CAPITALISM AND THE CLIMATE

The climate strikes of September 2019’s Global Week for Future inspired a record seven million protestors worldwide to strike in demand of action against climate change. The partnership between the new American environmental movement and labor unions is revolutionary for its true intersectionality, reflecting hope for the grassroots “people-plus-planet” trend that has inspired American environmentalism since the original counter-cultural movement of the sixties. The national participation in an international movement demonstrates the power of global collaboration and speaks to a popular desire for American participation in international environmental convention. New-wave sustainability and an emphasis on environmental justice has empowered activism from diverse groups in a global playing field.

Understanding the ecosystem inhabited by this new American wave of climate justice first requires an environmental history of the US: just as environmental degradation shook the European continent, the Americas appeared to the global West as a paradisiacal landmass of endless natural resources. The United States was born with an optimism as boundless as the open plains. That optimism persists, yet the plains have long since splintered into fencedoff fragments.

The country’s capitalist foundation demands natural resources to fuel the industrial mode of production. Americans’ general attitude, too, has been one of denial about the limitations of the planet, with such researchers as Marion King Hubbert being derided entirely for predictions about peak oil or the finite reserves of fossil fuels. The “myth of superabundance” has transformed into one of “scientific supremacy,” where technological progress generates confidence that new fuels and new materials can and will be discovered. Indeed, that attitude has further entrenched itself in society through innovations like offshore drilling and hydraulic fracturing. However, the mounting environmental and social costs of energy production are poorly captured by market prices. Changing attitudes about the natural world have also required changing environmental practices.

Dorceta Taylor characterizes three main paradigms chronologically in the American environmental movement: an initial phase of Romantic Environmentalism, a shift into New Environmentalism, and finally the Environmental Justice paradigm of the post-Love Canal era. American Conservation began with top-down gentlemen’s agreements between upper-crust outdoorsmen and their politician buddies; green leaders in America, as well as the communities in which they worked, were overwhelmingly white and wealthy. With Romantic Environmentalism, transcendentalists sought outdoor havens as a retreat from dirty city life, emphasizing the nobility of nature. New Environmentalism’s popularity with the counterculture of the 1960s saw inspired activism and the momentum to demand centralized environmental legislation that continues to defend clean air and water to this day. It was finally the cases of Three Mile Island and Love Canal that wholly exposed the disparities in share of the environmental burden placed on low-income and minority populations. New understanding of environmental justice has democratized the movement to empower greater grassroots activism, and nowhere has this impact been more apparent than in the climate movement.

Diversity in sustainability is vital. Within America, it is less common for people of color to attach partisan identification to climate change than for white voters to do so-- perhaps an understanding of environmental justice as a socioeconomic challenge lends appreciation for the shared burden placed on humans by climate change. However, the valuable perspective of people of color is all too often excluded from the leadership ranks of American environmentalism, which by and large remain washed in whiteness. Strikes and recent partnerships between labor and climate (consider the Ecosocialist Working Group of the Democratic Socialists of America) have expanded the inclusivity of the movement, and leadership diversity of color and gender alike has almost doubled since 2014. Conversely, the urgency of climate change has also heightened the eco-fascist overtures of America’s white environmentalism. There has been increased reactionary disdain for immigrants and refugees-- many of whom are increasingly forced to move, in part or in whole, by climate. A false dichotomy between the environment of the developed Western world and the ‘global south’ encourages American holier-than-thou sentiment, even with a U.S. per-capita carbon emissions rate more than double that of China.

Developed countries have been able to literally ship waste and recyclables abroad, disappearing accumulating heaps with the scribble of a pen. That’s the importance of global strikes and climate solidarity: awareness and a cultural demand for change must be nurtured in the United States. Despite efforts like the Basel Convention to regulate unjust redistribution of damage, global waste management-- and the capture of emissions reductions by recycling-- is inefficient because of this toxic waste colonialism. Perhaps more importantly, people believe that there is no problem because it is moved out of sight. In 2018, a Census Bureau Report found that 78 percent of U.S. plastic waste exports were sent to countries with waste mismanagement rates greater than five percent. Waste mismanagement leads to toxic fumes, misrepresented carbon savings, and pollution. Yet these exports were counted by industry and the EPA as recycled material, thus painting an illusion of superior environmental stewardship.

In a similar way, it is easy to ignore climate change when the initial impacts disproportionately hurt lower-income countries who are less resilient to rising temperatures and sea levels. The affordance of American wealth is that even as an additional 250,000 people will die worldwide each year due to climate change starting from 2030, U.S. carbon emissions increased 3.4 percent in 2018. The 2019 climate strikes are powerful for their transcendence of boundaries, both demographic and geographical. Only with expanded inclusivity in the environmental movement can we approach a global problem with global goals.