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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
In the midst of the current ecological crisis, there is often lofty talk of the need for humanity to 'overcome its divisions' and work together to tackle the big challenges of our time. But as this new book by Razmig Keucheyan shows, the real picture is very different. Just take the case of the siting of toxic waste landfills in the United States: if you want to know where waste is most likely to be dumped, ask yourself where Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other racial minorities live and where the poorest neighbourhoods are. This kind of 'environmental racism' is by no means restricted to the United States: it is very much a global phenomenon. Keucheyan show how the capitalist response to the crisis has been marked by a massive expansion in 'environmental finance'. From 'carbon markets' to 'pollution permits', 'climate derivatives' and 'catastrophe bonds', we are seeing a proliferation of nature-related financial products. Instead of tackling the root of the problem, the neoliberal strategy seeks to profit from environmental risks. Moreover, with the rise in natural disasters, resource scarcity, food crises, the destabilization of the poles and oceans and the prospect of tens of millions of 'climate refugees', Western powers are increasingly adopting a military response to ecological problems. The Cold War is over: welcome to the 'green wars'. From New Orleans to the Siachen glacier via the Arctic floes, Keucheyan explores the landmark sites of this new 'climate geostrategy'. Through a sharp critique of the way capitalism responds to environmental disaster, this innovative book provides a fresh perspective on some of the most critical issues confronting our societies today.
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Epigraph
Introduction
Notes
1: Environmental Racism
A philosophical event
The colour of ecology
Hurricane Katrina as a ‘metaphor’ for environmental racism
The spatiality of racism
Lead poisoning and class struggle
Postcolonialism and environmental crisis: the conflict in Darfur
Ecological inequalities: A Marxist approach
The archaeology of environmental racism
Race and reforestation
Purifying nature …
… and naturalizing race
Exporting the environment
The coming political ecology
Conclusion
Notes
2: Financializing Nature: Insuring Climatic Risks
Financial markets ‘plugged into’ nature
Principles of insurance
New risks?
The ontology of catastrophe
Risk and postmodernity
Adventures in insurability
Cat (catastrophe) bonds
Nature as ‘real abstraction’
Carbon markets and unequal development
Constructing profitable markets
A ‘multi-cat’ bond in Mexico
Ecological crisis and the fiscal crisis of the state
A derivative nature
Nature as accumulation strategy
Conclusion
Notes
3: Green Wars, or the Militarization of Ecology
A doctrine emerges
A benevolent dictatorship
Chaos specialists
Terrorism and climate change
The new military ecology
Conservation and counter-insurgency
Econationalism
Agent Orange
From the Cold War to green wars
The end of conventional wars?
Double movement
Climate refugees
Nuclear deterrence and ecological crisis
War and biofuels
The oceans destabilized
The scramble for the Arctic
The North Pole and globalization
Commodifying the thaw
The speed of the circulation of capital
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion: Game Over?
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
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Dedication
For Adrienne
Copyright page
First published in French as La nature est un champ de bataille. Essai d’écologie politique, (c) Éditions La Découverte, Paris, France, 2014
This English edition (c) Polity Press, 2016
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0377-3 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0378-0 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon Roman by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Keucheyan, Razmig, author.
Title: Nature is a battlefield : towards a political ecology / Razmig Keucheyan.
Other titles: Nature est un champ de bataille. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016006440 (print) | LCCN 2016018681 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509503773 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509503773 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509503780 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 1509503781 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781509503803 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509503810 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Political ecology. | Ecology–Political aspects. | Environmental disasters–Political aspects. | Human ecology–Economic aspects. | Environmental justice.
Classification: LCC JA75.8 .K4813 2016 (print) | LCC JA75.8 (ebook) | DDC 304.2–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016006440
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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The experience of our generation: that capitalism will not die a natural death.
