Ecojustice: Local and Global Community

"All the disparate popular struggles of our history to achieve justice for workers, women, and people of color, as well as the struggles for peace and the environment are subtexts of a larger meta-struggle against the cultural mindset and institutions of Empire." - David Korten ["The Great Turning", p. 215.]

"Whether it's environmental movements, peace movements, or cultural creative movements, they all want the same thing: respect for life. My suggestion would be to get together and create one big movement I would call The Reverence Movement. After all, the violence we inflict on ourselves and one another is the same violence we are using to destroy the planet. If every movement continues to treat the symptoms, we won't get anywhere. We're only wasting time and energy." - Aqeela Sherrills

Thus far, ECOSHIFT has concentrated on changing behaviors of the most affluent one-sixth of human population. This chapter concerns the other five-sixths of humanity, those who are too impoverished to choose voluntary simplicity or too powerless to affect corporations.

First, I assume that there is some general agreement about what is "just", "right", or "fair". I prefer to use the word "respect" because I can more easily tell what behavior is respectful than I can what is "right" or "just". Being respectful means trying to understand the thoughts, feelings, and purposes of others, whether those others are relatives, friends, or strangers, whether those others are of similar or widely differing race, culture, or religion, and even whether those others are humans or of other species or entities. Respect is the opposite of arrogance, and arrogance leads to injustice and loss of rights. Respect for all humans and respect for other species go together, just as arrogance can be directed both against people and against Earth. All world religions formulate the Golden Rule as a simple statement of justice: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

Ecojustice can be defined as the interface between greening and social justice, or the impact of so-called environmental issues on people who have to struggle for existence. This chapter shows that social justice and environmental problems have similar bases and many commonalities and that they are combined into the problems of sustainability and Ecoshift. Resurgence magazine and Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" emphasize this fusion and are major sources for this chapter.

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism has been wonderfully exemplified by Hugh Brody in "Maps and Dreams", which describes the impacts of Western or European culture invading the terrain of the natives of northeastern British Columbia, not in prior centuries, but in 1980. The impacts of capitalism on indigenous peoples are not only in distant lands or distant times. Brody shows how the "developers" of oil, farmland, and recreational hunting fail to connect with or understand the Beaver Tribe's hunter-gatherer culture, in spite of apparent efforts to do so. The white's "fairness" has not yet lost its patriarchal "we know what's best for you" attitude. The whites cannot understand why the Beaver want to continue to live the way they have for centuries, in voluntary simplicity and with a bioregional, ecospiritual, and deep ecological relationship to their land.

On a philosophical, rather than a practical level, debate continues about whether evolution and the natural world are primarily competitive or primarily cooperative. As with so many other presumed dichotomies, this one is really a continuum. Among individuals, among species, and among ecological communities a varying tension exists between cooperation/symbiosis/altruism and competition/dominance/predation. Lewis Thomas states that "the survival of the fittest does not mean those fit to kill; it means those fitting in best with the rest of life." Why does humanity have such a difficult time learning this lesson from nature? Humans are, after all, the only species on this planet, and perhaps in our part of the Universe, that can contemplate these philosophical/ethical issues and decide to adapt and change its behavior.

Failure of Environmentalism

Now more and more writers are recognizing the deep connection between dominance over people and dominance over Earth, between our oppression of our own species and our oppression of other species. These writers recognize that impoverished people are not likely to be environmentally "correct". In fact, they are much more likely to be environmentally "dumped on". Trashing of the environment and trashing of the poor go together. Addressing the issues of the human relationship with Earth cannot be done without also addressing the relationship of humans with each other.

Another failure of environmentalism revolves around the threats of "natural resource" scarcity, whether food, fossil fuel, forests, or water, and runaway population growth. Predictions of "gloom and doom" by environmental and population groups through the 1980s were largely ignored. This happened again through the 1990s with the threat of global warming and the demise of fossil fuel. It took a long time to learn that threats are not the way to change human behavior. In contrast, the Ecoshift movement believes fundamentally in positive thinking to produce positive actions and positive change.

