[mobglob-discuss] NOII-Van Environmental Justice Statement

[Harsha Walia]

[ No One is Illegal-Vancouver is a grassroots anti racist and anti
colonial migrant justice collective ]


NO ONE IS ILLEGAL VANCOUVER STATEMENT
"ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: RACE, DISPLACEMENT AND LAND"

In light of the devastating reality of environmental destruction globally,
there is an urgent and critical need to expose the root causes of
environmental injustice as stemming from systems of domination. Predatory
capitalist expansion and imperialist militarization has devastated the
lands, resources, and communities of primarily people of colour locally
and globally.

Toxic industries are largely located on Indigenous lands and closest to
people of colour communities. While people of colour communities are
disproportionately victims of environmental degradation, they are often
scapegoated as responsible for the environmental crisis and excluded from
the leadership of the environmental movement.


* COLONIZATION AS ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

Environmental degradation, with climate change as one obvious
manifestation, is intimately linked to the forced displacement and
migration of people. By the year 2050, an estimated 1 billion people will
be displaced from their homes because of global warming and
stated-sponsored climate terrorism.

Populations of the global South and indigenous communities in the North
have been ravaged by centuries of colonial-corporate theft and
environmentally-destructive “development”.  Colonization brought with it
not only the displacement and genocide of peoples across the world but
also an exploitative view of the natural world. Early colonial imagery of
nature presented it as something to be tamed, conquered and exploited; in
the same way that indigenous peoples were.

The colonial project centred on gaining access to natural resources in
order to fuel the growing capitalist industry. This continues today. For
example the top five mining companies of the world are run out of the UK,
Australia, Canada, Switzerland and the USA (with many of their
headquarters in Vancouver). The mining industry is responsible for causing
severe environmental devastation including loss of food supplies, flooding
of entire communities, releasing lethal concentrations of acid into water
supplies, and displacing millions of people.

Other industries such as fishing, cattle and dairy, farming, oil, and
lumber are also responsible for displacement, the destruction of entire
ecosystems, emission of toxic substances, and intensifying deadly natural
disasters such as landslides, hurricanes and floods.

Within displaced populations, indigenous people – particularly women and
children – are the most affected as their resources for survival, such as
subsistence farming and hunting, rapidly disappear and they are driven to
urban slums or refugee camps.  For example in Canada, the Inuit who have
lived harmoniously with nature in the Arctic North, are now facing
reduction of their stocks of walrus, seals, and whales,  and erosion of
their coastline. In Mexico, farmers struggle to grow food as highly
subsided US corn is dumped into their economy.

Yet the colonial and racist underpinnings of the nation-state system, is
quickly revealed by the lack of response of those states who in reality
have the most resources (as a result of theft) to protect environmental
refugees. Indeed, these people are not even legally recognized as
refugees. The borders of Western countries have remained tightly guarded
against refugees of all stripes, and particularly so against those who
have been displaced by environmental destruction.

This is despite the fact that such states hold the most responsibility for
the global environmental crisis and hence the creation of soaring numbers
of environmental refugees. For example, Australia, which has one of the
highest rates of carbon emissions per capita in the world, refuses to open
its borders to citizens of Tuvalu, a Polynesian island facing catastrophe
from rising sea levels.

Racialized peoples in the First World are also victimized by this
ideology, as witnessed in the handling of Hurricane Katrina. Most
disgustingly, Katrina facilitated the government’s injection of funding
into compliant NGOs to legitimize the current world order under the veneer
of charity and awarded corporate contracts for “reconstruction”. Katrina
made clear that beyond state lines, we are still thoroughly crisscrossed
by borders of race, language, religion, gender, class, age, ability,
sexual identity - borders continue to be socially, politically, culturally
and violently enforced to divide us and discipline us into believing that
some lives are worth less than others.


* GREENING OF HATE

Unfortunately within the environmental movement, we have seen a rise in
the "greening of hate". This ideology blames environmental degradation on
poor populations of colour.

