Colonialism, Racism, and Environmental Justice Flashcards
When was New Imperialism and what did it consist of?
Late 19th to early 20th century
Second Industrial Revolution increases demand for resources and land (for cash crop agriculture) and cheap labor, leading to imperial powers expanding their territories on an unprecedented scale
How was the first global environmental crisis created?
Colonial policy promoted cash crops for exports which led to monocultural farming aimed as mass production exportation -> this eroded the soil and led to starvation as cash crops for export outstripped food crops for local consumption
How was soil erosion understood at the time, meaning in late 19th and early 20th century?
As a direct result of colonial conquest and colonial agricultural practices - seen as the environment putting up a fight
How was soil erosion framed as another “white man’s burden”
Soil erosion seen as a burden of developed that only white colonizers can solve (despite having caused it) - seen as a new technical challenge to solve rather than a failure of colonialism (early eco-modernist logic)
How is white supremacy and colonialism connected?
White supremacy is essential to new imperialism because it provides a justification for colonial conquest (alleged superiority means whites have an obligation to intervene)
How was the opening of land before the Dust Bowl seen as a “release valve” for class antagonism
It helped to neutralize class antagonism by displacing and redirecting it, allowing the economically disadvantaged to be relocated with the mission of spreading white supremacy
Why could the agricultural techniques used to cause the Dust Bowl not be both permanent and prosperous?
It was volative (lucrative one moment and not the next) and constant (always more money to be made) -> profits instead of environmental best practice guided them, leading to environmental degradation
Definition: Dust Bowl
Period of severe dust storms and drought in 1930s US
The US Dust Bowl was not a domestic-regional problem but
A manifestation of the first global environmental crisis (soil erosion) driven by imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism
What is the standard lesson from the Dust Bowl?
Soil erosion and desertification caused by poor knowledge and inadequate tech that can be corrected and avoided now through better knowledge and tech
What, argues Holleman, is the right lesson from the US Dust Bowl?
Soil erosion and desertification were caused by imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism, and won’t be a knowledge-tech question in the future - and will likely to worse because of climate change
Colonialism might be over, but coloniality endures in how…
The Global North calculates cost of climate action (sacrificing faraway peoples and places because changing own relation to environment is too much) and in that some people and places are disposible and can be sacrificed
Definition and in practice: Environmental racism
Sacrifice of radical minorities’ environmental health and well-being for the sake of racial majority’s
In practice, any policy or practice that disproportionately affect a community based on race
How is environmental colonialism and racism linked?
Through the logic that some areas and peoples are allowed to be sacrified environmentally
According to Bullard, how does racism and environment play out within the North?
Racial majority within North may sacrifice racial minority’s environmental well-being for own material comfort (e.g. in US, non-white populations more likely to live and work in degraded places)
Definition: white privilege
Benefits and advantages that accrue in highly racialized societies to white people simply due to whiteness
White privilege means that environmental racism can be
Unintentional
Definition: Ecologically unequal exchange (EUE)
Uneven, unfair, unequal distribution of environmental goods and bads
According to Givens, how is EUE linked to injustice?
Global North takes more environmental goods from Global South than the other way around (tap) and dumps more environmental bads in GS than the other way around (sink)
EUE concept: environmental load displacement (physical and temporal aspect)
Global North physically relocates environment bads to South (shipping waste, offshoring environmentally taxing industries)
Global North temporally relocates environmental bads to South (future generations obliged to endure environmental harms they didn’t create, esp. in South)
Netherlands fallacy
False assumption that improved levels of well-being in this country is achieved without displacing burdens outside of the territory - EUE must be seen in a global context
Ecological debt (Givens)
By unequally and unjustly treating Global South as an environmental tap and sink (EUE), Global North has developed itself only by incurring a material debt to Global South
How can Global North pay off its debt - 2 ways?
- Global North mitigating own carbon emissions
- Global North helping South to achieve comparable development, ideally in less environmentally taxing way
Definition: environmental justice (EJ)
Fair distribution of environmental goods and bads or benefits and costs
Distributive EJ asks whether
Environmental goods and bads are allocated fairly, and if not calls for fair re-allocation
2 critiques of distributive EJ
- Universalizes a particular Western view of environment (viewing it as inert material to be divided), whereas others may see nature differently -> risking that some justice claims are “lost in translation”
- Why should there be so many environmental bads that need to be fairly allocated in the first place? Need to interrogate the root cause behind existence of environmental bads
