On this day, in 1994, Bill Clinton, the President of the United States, signed an Executive Order telling all government departments – not just the EPA – that they had to consider environmental racism. The clue is in the name – “Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.”
Now the crucial thing here is that these moments in history get put down as “Oh, enlightened leader leading,” but if you actually peel back, he’s (and it is usually a he) putting his name on something that is the result of years of tireless, dedicated campaigning by people whose names don’t appear in the history books. And there is always this bias towards the personality of an individual. This does not mean that the personality of individuals does not matter in specific moments. But for this sort of bread and butter (attempted) institutional change probably it doesn’t.
Why this matters
We all need to understand that institutional racism isn’t something that’s only there with the Metropolitan Police – it is baked into society.
What happened next?
Well, is the USA less institutionally environmentally racist? Is it? [This is not to criticise the heroic efforts of countless people fighting for justice!]
Sakshi Aravind is a PhD student at University of Cambridge. (see her review of Andreas Malm’s book “How to blow up a pipeline” here, and see an interview here) reflects on the 32 years since this-
1990 Shabecoff, P. 1990. Environmental Groups Told They Are Racists in Hiring. New York Times, 1 February. WASHINGTON, Jan. 31— Several members of civil rights and minority groups have written to eight major national environmental organizations charging them with racism in their hiring practices
After thirty-two years, it is a small relief that we do not have to write letters about discriminatory hiring practices in environmental organisations. We have traversed some distance. Let us make past this momentary sense of satisfaction. We can sit down for a hard-headed debriefing about whether this ‘distance’ was noticeably significant in any particular direction or just self-congratulatory posturing about having made it past our front yards. Since I am writing about a small but exceedingly significant letter written in the year I was born, I cannot dismiss all that peoples’ persistence has achieved in these years. The concept of ‘environmental justice’ has found a strong foothold and bided its time in the social, political, and juridical spheres. Social movements for environmental justice, fair and equitable environmental policies, and opportunities for democratic participation are very vibrant. The environmental organisations do not have visible and impenetrable walls obstructing BIPOC members. The phrases ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ seem boundlessly desired even by vampiric corporations. While it is easy to pin down ‘what changed’, ‘what did not’ is worrying. What have we done with the achievements, transformations, and progresses of the last 32 years as the nature of planetary collapse worsens?
When the racist hiring practices were seemingly remedied, how did the people responsible for those changes define the problem? What did they imagine they were solving when they hired a more representative workforce and opened their membership for all? It is important to document and assess the changes we have witnessed in the last three decades to classify what problems are fully addressed and what others have shapeshifted into another version of themselves. Whilst environmental movements and groups appear to be more representative, ‘representation’ does not fill the shoes of ‘recognition’. Even ‘recognition’ can be a lopsided concept if it is not constructive and does not allow for a plurality of voices across race, class, gender, etc. The big question of what changed between then and now should be: whether the change of heart in environmentalism confronted the entrenched whiteness (and consequently coloniality) that underlies the collective understanding of environmental injustices, policy choices, and the general direction of environmental movements. The problem of racism and coloniality in environmental movements is also structural. Hence, cosmetic changes in representation can only have incremental benefits and not the epistemic shift we need to counter the rapid destruction of the planet. Mercifully, we did not regress. However, environmental organisations also did not build on their knowledge on a required scale. There are no visible and invisible forms of environmental racism and environmental colonialism. There are either visible aspects that are hard to deny or the aspects that are wilfully ignored and diminished without any accountability—through entrenched knowledge and epistemologies that are vital to the sustenance and reproduction of colonial, white supremacist, capitalist nations.
If environmental movements and organisations had understood how ‘spaces’ (emphasis on structures as opposed to a handful of institutions) exclude BIPOC workers, activists, members, and environmentalisms, our responsibilities at the moment would have been lighter despite the number of challenges regarding environmental destruction and climate change. Something as simple as how wilderness is defined, what opportunities are available to benefit from the environment—even simple pleasures such as birdwatching—and what autonomy does BIPOC have on controlling and governing land, natural resources are steeped in relationships of expropriation and elimination. Therefore, it is still easy to please many people with Don’t Look Up as if it were the pinnacle of artistic expression. At the same time, Global South prepares for the worst of climate crises that have been building up due to imperialist plunder. In 1990, they were concerned about the absence of People of Colour in key organisations. Now, we are concerned about the absence of constructive voices that would define climate change as anything but a specific event; dismantle structures of accumulation, theft, and exploitation; demand reparations and imagine world-making practices in terms of kinship, care, cooperation, and justice.
If we think long and hard, a lot changed for the good. Nevertheless, the ways in which environmental injustices have been defined are still largely in the clutches of those who command the resources—social, political, capital et al. Effectively, the epistemic resources need redistribution along with material redistribution. Moreover, epistemic justice must follow environmental justice close at hand. Meanwhile, we keep writing and conversing in the hope that we might have done a little more towards the things we care for than what we inherited thirty years later.
