The Violence of Climate Change

7 Cesar Chavez and the Liberating Power of Sacrifice

When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!

—Cesar Chavez, “Speech Ending 1968 Fast,” in Words of Cesar Chavez

The civil rights movement and the struggle for racial and economic justice of course continued after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., as did nonviolent protests. This is well reflected in the struggle for justice, health, and dignity among farmworkers, a movement that still cites Cesar Chavez as an iconic leader.

Chavez devoted his life to resisting the forces of structural violence oppressing farmworkers. As the world warms and the weather becomes less predictable, these workers’ lives are likely to become more difficult. Growing seasons are changing, natural disasters threaten the livelihood of all who work on the land, and corporate growers are seeking more and more cost-saving measures. Thus, Chavez is still a vital witness for those who seek climate justice.

The quotation above is from a statement Chavez released in 1968 at the end of a twenty-five-day fast during his union’s strike against grape growers in California.1 He regularly incorporated fasting into his activism, and he encouraged those who worked with him to do the same, because he believed that such sacrifice helps to clarify purpose, to inspire discipline, and to foster commitment. He called those in his movement and those who supported it to take up a metaphorical cross, accepting sacrifices in order to make the world better. When made voluntarily, he argued, sacrifice is not a loss but a gain, and those who are willing to give their lives to the cause of justice will “find life.”

International negotiations about climate change do not tend to explicitly mention sacrifice, but the topic is frequently implied in discussions of climate “debt” or “reparations.” The idea is that the poor of the world, who have had relatively little impact on the climate, are owed something by the wealthy, who have disproportionately created the problem but do not tend to suffer its worst effects. This logic is straightforward: The developed world has less than 20 percent of the world’s population but has produced more than 70 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. Furthermore, the developing world has incurred more of the costs of climate change and is faced with higher risks and scarcer resources because of widespread poverty. Thus, the developed world owes a debt for contributing disproportionately to a problem whose costs fall more heavily on others.2

Such claims are often quickly rejected in one of two ways. The first dismisses the argument as counterproductive, because the best way to help those who struggle in a changing climate is for the rich to maintain a growing economy by expanding their own wealth. The second dismisses the argument as impolitic, because people in a consumeristic society will never be willing to listen to arguments or proposals that will cost them money. The first argument suggests that sacrifice is unnecessary, the second that it is impractical. In both cases, the assumption is that climate justice cannot be achieved by sacrifice. This chapter draws on the witness of Cesar Chavez to argue against such an assumption.

Admittedly, valorizing sacrifice is dangerous. The idea that sacrifice is restorative can be used by the privileged to ask the marginalized to give up more, and it can discourage or alienate those who seek moderate, pragmatic solutions to climate change. Though I take these dangers seriously, the following pages argue that privileged people are nevertheless called to make sacrifices. Those of us who have disproportionately changed the climate must give up some of the comforts, conveniences, and habits bought with greenhouse gas emissions. Chavez, who sought “a totally nonviolent struggle for justice” fueled by the voluntary sacrifice of his movement, can help twenty-first-century people articulate a morality of liberating sacrifice relevant to the changing climate.

LA CAUSA

Cesar Chavez was born in 1927 on his family’s farm near Yuma, Arizona. He lived there until age ten, when his family was evicted and moved to California to begin the migrant farmwork that defined the rest of his life. He once traced his willingness to stand up for workers’ rights to this experience of settled life: “Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on land, and I knew a different way of life. We were poor but we had liberty. The migrant is poor, and he has no freedom.”3

After years of farmwork and a brief stint in the Navy, Chavez became a community organizer in 1952. He spent a decade registering Latino voters across the Southwest and then devoted himself to organizing farm laborers. In 1962 he and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers (UFW). At its first convention, Chavez was elected president and charged to advocate for a minimum wage law that would cover farmworkers. The motto of this convention, which has stuck with the movement ever since, was “Viva la causa!”

In 1965, Chavez led the UFW into its first extended strike, against grape growers in Delano, California. This strike evolved to include an extended public fast, an organized march across the state, and a national boycott. The campaign concluded with a more favorable contract between workers and grape growers, and Chavez spent the rest of his life seeking to maintain and expand the rights farmworkers had gained by raising national awareness about their working conditions.

Chavez was a Catholic of Mexican American descent, and his work grew out of his faith and his Church community. He told his biographer, “I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. . . . For me the base must be faith.”4 Religion was also a tool for organizing. Preparing the UFW for its first action in 1962, Chavez had rose-flower workers place their hands on a crucifix and pledge to not break the strike.5 At that event and all others to follow, the Virgin of Guadalupe was prominent as a symbol of hope and unity, of Catholic faith, and of Hispanic heritage. During his public fasts, many workers were stirred to religious devotion, holding Mass outside Chavez’s lodging after some crawled from the highway on their knees in an act of penance and respect.6 Although a few UFW leaders found these religious displays embarrassing, Chavez continued to publicly proclaim the Christian and Catholic foundations of his work throughout his life.7

But Chavez also sought to change religious institutions. He repeatedly called on the Catholic Church to use its power on behalf of the poor. He emphasized that it was not enough to provide charity and food baskets without also working to solve the social and political causes of poverty and oppression. In an essay titled “No More Cathedrals,” he made the case this way: “Finally, in a nutshell, what do we want the Church to do? We don’t ask for more cathedrals. We don’t ask for bigger churches or fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don’t ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don’t ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood” (emphasis in the original).8

Chavez believed that Christians are called to serve the poor, an idea consistent with the other four witnesses and the nonviolent tradition discussed in earlier chapters. For Chavez, this meant a particular commitment to those who work long days in farm fields. He frequently lamented that some workers were not even paid enough to afford the products they harvested: “They bring in so much food to feed you and me and the whole country and enough food to export to other places. The ironic thing and the tragic thing is that after they make this tremendous contribution, they don’t have any money or any food left for themselves. And that’s ridiculous. Here they produce a tremendous amount of food and there is no food left for themselves and for their children.”9 Chavez’s basic appeal was for recognition of human dignity, a demand that people should be fairly compensated for their work and that working people should have sufficient resources to feed their children.