Diversity and Respect

Globalization erodes cultural diversity in many ways: loss of local knowledge of crafts, medicine, and skills for food and shelter; loss of local languages, dialects, and accents; and loss of local spiritual practices. Warren Wagar states that cultural differences tend to be reduced and even disappear when cultures interact. Is this threatened loss of local culture the reason for interracial and interreligious hatred and warfare, or is the reason some perceived threat of the unknown or the different? In any case, many indigenous peoples and nations are trying to prevent being taken over by larger, more global, cultures. Resistance ranges from tiny groups in the jungle to whole Muslim nations. But on the other hand we need globalization of concern for Earth and for all peoples. There may be value in incorporating thoughts and practices of local groups into larger cultures. Humanity has embarked on a quest to learn how to maintain the benefits of diversity within a global community.

Who are the "indigenous peoples" so frequently discussed in the Ecoshift movement? Thomas Berry's "The Dream of the Earth", Jerry Mander's "In the Absence of the Sacred", and Jim Merkel's "Radical Simplicity" all describe what we can learn from native-American (both North and South), African, and southeast Asian groups and tribes about how to live simply and lightly on Earth. "Indigenous" seems to imply separate, secretive, independent, unassimilated, or native in contrast to the currently dominant culture of their areas. Some Ecoshift writers apparently suggest a global return to the hunter-gatherer existence of many of these groups. But I think it is very unlikely that a future "Western" society will choose to revert to an "indigenous" life-style. What we can do is to take "lessons" from these groups, as Jim Merkel learned from the people of Kerala, India, about a cooperative mindset and reducing wants.

We affluent folks have work to do.

"This is a time of sorrow and denial for the United States. We suffer from the considerable gap between our idealized self-image as a democratic, peace-loving nation and the reality of our history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, exploitation of working people, and imperial expansion.... To become the people and nation of our ideals, we must find the wisdom and the courage to collectively acknowledge and learn from our past transgressions and to engage in a process of national and global healing and reconciliation." - David Korten ["The Great Turning", p. 235]

Health and Job Issues

"Deeper Shades of Green" by Jim Schwab describes how minorities, blue color workers, and other disadvantaged individuals and groups have begun to fight against being dumped on by corporate and political power in the United States. He points out how formation of local groups to oppose existing or proposed "dumping" creates local bonds and local community where there may have been little or none before. The down-side occurs when the issue becomes reformulated as a jobs and local economy issue; this splits communities between those who hope to gain financially via jobs, and those who expect to lose via pollution. Schwab documents how local activists from poor communities have faced corporate and government forces seeking to construct airports, incinerators, mines, hazardous waste facilities, nuclear waste dumps, coal-fired power plants, and polluting factories in their communities.

Traditional Western medicine, as practiced in the affluent world, has long failed to recognize the many adverse health effects of pollution, especially on poor communities and industrial workers. Problems of local air and water pollution, regional asthma, smog, lead, second-hand smoke, plastics like PVC, and chlorinated pesticides took many years to become recognized as problems and even more to be at least somewhat solved. As usual in ECOSHIFT lists, these are just a few of the issues that could be mentioned. Some more complicated questions at last are being studied. I just read last night about a long and intensive study of over 100,000 workers at Pratt and Whitney plants in Connecticut; workplace chemicals may have been responsible for an abnormally high incidence of brain cancer. The study seeks to determine specifically what chemicals were involved. In the United States we now recognize that compared to most affluent countries we do a terrible job of providing medical care for the poor, including victims of pollution.

The "jobs" argument gets used repeatedly to oppose pollution control and protection of endangered species and ecosystems. Schwab's activists fought this continually and he describes the deep rifts that can be created in a community by the jobs issue. Clearly changes from a profligate consumer economy to a sustainable economy are going to involve many, many job changes, but there should be plenty of new jobs available in "green" sectors. It is important for the sustainability/Great Turning/Ecoshift movement to recognize a huge need to provide for re-education of workers. This major societal task could be paid for by cessation of present and avoidance of future wars costing hundreds of billions of dollars. We also need to return to labor-intensive industry where things are made carefully by hand, are expensive, and last forever. This will create many more jobs than are lost by the demise of Earth-trashing industries. Over the last century we have replaced human labor with fossil-fueled machines. The demise of fossil fuel will be a good thing for the billions who now cannot find work for fair pay.

