Purpose Articles Books Websites -NEWSLETTER- Subscribe		December 22, 2004 www.SustainableWays.com Newsletter #21 In This Issue: -Drawing Parallels -The Integrationist Approach -The Separationist Approach -The Transformationist Approach ::DRAWING PARALLELS:: This past month, I was reading a book about racism for one of my classes: The Great Wells of Democracy by Manning Marable. While it wasn’t a particularly compelling book for me, I found myself starting to draw parallels between the struggle against racism and the fight for sustainability. I don’t know if Marable’s arguments hold water…I haven’t experienced and/or thought enough about racism to say for sure. But throughout his book, Marable implies that the biggest difficulty with fighting racism is that most people in the United States think that there isn’t a racism problem at all anymore. Popular opinion holds that racism is a thing of the past, put to death by the victories of the civil rights movement, and that equality is so rampant these days that if minorities are struggling, it’s their own fault. As you can guess, Marable strongly disagrees. His argument is that there were pervasive cultural beliefs that backed up racism throughout the history of the U.S. Yet most people pretend that those beliefs (and their effects) vanished into thin air with the passing of the Civil Rights Act. If what Marable says is true, then I can’t help but speculate that those of us who are concerned about our situation with the environment face a similar roadblock. It seems like the typical American thinks that all of our environmental problems were solved during the golden days of the environmental movement. Once the most obvious indicators of environmental irresponsibility were removed (air so thick with pollution that you can’t breathe, for example), public awareness gave way to an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality. Subtle signs of environmental mismanagement like rising asthma rates and melting ice caps were subsequently dismissed or ignored. Why? Because the beliefs that funded our unsustainable ways are still alive and kicking in people’s heads. So how do you deal with such beliefs? How do you go about uprooting a worldview so entrenched in people’s minds that anything you say falls on deaf ears? Maybe the struggle against racism can offer some insights here, too. ::THE INTEGRATIONIST APPROACH:: In his book, Marable described three general approaches that have been used by what he calls the “Black Freedom” movement to effect change. The one we are most familiar with, both with regard to racism and environmentalism, is the “integrationist” or state-based approach. In terms of racism, it’s an approach based on the belief that minorities can be integrated into the existing system through the workings of democracy. In a more general sense, it means changing the system from within, primarily through political means. Environmentalists are no strangers to this approach. Most of the people I speak to believe that the only way we can really change things is through the government and political activism. And the truth is, we have made enormous strides in this way. But is political involvement enough to finish the job? Marable’s answer is no—at least in terms of racism. He makes a very good point in saying that our so-called democracy, which was supposed to ensure the equal rights of all citizens, wasn’t a democracy at all, given especially what was being done to slaves and Native Americans at the time. While it rode on some of the principles of democracy, our political system was ultimately designed to preserve the rights of property-owners and prevent minorities from becoming any real political force. That’s why we have things like the Electoral College, which makes it nearly impossible for third parties to have any real say in what goes on in politics. (Don’t believe me? Check out Federalist Paper #10, by Madison himself: “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.” In other words, our system is organized as a hierarchy with an unequal distribution of resources, and our government’s utmost priority is preserving this structure. But I digress…) The point is, our government has inequality built into it, so using it to create equality seems rather self-defeating. Also, one of the tenets of democracy is that majority rules. If the majority of people in the United States are racist (as Marable contends), then any efforts made by minorities to ensure equality will be met with unparalleled resistance, especially when ensuring equality for minorities poses any threat whatsoever to the majority. (E.g. Affirmative action, an attempt to get minorities integrated into educational institutions and workplaces, and one of the strongholds of the civil rights movement, results in what critics call “reverse discrimination,” where non-minorities lose opportunities. Not surprisingly, as this becomes more and more common, affirmative action is gradually being phased out.) I don’t know if having a hierarchy is inherently unsustainable. I don’t know if affirmative action is racist or fair. But I do know that our government was founded on unsustainable practices…In fact, I don’t think it gets any more unsustainable than depending on colonization for