Chavez insisted that farmworkers deserve better treatment by asserting the dignity of all people, and he used the same logic to insist that farmworkers must treat others with the same level of dignity. The only way to consistently assert the rights of workers as human beings, he argued, was for workers to respect the humanity of the growers against whom they struggled.10 For the same reason, he discouraged attempts to overemphasize the singularly Hispanic identity of his movement. When many within the UFW began to stress that la causa was for la raza, he responded: “When you say la raza you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and our fear is that it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti–Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican and anti-dark-skinned-Mexican.”11 So instead, he called for everyone to recognize and respect the humanity of all people, regardless of distinctions.

A commitment to human dignity was also demonstrated in la causa through a resolute commitment to nonviolence. When an airline pilot employed by growers sprayed a picket line with toxic pesticide in 1966, Chavez suppressed calls for revenge by quickly organizing a peaceful march from Delano to the state capitol in Sacramento. This outlet for anger successfully publicized the violence of growers but did not lead to further violence. Chavez insisted that the UFW’s work could be successful and righteous only if it was nonviolent: “If to build our union required the deliberate taking of life, either the life of a grower or his child, or the life of a farmworker or his child, then I choose not to see the union built.”12 Having been profoundly inspired by the work of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez argued that the workers could best find their own dignity by not only respecting their opponents but also by learning to love them: “If we are full of hatred, we can’t really do our work. Hatred saps all that strength and energy we need to plan.”13

Chavez was first and foremost a union organizer who sought justice for farmworkers and led a people’s movement for recognition and rights. However, with that work understood as primary, it is appropriate to note that Chavez was also an environmentalist. His work to honor human dignity included a commitment that everyone should have access to the natural resources necessary for survival and thriving. In a 1970 essay he lamented that the middle class of the United States was so excited about “a rocket to the Moon” but did not “give a damn about smog, oil leaks, the devastation of the environment with pesticides, hunger, disease.”14 In a 1976 speech he expressed his environmental impulse more positively, asking, “What could be more joyful than working to restore and preserve the sacredness of land, water, and air? For patriotism is not protecting the land of our fathers, but preserving the land for our children.”15

The most explicit and extensive environmental aspect of Chavez’s work came in his attention to the hazards of pesticides. The union’s first grape boycott began in 1965, only three years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and yet it already incorporated careful attention to the dangers of chemicals like DDT that threaten the health of farmworkers, food consumers, and the natural world.16 Indeed, Chavez bragged that “the first ban on DDT, Aldrin, and Dieldrin in the United States was not by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, but in a United Farm Workers contract with a grape grower in 1967” (emphasis in the original).17

Building on this success, Chavez made pesticides the central subject of his final campaign, which was called “the Wrath of Grapes.” In a 1989 speech he explained that “there is something more important to the farmworkers’ union than winning better wages and working conditions. That is protecting farmworkers—and consumers—from systemic poisoning through the reckless use of agricultural toxics.” He told the stories of grape workers’ children who died of cancer at age five or were born without arms or legs, arguing that these were the direct result of their parents’ exposure to pesticides. He called on his audience to boycott grapes and to make sacrifices for the sake of farmworkers and everyone else threatened by such pesticides. He also linked the issue of pesticides to broader environmental trends: “The problem is this mammoth agribusiness system. . . . The problem is the abandonment of cultural practices that have stood the test of centuries: crop rotation, diversification of crops. The problem is monoculture—growing acres and acres of the same crop; disrupting the natural order of things; letting insects feast on acres and acres of a harem of delight.”18

In 1988 Chavez undertook a thirty-six-day “Fast for Life” to draw attention to this issue. The growers did not respond and refused to change their policies. However, Chavez garnered national attention and emphasized to audiences across the nation that he was doing penance and praying not only for the children of farmworkers but also for all who had been exposed to these poisons in their food. In his statement ending this fast, he called pesticide usage a “cycle of death that threatens our people and our world.”19

Chavez died in Arizona in 1993, at the age of sixty-six years. Despite his eloquent writing, his national reputation, and his personal commitment to la causa, the UFW never met its initial goal of becoming a national union organizing all farmworkers. It began losing numbers and strength during Chavez’s life, and a number of his critics blame his inflexible leadership style, his failure to build an organization that could thrive apart from his charisma, and his refusal to choose between creating a social movement and a labor union.20 However, he has had a substantial influence on national culture. He remains a central Latino figure in US history, and generations of activists and politicians cite him, and in many cases their work with him, as a key inspiration.21

THE LIBERATING POWER OF VOLUNTARY SACRIFICE

Chavez had a quiet voice and a relaxed speaking style, and he was never entirely comfortable in front of a crowd. His charisma came not from rhetorical force but from the strength of his personal witness. He created this image in part through his profound willingness to make sacrifices for the cause of justice.