Walter Benjamin
Introduction
In Autumn 1982 the inhabitants of Warren County in northeast North Carolina mobilized for six weeks in opposition to a toxic waste landfill being situated in their area.1 Four years previously, in 1978, an industrial waste management company had illegally dumped large quantities of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) – a substance used, among other things, in paint and in electrical transformers. Once these PCBs had been discovered, the state of North Carolina decided to acquire a site where it could bury them and, after looking into many possible locations, it finally opted for one close to the town of Warrenton. As is often the case in this type of situation, local residents opposed the plan, fearing for its impact on their health (as PCBs are carcinogenic substances). They launched a legal bid to stop the waste being dumped in their area but, two years later, the district tribunal rejected their complaint. It was then that the protest took on extra-judicial forms, with demonstrations, sit-ins, boycotts, civil disobedience, marches, meetings, road blockades … These actions led to the arrests of over five hundred people, including various local and federal representatives. In the short term, the movement did not succeed in getting the project withdrawn and only in the 2000s would the site be decontaminated.
The arguments that the protestors initially raised in opposition to the landfill site related to the pollution of the environment (both the water and the soil) by PCBs and the health risks that this substance posed. Yet as the movement expanded and became more politicized, the nature of its arguments changed. The residents and their allies insisted that the state had chosen this site for burying the toxic waste because it was an area inhabited by Blacks, poor people and above all poor Blacks. To put it another way, there was a racist basis for the decision to locate the dump there. At the time, Warren County had a 64 per cent Black population, with the corresponding figure for the area immediately next to the dump rising to 75 per cent. In its environmental management and resources policy, the state systematically favours White populations and the middle and upper classes, which it protects from this type of harmful substances. Conversely, minorities – including not only Blacks, but also Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians, as well as the poor – bear the brunt of industry's negative consequences. We can see that, still today in the United States, the improper handling of waste in the vicinity of White neighbourhoods leads to fines five times more frequently than when it takes place close to Black or Hispanic ones.2 This racial discrimination is not necessarily intentional on the part of the public authorities, even if it often is so. It is systemic: that is to say, it results from a logic that is partly independent of individual will. So what allowed the Warren County movement to reach such scale was its capacity to generalize, to ‘hook’ a local demand on to a global injustice.
This episode is a marvellous illustration of this book's main argument: namely, that nature is a battlefield. Already today, it is a battlefield; and in future, as the ecological crisis deepens, it will increasingly become the theatre of conflicts among actors with divergent interests: social movements, states, armies, financial markets, insurers, international organizations … In the Warren County case, the conflict resulted from a particular form of injustice, racism. But it could also follow from other types of inequalities. Nature is not somehow free of the power relations in society: rather, it is the most political of entities.
In approaching the ecological crisis in this manner, we are clashing with what is today a dominant view; indeed, a well-established consensus maintains that humanity has to ‘overcome its divisions’ in order to solve the problem of environmental change. This consensus is driven by ecologist parties, many – if not all – of which emerged in the 1970s, based on the idea that the opposition between Left and Right was obsolete or now of only secondary importance. In France it is also promoted by ‘civil society’ figures like Yann Arthus-Bertrand and Nicolas Hulot, and there are equivalent personalities in most countries. The ‘ecological pact’ proposed by Nicolas Hulot – a charter signed by several of the candidates for the 2007 French presidential election, as well as many thousands of citizens – is typical of this conception of ecology.3 This consensus is also the backdrop to the dissatisfaction over the recurrent failure of international climate talks – most recently in Copenhagen and Rio. Such complaints are a moral condemnation of states’ incapacity to come together over common environmental objectives.
There are more sophisticated versions of this ecological consensus. One of the leading theorists of postcolonialism and author of the classic Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty,4 has recently published a text entitled ‘The Climate of History’.5 In his eyes, the ecological crisis allows us to see for the first time the prospect of humanity as such and not one of its component parts – workers, peasants, the colonized, women … – becoming the ‘subject’ of history. We humans never experience ourselves as a ‘species’, since all experience is always singular, even if it is collective. Yet in Chakrabarty's view, climate change means the emergence of conditions in which humanity must act in common in order to respond to the challenge of global warming; and this should thus lead us to re-evaluate the old notion of humanism, to which this challenge grants unprecedented significance. It should also lead us to re-evaluate the critiques of this notion, in particular the ones that (post)structuralism levelled against it from the 1960s onward. The ‘theoretical anti-humanism’ of Louis Althusser or of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things takes on different meaning when the survival of humanity is under threat from climate upheavals.
