Nativist environmentalism is clearly not a passing fad or a recent development in U.S. politics. It has much of its roots in the Western European concept of the “virgin land” or “empty land,” born centuries ago. European explorers and colonizers judged themselves to be the rightful and dominant inhabitants of these lands; thus indigenous peoples would no longer enjoy that entitlement. This myth of the virgin land undergirds nativist environmentalism and facilitates the maintenance of environmental privilege in many settler-colonial societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. That myth remains strong today and supports the broader ideological power of the Aspen Logic—the driving force behind mainstream environmental movements in the United States.
Within the Aspen Logic, environmentalism and capitalism work in concert, claiming that we can achieve ecological and social sustainability by supporting capitalism, not transforming or transcending it.1 What this also means is that existing social hierarchies are, at root, not problematic; they only need be tapped, along with other resources such as innovative thinking and the kind of “breakthrough” entrepreneurial creativity that is popularly associated with free markets.2
The Aspen Logic is dependent upon the continued practices of racism and other forms of social domination but is resolutely blind to these realities. It is shrouded in the innocence of whiteness. This idea parallels, in many ways, the phenomenon of post-racialism. Unlike the United States of the pre–civil rights era, today public pronouncements, laws, and general mores in this nation disavow, deny, and condemn racism, offering a kindler, gentler social order of official racial equality. Never mind that this is contradicted by continued racist violence on the part of states, institutions, and individuals domestically and abroad (through the prison industrial complex, education, health care, labor markets, and U.S. foreign policy, for example). But it is precisely the words and promises of equality that make this country’s post-racial paradigm parallel—and a core part of—the Aspen Logic.
Consider many of the nativist environmentalists in the Roaring Fork Valley who go to great pains to declare themselves “not racist,” all the while writing open letters calling for public policies that are indeed thoroughly racist. The idea is to change the veneer, the message, or the façade of the machine, while further fueling its functions. The Aspen Logic is simultaneously a project of racial domination and one that refuses to see the world it produces and does great harm to. Post-racialism is an idea that entices many of us, as Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres write:
[C]olorblindness disables the individual from understanding or fully appreciating the structural nature of inequality . . . it disables groups from forming to challenge that inequality through a political process . . . [it] is a deterrent to collective political action . . . such an ideological approach guards oligarchies from moral reproach and promotes a popular disengagement from politics . . . .the colorblindness attack has destabilized the movement for transformative social change within communities of color as well.3
The Aspen Logic is also implicated in persistent gender inequalities across societies. The Native American Studies scholar Andrea Smith makes profound connections among the domination of ecosystems, Native peoples, and gender politics as part of current-day colonialism. Smith explores the ways in which indigenous peoples and people of color experience sexual violence at the hands of states and corporations that harm their communities while enriching other communities (through environmental racism and land theft, for example). In other words, Smith uses the concept of sexual violence in both a literal and metaphorical sense, to underscore that many communities have experienced a process in which resources were taken without permission and in which land and bodies were violated without consent.4 This is a fundamental part of the Aspen Logic and environmental privilege because they thrive on social and ecological domination. Not only is the Aspen Logic blind to its race and gender effects, it does not allow for the acknowledgement of the capitalist engine it fuels and the path of devastation it leaves in its wake (thus it is purposely blind to class dynamics as well). James Gustave Speth’s book The Bridge at the Edge of the World speaks directly to the Aspen Logic.5 Speth, an environmental studies scholar, argues that capitalism as we know it is incompatible with ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy. The Aspen Logic seems to be oblivious to this reasoning. Speth also finds that U.S. environmental movements possess a number of shortcomings, most of which revolve around their ultimate acceptance of the inequalities capitalism produces as a matter of course. Ultimately, Speth concludes that markets can be made to work, if the system itself is transformed in ways that value both human beings and ecosystems. Whether that would constitute a new kind of capitalism or something different altogether remains to be seen.
On the contrary, in The Enemy of Nature, the philosopher Joel Kovel unabashedly contends that capitalism must die so that humankind and the planet we inhabit may live. He asks, “where is the serious, systematic reflection of the brutal truth—that humanity is in the hands of a suicidal regime?”6 Kovel likens capitalism to “a trusted and admired guardian . . . who . . . is in actuality a cold-blooded killer who has to be put down if one is to survive.”7 He writes, “Capital’s combined ecodestructivity and incorrigibility forces open the prospect of a total revolution.”8 Like other progressive scholars of ecological and social crises, Kovel also argues that a societal transformation beyond capital must embrace a feminist orientation (specifically ecofeminism) that recognizes how capitalism thrives off of hegemonies of humans over ecosystems, Europeans over people of color, the rich over the poor, men over women, citizens over noncitizens, and heterosexuals over gays/lesbians/bisexuals/transgendered/queer communities. Without integrating these systems of inequality into our analyses of the problem, we will fall short.