The most iconic sacrifices were the three extended public fasts that Chavez undertook as a form of personal penance. Between twenty-one and thirty-six days in length, these fasts created a great deal of national attention, but he insisted that they were not for publicity. They were, instead, a personal necessity for his own spiritual health and dedication. This assertion is supported by the fact that Chavez conducted many other, private fasts throughout his life.22 In part, he fasted because he found doing so to be liberating and clarifying and because he believed it helped him to experience life “on a different level,” making him happier, wiser, and more patient.23

The sacrifice of fasting was a way for Chavez to limit the temptations of power and resist the comforts of contemporary life. He worked to convince all who worked with him to make sacrifices, as well, so that they would not fall into the trap of seeking easy answers and would instead build up the discipline to work for justice. In the course of his work to establish a fair wage for farmworkers, he also tried to lay the groundwork for a continued sense of cooperation and sacrifice, resisting the atmosphere of “superconsumerism” that shaped the lives of most wealthy people.24 Even if farmworkers attained economic security through nonviolent protest and sacrifice, Chavez believed, they needed to maintain a strong sense of community and avoid entrapment in the lures of middle-class society.

Sacrifice was a central moral principle for Chavez because it resisted the problematic conveniences of mainstream culture and opposed the violent structures that told privileged people they could insulate themselves from the world’s suffering. He insisted that true resistance to violence requires a willingness to take on some of this suffering: “There is no way on this Earth in which you can say yes to man’s dignity and know that you’re going to be spared some sacrifice.”25

Chavez also believed that asking people to sacrifice was a way to ensure their commitment. At the UFW’s founding, he insisted that monthly dues be required, despite the fact that workers were making very little and could not count on reliable daily work. He argued that if people were allowed not to pay because of economic hardship, then “they would never have a union because they couldn’t afford to sacrifice a little more on top of their misery.” Insisting on dues was also a strategic way to bring workers together: “Because, you see, they had an investment now. They were coming to the meetings, if for nothing else, but to see what was happening with their money that they were paying. And while they were there, we were taking advantage of educating them.”26 Sacrifice was a tool with which Chavez created community.

For the same reason, Chavez insisted that the UFW pay him and the other organizers only room, board, and $5 per week. Organizers who were willing to take this low wage worked out of dedication rather than self-interest, and Chavez believed this made them better organizers. This proved useful in the 1970s when the UFW competed with the Teamsters Union to represent grape workers. Chavez reported that his union won “with the numbers game” because he could hire ten organizers for what they paid one: “We don’t have to worry about money. That’s how things get done. . . . We’ll organize workers in this movement as long as we’re willing to sacrifice. The moment we stop sacrificing, we stop organizing.”27

At the beginning of the Delano grape strike in 1965, Chavez and other leaders spelled out the key principles of their movement in the “Plan of Delano.” Rather than discussing the specific tactics of strikes and boycotts, this document is a meditation on the suffering of farmworkers. It first frames their oppression as unjust and involuntary sacrifice imposed by growers, and then calls on the workers to sacrifice further for the sake of justice and a better future. Beginning from the premise that “our sweat and our blood have fallen on this land to make other men rich,” the plan asserts:

Our men, women, and children have suffered not only the basic brutality of stoop labor, and the most obvious injustices of the system; they have also suffered the desperation of knowing that that system caters to the greed of callous men and not to our needs. Now we will suffer for the purpose of ending the poverty, the misery, the injustice, with the hope that our children will not be exploited as we have been. They have imposed hungers on us, and now we hunger for justice. We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live.28

The plan laments suffering, but then it calls for a sacrificial acceptance of more suffering. It asserts a willingness to give up meager pay and what little security came from grape picking in order to demand a more just arrangement with the growers.

Inherent in this foundational document is a distinction between involuntary and voluntary sacrifices. In much of the plan, Chavez and his coauthors critique the sacrifices imposed upon farmworkers, which kept them poor, hungry, and disenfranchised. Such involuntary sacrifices included the worst drudgeries of farmwork, which the UFW sought to prevent rather than celebrate. As Chavez told one biographer, “Every time I see lettuce, that’s the first thing I think of, some human being had to thin it. And it’s just like being nailed to a cross. You have to walk twisted, as you’re stooped over, facing the row, and walking perpendicular to it.”29 This unnecessary sacrifice of farmworkers’ health and well-being is a form of violence, which Chavez signaled by associating it with the crucifixion of Christ. Such involuntary sacrifice was the problem the UFW worked to solve.

However, Chavez taught that liberation from such violence can be found in voluntary sacrifice. Thus, the Plan of Delano also called on workers to choose redemptive and restorative sacrifices, a choice that its authors argued would contribute to self-worth, dignity, and a better future. When workers gave their resources to the movement, they were more invested in its work; when organizers sacrificed lucrative careers, they became more flexible and less beholden to the wealthy; when Chavez went without food, he became clearer and more attentive. Such sacrifices reflected both an organizing strategy and a spiritual practice.30

THE IMPORTANCE AND LIMITS OF SACRIFICE

Those concerned about climate justice should learn to think and communicate about sacrifice, and Chavez is a helpful resource. We should take seriously the involuntary sacrifices already being made by the peoples of Bangladesh, Sudan, Kivalina, and those in many other parts of the world. We must admit that the best way for privileged people to help liberate such people from involuntary sacrifices is by making our own voluntary sacrifices. However, we also need to acknowledge that the world’s injustices and structural violence make sacrifice a morally fraught category.

