Environmental Justice

Working in the Mountain Justice movement as a socialist has had its trying moments. The movement was established in 2005 by a coalition of local Appalachians effected by the worst excesses of the coal industry and a much younger layer of environmentalist activists from outside the region itself. On one wing of the movement, there is a hard core dedicated to tactics of direct action and non-violent civil disobedience while, on the other, is a NGO-ized section of more bureaucratic organizations dedicated to incremental legal challenges to the practice of mountaintop removal coal mining--a particularly ruthless form of strip-mining. In between these are the actual working people of Appalachia whose hearts are frankly more with with direct action-oriented activists, and with good reason. Incremental legal challenges to the coal industry have mostly failed, especially in the context of the catastrophe that is befalling Appalachia.

President Obama and the Congressional Democrats have been stern in their condemnations of BP. Yet their responses to the greatest environmental catastrophe in U.S. history show the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to challenge not only the logic of private profitability, but also the short-term prerogatives of corporate interests.

The President’s June 15 Oval Office address met a wide array of critics. Some questioned his lack of specificity, others the tardiness of his response. But Obama is operating within a box of his own construction. Out of deference to private property and corporate power, he will not entertain discussion of seizing BP’s assets to guarantee that all those harmed are made whole and that the Gulf is cleaned. The $20 billion dollar fund Obama got BP to agree to will not likely come close to what will eventually be needed. The logic of his pro-corporate agenda reduces his options in dealing with even a rogue corporation.

Book Review: Laura Pulido’s Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest.

“Subaltern” groups, according to Pulido, are those which are subordinated socially, politically, culturally, and institutionally as well as economically. For example, Mexican agricultural workers occupy the lowest position within the division of the labor, lack political rights and legal protections, and face language barriers.

Book Review: David Naguib Pellow’s Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.

Pellow’s Garbage Wars examines the history of the environmental struggles over the means and locations of the disposal of solid waste in Chicago and discusses the problems of “environmental racism.”