The Aspen Logic is fundamentally a neoliberal idea with a message of hope and redemption, but without a change in policy direction. The following quote from the World Resources Institute’s Guide to the Global Environment captures the Aspen Logic that dominates U.S. environmentalism:
Energy conservation was once unfairly linked to the need for drastic cutbacks in living standards. Although some changes in human behavior are clearly appropriate, conservation efforts are now strongly focused on introducing new technologies for producing and using energy more efficiently and on improving energy management. By increasing energy efficiency, demand can be reduced without adversely affecting personal lifestyles or a country’s economic growth. In fact, increasing energy efficiency can even enhance them.9
According to the sociologist Michael Goldman, for “Global Resource Managers [like the World Resources Institute] ‘sustainable development’ is just another way of saying that world economic growth rates can be sustained without destroying the earth.”10 This is nothing new. In fact, the early twentieth-century precursor to the “sustainable development” discourse and policy framework (dominant since the late 1980s) was termed “sustained yield.” The idea was that the U.S. federal government might serve as a steward to the nation’s ecological wealth in a way that does not exhaust it, while at the same time wholeheartedly supporting capitalism.11 The term “sustained yield” remains in wide use today among foresters. Sustainable development and sustained yield are concepts that speak to the Aspen Logic’s ability to incorporate and co-opt genuine concerns about un sustainability into a language of sustainability. Allan Schnaiberg’s “Treadmill of Production” sociology thesis captured this dynamic years ago when he argued that national and global political-economic power structures will attempt to solve social and ecological crises by simply speeding up or reinforcing the system itself.12
James Speth writes, “today’s environmentalism believes that problems can be solved at acceptable economic costs—and often with net economic benefit—without significant lifestyle changes or threats to economic growth.”13 In other words, the cure for the ills of capitalism is more capitalism. We must also note that many socialist societies have produced their fair share of social inequalities and ecological devastation, so this is not a feature that is exclusive to capitalist economies. Any system of governance that produces violence against people and ecosystems is a part of the problem.
Many leaders in environmental organizations believed that the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro would catapult the world community toward a consensus and action plan around global sustainability. Unfortunately, among other things, the summit’s “effect has not been to stop destructive practices but to normalize and further institutionalize them.”14 What has become clear is that Garrett Hardin’s 1968 “Tragedy of the Commons” thesis—despite being challenged thoroughly by numerous scholars over the years—has served as a guide for global ecological management within the United Nations, global corporations, and nation-states. Hardin’s thesis that individuals will overconsume resources within common spaces has taken hold at the highest levels. Generally speaking, as global capitalism has gained in strength and force since World War II, the privatization of the commons has occurred at a parallel rate. People fighting for open space in urban parks, for rights to grazing lands, for the right to live on ancestral forest lands, and for public airwaves and the digital spectrum are facing an uphill battle because capitalism views these spaces as potential profit sources, indeed, as sites of future enclosures.
But they also face a difficult road because of the strength of nativist environmentalism. So in Aspen and other places around the world, people who construct themselves as the rightful inhabitants or owners of ecological systems and resources exclude others from gaining access to those spaces. What this practice also does is to naturalize the idea of nation. That is, some people “naturally” belong, are naturally a part of this nation, while others naturally do not belong. The idea of “carrying capacity” makes this plain and simple in the most basic biological terms. This is a new twist on the “old” racism associated with biological differences; it just comes wrapped in a green package. And while racism always hurts those who suffer its indignities, it also works in the service of privilege.
In his powerful book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, George Lipsitz denotes how whites value and invest in whiteness “to remain true to an identity that provides them with resources, power, and opportunity.”15 We see this in housing, education, banking, environmental protection, voting, health care, and virtually any other space of social interaction. There is a payoff for being white. The transportation infrastructure of the United States is a classic example of white privilege in action. The interstate highway system provides suburban white communities access to resources while locking inner-city communities into local dead-end labor markets, crumbling school systems, and contaminated industrial spaces. The construction of interstate highways is also reflective of this process by repeatedly being directed through neighborhoods of color, destroying and displacing African American communities like Rondo in St. Paul, the Chicano communities of Sal Si Puedes in San Jose and Barrio Logan in San Diego, and the Coldwater Springs area of Minneapolis, a site viewed as sacred to the Lakota and Dakota nations. The result is the preservation and maintenance of white communities and the identity of whiteness.
Environmental racism and environmental privilege are often part of the problem of white privilege. The possessive investment in whiteness drives white communities to maintain the social, economic, political, and environmental privileges they have secured through histories of dominance over other groups. But since there are many nonwhite communities around the globe that enjoy environmental privilege, white privilege is not always at the root, but some combination of racial, class, political, and cultural privilege is always at work in this process.