Comparing the economic and ecological crises, Chakrabarty states that ‘Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here [within the context of climate change] for the rich and the privileged.’6 The rich will always do well out of economic crisis but, according to Chakrabarty, this will not be the case with the ecological crisis, since there will be no ‘lifeboat’ allowing them to leave the planet. Even though Chakrabarty does recognize that this crisis also entails a class dimension, in the sense that its impact is not evenly distributed across the population, he maintains that in the last instance it transcends this dimension and that the question of humanity must therefore be put back on the agenda. As such, he argues that ‘the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities’.7 To say the least, this idea is rather surprising coming as it does from postcolonial studies, which have made a specialty out of rejecting all forms of universalism.8
Our analysis starts from a hypothesis that is exactly the inverse of Chakrabarty's. If we take seriously the idea that since the mid eighteenth century climate change has been brought on by economic development, and that this development is called ‘capitalism’, then it is unlikely that we will be able to transcend our class oppositions before we find a solution to the environmental crisis. In other words, it is unlikely that rallying the human species around common objectives is a condition of resolving this crisis. Rather, its solution may well require the radicalization of these oppositions – that is, the radicalization of the critique of capitalism. The one divides into two, in environmental matters as with so many others.
Our first chapter is entitled ‘Environmental Racism’. It will allow us to demolish the idea that humanity suffers the consequences of the ecological crisis in a uniform way. Just as there are economic and cultural inequalities, we also find inequalities in individuals’ or groups of individuals’ relation to nature and to the resources that it offers, and in their exposure to the harmful effects of development: pollution, natural and industrial disasters, water quality, access to energy … In certain cases, environmental inequalities are the result of the actions of states, whose policies are far from neutral in this regard, as we saw in the Warren County example. In other cases, they are the fruit of market logic being left to its own devices. In still other cases, they are the outcome of inextricably linked economic and political logics.
The ‘intersectionality’ of gender, race and class, which is today the object of numerous works,9 must therefore be completed by a fourth, complicating dimension: nature. This latter itself possesses a highly problematic (political) ontology, which can only be conceived in dialectical relation with these three other dimensions. Here we will concentrate on the question of environmental racism – that is, on the intersection between ‘nature’ and ‘race’. Even so, we can only properly understand this phenomenon on condition that we take into account the whole set of inequalities that are at work within the system.
Throughout capitalism's existence, faced with crisis situations and the aggravated inequalities that they engender, it has resorted to the two solutions of financialization and war. In generating ‘fictitious’ capital, finance allows for the deferral and thus the temporary attenuation of the contradictions inherent to capitalist production (as its subprime lending mechanism recently once again demonstrated). War is the fruit of the inevitable conflicts that these contradictions periodically generate. The shrinking of profit opportunities and the need to guarantee control over the extraction and circulation of resources – but also the growing opposition to the system – tend to make political conflictuality increasingly acute. In (literally) destroying capital, war also makes it possible to restart accumulation on new bases.10
The ecological crisis is a further case in which capitalism is putting these two solutions into effect. In other words – as this book will seek to demonstrate – financialization and militarization are the system's two reactions to this crisis. The second chapter (‘Financializing Nature: Insuring Climatic Risks’) concerns the insurance covering the climatic threat, which is today one of the main forms that environmental finance takes. We are currently seeing a proliferation of ‘trendy’ financial products related to nature or biodiversity: carbon markets, climate derivatives, catastrophe bonds … These products are aimed at mortgaging or managing the social and economic turbulence that results from the ecological crisis. They nevertheless also have the objective of making a profit from it. They are part of the financialization of capitalism that is now underway: and as we shall see, this also involves the financialization of nature. For capitalism, nature is today the object of an accumulation strategy.
Capitalism is an ambivalent system and insurance is a centrally important component of this mechanism. On the one hand, capitalism is unstable, since it generates innovation (the ‘creative destruction’ so dear to Joseph Schumpeter), globalization, class struggle and processes that exercise a corrosive effect on social order. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air.11
On the other hand, capitalism requires stability, since investment and the construction of profitable markets would be inconceivable without this. How is it possible to reconcile the system's two contradictory characteristics, instability and stability? Well, in good measure it is thanks to the mechanism of insurance. This mechanism is what makes it possible to take financial risks, while also protecting the investment when things turn bad. But what happens to this insurance mechanism in a context being made increasingly uncertain by environmental crisis?
