The logic of exploitation can creep into "environmentalism":
Curtis White:
Environmentalism consorts with the enemy when it makes science and quantitative reasoning its primary voice, and when it agrees – as it does in the utterly failed Kyoto protocols – that economic growth is a desideratum of the future and that any negative environmental consequences will be handled by wiser bureaucracies, laws, and technological fixes.
We need, first of all, clean air and water. Next, healthy food, which must be grown or gathered.
Clara Price:
When it comes down to it, would you really choose economics over environment? Where will you be when there is no clean air or water? Screw economics. I want to live.
You may be interested in my essay:
Earthpocalypse Isn't a 'Marginal' Cost (Despite What Economists Say) (Oct 15, 2022)
Some environmental conservationists were racist.
Leah Penniman:
White supremacy was built into the parks system from the outset. The US national parks comprise eighty-four million acres of land that were stolen from Native communities through forced treaty agreements under the genocidal project of Manifest Destiny. Among these displaced Native people were twenty-six Indigenous groups living in Yellowstone. They were fired out in the 1870s in a settler effort to create, then protect, ‘uninhabited wilderness.’ This became the blueprint for the ‘fortress conservation’ strategy that has displaced Indigenous people across the globe, ignoring the fact that Indigenous communities currently protect around 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity.
Some of the founders of the Western environmental movement espoused eugenics and white supremacy. Madison Grant was instrumental in creating the Everglades, Olympic, Glacier, and Denali National Parks as a strategy to strengthen the ‘Nordic race.’ Adolf Hitler referred to Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, as his ‘Bible.’ The first head of the US Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, was on the advisory council of the American Eugenics Society and a delegate to the International Eugenics Congress. John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, referred to Black and Indigenous people as ‘dirty, lazy, and uncivilized.’ John James Audubon, famed ornithologist and scientific illustrator and namesake of the Audubon Society, owned slaves and stole human remains for a pseudo-scientific study claiming white superiority.
We are part of nature, and both humans and nature must be free.
Leah Penniman:
Among the Free Soilers, whose framework included opposition to the westward expansion of slavery, was Frederick Douglass (b. 1817/18). Douglass critiqued capitalism’s alienation of workers from the land and expropriation of the commons, arguing that ‘liberty achieved its truest expression when free people mixed their labor with nature in the pursuit of self-reliance.’ Paying tribute to the agrarian ideal, Douglass advised Black people to own land, forgo urban wage employment, and turn toward agriculture as a means of true independence. * * * Consistent with the African conception of humans as part of nature, Free Soilers believed that the oppression of people on the land had cursed the American soils themselves. Redemption of the land could be achieved through emancipation, and absent that, free soil would be sought across the ocean.
Sources
"Pants on Fire." Curtis White, interviewed by Cheston Knapp. UTNE. March-April 2010. p. 77.
Clara Price. Quoted in "Sunbeams," The Sun. January 2010. p. 48.
Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: “Reading the Sky.” [on the parks system]
Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "These Roots Run Deep." [on Free Soilers]
Please also see
Texas Agriculture Commissioner sounds the alarm, says Texas is running out of water: In a recent op-ed, Sid Miller outlined the problem and offered possible solutions. Michael McCardel, WFAA, September 8, 2024.
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