For example, the rhetoric of governments and many environmental
organizations in the North place the blame of excessive CO2 and other
pollutants on countries from the South such as India and China. This is
done in order to shift the blame from the real culprits to those countries
that have been exploited by the imperialist project for centuries. In
reality, much of China’s pollution is generated by the North’s demand for
cheap manufactured goods. Approximately 30% of industry in China is
foreign-owned by companies such as Wal-Mart. And, greenhouse gas emissions
are 1.2 tonnes per capita in India compared with 23 tonnes in the US and
18 tonnes in Canada.

Within the Western world, certain environmental movements propose
restricting immigration in order to control population growth. The most
well known example of the pervasive nature of such discourse is in the
1990's when a large anti-immigrant bloc within the Sierra Club pushed for
a ballot initiative supporting a reduction of net immigration as part of a
“comprehensive population policy".

In addition to promoting racism, such measures obscure the reality that
the fundamental cause of environmental degradation is not overpopulation
of the Earth by humans but overpopulation of the Earth by pillaging state
and corporate interests! While policing borders, such measures regulate
women's reproductive choice by blaming women - predominantly poor
indigenous and racialized women - for having too many children.

One of the most significant ways in which racism is perpetuated within the
environmental movement is the invisibility and marginalization of those
most directly affected by environmental degradation. Indeed, in
stereotypic fashion the environmental movement often traces its origins to
the efforts of visionary white men to protect the natural world from
industrialization, rather than acknowledging the historic ties that most
people of colour communities globally have had to the natural world. They
readily ignore the wealth of traditional knowledge that land-based peoples
have on how to live harmoniously with the land and how to appropriately
steward the land.

The mainstream environmental movement has also perpetuated a mythology of
the environment as separate from humans (the man vs nature myth). In
Canada this has often meant the pitting of indigenous peoples against
environmentalists as environmentalists become complicit in the
displacement of indigenous peoples in order to support "conservation
efforts" that ignores the ways in which indigenous peoples relate to the
land. For example anti-fur activists do not recognize that non-commercial
trapping is one of the main sources of livelihood for indigenous peoples
in the North.


* ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND CAPITALISM

The ideology that capitalism and colonialism can co-exist with genuine
social and environmental justice is disproven when we recognize that it is
a social, economic and political system that is fundamentally and
necessarily rooted in exploitation and expansion.

Sustainable development and creation of “green industries” within
capitalism continues to remain heavily resource-extractive and costing the
lives of millions of people. The production of bio-fuel, for instance, is
directly linked to the food crisis in the global South.

We reject the developmentalist framework that guides so much of economic
policy, including in Third World states. While the impoverishment and
destabilization of the Third World has been one of the primary
consequences of First World imperialism, so is the imposition of an
environmentally-destructive capitalist social organization (a.k.a.
“liberal democracy”) in the Third World.

Such development is not designed to alleviate the poverty and inequality
of the Third World vis-à-vis the First World. It is designed to give
corporations access to land, natural resources and cheap labour; to grant
power to the state to police and regulate human beings as economic units
and Mother Earth as a commodity; and to alienate people from their
connections to the Earth, to themselves and to each other.

It is absolutely not meant to develop people’s ability to build
self-sufficient and self-determining communities in harmony – indeed in
reverence – of that which gives us life and sustains us day by day, the
Earth itself.


* CONCLUSION

In our struggles for social and environmental justice, we must insist on
striving for a holistic understanding of issues and the complex ways in
which they are interconnected; it is this understanding that must ground
our visions for the future.

We demand that residency status be given to all migrants who have been
displaced by environmental destruction. We are speaking especially to
First World states that have through violence and exploitation reaped the
most benefits from – and therefore bear the most responsibility for – the
pillage of our earth.

We believe that indigenous women must be placed at the centre of the
environmental movement as they are the most impacted by environmental
degradation and they also possess generations of knowledge on how to
protect the Earth.

We desire a world where people can move freely and no one is forcibly
displaced. We envision a future of joyful and truly sustainable
communities that are held together not by domination, but by a deep
connection to each other and to the Earth.