Would the Real Environmentalists Please Step Forward?: Beyond the Absurdity of Consumerist Environmentalism

There has been a recent spike in the environmental "movement." Hybrid sales have increased steadily with the cost of gasoline and diesel fuels, Al Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out about environmental degradation, and there are more and more businesses requiring their employees to turn off the lights before they leave their offices. “We all seem to be mobilizing to do our small parts to reclaim and maintain the earth.” Perhaps it is still my lingering post-Katrina shock or utter disgust for fanciful feel-good liberalism, but I hate this green “movement” bullshit.

I've seen so many environmentally "conscious" people driving hybrids, and I am disgusted. Although hybrids have a positive impact on local pollution, I question some of the supposed global impacts. The fact is that hybrids have a big and messy carbon footprint. The nickel that is a key element of the hybrid battery is mined in Ontario using inefficient fossil fuel run machines. Other key ingredients that go into the manufacture of hybrids are mined in other faraway places using big machinery. The carbon impact of mining these parts plus the carbon impact of shipping them from faraway places greatly reduces or completely obliterates the supposed global environmental benefits of driving the hybrid. There are also lots of smug greenies driving their smaller SUV’s with bumper stickers that tell us to do our part to save our mother earth. This image of a soccer dad admonishing the rest of us about our “un-green” consumption practices is really strange when juxtaposed with the image of over a million homeless and a thousand dead in Haiti after the barrage of four powerful hurricanes. Sorry to burst your bubbles hybrid driving "environmentalists", but this "let's all do our parts and consume green" nonsense will not end the truly catastrophic effects of global climate change.

Those of you who think the biofuel buses are a legitimate alternative must also rethink what it means to be green for a better world. The current push to run our vehicles on corn ethanol has had dramatically adverse effects on the ability of many people around the world who rely on corn as the base of their food supplies to procure basic amounts of food. In Latin America, for example, the prices of tortillas and other corn based food products have gone up, in part, because of the rush to grow corn to "feed" our vehicles. Feeding our cars while people starve is antithetical to the humanist rhetoric of environmentalism. Closer to home, this ethanol craze is taking a heavy toll on catfish farmers in the Mississippi Delta region. As the price for corn and soybeans has risen dramatically, in part due to the growing demand for biofuel production, the profitability of catfish farming has hit bottom. Many of the smaller farmers are already starting to go out of business and hundreds of people have already lost their jobs. Sorry to burst your bubbles again "environmentalists," but an environmental "movement" isolated from the social and economic realities of the world majority dramatically hinders the task of building a "better world."

The current environmental protection "movement," then, is little more than a politically defunct, consumerist frenzy. If people are truly concerned with the global environment then they must reject the simplistic solutions being espoused to us in the news, by politicians, and by corporate interests. This current approach, which I term Jeffersonian consumerism, calls for us to buy ourselves out of environmental degradation rather than demanding that our federal government appropriately regulate big and messy industry, without contesting pressures from groups like the IMF or World Bank that force Mexico to import food and export corn (?), and without questioning corporate directed governmental policies on issues like the construction of motor vehicle infrastructure. This Jeffersonian consumerist approach to environmentalism assumes that the government or corporate interests will act in good faith, as long as the citizenry bends its concerns and demands to match the dominant market logic. 

Recently an advisor for this piece relayed a story that points to the nature of America’s consumption woes and the inadequate responses being espoused by the “environmental movement.” In the '90s, a close friend of of my advisor was doing health and safety work for the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. She was touring the Portsmouth, Ohio nuclear bomb plant and the plant manager boasted that the plant consumed more electricity in a day than the city of Los Angeles does in a year. Ironically, this friend of my advisor was accosted more recently by a professional staffer at her current job for keeping the lights on in the women’s bathroom, which is, by most accounts, a dark and creepy place. The fact that many of us are accosted for keeping on the lights or keeping the thermostat set at 75 rather than 77 degrees while a nuclear bomb plant consumes more electricity in a day than the second largest city in the country does in a year, points to the absurdity of the so called environmental movement. Bomb production isn’t even on the radar of most of these consumerist environmentalists and that is one among many of the flaws in this so called movement. These “activists” don’t even question the current role of the government or American capital in shaping the looming global catastrophe. They just run around yelling at the rest of us for forgetting to turn off the lights.

As I have demonstrated, this form of environmentalism benefits the industries savvy enough to adopt green market ploys in their advertising campaigns, and not the planet or most of the people on it. Moreover, this framework of Jeffersonian consumerist environmentalism allows the U.S. government to continue its direct (the nuclear bomb plant discussed above) and indirect (continued deregulation of messy industries) roles in destroying the planet. Thus, Exxon-Mobile is pulling profits higher than ever before, while the threat of Katrina-like catastrophes grows each year.

The Jeffersonian consumerist framework is antithetical to the idea of "making a better world for all" because it also places potential profit from green spending over the lives of the people who will ironically be the most vulnerable to environmental degradation first. In order to become politically relevant and more importantly, efficacious, real environmentalists must engage in the work of organizing in the communities that have been and continue to be the first to receive Mother Nature's blows and the first to report higher rates of cancer and asthma. Thus, reclaiming environmentalism from its consumerist orientation requires a wider evaluation of the state of American politics. Are we engaging in substantive organizing initiatives that reach and build community with the communities most dramatically and adversely affected by environmental degradation or its accompanying projects? Are we working with disaffected communities to build power or are we squabbling over the thermostat setting?

Despite the bleakness and smugness of the “green movement” there is hope in the small cohort of groups doing the encouraging work of organizing in the communities most affected by environmental devastation. The Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) based in Richmond, California is an important model for this sort of mobilization. Specifically, APEN works to organize Asian communities in Richmond, California to fight Chevron and to pressure the government of Richmond to provide alternatives for Chevron economic stranglehold on the City. APEN organizes around protecting the local community from the poisons pumped out by the refineries. In challenging Chevron, they are also challenging Chevron’s role in global pollution. Interestingly, they have also connected with Nigerian communities who are bringing Chevron to federal court in relation to major environmental damage that the company caused in the 1980’s and ‘90’s. Thus, there are substantive alternatives to environmental consumerism. APEN is one model, but there are a myriad of ways that people and groups can effectively fight environmental destruction. Organizing around consumer identity is not one of these effective mechanisms, however.

And perhaps I am angry because I am still reeling from the havoc that Katrina's legacy continues to deal, but environmentalists can start by reclaiming the "movement" from their feel good liberal counterparts. Would the real environmentalists please step forward?