Abstract
In a time of mass extinction of species, melting glaciers, devastating hurricanes, flooding, drought and out-of-control wildfires, it is easy to overlook the fact that these disasters disproportionately affect the lives of the poor, racial and ethnic minorities and indigenous communities. The eighteen essays in this pioneering anthology make a powerful case for re-envisioning the field of environmental studies by calling urgent attention to the ‘historically pernicious relations of humans to the planet and the corollary, intersecting exploitation of ethnic and racial difference’.
In their response to the question, why racial ecologies? Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams point to the Flint, Michigan lead-contaminated water crisis and the resistance of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to the Dakota Access Pipeline next to their reservation in North Dakota. ‘In Flint, the callous disregard shown by public officials has marked the primarily African American population as a group excluded from state recognition and protection.’ And at Standing Rock, ‘colonized indigenous nations have been designated as ineligible for state protection and subject to dispossession and genocide’. The crises at Flint and Standing Rock ‘reinforce a racial divide whereby communities are shaped by the uneven distribution of resources, discrimination, and structural racism’.
Four years after Flint residents first complained about lead-contaminated water in their state-run water supply, they still do not trust the water for drinking, cooking or bathing. Meanwhile, the US Army Corps of Engineers has just released a report that continues to dismiss the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s concerns about the risks of an oil spill on the Missouri River, where the Dakota Access Pipeline crosses just half a mile upstream of the reservation’s drinking water. The Missouri River provides drinking water to 10 million people. The Standing Rock Sioux (Lakota) are fighting for everyone.
From the Flint water crisis to indigenous opposition to the fossil fuel industry, communities of colour, indigenous peoples and colonised nations are on the front lines of resistance to ecological disasters and environmental violence. Several of the authors in this anthology argue for a more expansive definition of environmental activism that recognises how they have responded to disasters and environmental violence using their own knowledge systems. Examples are as diverse as a Puerto Rican activist campaign that employs anti-colonial ideology and national symbols to oppose a gas pipeline, to Black South Africans finding their identity in community gardens as a site of communal collaboration in opposition to the racist ideology of apartheid. These critical essays are a major contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary ethnic studies approach to environmental studies.
The ecological issues in this wide-ranging anthology include climate change, water, air and land pollution, toxic waste exposure in both factories and agricultural fields, extractive resource conflicts and nuclear weapons testing. While the list of environmental issues is familiar, the analyses emphasise that environmental concerns are intertwined with differences of race, indigeneity, class, gender and nation.
Dian Million’s essay on indigenous ecologies notes the contrasting images of Standing Rock as a ‘heretofore unimagined assemblage in solidarity to protect water, the source of life on this planet’ juxtaposed to ‘the subsequent drilling beneath the Missouri River as an act of rape, a violence that ignored Standing Rock’s long-embodied sovereignty in that Lakota place’. The overwhelming police and private military security violence against the Lakota Water Protectors is a powerful reminder that indigenous nations are not seen by the fossil fuel industry and the government as deserving of state protection. The oil pipeline was originally proposed to cross the Missouri River near the state capital of Bismarck but the company rejected that route because it could harm the drinking water of the white residents in Bismarck. According to Million, ‘For the United States, the Lakota always exist in “the barrens”, where rural white America demands a replaying of “the Indian Wars” every time the nation moves to take resources from Indian lands’.
Zoltan Grossman’s essay on Maori opposition to fossil fuel extraction in Aotearoa New Zealand reminds us that indigenous priorities have been largely ignored or marginalised within white-led environmental movements in most western countries. But Maori have taken the leadership in opposition to foreign corporate deep-sea oil exploration. ‘Their resistance has grown’, says Grossman, ‘primarily through cross-cultural organizing anchored in the power of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi between Maori and Pakeha (European settlers).’ Under this treaty, incorporated into New Zealand law, governments are required to consult on both onshore and offshore development with people of the land regarding any plans in their fishing grounds. As more and more New Zealanders realised that the treaty provided them with a powerful legal tool against oil drilling, they have aligned themselves with the Maori and effectively convinced several giant oil companies to leave Aotearoa.
A major theme of several of the case studies is that environmental exploitation is ideological and that any strategy to address environmental degradation depends on our ability to name and resist these ideologies. The dominant, racist stereotypes of African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans and others, that these groups are docile, unsophisticated, uncivilised and unappreciative of the natural world, ‘serve to justify their continued endangerment by validating the idea that marginalized communities have created, or at least are complicit in, the degradation of their environment’.
Stephen Nathan Haymes takes issue with colonialising ecologies that perpetuate the idea that ‘African-descended communities are historically incapable of having ecological experiences and concerns’. He argues that when many African Americans migrated from the rural South to southern and northern cities, they ‘engaged in forms of place-making ecologies that often reinvented rural traditions in their city neighborhoods’. These traditions recalled popular memories of ‘shared folk traditions related to gardening, by exchanging medicinal plants and delicacies, and by fishing and feasting’, which contributed to the creation of black collectively owned and operated cooperatives such as credit unions, restaurants and mutual aid societies.
Several authors in this critical anthology emphasise the important contribution to environmental humanities of Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, which calls attention to actions that can harm individuals, their children, and whole communities over long periods. Julie Sze’s essay on birth defects in a Latino farmworker community in Kettleman City, California is a case in point. She examines how mothers of babies born with cleft palates and other birth defects made toxic exposures a central component of their reproductive environmental justice activism.
Kettleman City, in California’s Central Valley, is the site of the largest commercial hazardous-waste facility west of the Mississippi. Between 2007 and 2008, six children of mothers from Kettleman City were born with serious birth defects, including cleft palates, deformities and brain damage. Half of those infants subsequently died. The challenge for the Latino community was to hold corporate polluters accountable for the harm.
Activists brought photos of their babies to political protests to make their point. According to Sze, ‘the images of damaged babies and cleft palates have visceral effects: they are self-consciously intended as a powerful political message’.
Among the most neglected episodes of environmental violence is the March 1954 hydrogen bomb test on the island of Bikini – 7,200 times more powerful than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that spread deadly fallout to the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands hundreds of miles from the test site. Following the test, the indigenous people were subjected to high radiation doses and medical experimentation in the hasty and still incomplete resettlement process.
Yu-Fang Cho explores the political and racial dimensions of this hidden history through a brilliant analysis of the original 1954 Japanese film Gojira/Godzilla and the 2014 remake of Godzilla. She explains how the narrative changes from the original Japanese version to the 2014 US remake, serve to ‘legitimize the use of nuclear weapons for imperial domination and mass destruction in the name of assuring world peace and achieving other political objectives’.
Racial Ecologies is essential for anyone concerned about how different racial, ethnic, indigenous, class and gender groups experience ecological disasters intensified by climate change and the toxic effects of industrialisation. It should be required reading for classes on the environment, race and ethnic relations, international relations, political economy, sociology, human rights and environmental ethics.