Sacrifice Is Necessary and Possible

Sacrifice is most often raised in public discourse about climate change in order to argue against it. For example, in 2014, the managing director of the World Bank, Sri Indrawati, argued that the global community must take action on climate change but that this action “does not have to come at the expense of economic growth.” The headline of her op-ed was: “Climate Action Does Not Require Economic Sacrifice.”31 This is a reassuring perspective for many, and she backed it up with careful economic data. However, the previous chapters of this book have told a different story. The witness of Jane Addams makes clear that economic and political change must accompany any attempt to end structural violence. The witness of John Woolman suggests that such change must begin with privileged people altering their lifestyles, sacrificing some of their comforts. Responding morally to climate change means being willing to change the structures in which privileged people and other human beings live. This will feel like a sacrifice to those who live comfortably in the existing system.

The social ethicist Anna Peterson offers a powerful counterargument to the common insistence that sacrifice is unnecessary. As a scholar of religion, she notes that rituals of sacrifice are ubiquitous across every human society, and this raises suspicion about any claim that no one needs to sacrifice. Any transition toward a sustainable society will require sacrifices from affluent Westerners, Peterson argues, and she further emphasizes that environmentalists should identify and explore “the sacrificial logic of everyday life in American culture,” asking people “what we are willing to give up, and why.” She points to the concrete sacrifices that contemporary US society expects from its citizens:

We take for granted the fact that we “have to” sacrifice excellent health care or public education, or clean air and water, or safe highways, or a number of other public (and private) goods, not because we do not value them, and not even because we value the goods for which they are sacrificed (usually lower taxes or corporate profits). We take these sacrifices for granted because they are not called sacrifices; they are simply part of “the way things are.”32

Awareness of structural violence calls for a close examination of anything that the existing power structure frames as inevitable and unchanging. This means carefully considering the possibility that some economic growth should be sacrificed in order to respond to the violence of climate change. When a leader of the World Bank insists that economic growth is nonnegotiable, it is important to ask hard questions about what sacrifices are already being made to ensure that such growth continues.

To frame sacrifice as unnecessary is to ignore the fact that sacrifices are already being made. In their book The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice, the political scientists Michael Maniates and John Meyer call attention to the “hidden and coerced sacrifice already borne by those most vulnerable to climate disruption.”33 As waters rise in Bangladesh and Kivalina, people’s homes are being sacrificed. Some people are losing their lives. Such involuntary sacrifices call for a liberation that can only come through voluntary sacrifice by those who can afford it.

Another argument against sacrifice suggests that even if it is a good idea, mentioning it is counterproductive because people will never voluntarily give up privilege. Consider the observation of a USA Today editor on Earth Day in 2014: “The vast majority of us won’t sacrifice our high-consumption lifestyles, put jobs at risk or pay a high price to protect the environment. . . . We’ll continue to mark Earth Day, then drive home, turn on the TV, take a swig of water from our plastic bottles and check out the latest post on our Facebook pages.”34 Whether sacrifice is necessary or not, this perspective asserts, it will never happen.

Again, the witnesses considered in this book offer a counterargument. Martin Luther King Jr. chose to put himself at risk in order to live out his commitment to justice. Dorothy Day gave up economic security and made a commitment to live among the poor. These sacrifices were made by rare witnesses, but they were supported by thousands of others who made smaller sacrifices of wealth, time, and attention. Privileged people can make sacrifices. We know this is true because it has happened.

Maniates and Meyer criticize mainstream environmental groups in the industrialized world that “treat sacrifice as an idea to be avoided at any cost, lest environmentalism become identified as a movement of deprivation and hair shirts.”35 To dismiss sacrifice because it will not sell is to ignore the realities of suffering and sacrifice all over the world among the poor and marginalized. Anyone who seeks climate justice, who hopes to respond morally to the structural violence of climate change, must take the involuntary sacrifices of others seriously and consider the possibility that it is time to make voluntary sacrifices in response.

Sacrifice Is Dangerous

Still, calls for “sacrifice” must seriously consider this term’s limitations and dangers. One perspective on these limitations and dangers is demonstrated in the quotation from Cesar Chavez that began this chapter: “To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men.”36 In 1972 Chavez likely considered this to be an inclusive statement, meaning to incorporate all people with the word “man.” However, the implied identification of sacrifice with masculinity resonates with feminist critiques that have questioned whether, in a patriarchal society, sacrifice is as noble for women as it is for men.

In an iconic essay, the theologian Valerie Saiving observes that male Christian thinkers frequently “identify sin with self-assertion and love with selflessness.” This view valorizes sacrifice, associating Christian love with self-abnegation and sin with the prideful inflation of the self. Saiving then argues that though this is an accurate account of many mens’ moral lives, it does not reflect the experience of women. Because women have been socialized by patriarchal cultures to care for others rather than themselves, they face a different temptation, to “give too much of herself, so that nothing remains of her own uniqueness; she can become merely an emptiness, almost a zero, without value to herself, to her fellow men, or, perhaps, even to God.”37 It is dangerous to instruct such women that sacrifice is virtuous because it can end up telling those who have been marginalized that they should not stand up against the structures that marginalize them. Saiving suggests that men in a patriarchal society should indeed learn to limit themselves and surrender some desires but that such an ethics based exclusively on male experience must be questioned and balanced by an ethics based upon womens’ experiences. This ethics would recognize the importance of self-assertion and self-defense for women rather than or in addition to sacrifice.

