BY: LYDIA WIENER, SUMMER 2020 COLLABORATOR AT POWER IN PLACE
Millions across the globe have taken to the streets and opened their minds (and wallets) to combat the systemic racism that has historically plagued Black and Brown communities. Outraged, and rightfully so, over the wrongful deaths of George Floyd and the many before him while in police custody, protestors have championed the phrase “No Justice, No Peace,” indicating that unrest will not cease until Floyd’s killers are convicted and major police reform is made. The Black Lives Matter organization has spearheaded this movement by demanding police budgets be cut, demilitarized, and the resulting money be invested into marginalized communities. But police brutality is merely one symptom of foundational racism. The meta mantra “No Justice, No Peace” calls for environmental justice, education justice, economic justice, and everything in between.
The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulation, and policies,” calling into question the blatant environmental inequities faced by Black and Brown communities in the US and around the world since the colonial era [1]. Colonial discourse, canonized by Edward Said’s book Orientalism, framed white men and the Western world as the picture of progress, civility, and rationality, while people of color and the global East were framed as the barbaric, savage, primitive, “other” [2]. This mentality, paired with lingering sentiment from the 1800s movement to preserve American wilderness (which was largely a response to immigration and the emancipation of slaves), culminated in the Wilderness Act of 1964—a racially charged foundation to the “golden era” of environmental legislation. Section 2c of the Wilderness Act prescribed “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” turning wilderness into a racialized “purification machine” where Native American and Black communities were evicted from their residential lands [3].
These Black and Brown communities were relocated to vulnerable, degraded, and largely unwanted lands. Whether it be lands geographically predisposed to bear the forefront of climate burdens (think the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina), or lands that are riddled with calculated placements of locally unwanted land-uses such as landfills, superfund sites, and highways (think the Warren County PCB Landfill circa 1982), these Black and Brown communities face intensified health, economic, and development vulnerabilities not experienced by their white counterparts, reinforcing the historical cycle of disenfranchisement and oppression.
It’s no wonder why the collective memories of Black communities hold ambivalent connections to wildlands. Prior to the civil rights movement, wildlands provided spaces for escaped slaves to develop medicinal practices with plants, perform spiritual practices, form resistance movements, and feed families, while also serving as grounds for rapes and beatings. Over time, this relationship only became more convoluted as imposed restrictions on historical and cultural lands encouraged an influx of wealthy, white visitors, skewing local understandings of sense of place associated with those spaces and causing many Blacks to feel alienated and unsafe. Just this past Memorial Day, white New York City resident Amy Cooper highlighted the manufactured doubts surrounding the place of the Black body in the natural space when she reported and threatened Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher and board member of the New York City Audubon Society, to the police.
Carolyn Finney, an environmental justice scholar, author, and activist who has been targeted by unsettling racial perceptions herself, calls on predominantly white-led environmental organizations and academic institutions to “recognize that systemic racism exists on both the streets of our cities and inside our national parks” [4]. According to Finney, there needs to be “full representation at every level in the environmental sector,” including reparations for disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities, to induce “fundamental, consequential, and absolute change.”
The Black Lives Matter movement and activists like Finney are forcing whitewashed America to grapple with its place in building this racist and oppressive system, and pushing the environmental movement to reassess its mission as well. Within the last month, paramount climate change activism and advocacy groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, 350.org, and the Sierra Club have publicly pledged to support Black-led justice initiatives, build inclusive, multiracial climate coalitions, and divest from systems of white supremacy. During a Black-led 350.org webinar on dismantling racism in the climate movement, Executive Director of Minnesota 350, Sam Grant, implores listeners to “live at the intersection of abolition and ending climate apartheid” [5].
References
[1] OP US EPA, “Environmental Justice,” Collections and Lists, US EPA, November 3, 2014, https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice.
[2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
[3] Janae Davis, “Black Faces, Black Spaces: Rethinking African American Underrepresentation in Wildland Spaces and Outdoor Recreation:,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, December 14, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618817480.
[4] Carolyn Finney, “The Perils of Being Black in Public: We Are All Christian Cooper and George Floyd | Race | The Guardian,” accessed June 15, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/03/being-black-public-spaces-outdoors-perils-christian-cooper.
[5] “Pledge to Act in Defense of Black Lives,” 350.org, accessed June 15, 2020, https://350.org/in-defense-of-black-lives/.
Lydia Wiener is a recent graduate of Middlebury College , where she majored in Environmental Policy and minored in Geography and African Studies. She is fascinated with the social, economic, and political nexus that underscores environmental issues, and is committed to creating equitable environmental change.