Environmental Justice
Intersectional Environmentalism
Environmental protection deeply practiced'
An interwoven, thriving community
Eco-influencer Leah Thomas, commonly known as Green Girl Leah, posted on Instagram last May, asking environmentalists to step up and acknowledge the racial disparities in their own organizations. “I’m calling on the environmentalist community to stand in solidarity with the black lives matter movement and with Black, Indigenous + POC communities impacted daily by both social and environmental injustice,” she wrote. “Please swipe to learn more about intersectional environmentalism and take the pledge.”
Intersectional environmentalism serves as a kind of generational marker. Even the word intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, means different things to different age groups. To many older millennials and their forebears, it is an overly wordy and academic addition to perfectly good terminology already in existence; a movement can be intersectional, but intersectionality is not a movement in itself, they say. Not to mention that the phrase “in-ter-sect-ion-al en-vir-on-ment-al-is-m,” clocking in at 12 syllables, doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. Environmental justice is a mere seven beats (and is associated with nearly four more decades of experience).
But young people say those arguments miss the point. Gen Zers don’t relate to intersectionality because it’s fun to say (it’s not). The appeal comes from its framework, which emphasizes the idea that everyone’s individual worldview is shaped by many overlapping identities and privileges. By putting words to those differences, one acknowledges the need for a deeper kind of commitment to fighting racial injustices, especially when it comes to the mainstream environmental movement. That, they say, makes it a separate entity from its predecessor.
Toward Community-wealth, Community-cooperation
- The history of the modern environmental movement ... note Mr. Alperovitz' work with Gaylord Nelson, a founder of global "Earth Day"
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- Community Wealth Cities | Community Wealth InfoGraphics | Community Wealth Interviews | Community Wealth Map | Wealth Videos
- Anchor Institutions | The Cleveland Model | Community Development Corporations (CDCs) | Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) | Land Trusts (CLTs) | Cooperatives (Co-ops)
- Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) | Green Economy | Individual Wealth Building | Individual Wealth Preservation | Local Food Systems | Municipal Enterprise | New State & Local Policies | Outside the U.S. | Program Related Investments | Reclaiming the Commons
- Social Enterprise | Responsible Investing | State Asset Building Initiatives | State and Local Investments | Transit Oriented Development | University & Community Partnerships | Worker Cooperatives
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Reclaiming the Commons
The silent theft of our shared assets and civic inheritance need not continue
By David Bollier / Boston Review / Economics After Neoliberalism
• http://bostonreview.net/forum/david-bollier-reclaiming-commons
GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: This is an extended, thoughtful reflection on 'the Commons' and 'Commonwealth'. Well worth reading and sharing...
One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused...
One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? "The commons" refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused...
Varieties of Commons
The American commons comprises a wide range of shared assets and forms of community governance. Some are tangible, while others are more abstract, political, and cultural. The tangible assets of the commons include the vast quantities of oil, minerals, timber, grasslands, and other natural resources on public lands, as well as the broadcast airwaves and such public facilities as parks, stadiums, and civic institutions. The government is the trustee and steward of such resources, but "the people" are the real owners.
The commons also consists of intangible assets that are not as readily identified as belonging to the public. Such commons include the creative works and public knowledge not privatized under copyright law. This large expanse of cultural resources is sometimes known as the public domain or—as electronic networking increases its scope and intensity—"the information commons." In addition, our society has dozens of "cultural spaces" provided by communications media, public education, and nonprofit institutions. Another large realm of intangible assets consists of scientific and academic research, much of which is supported by the public through government funding. The character of these spaces changes dramatically when they are governed as markets rather than as commons.
No less important and vulnerable are what might be termed the "frontier commons": features of the natural world that have historically been too large, too small, or too elusive for any market regime to capture and that have often been regarded as parts of a common human heritage. Yet entrepreneurs and corporations are now developing ingenious ways to turn these natural commons into exploitable property. Several multinational companies are, for example, seeking to transport huge supplies of freshwater in Northern countries to "thirsty" regions in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and southern California. Biotech companies are trying to gain proprietary control over agricultural seed-lines that have long been regarded as community assets—for example, by seeking patents for a common yellow bean grown widely in Mexico, as well as for basmati rice and neem plants in India. The human genome is a target of property claims and landowners fighting environmental regulations insist that they "own" wildlife and that the regulations amount to an unconstitutional "taking" by government.
A last category of threatened commons is that of so-called "gift economies." These are communities of shared values in which participants freely contribute time, energy, or property and over time receive benefits from membership in the community. The global corps of GNU/Linux software programmers is a prime example: enthusiasts volunteer their talents and in return receive useful rewards and group esteem For the most part, no money changes hands, yet economically valuable work occurs. Gift economies are the animating force behind scientific research communities, blood donation systems, New York City's community gardens, and Alcoholics Anonymous.
What unites these highly disparate commons—from natural resources to public domain to gift economies—is their legal and moral ownership by the American people. The commons comprises not just marketable assets, but social institutions and cultural traditions that help define our common life as Americans. In virtually every case, the market price for a resource does not begin to capture its actual value to the larger community. But generally we have no rigorous way to speak about such shared assets, or about the costs of enclosing them.
Learning to see the Commons
In an age of market triumphalism and economic myopia, it is an open question whether the notion of "commonwealth"—that we are a people with shared history, common values, and control over collectively owned assets—has practical meaning. As private interests have quietly seized the American commons, we have lost sight of our heritage as a democratic commonwealth. A society in which every human transaction is increasingly mediated by the market, in which everything is privately owned and controlled, may come to resemble a network of medieval fiefdoms, in which every minor property-holder demands tribute for the right to cross his land or ford his streams. This balkanization is bound to impede the flow of commerce and ideas—and the sustainability of innovation and democratic culture...
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- Earth 'Stewardship': Religion, Community, and Values