Barbara Hilkert Andolsen makes a similar point by arguing against the uncritical celebration of sacrificial love in Christian ethics: “The virtues which theologians should be urging upon women as women are autonomy and self-realization. What many male theologians are offering instead is a one-sided call to self-sacrifice which may ironically enforce women’s sins.”38 The same argument must be made for people of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups, whom the privileged have no right to ask to sacrifice on behalf of a system that already denies them agency and power.

These critics rightly reject involuntary sacrifice—sacrifices forced upon those without agency. This is a vital caution for anyone who advocates sacrifice in any form. However, it does not forgo the possibility of a different kind of sacrifice that liberates people rather than constrains them. For example, the ecofeminist Mary Grey takes the critiques of sacrifice seriously, but she then goes on to argue that sacrifice and austerity are essential as “the only means of effective resistance to an unjust world order.” She urges women and men who benefit from a world of excessive consumption to choose a different path by embracing some sacrifices. Giving up some of the privileges that come from economic dominance and industrialism, she argues, is the only way to affirm “life for all, joy and justice for all, sustainable living for all.”39

Sacrifice is dangerous, so a moral response to climate change cannot simplistically call for universal sacrifice. Suffering is not always liberatory. Those who struggle to survive and assert themselves should not be called upon to suffer more, nor to give away what little they have. However, sacrifice is a vital practice for privileged citizens of the industrialized world. Privileged people concerned about climate justice must, therefore, find ways to sacrificially turn away from those systems and structures that have served our desires at the expense of other people, of ecosystems, and of future generations.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SACRIFICE

Cesar Chavez called on his audiences to give up the destructive aspects of contemporary life, to sacrifice comforts and even standards of success if they were based upon the suffering of others. In other words, he called on his followers to resist structural violence by withdrawing from violent structures. Following this calling may feel like a sacrifice if it means skipping a vacation, forgoing a favorite food, leaving a job, or accepting a lower income. But Chavez promised that the freedom and energy that come from sacrifice can make it liberatory. This is a crucial idea that can inspire the movement for climate justice, which should call its privileged members to sacrifice destructive ways of life for the sake of those whose lives and well-being are already being involuntarily sacrificed.

Resisting Involuntary Sacrifice

The first lesson to be drawn from Chavez is that it is immoral to force involuntary sacrifices on the poor and marginalized. He protested against the meager wages paid to farmworkers and the indignities of unrelieved backbreaking labor. Climate justice advocates should continue this protest today. Indeed, this protest may be even more urgent than in Chavez’s time, given that UFW veteran Marshall Ganz reports that “in real dollars, the nearly 400,000 farmworkers employed today by California’s $30 billion agricultural industry earn wages 20–25 percent below those paid in the late 1970s.”40 Pesticide use also remains a prevalent and understudied problem. Chavez’s witness calls for resistance against such impoverishment.

Climate change makes life even more difficult for farmworkers. Heat stroke has long been a serious threat in the fields, and increasing extreme weather can increase that danger. Changes in growing conditions may well lead to the use of more chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and those who apply these chemicals and work closest to the crops face the most dangers.41 Poor farmworkers are, sadly, another example of the unfair burdens of climate change placed upon those who have contributed least to the problem.

Climate change will demand sacrifices in the twenty-first century, perhaps from every human being on Earth. However, such sacrifices should not come first or foremost from those already struggling to survive. Chavez’s witness calls for a resolute stand against a system that “caters to the greed of callous men” rather than to the needs of those who struggle to feed and shelter their families. Involuntary sacrifice is not redemptive or constructive. It is, instead, a form of violence.

In this sense, Chavez’s witness is consistent with the feminist ethicists cited above on the dangers of sacrifice. Like them, Chavez insists that the privileged have no right to ask for sacrifice from those with less.42 Instead, he asked for sacrifice first from people with whom he was in community and those with more power than himself. Identifying himself as a farmworker and organizer, he asked others in those communities to dig deep and make sacrifices, paying union dues and taking reduced wages. He ensured that his own lifestyle matched that of the workers and so remained on an even footing with them. He asked those with more wealth than himself to make sacrifices, exemplified in his call for the Church to sacrifice grandiosity for the sake of social justice. He also traveled widely to ask privileged people across the country to boycott grapes and to fast in solidarity with suffering farmworkers. He asked a college audience in 1989 to “join the many hundreds who have taken up where my fast ended—by sharing the suffering of the farmworkers—by going without food for a day or two days or three.”43

The Call to Consume Less

For Chavez, the danger of involuntary sacrifice is matched by the power of voluntary sacrifice. This, too, is a vital lesson for privileged people today. We should ask our own communities and those with more power than ourselves to make voluntary sacrifices. Citizens with economic security in the industrialized world should consider giving up comforts in order to reduce our carbon footprints. We should undertake energy or dietary fasts that reduce dependence on destructive fossil fuel and agribusiness infrastructures. Wealthy consumers should follow the example of the UFW grape boycott and forgo products with particularly destructive environmental records. Learning from Chavez, we may discover that such sacrifices can help us to feel less imprisoned by consumer culture, free to live up to our truest desires and ideals. As discussed in chapter 3, privileged people concerned about climate change should eat lower on the food chain, make careful choices about our transportation, and consume energy as responsibly as possible. Chavez complements the witness of John Woolman, agreeing that such sacrifices can in fact bring more joy and satisfaction to people’s lives.

