-----Original Message-----
From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>The business about
>identifying with the African-Americans in the jazz club who implicitly view
>Earth Day as a "white thing" is really key to the book, since he regards
>any environmental struggle _outside_ of the framework of racial minorities
>and the like as a diversion and a trap.
I will have to read Harvey's book, but this commentary is hardly from some
abstract free-floating theoretical position, but is the bread-and-butter view of
the growing environmental justice movement. Early in the 1990s, the national
network of toxic waste advocates broke apart largely over the fact that
environmentalism was being discussed outside the framework of race dynamics.
The result of those race-free approaches was that environmental regulations give
white elite communities plenty of power to kick toxics out of their community -
NIMBYism - without regard to the fact that the toxics then inevitably get
concentrated in poor, usually non-white communities. The new environmental
justice networks, like the Southwest Network for Environmental Justice, created
new approaches that tied the concerns of working class non-white communities to
environmental advocacy.
The Sierra Club with its recent vote around immigration illustrated the
intertwining of environmental and race issues quite dramatically. The
anti-immigrant proposition was classic NIMBYism: keep the US population down so
our trees and our rivers can avoid straining their "carrying capacity" without
regard to how poverty and misery in the third world will be effected by such
anti-immigrant environmentalism. I was happy that 60% of Sierra Club members
voted against the proposition, but the fact that 40% voted for it shows an
incredible level of racism and NIMBYism in the mainstream environmental
movement.
It's funny; a professor I know here at Berkeley who studied under Harvey made
fun of him for that fact that Harvey was too political, that Harvey spent many
weekends with a staple gun in hand putting up posters for rallies. This
professor, who loved radical Marxist geographic theory, was somewhat embarassed
that his mentor actually got his hands dirty doing plebian political work,
rather than just being a sophisticated talking head commentator.
Just on that "recommendation", I've always harbored a certain admiration for
Harvey without having met him. Anyone with tenure who still handles a staple
gun is alright in my book :)
--Nathan Newman
