As the news about
coronavirus overwhelms us with worry and fear about our loved ones and the
spike in suffering around the world, it may be tempting to find “silver
linings” in news about how great the environment is doing, now that humans are
leaving it alone. Our news feeds are full of these
scenes: China enjoying a level
of air quality it has not experienced since it became the industrial heart of
the world, critters
braving landscapes that
are usually occupied by lots of people, fuel consumption at an all time low,
less noise and light pollution, the list goes on.
Meanwhile, since the
U.S. President began calling coronavirus the “China virus,” incidents of violence against Asians, Asian-Americans,
Chinese, and Chinese-Americans have skyrocketed. One family, including a 2-year
old and a 6-year old, was
stabbed by a person who
thought they were Chinese and that ending their lives would help prevent the
spread of coronavirus.
The Environmental
Studies Program at HSU firmly condemns such acts of violence. Further, we want
to expose the racism inherent in claims about the “silver lining” of nature’s
rebounding, and articulate the links between these claims and such acts of
violence.
Addressing racism and
violence against Asian-Americans in this moment is not the job of entities
focused on hate crimes; environmentalists and environmental organizations have
a profound responsibility to engage these conversations and reckon with their
complicity in legacies of “green hate” and eco-fascism.”
A historical perspective
of the roots of American environmental ideas is part of this reckoning. Early
views of ecology and resource conservation in the mid-19th century were
deployed for the purposes of social engineering: America’s finite resources and
land was framed by leaders such as Theodore Roosevent and Gifford Pinchot as
needing to be preserved, but only for certain people--white, able-bodied,
upstanding Anglo-Americans.
In the early
20th-century, these Social Darwinian, Malthusian values led to racist
anti-immigration laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and became the
foundation for America’s eugenics movement, which resulted in the genocide of
Native Americans and other groups deemed “unfit” for life in an ideal
“America.” These values and policies were then emulated by the Nazis as they
spread their “blood and soil” ideology, connecting a geopolitics of “lebensraum”
(“living room”) with genocide. The earliest
environmentalists in America were just as interested in designing what they perceived to be an
ideal society and race as they were in preserving and understanding
ecosystems.
We can see resurgances
of the racist underpinnings of environmentalism in the 1970s debates about
overpopulation and immigration, and Earth First!’s hailing of AIDS as a boon
for the environment. In contrast to these moments, the environmental justice
movement was born, which aimed to center social justice in environmental
considerations, and distinguished itself from these racist arguments coming out
of the mainstream environmental movement. Social justice scholars and activists
have long observed the “greening of hate,” but it
would be a mistake to think the racist agenda of some environmental ideas are a vestige of the
past.
The Environmental
Studies Program at HSU seeks to highlight this history in our moment of
pandemic precisely because of the growing violence and animosity toward
non-white Americans. Some of this aggression is couched in environmental ideas.
For example, the shooter in the El Paso mass shooting claimed in his letter
that one reason for his desire to
kill Mexicans was because of climate change and the resulting “Hispanic invasion of
Texas.”
When we hear arguments
that a natural disaster (like a tsunami or hurricane) is nature’s way of
cleansing the planet of humans who are reproducing too much, or that a health
disaster (like ebola or AIDS) is “nature
striking back” at humans for their
evil ways, we must stand up against the ongoing use of “nature” to justify
violence against marginalized communities.
People who say that the
coronavirus is good for nature are implying, perhaps inadvertently, that the
thriving of human life is incompatible with the thriving of nature. Such claims
create a zero-sum solution: if we want humans to keep living, then we have to
accept the destruction of nature, or vice versa. The latter position opens the
door to eco-fascism and reproduces unnecessary and potentially dangerous
Cartesian and colonialist ways of seeing the world. Indeed, the very separation
of categories like “nature” from “culture” has long been problematic as it has
allowed for some people to extract resources, labor, ideas, and more from other
people who they equated with nature. But many human groups have thrived
alongside nature, and nature alongside them. It is irresponsible and futile to
ask people to make a choice between nature or humanity. Asking whether we
should save humanity or save nature isn’t the right question, and it overlooks
the real problem--colonial-capitalism’s treatment of certain environments and
certain people as valuable, while others are disposable.
Touting the rebounding
of nature in this context may seem an innocent, non-racist appeal. However, in
the context of understanding environmentalism’s racist legacies, we can see
that such an appeal creates oversimplified divisions between nature and humans.
This binary ignores the ways that communities of color are disproportionately
suffering coronavirus outcomes, and have and will continue to
disproportionately suffer the effects of environmental degradation, even as
they are often the communities who least contribute to that degradation.
Furthermore, such a
binary fails to account for the many ways that many indigenous communities have
long lived in ways that enhance ecosystem health, and how colonization has
impinged on their ability to continue to do so. A virus like coronavirus is not
nature’s way of inoculating itself against all humanity, and when we imagine
this to be so, we create conditions for ignoring all of these ways that
inequality and difference shape different communities’ access to environmental
goods, like the ability to breathe, and costs, including infection.
As we celebrate the
planet getting a break from emissions, the EPA is
busy rolling back many
hard-won environmental protections and moving
forward the keystone and
other pipelines. This news is nothing to celebrate. Moreover, the fact that
more peoples’
lives will be saved by
the reduction in emissions than by anything we can do to prevent coronavirus
infection suggests that we are focusing on the wrong problem, and ignoring the
far larger problem of colonial-capitalism’s reliance on some people being more
disposable than others.
The problem isn’t that nature
has been disposable; the problem is about who gets
to decide which humans are
the most disposable. The coronavirus is not an equalizer. It is exacerbating
existing inequalities; the bodies of black and brown people are
disproportionately in the jobs that are on
the frontlines of risk, such as health workers and farmworkers, are already in positions of legal and medical
disenfranchisement (such as in detention camps or prisons), and are suffering
the worst health outcomes.
We must stop demonizing
a monolithic notion of “humanity” as bad for a monolithic notion of “nature,”
and combat the deployment of “the environment” to fuel fears of virus-spreading
“others.”
Instead of thinking
about nature temporarily bouncing back, we must be using this dire moment to
work for that post-fossil-fuel future, where people are no longer more likely to die
of pollution than pandemic. We look to the vision and action of groups like Movement Generation Justice and
Ecology Project, Indigenous Environmental Network, Just
Transition, and admire the local
work of Cooperation
Humboldt in organizing for the
world we are now all the more called to build in this crisis.
The ENST program at HSU
stands with communities of color whose oppression has long been achieved in the
name of “preserving nature.” We call on other environmental groups to take
action against such violence, and to take the lead on drawing these
connections. We amplify the work of groups like Avarna and the Association
for the Study of Literature and Environment, who are taking such actions. We urge our
students, faculty, administrators, and peers to see this moment of crisis as an
opportunity for further support of decolonial, abolitionist, and liberatory
world-making.
