of your peers. Money and prestige. It is us.

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@p cook There can't be enough said about the damage to the climate and environment not to mention the incredible waste of land and water, due factory farming and the over consumption of meat in this country. Most are willing to at least discuss the fossil fuel issues, The meat eating not so much.

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@pro left of outflow from cities sewage treatment. Hormones, antidepressants, antibiotics, heavy metals, salt, illicit drugs and storm runoff, yum.

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@pro left Double post. See next post.

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@pro left Animals and plants have a symbiotic relationship. Take out the animals and the plants really suffer. And we have taken out nearly all of the big mammals that used to fertilize our grasslands.

Alan Savory makes the case that we must bring animals back and we must use livestock in the meantime to do the job of wild animals because livestock are all the big animals we have left in large enough numbers. My favorite TED talk of all time.

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wendy davis's picture

the new UN climate scary report platform on biodiversity, etc. is science always right? i know most genuflect before it, but i'll offer that the 3 green new deals: ocaiso's, greens in the UK, and extinction rebellion only speak to net-zero carbon Ocasio's, net biodiversity, greens UK and XR, which use capitalist market solutions (cap and trade, carbon offsets, and big bidness carbon capture and storage and programs that foist the burdens onto the poorest hapless nations, esp. in the global south).

what i'm asking is this: given that, and that actual ecosocialists in the global south continue to be marginalized: is that what this next generation science report (if true) about? extending bidness solutions to capital again?

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@wendy davis
I don't need a scientific report to tell me that we're destroying the environment, and that unrestrained capitalism will kill us all.
You can't buy a new environment.

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wendy davis's picture

@gjohnsit @gjohnsit

to my Q, though, as i'd hoped my Q would reflect. ; ) why now is it all an emergency now, even with the flimsy terms such as 'threatened with extinction'?

but your response does mirror klein's 'this changes everything nothing' title as she'd blamed 'unfettered' capitalism as the culprit (yeah let's 'fetter' it the DSA way). nor did she nor bill mckibben keep us endlessly diverted from realizing that the US War, Inc. is far and away the largest carbon footprint on the planet. but their funders wouldn't have liked them saying that, would they?

sure, it didn't take a weatherman to know that capitalists were blowin' down the ecosphere, whether by Factory Ag, monsanto and bill gates' Green Revolution' (even more so in africa in 2012), the almost satirical green washing of COP 2015 (oh, but DT pulled us out of it! as if it mattered). poisoned and depleted aquifers, hansford station still leaking depleted nuclear waste into the rivers and on to the seas in the northwest.but the Big Solutions in the developed world today are are all about foistng the burdens on the back of the marginalized and poor.

'learn from the indigenous', the report says. good tip, cuz the indigenous knew exactly as afoot even before 2012; too bad they'd had to hold side meetings at the rio 2012 sustainability conference (scroll down to Good News).

but here it comes again: the third worlders in the global south are being blamed for having to many chirren (paul erlich believers). and the eugenicists are having a good time joining in.

but again, my question was really: why now? because capitalist pseudo-solutions rule? buffy had it right even as far back as 1990 as well:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM-2k1jo0zU]

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@gjohnsit What are you going to do about it? Continue to type?

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Dawn's Meta's picture

is that corn and rich grains, which are chemically farmed in huge swaths across the landscape, are unhealthy for the animals forced to eat them.

They are not natural foods. Forcing these animals to eat these chemically grown foods, is unhealthy to cause infections and other diseases. This in turn causes more use of biocides directly in our beef cattle as well as other supposed food animals.

Left to their own preferences cattle will eat mixed herb: grasses, low on nitrates, herb plants and flowers. They feel poisoned and will rid themselves (purge) given the chance.

Ivermectin is given to beef for intestinal worms. They then go out to grass pastures and leave the worm killing cow pats on the pasture, which in this cycle, sterilizes the ground, both the critters in it and the natural networks of root and fungal (mycorrhizal network)

Extensive network for nutrition

Grass-fed must be carefully evaluated. And it is currently the province of the wealthier to eat "organic" unless food is grown in backyard gardens.

I have learned a lot in the last month from "Wilding" a book written by yes a privileged couple, Isabella Tree, who return their UK farm back as close as possible to a pre modern system. It actually works, and rather quickly.

Wilding

https://rewildingeurope.com/what-is-rewilding/

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A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit. Allegedly Greek, but more possibly fairly modern quote.

Consider helping by donating using the button in the upper left hand corner. Thank you.

There used to be a term, calling someone or some group a "sell out". Meaning, I think, capitalizing a benign vision into an industry where profits are the measure of success. So many of the organizations and individuals we used to think of as environmental have sold out.

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lotlizard's picture

@Snode  
They become part of the “non-profit industrial complex.”

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EVERYONE should be subject to minimum wage.
This is distinguished from volunteer work, where it is clear that no paying job will ever result.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.