[lbo-talk] "new" environmentalists

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Sat May 7 17:43:47 PDT 2011


Luckily, Somebody can straighten Tom Athanasiou out... there's no meaningful connection between health, climate and justice that technology couldn't fix and shouldn't be the primary focus of efforts for a fix. I've long had serious disagreements with parts of Athanasiou's work but I'd take him over Somebody any day.

TAX JUSTICE AS CLIMATE JUSTICE http://www.ecoequity.org/2011/04/tax-justice-as-climate-justice/

You don’t have to leave America to go to the Third World. I, for example, live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and here, as in all northern megacities, crushing poverty surrounds the comfortable precincts. I can’t call it “extreme” poverty, for of course it cannot compete with the despair endemic to, say, the north African drought zones. But when an organization like Remote Area Medical <http://www.ramusa.org/projects/reach.html> feels compelled to bring its traveling free clinic to The Oakland Coliseum<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/10/MND81ITGSR.DTL> (now, officially, the Oracle Arena), and when thousands stand for long hours to receive basic care they could not hope to afford, the problem is nonetheless clear. This last April, when the good folks at RAM pulled up stakes and left Oakland for their next stop, it was Haiti.

... SNIP...

Today’s climate movement is primed to learn them. For one thing, it’s marked by a pervasive sense of justice, one far beyond the standards of environmentalism’s past. It may even be fair to say that it’s slowly awakening to an expansive, and increasingly coherent, sense of the way forward. The problem is that, despite the terrifying drumbeat that’s coming from the scientists’ quarter, the climate movement is not even close to controlling the terms of the climate debate. That’s the bad news. The good news is that those terms are being reframed before our eyes, as are the politics of health care, and military spending, and national security, and just about everything else on the public agenda. And while the right clearly won the first round with its “we’re broke” revolution, the wheel is very much still in spin. In fact, it seems increasingly like this is a vast watershed of progressive possibility.

...THERE'S MORE...



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