The third chapter (‘Green Wars, or the Militarization of Ecology’) looks at the growing interconnection between war and ecology. The capitalist exploitation of nature influences the manner in which armed conflicts develop. The environmental crisis resulting from this exploitation has already led to a rise in natural disasters, the increasing scarcity of certain resources, food crises, a destabilization of the poles and oceans, as well as the multiplication of ‘climate refugees’, set to number in the tens of millions by 2050. The result is green wars or climate wars – the translation of the ecological crisis onto the terrain of war. States in general and armies in particular are in the front line of the very particular ‘negative externality’ of armed conflicts. The ecological crisis is not only being financialized, but also entails the potentiality of armed conflicts.
Military figures are conscious of this growing interconnection between war and ecology. Across the last decade or so the planet's major armed forces, with the US Army first among them, have been producing reports devoted to the impact that climate change will bear on military strategy. What consequences will this change have for the way in which war is fought? If we accept that the environment is a crucial factor in any war situation, then the upheavals that it is going to go through – and is already undergoing – on account of the ecological crisis will necessarily influence the art of war. In short, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz are being ecologized.12
Notes
1
See Eileen Maura McGurty, ‘From NIMBY to civil rights. The origins of the environmental justice movement’,
Environmental History
, 2 (3), 1997.
2
Marianne Chaumel and Stéphane La Branche, ‘Inégalités écologiques: vers quelle définition?’,
Espace, populations, sociétés
, 1, 2008, p. 107.
3
Nicolas Hulot,
Pour un pacte écologique
, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 2006.
4
Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000.
5
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History. Four Theses’,
Critical Inquiry
, 35, Winter 2009.
6
Ibid., p. 221. See also ‘Penser et agir en tant qu’espèce. Entretien avec Dipesh Chakrabarty’, interview by Razmig Keucheyan, Charlotte Nordmann and Julien Vincent,
Revue des livres
, 8, November–December 2012.
7
Ibid., p. 217.
8
Chakrabarty has explained himself on this point: see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change’,
New Literary History
, 41 (1), Winter 2012.
9
Alexandre Jaunait and Sébastien Chauvin, ‘Représenter l’intersection. Les théories de l’intersectionnalité à l’épreuve des sciences sociales’,
Revue française de science politique
, 62 (1), 2012.
10
The interlacing of financialization and war is at the heart of the
longue-durée
periodization of capitalism that Giovanni Arrighi proposes in his
The Long Twentieth Century. Money, Power, and the Origins of our Time
, Verso, London, 2009.
11
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The Manifesto of the Communist Party
, in
Marx-Engels Collected Works
, Vol. 6, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1976 [1848], p. 487.
12
Before we begin we shall make a terminological clarification. The notion of ‘ecological crisis’ or ‘environmental crisis’ frequently used in this work designates a complex tangle of natural and social processes that are currently at work. We will leave to one side the many epistemological questions that this definition raises.
1Environmental Racism
Reforestation is the means by which our race will conserve its European faculties.
François Trottier, Reboisement et colonisation (1876)
The Warren County episode to which I referred in the Introduction was the founding act of the environmental justice movement and the starting point for a whole cycle of protests. And while one of the first expressions of this movement arose in the USA, it also has major international ramifications. After all, this movement's most important characteristic is the fact that it sets the social – gender, race and class – in relation with nature. It is also in dialogue with other contemporary ecologist currents, for example the movement for climate justice.1 This latter has established the correspondence between climate crisis, the inequalities between North and South and the logic of centre and periphery. Among its most important demands is the recognition of the ‘ecological debt’ the countries of the North owe those in the South, having racked up this liability across the colonial and postcolonial periods.2
For its part, the environmental justice movement's struggles have to do with climate change and its consequences, but also the environment more generally: including toxic waste, pollution, access to amenities, workplace safety and so on. Characteristic of this movement is the fact that it poses the question of ecological inequalities not at the global level, like the climate justice movement, but at a national level. These inequalities are inherent in the construction of modern nation-states but have long been rendered invisible on account of the greater prominence of other types of inequality; the neglect of environmental questions by large parts of society and, in particular, by the workers’ movement; and the idea that nature is a universal good accessible to all regardless of gender, race or class. Yet on closer inspection we see that nothing could be further from the truth.
