New hope in an old fight
More than 200 environmentalists and climate leaders attended the Environmental Joy conference hosted by the Yale Center for Environmental Justice on November 8-9. (Photo: Cloe Poisson for Yale)
I went home a couple of weekends ago. To a place of beginnings.
It happened at my old school, the environment school at Yale, where I was dean for a decade. I went there to be part of the school’s flourishing annual environmental justice conference. My mission in going was to say something I needed to say to the hundreds of participants there: Thank you, environmental justice movement, for you are saving American environmentalism.
The disaster election had just happened, but the theme of the event, set long ago, was “environmental joy.” It first seemed incongruous, but for the diverse, young, and ready-to-fight group assembled, it was just the ticket.
The conference goal was to explore how environmental and climate justice work can grow, and grow in ways that generate joy “in the face of anticipated challenges.” Again and again, participants returned to the idea that joy could be found in joining closely with colleagues in a determined struggle for people and planet.
You can get a feel for the event and the impressive people involved here, and more about the environmental justice focus here.
I had but a few minutes to talk. Searching for inspirational words, I returned to one of my favorites, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. There, Camus says, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” A startling injunction, and an inspiration to the oft-defeated like me, but I don’t think it hit the spot at the conference.
So, I turned instead to the great work ahead of them, and their importance in this perilous time. And that took me back to my beginning, to a time in the late 1960s when a group of us, still students, decided to form what became the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
To a person, I related, we were white, male, and otherwise privileged. The thought of diversifying never occurred. We understood the many social injustices all around us. We were, after all, children of the 60s and social activists by instinct and intent. But the idea of environmental justice was unknown to us. Apparently unknown. too, to the major institutions like the Ford Foundation that supported our founding, for no one to my recollection pressed us on it or our lack of diversity.
“I was impressed by the environmental justice activists I met at Yale. They were not captive to the old cocoon, and they understood a new answer to the question, ‘what is an environmental issue?’”
That world is so very far away from the new reality reflected in the EJ Movement. I wanted the group at the conference to feel the growth, and the hope and power, that they represent, and I think they did. The EJ community reminded me of our NRDC crew of the 1970s with its vitality, commitment, and drive. But the similarity stops about there.
In the 1970s NRDC and others spun the cocoon of modern environmentalism. That old movement can notch many victories, indeed countless victories, but the environment has continued to go downhill and the natural world is even more threatened today than in 1970. Despite all the impressive effort, we now find ourselves on the cusp of a ruined planet.
American environmentalism as we know it had its heyday and accomplished much, but it has failed to keep up with the growing realization that big, determinative issues lie outside its established ambit.
I was impressed by the EJ activists I met at Yale. They were not captive to the old cocoon, and they understood a new answer to the question, “what is an environmental issue?” We think immediately of climate change and species protection. But the new answer is “anything that determines environmental outcomes and success.” It follows that the ascendancy of money power and corporate power over people power is an environmental issue. And so are America’s vast social insecurity and injustices, the runaway consumerism, the misleading cultural values, and the constant growth imperative working at all levels from corporate to national. These forces powerfully affect, and diminish, environmental prospects.
These issues are rarely addressed by mainstream environmentalism in America, and the EJ movement, with its feet already in two camps, is a force that is helping to bring this new picture into focus. Having grown out of victimization, powerlessness and inequality, it sees, indeed lives, the connectivity among these issues. In doing so, this growing movement can help bring about not only a revitalization of environmentalism but also a fusion of forces, a movement of movements, that is now more essential than ever.