This echoes the call for voluntary poverty made on the basis of Dorothy Day’s witness, as described in chapter 5. The ecofeminist theologian Sallie McFague, who picks up this call from Day, writes that wealthy people in the industrialized world “cannot love our neighbors—neither the human ones nor the earth ones—unless we drastically cut back on our consumption.”44 So, McFague suggests that privileged people in the twenty-first century must learn the gift of “self-emptying,” of “self-restraint, giving space to others, pulling back, saying ‘enough.’ ”45 To sacrifice, she explains, is to put the community above oneself, to recognize that one’s neighbors who suffer deserve the basic necessities of life from those who have more than they need. Like Chavez, she insists that such sacrifice is ultimately joyful, turning away from the never-ending and unsatisfying cycle of overconsumption and instead embracing “a vision of sustainable and just planetary living.”46

Chavez emptied himself—literally and figuratively—by fasting for his movement, and in so doing he found a peace and clarity that inspired him to continue devoting his life to justice. However, his example also extends beyond the personal. He worked hard to make political changes, not only calling on individuals to make voluntary sacrifices but also seeking to restructure economic and political systems so that the entire nation would learn to respect the dignity of farmworkers. In a democracy, widespread public sacrifice can be considered voluntary when a majority decides it is a good idea. Thus, the movement for climate justice should use politics to help privileged people make sacrifices. Activists should seek laws that require everyone to pay more for the privilege of burning fossil fuels, so that they will be burned less often. Activists should demand regulations to increase the price of industrially produced meat and other foods that disproportionately contribute to climate change and thus encourage the production of more locally sourced and lower-impact foods. The movement should also work to see that the money society saves from these sacrifices does not go into the investment portfolios of the rich but rather into projects that benefit those who already suffer the most from a changing climate. If political systems are engaged carefully, such sacrifices can change the lifestyles of the privileged without becoming undue burdens on those who already struggle.

The Energizing Power of Sacrifice

In a world dominated by the logic of the market, such calls for giving up wealth and comfort will not be popular. Thus, the central idea quoted from Chavez at the beginning of this chapter is crucial: The only way to be fully human is to say yes to sacrifice out of respect for the dignity of others. Chavez promises that in making sacrifices, people will discover true and deep values, rewards that are far more worthy than money and consumer goods.

Chavez lived out this belief by insisting that even poor workers must pay dues and union organizers should be paid very little. Other unions treated membership and organizing as purely economic transactions—members expected to get their money’s worth, and employees expected to be paid what the market dictates. But Chavez worked to build a union based on community and a commitment to human dignity. The value of the union was the sense of belonging and inclusion it provided, and organizers were expected to commit to the cause rather than their paycheck.

Privileged people seeking climate justice need not copy every concrete strategy that Chavez used with UFW members and workers. It is not our place to tell the poor how to spend their resources, and those who can afford it should support a living wage for all who do the work of activism and organizing. However, the broader point is worthy of careful study: People are more committed and more energized when they have sacrificed.

The communications scholar Shane Gunster makes a related point critiquing the rollout of British Columbia’s carbon tax. This policy, which was instituted in 2008, added additional taxes to any fossil fuels burned for home heating, transportation, or electricity and is frequently cited as a model for political attempts to slow climate change. The tax was designed to be revenue neutral, such that every cent raised is channeled back to the public in the form of lower income taxes. Gunster characterizes this decision as based on the belief “that a fickle, narcissistic public can only be brought on side in the fight against global warming by appealing to their personal self-interest.”47 He critiques this assumption, saying that political leaders ignored citizens’ hunger for ways to take genuine action on climate change.

By emphasizing that British Columbians need to make no sacrifice for a carbon tax, the government communicated that citizens need not do much about climate change. Gunster suggests that this was a mistake. It ignored “how the process of collectively mobilizing the immense social, economic, and political resources of society to tackle environmental issues after decades of neglect and indifference is enormously appealing to large segments of the population.” People understand that climate change is a huge and serious problem, and many would feel empowered by the chance to do something significant in response. In this context, perhaps asking for widespread sacrifice is a way to meet a genuine need. Perhaps giving something up for the sake of the climate will be not only “intellectually compelling, but also emotionally attractive, carrying in its wake the genuine pleasure of working and acting together to make a better world.”48

Politicians in British Columbia did not ask for a genuine sacrifice, so it is impossible to know how citizens might have reacted. But Gunster’s suggestion that people are capable of such goodness when they are asked is a hopeful argument, and it is consistent with Chavez’s insight about the importance of sacrifice in solidifying commitment. The movement for climate justice should be calling for sacrifice from those who can afford it because people are likely far more open to such requests than conventional wisdom assumes.

CLIMATE DEBT AND REPARATIONS AS LIBERATING SACRIFICE

A concrete call for sacrifice from privileged people comes in the demands for climate reparations to repay a climate debt. One epicenter of such calls is the nation of Bolivia, which sadly provides further examples of the structural violence inherent in climate change. Bolivia is home to 20 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, which are rapidly shrinking. This creates both floods and droughts—floods when excess water comes from mountaintops far more rapidly than it used to and droughts when the reduced ice pack provides inadequate water in dry months.

