The year that environmental racism started to get noticed

TW: racism, erasure of people of color, classism, colonialism, Israeli occupation

I wrote on-again-off-again about a phenomenon over the course of 2012, where historical and present realities of racism and colonialism created economic and environmental conditions for people of color that put them at greater risk in changing climates.

That August, there was a bit of joking about global warming at the 2012 RNC that was primarily met with Democratic criticism that in the future that will seem foolish. At that time it seemed pertinent to remind people that global warming was already making indigenous Alaskan communities more food insecure, as fishing times and spots had begun shifting in relation to new weather. In Fall, with Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in Haïti, it seemed important to highlight how the poverty in that country meant that buildings and infrastructure were both more likely to fail and more likely to not be rebuilt. In fact the 2010 earthquake hadn’t been dealt with, exacerbating both the fallout from the hurricane and the subsequent cholera epidemic as untreated water became a normal backdrop in Haïti. After Sandy made landfall in the US, the media seemed to wholly erase what had happened years before to predominantly Black communities in the Gulf as a result of Hurricane Katrina. The intersections between global warming, systemic racism, and poverty were there, but were seldom being connected.

To a degree, 2013 was an improvement on that, with environmental issues and the realities of racism and classism sometimes being introduced in tandem. The Idle No More movement, originally founded in 2012 by First Nations (ie, indigenous) activists in Canada became an international phenomenon in 2013, which both attracting indigenous peoples to its activism in other countries but was widely reported on. By the end of the year, a common narrative had formed. The pattern of communities vulnerable to economic and environmental exploitation attracting companies, foremost minerals extraction ones, then facing police violence in response to protests had become established. Most painfully, against Mi’kmaq protesters in Canada in late 2013. The role that racism played in these communities being selected for environmentally questionable policies and actions and later the racism that informed the police response was unfortunately largely implicitly referenced in major media.

There were additional limitations sadly imposed on this type of story, however, with them often conforming to a set formula. Overwhelmingly, it was only indigenous groups, not other ethnically marginalized people who were covered, and the near exclusive type of exploitation highlighted was mineral extraction often in association with fossil fuel companies in Canada or the United States. Just as in previous years, the on-going reality of ethnically and economically marginalized populations in South and Southeast Asia whose their ancestral lands can and often are selected to be flooded as a result of damming projects have remained largely overlooked.

(From here.)

We still haven’t quite gotten to the point where the global connections between poverty, racist and colonial practices and histories, and climate change are part of typical media reporting on a number of events worldwide, but we’ve edged closer. Can we wait for more people to make this connection on their own, so that it’s not a shock to them for media to cover it in that way? While we’re sitting here, the reality the Philippines were hit by a hurricane categorically stronger than any storm on the planet in more than thirty years, which sounds silly until you read the stunning wind speeds recorded as it passed through a densely populated portion of the Philippines, a former Spanish colony and US territory. The Philippines’ Climate Commissioner released a petition in the midst of attempting to contact his family, but his request for not even any specific policy change but for the largest contributors to carbon emissions to “acknowledge the new climate reality” that the Philippines now know all too well. That garnered less attention than the disaster itself, however.

More recently, unusually heavy rains flooded the Gaza territory in Palestine, whose infrastructure couldn’t handle the crisis under the weight of Israeli occupation and other international factors. Our failure to connect these forces costs isn’t just threatening people’s futures, but presently costing lives.

Counting the deaths

It’s a tragedy of the modern age that the deaths from certain policies or politics have to be counted in order to force the acceptance of new ideas and practices, but unfortunately, that seems to be the reality. Unfortunately, as the death count for civilians in Iraq showed, those numbers aren’t always received equally, with certain lives mattering more than others. Perhaps the lives of US citizens and residents which are lost as a result of the current government shut down will gain more traction, however?

In any case, I want us all to remember and as this progresses tabulate the human cost of the shutdown from the following:

• Influenza – the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has already released an initial flu vaccine, but all additional monitoring and later releases are up in the air as long as the government is shut down. In short, we’ll be dealing with a half-implemented influenza program, and it might be revealing to note how many people die this year from the flu in comparison to other recent years.
• Tropical Storm Karen – the tropical storm is expected to make landfall tomorrow near the New Orleans area that was previously devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Karen is currently passing over waters the were abnormally warm at about this time of year which allowed Katrina to gain an unexpected degree of strength. Monitoring for that outcome appears to not be on the list of emergency services that will be provided by the federal government. Admittedly disaster management will be provided by the government, but in a state that historically has required federal assistance in response to tropical storms under these precise conditions (among others), any reduction in how much that help will likely be strongly felt.
• Tornadoes – eastern Nebraska has already been hit by one tornado (which thankfully didn’t cause any deaths), but the storm system likely to produce more stretches from Oklahoma to Wisconsin and will remain a threat for the rest of today and through tomorrow. As with Tropical Storm Karen, gaps in federal emergency assistance are possible.
• Cancer – the National Institute of Health will not be taking in any trial patients (who are usually children) for cancer treatment and remission prevention, during the shut down. It’s worth asking someone to take a look into the lives of those affected by that unfortunate result.