The environmental justice movement did not come out of the ecology movement that emerged in the 1950s or the environmentalist movement that first appeared in the nineteenth century; rather, it emerged from the civil rights movement. It was a belated consequence of this struggle, an unexpected offshoot that appeared in the last third of the twentieth century at a time when the civil rights movement was losing momentum. Like the civil rights struggle, it first arose and developed in the US South, before then spreading throughout the country. Moreover, the means that it used – its ‘repertoire of action’ – were largely inspired by this earlier struggle for civil rights, with its trademark sit-ins, boycotts, marches, road blockades, etc. Characteristic of this repertoire of action is its foundational commitment to pacifism, seeking to demonstrate that it is the system – and not the movement challenging it – that resorts to violence and repression. Traditional environmentalism in the United States has been notably characterized by its legalism, that is, by its often ‘technical’ or ‘expert’ approach to environmental problems (also in this sense differing from the means used by its European counterparts). The first generation of the environmental justice movement's leaders largely came from the civil rights struggle. Indeed, the question of waste management had already arisen within this movement. On the eve of his assassination in April 1968, Martin Luther King visited Memphis to support the strike action being pursued by mainly Black sanitation workers, who had walked out in protest at their dangerous and unhygienic working conditions as well as against low wages.
Poorer sections of the population and racial minorities are in general less likely to take legal action to stop toxic waste being dumped close to their neighbourhoods. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why the state so often offloads this waste in these areas. Because these people are less well endowed with various kinds of ‘capital’ – in a Bourdieusian sense – they are less able to mobilize effectively and build movements. In contrast, the representatives of higher classes know how to deploy the law to make themselves heard and how to play on politicians’ fears of being punished at the ballot box. Nor is the NIMBYism so decried by the mainstream ecology movement – strategies for avoiding private sacrifices that are to the detriment of the (real or supposed) general interest – evenly distributed across the whole population. Rather, it reflects factors of gender, race and class. The Warren County protest did also include Whites, such as the farmers opposed to the PCBs polluting their land; and, like any sizeable social protest movement, it was a heterogeneous coalition of interests and demands. But what was most notable about this movement was the fact that it exposed the racial and social injustice underlying the management of toxic waste.
A philosophical event
Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks that the Russian Revolution was a ‘philosophical event’ – it had consequences not only on the political terrain, but also at the level of thought itself.3 The environmental justice movement was also the starting point of a cycle of fruitful theoretical elaborations. Toxic Waste and Race in the United States was one study that made a particular splash, appearing in the wake of the Warren County episode and similar mobilizations. It was the first study to establish analytically what the North Carolina protestors had already seen on the ground: that in the USA race is one of the factors that explains why toxic waste is dumped where it is – and in many cases, the main factor. If you want to know where a stock of toxic waste is most likely to be discharged, then ask yourself where Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and other racial minorities live. And also ask yourself where the poor neighbourhoods are. This study was produced by the United Church of Christ, a progressive Black congregation that was very active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Indeed, as in the case of the civil rights struggle, churches play a crucial role in the environmental justice movement. From the era of slavery onward, Blacks have been deprived of any autonomous political institutions of their own and churches have therefore played an organizing role in their liberation movements. They have been vectors of struggle.4 Indeed, some of them have been in the vanguard of addressing ecological problems.
The United Church of Christ's study clearly demonstrated the existence of ‘environmental racism’ in the United States. This expression – indeed, one destined to a great future – is today the object of academic as well as political discussions. The theoretical interest in environmental racism is one consequence of the environmental justice movement. It is a ‘philosophical event’ in Gramsci's sense of the term.