survival in a finite environment. Unlike the concept of racism, which has been around for approximately 4 centuries, the principles of UNsustainability have been around for 10,000 years. They permeate every aspect of our lives. Can we really depend solely on the government, which itself depends on and revolves around unsustainable practices, to direct us towards sustainability? Not everyone thinks so. ::THE SEPARATIONIST APPROACH:: The second approach described by Marable is the “separationist” or race-based approach. Rather than depending on non-minorities to come to their senses and start being fair out of the goodness of their hearts, the separationist perspective goes something more like this: “Screw ‘em. Let’s do our own thing. We need to start taking care of ourselves and stop waiting for them to come around.” In environmental terms, I call this the “lifeboat” strategy. The premise behind this perspective is that our system is unsustainable, so let’s bail before it blows. What I like about this approach is that instead of trying to persuade people to live sustainably, you get to show them how it’s done and lead by example. Essentially, it’s walking the talk, with the added bonus of getting to save your own a$$ (if the system should crash during your lifetime). For minorities, the separationist approach poses many difficulties, the most destructive of which is that it further isolates races and reinforces stereotypes. But fortunately for environmentalists, stereotypes, though annoying, are the least of their problems. Another drawback is that it’s damned hard to give up modern civilization cold turkey. But I don’t see why you have to. For most of us, walking away from the system is not even an option. Even if you grew your own food, for example, you’d need land, which you’d have to own, which you’d have to pay taxes on, which you’d need a job to get the money to pay taxes with, and so on. No, going this route means gradually weaning yourself off of civilization as we know it, until there are enough people working outside the system that you can network with…So you can ultimately pull the plug and lead a life that offers more satisfaction and security than the one modern civilization has to offer. Unfortunately, this sequence is bound to take a very long time, especially since most environmentalists’ attention is focused on integrating rather than separating, and non-environmentalists are utterly disinterested in realistically pursuing an alternative way of life (mostly because they’ve been taught that modern life is as good as it gets). What if you don’t want to wait that long? ::THE TRANSFORMATIONIST APPROACH:: The final approach also happens to be the rarest. The “transformationist” or class-based strategy runs on the idea that racism is not so much a “race” issue as it is a “class” issue. In other words, minorities are treated poorly because they’re on the bottom of the totem pole, not because they’re minorities. Once they climb the economic ladder, they won’t be treated so badly. We’ve seen this happen with many racial groups in America, especially Europeans. As I mentioned earlier, our system is structured as a hierarchy, a huge triangle with a privileged few at the top and the working masses at the bottom. Since our government seems to work hand in hand with this structure, why not take advantage of it? What I’m trying to say here is: What if instead of doing the above, environmentalists focused instead on {gasp} getting rich? Think of it this way: That tiny minority at the top of our hierarchal pyramid controls most of the wealth and resources of the entire country and perhaps even the world. What they do with their power is generally unsustainable because, well, they don’t know any better, or they don’t care. If we could oust that, say, top 1% and replace them with people who have an inkling of what it means to live sustainably, think of what a difference that would make! I know that becoming rich and powerful doesn’t exactly paint a picture of sustainability, especially since we’ve been taught to equate nobility with poverty (there are a lot of environmentalists out there who scoff at luxuries and our proud to do without). But bear with me here. There are two ways to escape this unsustainable hierarchy: From the bottom, by giving up all of what civilization has to offer and probably getting harassed by it for the rest of your life, or from the top, where you’ve “earned” the right to do whatever the heck you want with your life. Getting up there isn’t easy. But neither is changing government policy, or cutting the umbilical cord to modern civilization. The difference is this: that latter two have never really been done…Environmentalists have only been partially successful at both. But getting rich? It’s been done completely, by individuals in one lifetime, over and over again. Why can’t that be us? I leave you with that, and I hope you enjoy the holidays, wherever you may be. Till next month, Krystle C. This is an opt-in newsletter. If it's not working for you, or it's been sent to you in error, please reply to this e-mail and write "Unsubscribe" in the subject area to be removed from the mailing list. All content is protected by copyright law. Do not copy or redistribute without permission.