Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

This is a very interesting piece:

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate - blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color - is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.

Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

This is part of what is at play whenever people in the rich countries bemoan the high birth rates of many poor countries. Once again, those with the least power (poor women of colour from the global south, in particular) make a convenient scapegoat for all manner of problems that we do not want to take responsibility for. There's also a certain paternalistic bourgeois white supremacy when we see Them as the problem and Us as the solution to all the world's problems. We just have to figure out what to do about Them before They wreck our Nature.

For example, the rush to blame China and India for the high cost of gas, food prices, and global warming. See, China is closing in on the USA as the biggest fossil fuel consumer and greenhouse gas producer. Still, the average Chinese person has around 19% of the impact of the average American. Not to mention the emissions in China have little to do with people's individual lifestyles and much to do with industrial manufacturing... mostly of crap to be consumed by Americans, Canadians and members of other wealthy nations. Not that China is a saint, but I find it interesting how we love to blame them.

The article documents the involvement of some environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Conservation International (CI) with some pretty right wing campaigns. For example:

With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements -- often Zapatista communities -- which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government's aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI's close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.

She puts this in perspective:

Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.

This is so true. For example, I was recently studying how in South Africa (but not only there!) the creation of national parks caused significant dispossession of indigenous peoples' land. The racialist ideas around pollution were often driving conservation movements.

Hartmann continues by outlining several myths that help to drive this coercive conservation: man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity. For example, the myth of the romantic and nostalgic wilderness ethic:

The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as "virgin" land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.

By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection - rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.

Also popular is the degradation narrative in which

...population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as "environmental refugees," either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.
[...]
It blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.

You should probably just go read the whole thing. H/T Lisa, commenting on Feministe

NYPD Officer Assaults Cyclist during Critical Mass

This is nuts.


But wait, it gets worse. Initially the cylist was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer. The police officer said in an affidavit that the cyclist deliberately ran into him (though you can clearly see the cyclist trying to go around him). The cyclist was held in custody for 26 hours.

At least the cop's father is proud of him: "These people are taking over the streets and impeding the flow of traffic. Then you gotta do what you gotta do," he said, not having viewed the video.

I must say: hooray for citizen journalism!

Disclaimer: it is possible the cyclist did something else really really bad earlier and the cops were specifically looking for him. Like maybe he was a terrorist with a ticking time bomb. It better have been that bad because a hit like that could have killed the guy (helmetless onto pavement!)

More at Democracy Now, Gothamist and the NY Post

Why Critical History in a Postcolonial World? Part 3

Continued from Parts 1 and 2

This is exactly why history as critical practice is so crucial. Without a relationship to the past (historicity) we assume things like culture are natural, immutable. Something which is the product of history is naturalized as the eternal human condition and then used to justify oppressive practices, as if it is in the nature of people of colour, women, and non-Western peoples to be dominated. Marx brought this to our attention when he unmasked bourgeois man masquerading as universal man. Historicity, then, is a means of recognizing alterity. As Spivak points out, history involves the "transgression of the logical by the historical-geographical." It introduces the problem of difference into the philosophical master narrative, requiring us to be sceptical of claims to timeless truths. This opens up the possibility of changing our present and imagining a very different future. Likewise, Nietzsche's critical history means the prospect of putting a knife to the roots of an injustice, "a privilege, a caste, a dynasty." Ironically critical history lets us be in the present by loosening the hold of the past, "to shatter and dissolve something to enable [us] to live."

The difficulty is how to act without the script, without slotting our story into its place in the grand master narrative. This is more important than ever in our supposed postcolonial world. Despite decolonization and liberation struggles, the hierarchies between the West and the rest of the world are perpetuated; indeed the disparities grow wider. HIV/AIDS, conflicts and intractable poverty prompt some to say the postcolonial project has failed. Trying to follow the blueprint the West has laid out does not seem to be an option, but neither does looking backwards. Time moves forwards so there is no choice about whether or not to progress, but maybe progress must not be unilinear. Maybe, as Nandy suggests, there are alternative universalities. If the universals of the West had to so distort the difference they encountered in order to include it, are they really universal? Instead of othering difference in order to force it to fit into the universals, can we modify the universals to truly accommodate difference? In other words, can we change the script?

According to Spivak's reading, Marx was already dealing with these concerns in his critique of the intending subject. Even the capitalist, in whom we usually see dominance, power and agency, is just an instrument of capital: "capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will." If both those who dominate and those who are dominated are but playing a part, following a script, where is there any room for responsibility, agency, change? Capital may be the historical agent in Marx's historicism, but it is not alive. Indeed any script is dead without actors to breathe life into the part. It cannot function without people, humans to play the part: "the human is the living element that can be instrumental in animating (or operating) inscriptions." A script is not entirely deterministic. If there is no escape from the script, can we perform it creatively?

In some ways, this is what people are doing all the time in their everydayness, when they, "collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible." (Yup, her again) Chakrabarty shows us that despite how hard the British worked to enumerate and measure fixed, impermeable and discrete communities, Indians still inhabit fuzzy communities: "In their everyday lives, in negotiating the spheres of friendship and kinship, say, Indians, like human beings everywhere, are comfortable with the indeterminacies of ethnic identities." This is part of what he means by the term History 2. There are ways of being in the world that cannot be explained by even the most rigorous history of capital. All the everyday practices that cannot be captured by scripts and identities are not necessarily subject to temporizing. Because it is outside its logic, History 2 is not the Other of capital. History 2 is its limits, disrupting its totalizing force. While historicism tries to "subjugate or destroy the multiple possibilities that belong to History 2," it cannot complete the "subordination of History 2s to the logical of capital."

In a sense History 2 is simply an attempt to name the radical alterity of the past. The past is often treated as the other of the present, as if it can be captured, but in truth it escapes our grasp. The infinite fullness and diversity of the vanishing present cannot be held onto, preserved, as the antiquarian would desire. It slips through our fingers. We can never capture the past in its rich livingness; we cannot make it present. Neither can we cram it into a single master narrative, to possess its essence or meaning. Its teeming complexity will overflow even the grandest monumental account.

We can never know everything that happened in the past – Nietzsche's superhistorical perspective notwithstanding – but neither can we be outside of history. Though the past has passed, its traces remain in the present. If I have a broken leg, it is because last week's event – say, falling out of a tree – is in some way present today. There is no standpoint outside of history, outside of human experience. As temporal beings, we are imperfect, finite, embedded in a particular history and culture. This contingency of our existence, rather than discouraging, is actually cause for hope. If contingent, it can be created otherwise. We can destabilize history's all-knowing narratives of power by starting with the limits. This opens new vistas. An imaginative source for re-presentation, history can be transformative. This is history in service of life.

---

BTW, I put the points I consider most important in bold - is it helpful or distracting?