It was the Reverend Benjamin Chavis – coordinator of the United Church of Christ's report – who first coined the notion of ‘environmental racism’, establishing the connection between race and toxic waste. At that time Chavis was the leader of that church's ‘racial justice’ commission; indeed, he was a leading figure in the civil rights movement and an aide to Martin Luther King. During the 1990s he became executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the body co-founded by W. E. B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century. Previous to that, Chavis had also been one of the ‘Wilmington Ten’, a group of civil rights activists imprisoned at the beginning of the 1970s; there was an international campaign for their release, whose prominent supporters included Amnesty International. As such, Chavis in many ways embodied the link between the civil rights movement and environmental justice.
This movement had an impact on the legislative agenda of subsequent decades and, in February 1994, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which made environmental justice a stated objective of federal policies. This decree bound the state to fighting environmental inequalities wherever they blighted the lives of racial minorities and the most deprived. In 1995 the federal government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published an Environmental Justice Strategy declaring that no social or ethnic group should have to put up with a ‘disproportionate’ share of ecological damage; or, to put it another way, its detrimental effects should be spread out as equitably as possible. It also stated that the elaboration of environmental policies at the different levels of government should involve all parts of society as stakeholders.5 However, this Strategy's stipulations largely remained a dead letter. Legislation in this field tended to naturalize environmental inequalities; that is, to represent them as an inevitable consequence of economic development, whose baleful impact merely ought to be spread out less unfairly. The movement for environmental justice, however, took a less complacent, more radical approach to these inequalities.
The colour of ecology
Of course, it is the racial dimension of the civil rights movement that explains why the movement for environmental justice originally emanated from this struggle. However, a further factor was the traditional US environmentalist organizations’ almost total lack of concern for racial questions.
In the mid 1980s the Los Angeles mayor's office decided to site an incinerator in the city's poor, Black and Hispanic-majority South Central neighbourhood. The authorities claimed that this project would encourage development in this area and generate employment. However, a report on the incinerator's environmental impact predicted that it would give off toxic substances (in particular dioxins, which are also carcinogenic) and that this would have potentially serious consequences for the health of those living nearby.6 As in the case of Warren County, the neighbourhood's residents mobilized to block the project. Seeking to get a coalition off the ground, they made contact with representatives of the country's most important environmental organizations. In the USA these are collectively known as the Group of Ten, a group that includes the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Wilderness Society, the WWF and the Environmental Defence Fund, each of which is something between a lobby group and a mass organization. Some of them were established a long time ago – for example, the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 by John Muir (1838–1914), often described as the father of US environmentalism – and they picked up strength again in the 1960s and 1970s, as they were swept along by the growth of the ecology movement. The Sierra Club today counts more than 1.5 million members. According to its mission statement, its objective is to ‘Explore, enjoy and protect the wild places of the earth.’7
These associations refused to join the coalition that the South Central residents were trying to build, responding that the installation of an incinerator in an urban setting was a ‘community health issue’, not an ‘environmental’ problem.8 That is not to say that they supported its construction; they thought that it simply wasn't their business to oppose it. This episode was not the first time that class and race relations knocked on the door of mainstream US environmentalism, only for it to remain shut. Already in 1972, under pressure from the civil rights movement and other social struggles of the day, the Sierra Club conducted a survey among its members, seeking to find out whether they wanted their association to develop policies specifically regarding minorities and the poor. Two-thirds of them replied in the negative.9 The recurrent argument underlying this view asserts that nature is a universal good that anyone can enjoy, regardless of any other differences. Setting specific policies would thus conflict with the ‘transcendent’ character of Man's relation to nature.
On this occasion, the Sierra Club's survey also undertook a census of its membership. This showed that the vast majority of them were White and drawn from the middle and upper classes. At that time, the boards of the Group of Ten associations did not include a single representative of the US's racial minorities. This was what the Black sociologist Robert Bullard – one of the organic intellectuals of the environmental justice movement and author of the classic Dumping in Dixie. Race, Class and Environmental Quality – called the ‘environmental élitism’ of the dominant ecology movements.10 The colour of ecology is not green, but White.