The ultimate difficulty with social privilege of any variety is that it is often unrecognized and unmarked. Privilege is the experience of being a part of a social group that benefits from inequality—and rarely having to account for it—because privilege is socially invisible.16 That invisibility is what makes privilege so difficult to challenge, and this is especially so with regard to environmental politics. When a tourist stands at the head of a ski run in Aspen, they rarely consider the labor of all of the people from around the world who make their leisure possible. Nor do they consider the ecological costs involved in maintaining their “get away” in the mountains. And as they stare at the sunset or dip their toes into the Roaring Fork River, they can easily fool themselves into thinking that such simple pleasures are a universal part of life, available to everyone.
Contrary to what one might believe upon first consideration, people with social privilege have paid a heavy price for their position and participation in the systems of power that maintain their dominance. Much of the scholarship on the costs of racial privilege focuses on the harm that white supremacy visits upon the white working class. The sociologist Joe Feagin and his colleagues argue that since the nineteenth century, the white working class in the United States has failed to prioritize the struggle against their own exploitation by capitalists and, instead, focused much of its energy on securing and maintaining privileges for white communities. This has resulted in enormous lost opportunities for collaboration and unity with working-class communities of color, therefore reducing the economic and political power of all working-class people in the United States.17 No less disturbing is W. E. B. DuBois’s conclusion in Black Reconstruction in America that both black and white workers’ inability to stand together against the white propertied class during the Reconstruction era revealed the persistent power of white capitalist supremacy and ushered in the failure of democracy in the United States at a time when there was a real opportunity to secure a democratic system for all.18 Thus the thirst for white privilege has undermined the very basis of democracy.
If the future of democracy is at stake, then clearly the problem of white privilege impacts whites at the bottom and at the top of the social structure. But those at the top seem increasingly impervious to the realities of racial and environmental injustice, precisely because their privileges have distanced them from these experiences and, because to seriously address these injustices they would necessarily have to give up those privileges. The environmental journalist Hervé Kempf believes that this creates an indifference to injustice that will eventually harm all of humanity. He writes that elites are “[b]lind to the explosive power of manifest injustice. And blind to the poisoning of the biosphere that the increase in material wealth produces, poisoning that means deterioration in the conditions for human life and the squandering of the chances of generations to come.”19 After all, ultimately everyone will pay the price of climate change; it may just take a little longer for the rich to feel to pain. But the blindness of power is a disease that is difficult to cure.
The anti-racist activist and author Tim Wise inveighs against social privileges associated with white racism. He contends that privilege is dysfunctional because it feeds a collective narcissism, abuses of power, a sense of self-righteousness, and mythologies of invincibility, which are unfounded and unsustainable. He writes “if we are going to truthfully analyze what is wrong with our culture . . . we should begin with the folks at the top, not the bottom, for as the old saying goes, the fish tends to rot from the head down.”20 We argue the same with regard to environmental privilege. Environmental racism and injustice are facts of life in many communities. The social distance between environmentally privileged communities and those communities suffering from environmental injustice reinforces the problem and feeds into the blindness to the ultimate outcome for all of us.
Many elites believe that they can shield themselves against the effects of the ecological and social violence they produce and profit from. No one is exempt from ecological harm, even those who live in the cocoon of environmentally privileged spaces. This is what Guinier and Torres call the problem and opportunity of the “miner’s canary”: that the conditions people of color suffer under racism are a warning sign that the general social atmosphere that we all must breathe is increasingly toxic and dangerous to all of us.21 The blindness to the social and ecological violence that environmental privilege produces and rewards in the short term will be shattered by the scourges of climate disruption and the pollution of air, watersheds, and the soil we all depend upon.
Environmental privilege is made possible by and works in concert with white supremacy, racism, class domination, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and the world’s most unsustainable ecological practices. The illogic of environmental privilege is that it supports the very ideas and practices that produce ecological and social devastation, so it undermines itself in the long run. There is yet one more reason to harbor concern about this issue. On a philosophical level, Tim Wise urges us to consider that “ignoring the essential humanity of another living soul . . . does something to a person, and what it does is never a good thing.”22 When we enjoy privileges and benefits at someone else’s expense—which is generally how social inequality works—we lose a bit of our humanity.
In their groundbreaking book From the Ground Up, Luke Cole and Sheila Foster, both environmental justice scholars, write about the need for “transformative politics” and how this phenomenon is already occurring within some social movement circles. Transformative politics occurs when individuals, communities, institutions, and national policies change dramatically in ways that produce new spaces for the imagination and creation of environmentally just realities. When a person evolves from being a bystander to a movement participant, or when an institution reprioritizes its energies to support the goals of social justice, or when a social movement experiences “fusion” with another movement to create a much more inclusive and powerful whole than the two parts, this is what is meant by transformative politics.23 We could use a little transformative politics right now.
