> Probably the biggest practical experience I have with this approach is in
> my work with feminists who've eschewed drawing out maps for how people ought
> the get from here to there, but have focused on building a good process for
> how people can do that, together, on the ground, as events are happening
> rather than pre-planning it and selling it in books. there were factions of
> feminists who didn't do that and, instead, wrote prescriptive books
> containing recipes for how women should live the feminist future right now.
> they are all resting in the dustbin of history. consciouness-raising,
> however, is still with us. the communes and utopian women's encampments,
> though, are dead.
>
>
> This is exactly what the most successful, robust, multiracial,
multi-regional and multi-status environmental movement of the last quarter
century did. Moving from the Toxics Clearinghouse into a variety of pre-EPA
cooptation environmental justice struggles, the politics was one of
laterally shared experiences horizontally across struggles rather than a
centralized, expert-led national organization. As long as these movements
stayed horizontal, they spread. As they centralized, and - not completely
unexpectedly - as they gained a foothold in the Big 10 mainstream
environmental groups and the EPA, the environmental justice movement moved
away from its inchoate, diverse open and proliferating trajectory into one
defined and operationalized by experts in and out of government for those
understood to be experiencing injustice. Before institutionalization, it
was pretty hard to define the anti-toxics and environmental justice
movements because of the diversity of toxics, broad spectrum of injustices
and the myriad players across multiple racial and class strata. Now, risk
analysis largely defines the statistical character of the
over-representation of some people with particular identies among those
exposed to specific chemicals or situations... environmental justice, in
these terms, is the equal exposure of everyone to only a modicum of nasty
and dangerous household, commercial and dispersed pollution.