“Environmentalism is essentially elitist. You have to be pretty secure economically before you can care about trees and animals and how beautiful your environment is.”
The remark, which I overheard in someone else’s conversation, struck me as both familiar and startling. I can’t guarantee that I remember it verbatim, as Stan Mack used to in his Real Life Funnies, but that may be because its import is so familiar that I grasped it only a few words in. What startled me about the remark was how deeply I objected to it. It doesn’t square with what I understand about the ecological imagination and environmental activism today.
Getting to that objection will require a slight detour into the topic of Lilian Calles Barger’s new book, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, recently the subject of a roundtable at this blog. Barger and I had been graduate students together, and we stayed in contact as she worked on her book and I worked on mine. Although our topics focused on differing imaginaries, hers theological and mine ecological, we were both writing about the late 1960s, about radical and challenging new ideas, and movements for transformative change. Without ever reading a page of each other’s drafts, it was clear there was a good deal of overlap. Reading her finished product, I finally saw the connections on the page.
“The modern situation required a reassessment,” as Barger writes in fine understatement, describes the overlap in its broadest terms. Her liberationists drew ideas from the Enlightenment period, but, like my ecological thinkers, also brought them under heavy critique. The concepts of giants such as Descartes and Kant enshrined individual autonomy, but also, as Barger puts it in an early chapter, severed “the individual from a social context.” Was this the essential severing, I wonder, or an echo of some more fundamental division in a long tradition of Western dualism? Freedom was freedom from received ideas, “from moral and mental tutelage,” but also and perhaps ultimately, freedom was “overcoming bodily needs and desires that continually kept one subject to necessity.” Gregory Bateson, the systems theorist at the center of my book, came to challenge the division between mind and body, and, some have claimed, successfully settled that argument on non-dualist grounds. Body/soul, natural/supernatural, ends/means, sacred/profane–whether the orientation is ecological or theological, I tend to fall a little behind, reading the variety of rationales meant to reconcile one or another of these dichotomies and keeping track of the distinctions between them.[1]
Here’s another pair that troubled the theologians: beyond history/in history. Did God’s grace and salvation transcend the world or was it immanent within it? “Much of the tension between liberal and conservative theology,” Barger writes, “revolved around this point.” The result of that tension was a sort of paralysis against the forces of modernization. The radical liberationists, frustrated by that paralysis, produced ideas that would resolve the tension and release a program of moral activism, engaged with present-day suffering, and aimed at care and repair. In the post-World War II period, due to the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others, “the center of theology moved from transcendence and subjectivity to the world.” That breaking through dualism and movement to the world amounted to a paradigm shift, a new way of knowing and thinking. Bateson put what he was talking about in the same sort of fundamental terms.[2]
Another overlap in these stories of radical thinking is that neither can be contained in a strictly American context. The radical strains of the liberationist theologians had their source in oppressed communities of color not only in the US but also among the economic victims of colonialism and modernization in Latin America. They were energized by the thinking and practices of indigenous communities and feminist movements. Today it’s common to read about movements for environmental justice and activism emerging from the same kinds of communities and locales that Barger writes about. These are communities typically outside the Anglosphere, often having to do with indigenous groups, and made up of the people who are suffering the most–not the least–from current arrangements.
In This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein reports on what she calls Blockadia, “a roving, transnational conflict zone,” where “interconnected pockets” of grassroots resistance are pushing back against the extractive industries. Blockadia runs through the “poor places,” the “out of the way” places, the “sacrifice zones” of Nigeria, Ecuador, Inner Mongolia, the Amazon, and more–places which have served as sinks for the poison wastes of “extreme energy.” A recent article in Third World Quarterly reports on “a panoply of new or re-emerging concepts and practices such as buen vivir, degrowth, ecological Swaraj, radical feminisms of various kinds, abuntu, communing, solidarity economy, food and energy sovereignty.” In the way the liberationists politicized religious thinking and practice, these ecological movements share a recognition that ecological thinking and practice must be politicized. Environmental health and justice cannot be addressed without addressing economic structure and human rights.[3]
Reading about these movements is a source of hope for me. They are why the remark that I mentioned at the outset–that environmentalism is essentially a first-world problem, an apolitical concern of those high up on some Maslowian scale—hit me the way it did. It isn’t so much that it’s plainly false, but that it functions to flatter and serve those whose mindset and habits are most in need of transformative change.
In his 2007 book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken reports on “the largest social movement in all of human history.” He describes a worldwide, grassroots movement for change, evidenced in over a million organized groups working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. They have arisen “from the bottom up,” “one by one, generally with no predetermined vision for the world.” If they share a general perception, it’s that “the planet has a life-threatening disease.” They also share what I’ve come to think of as the Regime of R’s: “restore, redress, reform, rebuild, recover, reimagine, reconsider.”[4]
This movement is “atomized,” “inchoate,” “vast” but “bottom up.” Its constituent organizations aren’t typically in contact or even aware of each other. That doesn’t mean they aren’t part of the same phenomenon, in Hawken’s view. They do share, obviously, a historical connection. Hawken sees this connection not only as chronological or coincidental but as “something organic, if not biologic.” The line gave me pause. It’s a radical, and some would say, religious construction. It comes from a certain way of thinking, a certain idea–one that moves those who hold it from a lonely place and sets them down in the world.[5]
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[1] Barger, Lilian Calles. The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford UP, 2018), 142, 70. Capra, Fritjof and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life (Cambridge, 2014), 89.
[2] Barger, 71, 141.
[3] Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), 294, 310. Demaria, Federico & Ashish Kothari. (2017) The Post-Development Dictionary agenda: paths to the pluriverse, Third World Quarterly, 38:12, 2588-2599.
[4] Hawken, Paul. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking, 2007), 3-4.
[5] Hawken, 3-4.
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