The "need for jobs" argument is also used for big-box stores. Bill McKibben says in "Deep Economy" that "Wal-Mart can offer those low prices precisely because of the damage it does to communities (ital. au.)" [p.107]. Replacing reliable well-paid jobs in local businesses with low-paying unreliable jobs in large corporations is not an improvement.

Direct efforts to raise wages in the United States involve initially raising the minimum wage and then seeking a "Living Wage". The minimum wage was raised on July 4, 2007 to $5.85 per hour after holding at $5.15 for ten years. It will rise further to $7.25 per hour by 2009. However even this wage rate will remain well below so-called "living wage" levels. A living wage is calculated by geographical region as the income needed in that region to support a family of four at the "poverty level" defined by the U.S. government. It can be $10 to $12 an hour or more in many locations.

Efforts to raise income in poor countries revolve around "Fair Trade", which is defined as a reasonable and just return for effort. Obviously this varies considerably geographically and is more of a qualitative than a quantitative goal. The fair trade effort seeks to cut out the many "middlemen" in the long route from producer to consumer so that the producer gets a much larger portion of what the consumer pays. The fair trade concept originated with respect to coffee, which is notorious for the number of middlemen involved and the low prices received by farmers (see the Food chapter). Fair trade contrasts with "free trade", which is the effort of global corporations to do whatever they want. Fair trade has expanded to cocoa/chocolate and indigenous crafts, and has potential for expansion to other products. The Winter 2007 issue of the Co-op America Quarterly contained an article "Making Trade Fair for Africa".

Efforts to promote fair trade often are closely linked to helping people grow their own food. My wife and I have supported Sustainable Harvest International for some years and have followed its development from a beginning in the mind of founder Flo Reed, a young member of our church. SHI's annual budget of $1.3 million supports a group of extension agriculturists in several Central American countries. They help over a thousand families in 100 villages to grow food for themselves and for sale using organic and sustainable techniques instead of the usual slash and burn methods. SHI provides a wonderful example of both how to provide help to people and how the efforts of one committed person can make a big difference in the world.

In contrast, corporate globalization continues the practices of the rich both exploiting the poor and dumping environmental waste on them. "Western" culture owes its rapid development over the past several centuries to continuous mining of poor countries for oil, minerals, wood, labor, and food. The destruction continues. We fight wars to protect our oil supply. We cut immense acreages of tropical forests for exotic woods and to make grazing land for our meat-eating. We "recycle" our plastic bags by shipping them to China where they are burned for energy without any air pollution limitations. We use manufacturing labor in places where there are little or no regulations about working conditions and wages. And most recently, our rush to biofuels (see the Energy chapter) causes conversion of agricultural and forest lands to biofuel plantations, especially in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. This threatens the already hard-pressed food supplies of the nations and peoples involved.

Organized opposition to all these corporate practices involving poor nations and peoples concentrates on boycotts and on shareholder resolutions. Boycotts have been organized by minorities and women, by religious and environmental organizations, by labor unions and consumer groups, and by gays and peace activists. Boycotts of California grapes over farm worker conditions, Nestle products for discourging breast-feeding in Central America, and Home Depot for lumber from tropical rainforests are all famous for creating positive changes. Coop America provides a guide to organizing boycotts at a local or national level. Coop America used to have a boycott list but now encourages letter writing to corporate heads instead. The only useful boycott list I can find is by the UK-based Ethical Consumer Research Association. Perhaps the use of boycotts is decreasing because positive actions like letter-writing and shareholder resolutions have more effect. But I maintain that individual boycotts when multiplied by millions of people can have huge effect. Choosing what not to buy and where not to buy it perhaps is the most powerful statement that an individual can make (see the Voluntary Simplicity chapter).

The combination of a consumer boycott with a shareholder resolution has increased power. Shareholder resolutions successfully influenced corporations doing business in South Africa and Myanmar. For more on such resolutions see the Socially-responsible Investing chapter. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility maintains a comprehensive list of shareholder resolutions, many of which concern the rights of the poor. Coop America provides more information on resolutions specifically involving sweatshops. The Alliance for Democracy urges people to join together to end corporate rule and to assert community rights over corporate rights.

