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I welcome you to my new green column, which will appear in
the economic section once a month in The Truth. The
American society and economy are about to be reengineered
around green industries and sensibilities—black communities
must not be left behind. This green column is being created
to help instigate thinking and conversation centering on
environmental issues relative to the black communities in
general and in the Toledo area in particular. Speaking
globally, black people suffer disproportionately from
environmental degradation, but we are far from the forefront
regarding environmental organizations seeking redress and a
more sustainable way of life.
In America, for example, brownfields as opposed to
greenfields or areas that are potentially contaminated
environmentally, are overly concentrated in African American
and Latino neighborhoods. It turns out that race, not
homeownership or home value, is the determinative factor of
brownfield location. Brownfields may not pose the
demonstrable and immediate health risks to communities that
active hazardous facilities pose, but they adversely affect
communities in more stealthy ways: they undermine social
capital, erode community pride, and stall economic
development. Brownfields, which are subject to
contaminant-migration, also pose potential environmental
dangers by, among other things, impacting groundwater.
For a global example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region’s
750 million citizens generate less than two percent of
global carbon emissions, but they suffer most of the world’s
deadly effects of climate shocks. Africans are living
through more pronounced and prolonged droughts in some areas
and floods in others. The areas on the continent suitable
for agriculture, the length of growing seasons, and the
yields of food staples are all projected to decline due to
industrial practices of rich nations who have literally
turned up the world’s thermostat.
Despite being hit hardest by the ill-effects of
environmental degradation, black communities worldwide are
not active in environmental movements and organizations to
the degree needed. Notes Robert Bullard, the prolific
African-American scholar of environmental studies, “blacks
must become more involved in environmental issues if they
want to live healthier lives.”
Two reasons are often cited for why African-Americans are
not inclined to roll with environmental movements. First,
the thinking is that African Americans and also other blacks
have bigger, more immediate fish to fry, such as addressing
crumbling black communities, grinding poverty, broken
families, high unemployment and incarceration rates, poorly
performing schools, serious health issues, and racial
discrimination (which affects all of the aforementioned)
before they can indulge the “luxury” of focusing on
environmental concerns such as climate changes and the
threat of polar bear extinction. In short, it is argued,
African-Americans and blacks throughout the world have their
priorities right by focusing primarily on social justice
first. This line of thinking is wrongheaded but
understandable.
The second reason, as argued by some, is that, at least up
until very recently, black people tended to equate
“environmentalism” with conservationism. The material basis
for this argument is that many of the prominent mainstream
environmental organizations have had a conservationist
orientation (e.g., the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and the
National Wildlife Federation).
Fortunately, the streams of social justice and environmental
protection have experienced a degree of merging over the
past decade. The movement that blacks are joining and
energizing today is the environmental justice movement,
which contends that no community should bear a
disproportionate share of the burden of an industrial
society and all communities should benefit from the
transition to a global green economy.
Moreover, I am sympathetic to the view that blacks have
always been environmentalists: from great-grandma demanding
we turn off that light when we leave a room to Africans
living more in harmony with nature in Africa for centuries
before Western penetration and subsequent domination.
But such thinking and actions are incommensurate with the
environmental crisis upon us today. That is, the
environmental tipping point that we have today requires
arming ourselves with substantially more knowledge and
engaging ourselves more energetically in activist campaigns
for sustainable living after a century and a half of
destructive industrialism.
A crisis embodies both danger and opportunity. The danger
associated with the present-day environmental crisis is our
inability to sustain the American economy and the global
economy, as we know them, by continued use of the reigning
production paradigm. America’s material wealth and
comfortable lifestyle have required scooping up more and
more resources from the environment and processing these
resources industrially into finished products, using
greenhouse gas-inducing technologies, then dumping these
often toxic finished products and production technologies
back into the environment.
Throughout thousands of years of civilization development,
humans have buried and burned their waste. In the industrial
age, with more elaborately toxic and greenhouse
gas-enhancing technological prowess and the intense
capitalist-consumerist demand for ever more
“new-and-improved” material goods, the discarded rubbish
became far greater and more ecologically lethal. In this
modern era, burying or burning our garbage comes in the form
of toxic waste dumps and municipal landfills.
The exhaustion of minerals, the loss of biodiversity, and
the destabilizing environmental effects of climatic shocks
from fossil fuel-based industrial production are making it
abundantly clear that this production paradigm that has
served Westerners so well in terms of material wealth and
comforts can’t be sustained, not for themselves and
certainly not for the rest of the world that is rushing to
improve the quality of their lives, largely through the use
of the same production paradigm. Nevertheless, billions of
citizens in developing and impoverished nations are
clamoring for a bigger piece of the action relative to
Western-style consumption and lifestyle. To accommodate
these additional nations, we would need over five new planet
Earths to provide the minerals, ecosystems, and
environmental sinks to burn and bury their fossil fuels and
toxic wastes.
Since we’ve got only one planet Earth, one course of action
for addressing this crisis is a whole new paradigm shift in
industrial production: from destructo-industrial to
eco-industrial. Destructo-industrial production is the only
industrial production we have known, as it destroys the
environment in step with more industrial production. But
industrial production isn’t inherently environmentally
destructive. Eco-industrial production severs the heretofore
link between industrial production and environmental
destruction.
Eco-industrial production, which is the opportunity wing of
the crisis, includes advanced renewable energies. For
example, northwest Ohio is a national leader in the
research, development, and commercialization of solar,
biofuel, and wind technologies. Consequently, the emerging
advanced renewable energy eco-industry is providing new
career opportunities for local citizens and talent is being
recruited from around the country and around the world to
help expand the industry.
Such opportunities are expected to expand rapidly, not only
because of recent technological breakthroughs and increasing
market demands for green products and services, but because
of the Obama presidential election. President Obama is as
intellectually committed to a green economy and is as
beholden to investors in the renewable energy industry as
President Bush was intellectually committed and beholden to
Big Oil. Venture capitalists and US corporations
constituting a new “green-industrial complex” have expanded
their lobbyists threefold in just the last year alone. With
an Obama Administration, oil subsides will continually
shrink while eco-industrial subsidies will continually
expand, thereby expanding green-collar opportunities in
Northwest Ohio and other parts of the nation.
African-Americans must remain informed about green-collar
employment opportunities and must be trained to take full
advantage of such opportunities. We must not allow a whole
new jobs-producing sector to emerge that recreates and
exacerbates the existing racial and social inequalities.
This inaugural column provides a frame and a flavor for the
local, national, and global green issues I will cover. Look
for my discussions in the economic section next month and
every month following. Meanwhile, get more green!
Rubin Patterson is a professor of Sociology and the interim
director of Africana Studies at the University of Toledo. He
worked as a professional engineer in satellite and
integrated circuits production before earning a doctorate in
Sociology. The Africana Studies program he is building at UT
is the first of its kind in the nation for its
specialization in environmental studies. |
