L-I: RE: Environmental Justice

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis R Redmond [mailto:dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2000 12:39 PM
To: marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Environmental Justice


On Wed, 8 Mar 2000, Craven, Jim wrote:

> As a native Washingtonian I grew up with whales since my childhood. I too
> would morn the wholesale slaughter of industrial-for-profit whaling. But
you
> know, I have never seen any of the whale watchers or protectors putting on
a
> wet suit to swim with the whales in Puget Sound or in the ocean; they
would
> look too much like a seal or a whalrus and might easily get eaten by their
> whale "brothers and sisters"; or perhaps just get crushed. I never see any
> of these PAWS or PETA types liberating lab rats or even minks (minks can
be
> quite vicious when held) I have never seen any of them protesting against
> turning Indian reservations into toxic waste dump sites (last year the EPA
> published a list of 73 toxic/radioactive waste dump sites and 72 were on
> Indian reservations);

This flies in the face of the environmental justice movement, which has
been making these kinds of connections for at least a decade. All the way
back in 1990, at Redwood Summer, a protest shindig in northern Cali
against the cutting of old-growth, the protestors were very careful to
distinguish corporate greedheads like Weyerhauser and Pacific from the
local indigenous American tribes, who ran their own logging operations.
The folks at the Rainforest Action Network have been acting in solidarity
with Fourth World peoples for years.

-- Dennis

Response: Did the Rainforest Action Network also support the traditional
Treaty-protected hunting and fishing rights of the Hupa and other nations in
the area too? Did they defend the right of Indigenous Nations to define and
consume their own traditional diets?

Bourgeois theory and ideology work off of sleight-of-hand and
ultra-reductionism. A whole totality of a predatory, wasteful and brutally
exploitative system--monopoly capitalism--is reduced to little niches and
special interests. Someone can call himself "Green" without being an
anti-capitalist--and many do--yet no true Marxist could be anti-"Green" in
the sense of being indifferent to wholsesale destruction of the total
"environment" of which humankind is an integral but hardly sole part. Among
Indigenous activists we have the same problem of those who call themselves
Indian activists but want to keep Indigenous struggles compartmentalized and
isolated from broader and very related struggles against a broader totality
of capitalism that chews up, spits out, degrades and murders other
non-Indian victims as well. Or we have Indigenous activists who define being
"revolutionary" in narrow narcissistic and personally non-threatening terms
like dressing-up "Native", eating a "traditional diet", speaking the
languages or engaging in "traditional rituals" while they do nothing in
terms of concrete struggle against predatory forces and systems that are
destroying Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples and cultures daily--sort of
like SOME of these Greens who define and confine "revolutionary action" in
terms of personal lifestyles and consumption habits and who have their own
comfortable and personal lists of "worthy" versus "unworthy" life-forms and
struggles.

This ultra-reductionism and these narcissistic narrow "niches of concern"
play right into the hands of those who really run and benefit from this
capitalist system. Just look at this "debate" that is going on on this net
and some of these infantile and pedestrian responses. Over and over:
"animals are not my CLASS enemy" (who has ever argued that whales or bison
etc are "fascists" and in need of being dealt with in the same ways and for
the same ways as fascists should be dealt with?) Or over and over, we get
the mere assertion, with nothing more than summary assertion and arrogation
behind it, that somehow vegetarianism is a moral imperative in addition to
being a potentially more healthy diet and lifestyle. And those who argue
that the non-vegetarians are hierarchically valuing different life-forms by
selectively eating some of them, do precisely the same thing: they obviously
have their own hierarchies on more or less "worthy" forms of life as
evidenced by their very selective concerns, arenas of action and issues
about which they are prepared to get emotional and attempt to do something
(which one of these "Greens" has shown even one-tenth the emotion about
genocide against humans when it has been discussed here? All we get is "yes,
it is horrible, but..."

You notice that some of these "Greens" continually attempt to get around the
Treaty issues of the Makah and the imperative to attempt to protect what is
left of any remaining Treaty rights to attempt to protect what is left of
the Makah (only 1800 enrolled Makah left versus an estimated 26,000 Grey
Whales which is more in estimated number than when industrial whaling
began). When the central role of the whale in Makah culture is mentioned, we
get "yeah, but..."; when the plight of the Makah on the verge of extinction
is mentioned, again we get "yeah but..." When we talk about what happens
when the legal precedent is established that the U.S. Government can and
should negotiate for the very sovereign nations they have sought to destroy,
again we get "yeah, but..." When the ugly "logic" and effects of the
Faustian deals/alliances between the "Greens" of Sea Shepherd and known
racists and anti-Semites are pointed out, we get "it is only a tactical
alliance because the whales are so important or then enemy of my enemy is my
friend"... When the naked hypocrisy and selective concerns of some of these
Greens is pointed out, we get "yeah but I once knew a guy who liberated lab
rats..."
as if a few anecdotes cancels out some generalized hypocrisy, hubris and
selective concern for worthy and unworthy life forms among some of the
petit-bourgeois "Greens". Even the notion of a "Green" movement is
ultra-reductionistic and narrow; as if environmental concerns could ever be
addressed within the confines of capitalism, or as if environmental concerns
were not inextricably linked with other issues and menacing forces like
imperialism, racism, sexism, capitalism, genocide etc etc.


The longer the "debate" goes on, the more shallow, pedestrian, sophomoric,
self-indulgent/obsessed, hypocritical, narcissistic, reactionary and inhuman
some of these "Greens" reveal themselves to be. Go swim among your whale
"brothers and sisters" if you dare. Go pet the wild bison if you dare. How
about going down to Texas, jump in and occupy the "rattlesnake round-up" and
liberate those poor exploited creatures (actually I think they are being
exploited) picking up each one and taking it out to be free in the wild? Of
course they won't because those creatures, like humans, feed-off other life
forms (veggies are life forms too)and hold territory in order to survive and
will probably kill their "Green liberators" perhaps lacking the
consciousness to appreciate how their liberators are trying to protect them.
And the "first ecologists", as some have put it--Indigenous
Peoples--were/are indeed "meat eaters" and it was not diet that made them
"ecologists", it was how they obtained the food and how much and on what
basis food was consumed and utilized.

Jim Craven


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