The South Central episode was in many ways symptomatic. The ‘environment’ seemed to lie beyond the relations among social forces. Yet nothing could be more political. Indeed, a number of genealogical inquiries in recent years have investigated the concept of ‘the environment’ – as a scientific, philosophical, administrative, or some other type of category.11 This notion also has a different meaning in each country: indeed, insofar as the environment is constructed in and through public policies, its contours have been shaped by the nation-state as a political form. It is also a class concept, which in problematizing a certain range of problems, also excludes others. So for mainstream US environmentalism, the community health issues raised by the siting of an incinerator in a working-class neighbourhood are not environmental matters. As the Sierra Club mission statement mentioned above has it, an environmental question worthy of the name is one that affects a supposedly virgin ‘wilderness’ that man has destroyed or despoiled, which the association proposes to return to its original purity. So this immediately defines the category ‘environmental issues’ in a way that excludes urban questions; and this separation between towns and nature has played a decisive role in the environmentalist movement in most Western countries.
In the United States as elsewhere, the popular classes and ethnic minorities are concentrated in urban areas, whether in inner-cities or on the city periphery. In walling the social off from the natural, the Group of Ten also erect a barrier between the urban and the rural. In contrast, precisely what the environmental justice movement is trying to do is to tear down this barrier: after all, this movement is firmly rooted in the urban context. This current is often described in terms of ‘ecopopulism’ – a populism in the original sense of an anti-élitist popular movement that uses a representation of the past to critique the present.12 Yet the historical forms of populism in the USA and Russia had a very marked agrarian component. As such, we can only really apply the term ‘ecopopulism’ to the environmental justice movement on condition that we also emphasize its urban dimension. A common witticism in this movement holds that Blacks are themselves an ‘endangered species’, no less than dolphins or the bald eagle, the emblematic bird of the USA. This joke subverts a central utterance of the ecology movement in order to attract attention to the link between racial and environmental questions.
Hurricane Katrina as a ‘metaphor’ for environmental racism
Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in August 2005, was particularly revealing in this regard, serving as a ‘metaphor’ for environmental racism. The whole series of racial and environmental parameters described above were now concentrated in a specific time and place.
Hurricane Katrina flooded close to 80 per cent of New Orleans’ land area, with the water level sometimes reaching as high as 7.5 metres. A good part of the city is situated below sea level, with property development also having spread out into the coastal wetlands – a buffer zone between the city and the ocean. The human cost of Katrina was some 2,000 confirmed fatalities. It is highly likely that the real death toll was much higher. More than a million people took refuge in the states neighbouring Louisiana, some of them for good: a third of them would never return to New Orleans.13 Looting in the days and weeks that followed led to a National Guard intervention, with some 65,000 soldiers coming to take control of shops and other premises.14 Katrina also provided the city and state authorities with an opportunity to accelerate the gentrification of New Orleans, further expelling poor and minority populations from inner-city neighbourhoods: a classic example of what Naomi Klein calls ‘shock therapy’.15
Who were Katrina's victims? This question is the key to understanding the relation between social inequalities and natural disasters, in the USA but also more generally. It would be some scientific achievement to produce a comprehensive statistical response to this question, since the available data is either full of gaps or difficult to obtain from the relevant authorities. The first series of the TV series Treme is telling in this regard. It portrays a female character – named LaDonna Batiste-Williams – trying to find out what happened to her brother in the hurricane: was he dead, was he in prison, or had he moved to another city? Treme was the work of the same producer as The Wire and shared the same realism. The struggle that this character faces trying to find a loved one reflects many families’ experience following this catastrophe.
The available data show that two categories were over-represented among the victims: Blacks and, most of all, the elderly.16 Old people are the first victims of this kind of event, at least in industrialized countries; another example would be the 2003 heatwave that swept across continental Europe. By definition, elderly people are less mobile, because of their more fragile health and greater isolation. Add to this the fact that given their fragility, old people's first reaction to a catastrophe will likely be to stay at home, and this often proves fatal.
But what explains the over-representation of Blacks among the victims – not only among the dead, but also among the people who disappeared? According to the available statistics 68 per cent of the pre-Katrina New Orleans population were Black and they represented some 84 per cent of those who went missing after Katrina.17
