lorna salzman
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BLACK AND WHITE


Some weeks back I attended a workshop sponsored by the NYC Apollo
Alliance. These past two days I attended a two day conference on
Climate Justice sponsored by We Act (West Harlem Environmental
Action). Night and Day. Black and White. Literally and Figuratively.

In a sense I had waited thirty years for the climate justice
conference. When I began my full-time professional involvement in
environmental issues under Dave Brower in Friends of the Earth (FOE), I was green but in the original sense of being unripe and uninformed. I learned on the job, not least because of Brower's inspiring and uncompromising leadership on so many crucial issues. I wasn't alone. Thousands of other people, inside Friends of the Earth and outside, warmed up to his message and got involved in their communities and in national issues.

The first two issues that confronted the country were the supersonic airplane, the Concorde, and the proposal to build the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline from the Arctic Sea down to the USA. In response, all the Washington-based organizations that existed at that time, including groups like NRDC and EDF who are so much in the news today, created a unified front opposing the SST and the pipeline. They conducted national campaigns with ads, mailings,and a strong lobbying presence in congress. We lost the pipeline battle but we succeeded in keeping the SST off American soil and eventually it disappeared entirely from the rest of the world, helped by a tragic crash that killed all the aircraft's occupants.

During the dozen years or so that I worked at FOE I came across quite a few attacks on environmentalism from minority leaders and
organizations, in which "the movement" was accused of racism, elitism and indifference to the "important" problems of poverty and racism. I responded to many of these, trying to explain that fights to ban threats to human health and communities, such as toxics and nuclear power, superhighways, pesticides, etc., as well as fights to preserve natural resources, wildlife habitat and wilderness, were in fact fights for everyone, not just wealthy whites, and that the impact of all of these issues would be felt directly and indirectly, and over time by everyone.

It was a difficult struggle to get these people to understand that
environmental battles were in fact social justice struggles that
challenged illegitimate and exploitive corporations and power
structures such as government regulatory agencies. Minority leaders
were not yet ready to identify the whole industrial capitalist
corporate=dominated system; they were still seeking a place at the
table where they could become as affluent and powerful as those they thought were benefitting from environmental struggles.

Two days ago at the We Act conference, the talk was of not only
sitting at the table but EATING. One person quoted Winona La Duke, a leading indigenous peoples' activist, as saying: If you're not at the table, you're on the menu. The vast majority of panelists and audience frequently shouted out: No carbon trading, no coal, we want carbon taxes, showing a degree of sophistication on energy policy that most white liberals still lack. What has changed in the past 30 years that has put the minority community in the intellectual forefront of environmentalism?

Yes, the movement has smart, informed leadership. But it always did
with regard to its own issues. Two things are responsible for the
change: first, global warming itself; second, the movement's
redefining environmental issues not as purely black issues but as
broad SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES, affecting all the disempowered and
disenfranchised of the world regardless of skin color and ethnicity
and geographic origin.

The global warming/climate change issue has infiltrated itself into
each and every aspect of politics and economic policy. The
realization -underscored by growing evidence that the poor peoples
and nations of the world will bear the heaviest burden of climate
change - that climate change's ULTIMATE causes arise from EXACTLY the same institutions and policies that have caused poverty and
discrimination has led to the creation of a powerful transnational
social movement that finally, after years of intellectual fumbling,
has accurately identified the root causes of both poverty and the
degradation of the planet.

For me personally, this was a celebration and a small source of
gratification. Many are the arguments that I have had with black
leaders about environmentalism, during which I struggled in vain to
show that defense of the earth and its systems and species was no
different from defending humans from oppression. But in retrospect I realized that each person needs to find her own path to enlightenment.

The climate change issue has been the galvanizing factor in the
realization that it has been the very institutions and policies of
the industrial capitalist society, based on economic growth models
that by NECESSITY reinforced wealth and power of a few on the top at the expense of the vast majority at the bottom, whether black or
white. The word "capitalism" was not even mentioned at the
conference but its presence nonetheless wafted in the air as topics
like Wall St., NAFTA, WTO, were floated and then blasted to
smithereens. And after I pointed out in a workshop that the concepts of Sustainability and Economic Growth were in complete contradiction, no one seemed surprised.

Now, I want to rewind the tape back to the Apollo Alliance workshop I attended a month or so back. There were no black faces there but
since I don't live by a quota system, I didn't think this was
especially relevant; I considered the content and topics of the
workshop to be the most important things. But what unfolded was
disturbing and made me more and more agitated.

First, there may have been a use of the term "global warming" or
"climate change" at some point, but if there was, it certainly wasn't very loud and it wasn't repeated. The best panelist was the one from Con Ed! The rest were cheerleaders for nuclear, power, union leaders speaking of nothing but jobs...and jobs only for their members, not for the non-unionized workers or the unemployed or the underemployed or the unskilled, which make up the largest number of workers in NYC I might venture to say.

The whole workshop was one big Smiley Face, in anticipation of the
"green jobs" that renewable energy and related development would
bring to union workers in NYC, and in anticipation that the federal
stimulus package would reward their efforts. There was no mention of the needs of anyone else except unionized workers, and no mention whatsoever of the dire and imminent threat of global warming that is likely to inundate our coast, our infrastructure, our drinking water and our transportation system unless we made immediate deep cuts in energy use.

In contrast to the solidarity shown by the We Act panelists and
attendees with the Appalachian communities being destroyed by
mountaintop removal of coal and mining and with the native American
communities being exploited for coal and uranium, and with the small farmers trying to survive the large corn-based ethanol movement that is responsible for higher food prices, the Apollo Alliance continues to support the oxymoron of "clean coal", the Big Detroit auto makers, the giant nuclear utilities, the high-paid privileged white union workers, and worst of all the cap and trade system that is giving ownership of the sky to the fossil fuel utilities and to the Wall St. brokers, traders, lawyers and accountants so they can make billions off the rest of us.

Reprehensibly, the Beltway biggies like Natural Resources Defense
Council and the nauseating group called the Environmental Defense
Fund, are all promoting the same objectives as the Apollo Alliance,
in a coalition called U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) which
consists primarily of dozens of the largest and most exploitive
corporations in this country. As a result, they have severely damaged the reputation of the local grassroots and regional environmental groups whose objectives are completely in sync with those of We Act and others in the climate justice movement. This split between the biggies based in DC needs to be acknowledged. EDF and NRDC have the ear of congress and the media, and it is important that we tell the public that they do NOT speak for the environmental community but for the corporate sector, and that the rest of us do not share their views or objectives.

The new day of a broad environmental justice movement hasn't quite
yet dawned, but enough light is showing above the horizon to give the message that environmentalists and social justice activists are
talking, meeting and finding common ground that can turn things
around under an administration that has exhilarated and encouraged
the black community into a new muscular activism. This new sense of hope prompted many at the We Act conference to refer often to the need for a "new model" of development in place of the exploitive neo-liberal globalized model being forced down our throats. This old model, with luck, may hang itself with its own rope, and out of it may come a model that we may with luck one day call Ecological Justice.

Lorna Salzman