A 2009 Oxfam report tracks the many ways Bolivians have already been affected by climate change, with more extreme weather events, shrinking water supplies, and endangered food sources. Lucia Quispe, a Bolivian farmer in the rural community of Khapi, told the Oxfam researchers that “it does not rain when it should any more. At any moment, there might be clouds and the rain falls. Before, there was a season for rain, and a season for frost, and a period of winter. [Now,] we get more illnesses, more colds, more coughs, because of the sudden changes in the weather.” When asked how she felt about her children’s future, Quispe responded, “Sad, and very worried. If we don’t have water, what are we going to live from? There’s no life without water.”49

As one of the poorest nations in Latin America, Bolivia can ill afford such disruptions. Adaptation to climate change is economically challenging or impossible for many Bolivians. And, in a trend that is disturbingly familiar, the nation has contributed relatively little to the problem of climate change from which it suffers. In 2012 Bolivians were responsible for 0.3 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. By comparison, the United States was responsible for 13 percent.50

Bolivia has the highest percentage of indigenous peoples of any nation in South America, and these communities are also profoundly threatened. Consider the Uru Chipaya, a community on the Lauca River that has maintained a consistent way of life for four thousand years, outlasting the Incan Empire and sustaining its culture through Spanish colonization. But this culture now faces extinction because the river by which it has always defined itself is drying up. The Uru Chipaya insist that while individuals might survive and migrate elsewhere, its culture cannot endure without the Lauca River.

In 2009 the Bolivian ambassador to the World Trade Organization, Angélica Navarro Llanos, stated that the people of Bolivia are owed a climate debt.51 The nation’s economy, the traditional cultures of its indigenous peoples, and the very lives of its citizens are threatened by a problem that was created and continues to be disproportionately caused by others. Navarro Llanos argued that her nation deserves reparations for the damage climate change is causing.

This proposal was controversial. Responding to Navarro Llanos and other nations making similar requests, the United States’ special envoy for climate change refused to accept responsibility for the harm of climate change. He argued that because US citizens and officials had not realized the harm they were causing, they do not owe anyone anything: “I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like. . . . For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect.”52 Critics questioned the claim that the United States was “blissfully ignorant” all the way up until 2009. Even if such ignorance were defensible, it would raise the question of whether the United States owes some reparation for the harms its emissions have caused in the years since 2009.

Another rejection of climate debt comes from the political philosophers Jonathan Pickering and Christian Barry. Unlike Stern, they concede that there is a moral logic to the call for reparations, but they then suggest that this is not a strategic case to make in the contemporary global climate. They worry that demanding a debt be paid or harm be repaired will inspire defensiveness in the industrialized world, whose citizens will seek to resist claims of guilt rather than genuinely engage the shared global problem of climate change.53 Again, there are two arguments being made against a call for sacrifice: that it is unfair and that it is impractical.

The witness of Cesar Chavez suggests otherwise—that sacrifice can be a moral response to violence that is empowering rather than divisive, if it is approached thoughtfully. This witness calls concerned people to take meaningful action in response to the involuntary suffering of the poor and oppressed in Bolivia. Chavez’s causa demonstrates that sacrifice creates community, and that people are more likely to believe in things for which they have made sacrifices. By this logic, a genuine discussion of climate debt might invite citizens of the industrialized world to engage with the suffering of others in a genuine way rather than ignoring it. Indeed, perhaps the reason that privileged people talk so little about the struggles of Bolivia in a changing climate is that they feel powerless to do anything about it.

A meaningful sacrifice that sent some of our wealth to those who are suffering most could allow privileged people to honestly face the structural violence of climate change. Along these lines, the legal scholar Maxine Burkett advocates reparations not only as a way to compensate those who have suffered from climate change but also as a way to “engage the globe—particularly those in the developed world—in the great ethical challenge posed by climate change.” The idea of paying for harm would allow privileged people to publicly acknowledge what most of us already know but rarely talk about: Our lifestyles contribute to structural violence. According to Burkett, the power of reparation language is that it emphasizes the moral dimensions of climate change. It moves the discussion away from purely scientific and economic issues and into the realm of morality. As she explains, “A discussion distinct from ‘caps,’ ‘trades,’ and ‘costs to the average consumer’ will help to illuminate suffering of the climate vulnerable, and the developed world’s understanding of its own responsibility.”54

National and international debates about climate debt and climate reparations will go on for many years to come. They may never be satisfyingly resolved. But concerned people committed to resisting structural violence should speak up for nations like Bolivia. Bolivians are owed a debt, and we should encourage our fellow citizens to consider how paying such debts could be a liberating sacrifice rather than a grueling punishment. Indeed, a discussion of climate reparations might be the only way to have an honest and mature conversation about climate change.55

Following the witness of Chavez, concerned people should embrace the chance to be fully human by recognizing the suffering of others, taking our fair share of responsibility for this suffering, and making sacrifices to alleviate it. Paying the debts that we and our ancestors have incurred will be a sacrifice, but it will contribute to the liberation of those who suffer from the violence of climate change.

NOTES

Most who write about Cesar Chavez use accents over a letter in each of his names—“César Chávez”—which would be correct Spanish. I do not write it this way because he himself wrote “Cesar Chavez.” I learned this from Luis León, who notes that Chavez has a “right to misspell his name consistently in a lifetime of signing it.” León, Political Spirituality of Chavez, 35. To avoid distracting the reader, this style is also followed for the works cited.

For biographies and analyses of Chavez, see especially Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez; Del Castillo and Garcia, Cesar Chavez; Ferriss, Sandoval, and Hembree, Fight in the Fields; Etulain, Cesar Chavez; Dalton, Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez; Shaw, Beyond the Fields; and Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez.

1.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 167.

2.Third World Network, “Climate Debt: A Primer,” June 2009, www.twn.my/title2/climate/briefings/Bonn03/
TWN.BPjune2009.bonn.02.doc. For an articulation of similar arguments that focuses more on domestic environmental reparations in the United States, see Collin and Collin, “Environmental Reparations”; and Harvey, “Dangerous ‘Goods.’ ”

3.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, xviii.