Of course, the question is, who could connect these dots and calculate the differences between what would have been inevitable in all of these situations and what these various government programs could have done. The sad answer is that the data that non-governmental sources would likely use would be information collected by the government and hosted on its websites (which are all of this moment, shut down). The government is unlikely to be allowed to take such measurements and others would likely rely on its information to make much of a statement about what’s happened.

In short, we’re likely losing lives because of this shut down, and we have no means of working out how many.

All this has happened before and will happen again…

TW: racism, hurricane-related damage, erasure of Black people from national narratives, erasure of Indigenous people, class warfare

Over at the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, who until recently was one of their main Europe-based correspondents, has written an intriguing (and free to read) take on the situation in New York following Hurricane Sandy’s destruction. In a nutshell, it’s a very meandering look at how this is, or at least should be, some sort of a wake-up call about the massive toll our national infrastructure is going to take over the coming years. Ultimately it concludes that the substantive investment required to make adjustments as the climate changes will only be available to the wealthy, namely in Manhattan. On the other hand, the working and middle class neighborhoods of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and eventually even the Bronx will probably receive public assistance only to rebuild, rather than to retrofit for new sea levels.

The problem is of course that Kimmelman treats these facts as things that have only just now rudely erupted into the national discourse. But, it seems obvious that the low-lying coastal edges of New York would face chilling new risks as the climate changed and that assistance would be concentrated in the well-to-do neighborhoods when you think about it. After all, there’s already been an example of an almost identical series of events, just with more Black people involved.

(Apparently what New Orleans looked like when the levies broke after Katrina went down the memory hole. Originally from this article which discusses the way post-disaster investment was primarily directed at wealthier residential districts and business areas.)

I don’t want to pick on Kimmelman, but that is a pretty glaring omission. To his credit, he has done some really important and interesting reporting on issues that affect Black communities in various cultural contexts, but that’s precisely the problem: his coverage in both articles has treated the experiences of primarily Black individuals in isolation. He appears to be able to cover négritude or Katrina with sympathy and interest in the lives of Black people, but importantly he stops there. The reality of Blacks in France, in the US, or anywhere in the world are in these writings exclusively that – about Black people. They aren’t analyzed as part of the larger culture, perhaps because like many people still today Kimmelman might not think of Black people in those terms. Alternatively, Kimmelman might draw connections between primarily Black experiences and national events, but shy away from writing about it, fearing that his readers will reject any such article for treating Black people as part of the larger country.

Regardless of cause, the effect is that the national consciousness is bleached. The regrettable tragedies this year in New York and New Jersey eclipse the equally appalling devastation in 2005 in New Orleans. The former are something that affects the national consciousness of all Americans, while apparently the latter was a “niche” disaster. Just like the new hurdles imposed by climate change on economically disenfranchised Native American communities, apparently Katrina didn’t happen to “real” Americans.

Admittedly, Kimmelman does imply that there’s interplay between race and class, especially in the demographic distinction between Manhattan and the other boroughs. He does that with a single line in the recent piece, in which he noted,

That billions of dollars may end up being spent to protect businesses in Lower Manhattan while old, working-class communities on the waterfronts of Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island most likely won’t get the same protection flies in the face of ideas about social justice, and about New York City, with its open-armed self-image as a capital of diversity.

In Kimmelman’s eyes, that appears to be the extent to which the way Black people and other people of color can contribute to this national realization of the dangerous interplay between inequality and climate: as additional flavor to the class war. And remember, if there’s not enough White people involved, it falls off the radar, so vague association is supposedly the best that people of color can hope for, at least from Kimmelman and those who think like him.

Climate change and the class war are nearly engaged at this point

TW: the class war, colonialism, international inequality, pandemic diseases, food insecurity

You’ve probably heard about how Hurricane Sandy has now damaged much of the Mid-Atlantic US coast on a scale unprecedented since modern innovations in meteorology. A small but consistent number of reports have talked about whether, like Katrina, global warming can be seen as a contributing factor in the increased danger to Americans posed by hurricanes. Less frequently, has it been noted that the capacity of the storm to disrupt people’s daily lives including their ability to participate in the upcoming election is uneven. Not only was the damage geographically concentrated, but the impact disproportionately falls on less powerful socio-economic classes. As one opinion piece before the storm hit warned, “If the storm were to make it harder for lower income Americans to participate in the election than middle and upper income Americans (eg, by knocking out public transportation), then we would expect this to hurt the vote for Obama.”

Even scarcer still has been any sort of analysis of how global-warming-enhanced severe weather might unequally impact people on a global scale, where living standards are even more divergent.

(One of the “tent cities” that sprang up after the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince experiencing flooding as a result of Hurricane Sandy. Originally from here.)

Just as global warming has been connected with more dangerous hurricanes for a while now, the connections between class and vulnerability to climate change have a lengthy history of theorization. At what point though, do we declare a seeming connection? When a hurricane threatens Haïti with starvation and cholera? When dengue fever seasons in India are longer and more severe? It seems impossible to pinpoint the exact turning point where poverty and colonialism give way to climate change and neo-colonialism. It’s often been said that a widespread political response to global warming won’t be produced until after a critical mass of climatological instability is reached. But what if the reality’s more insidious than that? What if we don’t even recognize climatological instability because our attentions are held elsewhere? Or we gloss over climatological processes as a contributing factor to crises?

Are international inequality and global warming tag teaming us already?