-----Original Message----- From: Michael Perelman <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Let me suggest an alternative to Harvey, as Louis presents his views:
>Work on environmental justice and in this way, get many of the less fortunate
to
>understand the importance of global warming and other environmental issues,
which
>presently are largely middle class causes.
Or maybe work in environmental justice movements and realize that the predicted effects of global warming are often less severe than the day-to-day environmental devastation of communities afflicted by environmental racism and economic bias.
I used to do a lot of work fighting toxic waste dumping in Massachusetts. Along with the general political work, I spent my summers raising money door-to-door in communities across the state.
And when we had to visit the communities, usually poor, often minority, where the dumping was most concentrated, it was heart-rending. One town, actually a poor white one, called Woburn had been poisoned so severely that leukemia was epidemic in one neighborhood; as we used to say, the kids could car-pool to chemotherapy. The field manager for the town was an emotional wreck by the time we visited all the neighborhoods in the town, listening to the stories of personal destruction.
There is nothing predicted in global warming that will come close to making life worse for those families than W.R. Grace did by poisoning the kids of Woburn, or any of the poor and often minority communities poisoned by toxics across the country.
The raw fact is that, by a rational calculus, many poor communities of color ignore the dangers of global warming as less of a threat than the issues they face day-to-day. Living in a clean community defended by NIMBYism that has shipped toxics to those other communities, the calculus is different and global warming becomes a much higher ranked threat in ones' life.
But let's be clear, the difference in priorities is not one of education but of the different alternative environmental threats different people face because of racism and class oppression in our society.
--Nathan Newman