Ecotourism

• "green" accommodations, from simple living to hotels that don't change the towels every day,
• efforts to minimally disturb wildlife,
• support for local crafts and other local products,
• protection of land, and
• approval of the local people for the tourist activities.

Much ecotourism occurs in poor countries of Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Pacific Islands. In many of these areas, the local peoples have produced some income by selling exotic materials like rhino horn, alligator skin, furs, and exotic woods to the rich elsewhere. Stories of how such export harvests decimate wild animal and plant species are abundant. Ecotourism conceptually provides an alternative source of income to the local poor, so that negative impacts on the natural world are reduced.

The Wikipedia entry for "Ecotourism" describes many negative aspects of the ecotourism phenomenon. Governments promote "ecotourism" because it attracts the affluent, but without consent of the locals involved. In India and elsewhere, poor people are forced off their lands to create parks for tourists, and are forced stop collecting fuel wood and medicinal herbs. Fees for ecotourism travel still go primarily to airlines and hotels, not to the local people. Carbon emissions from ecotourism are the same as for normal tourism and other travel (see the Energy chapter). So for several reasons ecotourism is not necessarily OK. Bioregional travel provides a superior alternative (see the Bioregionalism chapter)

. The concept of ecotourism does raise important questions. What are the best ways for affluent individuals to help the poor? What kind of justice is possible when wildland desires run up against poverty needs? Who decides what is good or bad for local community? Ecoshift will be wrestling with these issues over the next 100 years.

Regaining Community

We buy anything we want for tools and equipment; we have no need to share it with neighbors, so we don't. In "Bowling Alone", Robert Putnam documents declining participation in neighborhood organizations, sports leagues, town associations, and family rituals. "We don't need each other for anything any more (ital. au.)" says Bill McKibben in "Deep Economy". As a replacement for neighborhood community we create artificial communities connected by automobiles. I have a church community, an orienteering community, a birding community, and a running community. But these are not true local communities in which sharing of time, things, concerns, rituals, food, indeed all aspects of life, are continuous among a single group of people.

McKibben goes on to say "Living in a community comes with drawbacks; small societies can be parochial, gossip-ridden, discriminatory.... Instead of a happy mean though, we've swung to the hyper-individualism that pervades our culture." He talks about our "autistic" world, "composed, more and more, of individuals in isolation from each other, each following his or her own path." The pendulum has swung too far from living a whole lifetime in a local community to complete individual independence. Even within a modern FAMILY there often is little face-to-face interaction; homes are designed to keep people apart; cell phones, internet conversations, and personal headphones are ubiquitous; and grown children depart to live in distant places. Ecoshift tries to move the pendulum back toward the middle of this continuum. Change from growth to stability, from global to local, and from individualism to community are all part of the same thing.

I see four levels of human community:

1. local communities, in which interactions involve sharing of basics, including food, clothing, housing, recreation, land, and spirituality, and linkage is primarily by walking;
2. interest communities, in which interactions involve a single commonality such as religion, recreation/entertainment, extended family, or sport, and linkage is primarily by fossil-fueled vehicles or by electronics (virtual communities);
3. regional communities, which are tribes, ethnic groups, or nations, and
4. global community, in which interactions recognize the commonality of all humans, and linkage involves airplanes, electronics, and global government and non-government organizations.

Among the affluent I have already described several efforts to regain local community:

• community-supported agriculture, farmers' markets, and local foods (see the Food chapter),
• local business (see the Globalization chapter), and
• cohousing (see the Housing chapter).

A pilgrim named Saoirse has invented the Freeconomy Community, an effort to promote skillshare, toolshare, spaceshare (living), and landshare (garden allotments), among people living within a 10-mile radius. The philosophy behind this expects that development of true local community can make money unnecessary. Everything becomes barter and trade. Travel is on foot or bicycle. This rapidly expanding effort has almost 7000 members in over 90 countries in November 2008, and it only started in September 2007. Numerous other local efforts exist to promote community sharing of tools and trade. Many towns, notably Ithaca NY, use alternatives to money as a transaction medium.