The pioneering journalist Bill Moyers writes that “America needs a different story” because so many people have been written out of the dominant national narrative that has been so full of half truths, omissions, and distortions.24 Our new story must be one in which major differences in life chances (meaning the opportunities, living conditions, and life experiences that people have in common by virtue of belonging to a particular class), vast gulfs between the wealthy and the poor, and Gilded Ages must be confronted and disallowed. That new story can be written about environmental justice—where ecological sustainability and social justice meet.
Immigrants and social justice advocates in the Roaring Fork Valley have confronted nativist environmentalism locally. But they are just one node in a larger network of communities challenging this phenomenon. Since the mid-1990s, the San Francisco–based Political Ecology Group (PEG) has spearheaded what it calls the Immigration and Environment Campaign. The group started around the time the nativist Proposition 187 passed in California, and tackles several nativist environmentalist claims in its campaigns and writings. In one article they write:
Overemphasizing the role of population growth in environmental problems ignores who has control of production and consumption decisions. Many of the causes of environmental decline in the U.S. have nothing to do with population growth or individual consumer choices. The military, the nation’s largest single polluter, and corporations produce much more toxic wastes than households. Corporate advertising drives overconsumption and creates demand for new products that are often more environmentally destructive than old products. Sprawling suburbs, planned and built by developers, gobble up prime agricultural land and wildlife habitat. The public has little control over these decisions. Corporate lobbying against regulations often undermines attempts to make companies clean up after themselves or make new developments more compact and efficient. Corporate actions also limit individual decisions for more sustainable lifestyles, such as taking mass transit instead of driving.25
PEG’s Immigration and Environment Campaign position statement identifies seven strategies for movements to challenge nativist environmentalism. They include:
1. Creating alliances between environmental and immigrant rights movements to embrace an environmentally sustainable economy that works for all people
2. Working for immigrant rights, civil rights, and human rights
3. Combating environmental deregulation efforts by corporations and the federal government
4. Confronting nativist environmentalism and making more visible the contributions immigrants have made to this nation
5. Supporting policies that significantly lower U.S. consumption of global resources while encouraging the invention and application of ecologically sound technologies and practices
6. Ensuring that the state and corporations are accountable to public demands for environmental justice
7. Supporting universal and equal access to education, health care, and living wages.26
We observed and documented each of these objectives in the work and dreams articulated by activists and immigrant residents in the Roaring Fork Valley. They constitute a vision of a society where social and environmental justice, inclusivity, and democracy thrive.
Another organization doing work similar to PEG is the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, a multiracial alliance of feminist community organizers, scholars, and health professionals working to realize a vision of global peace, environmental justice, economic sustainability, and women’s empowerment. This group challenges ideologies of population control and nativism in the United States and in international politics. Both the PEG and the CWPE take credit for forcing the Sierra Club to take immigrant rights seriously in that organization’s recent elections.
Penn Loh, the former executive director of the Boston-based environmental justice organization Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), has been active in opposing nativist environmentalism as well. He writes:
Reducing immigration will not solve environmental problems, but will militarize borders, criminalize migrants, and increase the divide between haves and have-nots. A true ecological approach, one that sees everything as connected to everything else, broadens environmental concerns to include human rights, health, and livelihood issues.27
Finally, one contributor to the main publication of the radical environmental movement EarthFirst! declares unconditional solidarity with immigrants and contends that national borders only serve to divide people who should otherwise be working for environmental sustainability and against capitalism:
The U.S. Empire isn’t falling because of any “invasion along the border.” It’s crumbling from being faced with its own greed, indifference and precariously unsustainable industrial foundation. This machine is coming down, and it’s our work to ensure that its fall is as ecological, liberating and permanent as possible. Cross-border solidarity and anti-border struggle are a crucial part of that effort.28
When such radical environmentalists like this EarthFirster—who comes from a movement that has traditionally been charged with not seeing the people but seeing only the forests and the trees, a movement with deep nativist roots—casts their lot with immigrants and the cause of anti-imperialism, this is significant. Unfortunately, precisely because EarthFirst! is such a radical organization, it is viewed as a part of the political fringe and therefore irrelevant or perhaps a threat to many of us who are pragmatists.
But perhaps it is high time for some outrageous and creative thinking about our future. As James Speth bravely states on this subject, “if some of these answers seem radical or far-fetched today, then I say wait until tomorrow. Soon it will be abundantly clear that it is business as usual that is utopian, whereas creating something very new and different is a practical necessity.”29 We look forward to a future in which people work to create something as outrageous as social justice and ecological sustainability. A good place to start might be to name the social forces that obstruct this vision. Let us name these forces out loud. Let us look at ourselves honestly, question our own assumptions, and acknowledge the various forms of privilege so many of us take part in and benefit from. Let us listen to the voices that come from all corners of our communities, especially those that come from the innumerable “down valleys” all over America. Let us create a different story to live by.