4.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 27.

5.Watt, Farm Workers and Churches, 71.

6.Moffett, “Holy Activist, Secular Saint,” 106.

7.Prouty, Struggle for Social Justice, 24. Luis León makes an interesting argument that Catholicism should be understood as just one aspect of Chavez’s religious life and that la causa itself is best understood as its own “quasi-religion of resistance.” León, Political Spirituality of Chavez, 157. I agree with León that Chavez chose to ignore some Catholic doctrine and brought other religious rituals and ideas into conversation with his Catholic background. However, this seems to me to be entirely consistent with the faith of most Catholics, so I continue to refer to him primarily as a Catholic thinker and activist.

8.Chavez, An Organizer’s Tale, 87.

9.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 86–87.

10.Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes, 115.

11.Ibid., 143.

12.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 36.

13.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 196.

14.Chavez, An Organizer’s Tale, 83.

15.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 92.

16.Carson, Silent Spring.

17.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 144.

18.Ibid., 144, 147.

19.Ibid., 168–69.

20.For discussions of the UFW’s decline, see Shaw, Beyond the Fields, chap. 10; Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins, epilogue; and Pawel, Union of Their Dreams, parts V and VI.

21.Along these lines, the activist Randy Shaw argues that the key legacy of the UFW comes from the training it gave its organizers, many of whom went on to work in other organizations and other movements. Shaw, Beyond the Fields, 5.

22.One report suggests that he fasted almost one in five days for much of his adult life. Hribar, “Social Fasts of Cesar Chavez,” 332.

23.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 350.

24.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 144.

25.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 539.

26.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 66.

27.Ibid., 69–70.

28.Ibid., 16–17. For a complementary analysis of this text emphasizing its focus on human dignity as well as sacrifice, see Dalton, Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez, 87–89.

29.Levy and Chavez, Cesar Chavez, 74.

30.This combination of a broad strategy with a personal discipline is typical of Chavez, as the ethicist Frederick John Dalton insightfully observes. Dalton characterizes Chavez’s morality as a creative synthesis of “liberation ethics” and “character ethics,” thus bridging concerns for social justice and personal virtue. Dalton, Moral Vision of Cesar Chavez.

31.Sri Mulyani Indrawati, “Climate Action Does Not Require Economic Sacrifice,” 2014, http://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/climate-action-does-not-require-economic-sacrifice.

32.Peterson, “Ordinary and Extraordinary Sacrifices,” 96, 105.

33.Maniates and Meyer, Environmental Politics of Sacrifice, “Conclusion: Sacrifice and a New Environmental Politics,” 315.

34.Owen Ullmann, “Voices: On Earth Day 2014, a Climate Change Challenge,” USA Today, April 21, 2014, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/21/earth-day-environment/7905743/.

35.Maniates and Meyer, Environmental Politics of Sacrifice, “Conclusion,” 313.

36.At Chavez’s funeral in 1993, the end of this iconic quote was changed so that it read, “To be human is to suffer for others. God help me to be human”; Rodriguez, Darling, 138. Committed as he was to the dignity of all human beings, Chavez would probably not have objected to a change that made his statement more inclusive. However, the fact that it was originally written with exclusive language signals the possibility that there is a gendered character to such a call for sacrifice, that suffering for others in order “to be a man” is not universally advisable.

37.Saiving, “Human Situation,” 26, 43.

38.Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics,” 151.

39.Grey, Sacred Longings, 188. See also Mercedes, Power for.

40.Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins, 239. See also Oxfam America, Like Machines.

41.See, e.g., Northwest Public Radio, “How Farmworkers Experience a Warming Climate,” September 27, 2013, http://earthfix.opb.org/communities/article/how-migrant-workers-experience-a-warming-climate/.

42.This is not to say that Chavez should be seen as an uncomplicated feminist hero. He did not fully account for the burdens his sacrifices placed on his wife and his family, and he was not always welcoming to women’s perspectives, even among the leadership of the UFW. See especially Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez.

43.Chavez, Words of Cesar Chavez, 149.

44.McFague, Life Abundant, 22–23.

45.McFague, Blessed Are the Consumers, 17.

46.Ibid., 74.

47.Gunster, “Self-Interest, Sacrifice, and Climate Change,” 196.

48.Ibid., 202, 210.

49.“Bolivia: Climate Change, Poverty, and Adaptation,” 2009, p. 39, www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/file_attachments/bolivia-climate-change-adaptation-0911_4.pdf.

50.“CAIT Climate Data Explorer,” http://cait.wri.org/historical/Country%20GHG%20Emissions?indicator[]=Total%20GHG%20Emissions%20Excluding%20Land-Use%20Change%20and%20Forestry&indicator=Total%20GHG%20Emissions%20Including%20Land-Use%20Change%20and%20Forestry&year=2012&sortIdx=NaN&chartType=geo. These numbers include the greenhouse gas equivalents of land use and forestry. If these figures are taken out and only gas emissions are considered, Bolivia’s share drops to 0.1 percent, while the US share rises to 14 percent.

51.Llanos, “Climate Debt.”

52.Andrew C. Revkin and Tom Zeller Jr., “US Negotiator Dismisses Reparations for Climate,” New York Times, December 9, 2009.

53.Pickering and Barry, “Concept of Climate Debt.”

54.Maxine Burkett, “Climate Reparations,” 511.

55.Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently makes this argument with regard to reparations for slavery and racism in the United States: “I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.