Community organizations arise around the world to fight pollution, to improve welfare, to resist dominance from outside, and to maintain cultural identity . The poor may be learning faster than the affluent that when people stick together they can make things happen. Whether overt or not, many of these groups follow Ghandian principles involving ecocentrism, sustainability, and economic justice:

• sarvodaya - equality - the uplifting of all including non-human beings,
• swaraj - government of self - the meeting of needs and reduction of wants, and
• swadeshi - local economy - based on manual work.

Liberation Theology and Ecojustice

Other religious and political efforts to promote ecojustice are many; here I will just mention three personal examples: Greens, Unitarian-Universalists (my religious choice), and pantheists. Greens have always combined political justice and environmental issues in their 10 Key Values (see the Green Politics chapter). Unitarian-Universalist principles include the inherent worth of every person, justice, equity, and compassion in human relations, and world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. The World Pantheist Credo (see the Ecospirituality chapter) includes "All humans are equal centers of awareness of the Universe and nature, and all deserve a life of equal dignity and mutual respect. To this end we support and work towards freedom, democracy, justice, and non-discrimination, and a world community based on peace, sustainable ways of life, full respect for human rights and an end to poverty."

The "Principles of Environmental Justice" were adopted by the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Summit at Washington DC in 1991. This list of 17 principles, each beginning "Environmental justice ...", can be found in Wikipedia under "Environmental Justice" or as an appendix in Schwab's "Deeper Shades of Green". Principle 5 in this strongly ecocentric document states: "Environmental justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples." Principle 16 is "Environmental justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives." Other principles concern toxic waste, war, workplace health, cultural integrity, and "destructive operations of multi-national corporations."

I have not said much about effects of war. America's recent wars appear to cause more (far more?) civilian casualties than combatant casualties, and as in all wars, the casualties are greatest among the poor. The Viet Nam War created ecological devastation as well. Norman Myers back in 1993 wrote "Ultimate Security: The Environmental Basis of Political Stability" showing that future wars would be fought over issues of fossil fuels, water, arable land, overpopulation, and rising sea-level, and between the rich and the poor. How will the affluent world react to masses of environmental refugees, and how will the refugees themselves act?

Climate change impacts poor peoples and poor nations much more than the affluent. We saw this in great detail during and after the flooding of New Orleans, which is just a forerunner of what probably will happen in the future. Nauru, the smallest country in the United Nations, already devastated by phosphate mining, has been a leader among island nations arguing for strong carbon emission controls. If current emissions continue, sea-level rise will severely impact many coastal cities and many island countries.

Facing the Future has curricula for teachers on the relationships among population, poverty, consumption, conflict, and environmental issues.

The Earth Charter

I find it an amazing document. If only humanity were smart enough to adopt it and work to carry it out. Unfortunately, it looks as if the United Nations will not adopt it any time soon. On the good side, great efforts are being made to work on turning its various principles into practices. Paul Hawken, in "Blessed Unrest", documents thousands of efforts world-wide to address the issues of the Earth Charter. This book, ECOSHIFT, is a contribution to putting the Earth Charter Principles into practice at an individual level.

Justice versus Sustainability

I believe that though it is noble to campaign for high expectations for everyone, Earth CANNOT support such expectations for current, let alone future, human populations, no matter what technofixes we come up with. Reproductive rights to have as many children as now desired will ruin Earth. So we must have corollary inducements/attitudes to reduce reproduction and population. The Earth Charter is unlikely to ever be realized unless there is an Earth-wide decision to reduce human populations to a billion or fewer people. This CAN be done in as few as 100 years with a norm of one-child families (see the Population chapter). The single, simplest, best way that anyone can help the poor, help other species, and help reduce humanity's adverse effect on Earth is to have NO children. Hopefully human society will soon begin to praise that choice.

David Korten, in the "Great Turning" [p. 242] complains that "Progressive voices are often heard calling for the redistribution of existing wealth to help the poor and save the environment, but we only rarely challenge the imperial definition of prosperity. Our stories of how we would create new wealth in environmentally sustainable ways are ill-formed and rarely communicated beyond insider groups of activists." What future human communities and economic systems will look like remains to be debated and worked out. The precise outcomes cannot be known, but major change is inevitable.