A broader range of social justice causes
The thing about “the environment” is, we all live in it. We all depend on it for life. In that sense it’s not really political, and working to preserve it is not really political, because of the “all” bit.
But apparently activism to do that has become increasingly political.
When Aaron Mair ascended to the board presidency of the Sierra Club, he brought a new mission to the century-old environmental group: Where once it devoted itself solely to conservation issues, now it would embrace a much broader range of social justice causes.
That makes no sense to me. Social justice causes are fine, but conservation needs full attention all by itself.
Mair’s arrival accelerated then-executive director Michael Brune’s own progressive moves. Brune had taken over just a few years before from the Rainforest Action Network, a more activist, protest-oriented group. He took the Sierra Club in an overtly political direction, aligning it with the Democratic Party to create a “green line” of defense, as environmental groups called it, against Republican policies in Congress.
Under Mair and Brune, records show, the Sierra Club funneled its own funds into the groups Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice. In 2017, Brune threw the club’s support behind citizenship for children brought to the country illegally. In June 2021, Sierra Club backed reparations for Black Americans. It changed its definition of environment to the “environmental health of all communities, especially those communities that continue to endure deep trauma resulting from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.”
All true enough, but a change of subject. Social justice isn’t going to mean anything on a planet humans can’t live on.
Greenpeace USA is the latest major environmental organization riven with dissension. Interviews with 10 current and former staffers and documents obtained by POLITICO reveal an organization divided by tension between senior management and its younger workers over race and gender issues, culminating in a 2019 audit that blamed top-level management for creating a “culture of suffering and overworking” that was “guided by fear.”
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“I have a lot of people ask me, ‘What happened to Greenpeace? Where’s Greenpeace? Where’s the campaigns? Where’s the expertise?,’” said Ivy Schlegel, who left a senior position after nearly 12 years with the organization last year. “I feel like we’re just watching Greenpeace crumble away.”
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Indeed, in this new phase of environmentalism, Big Green organizations are extending themselves into labor rights, immigration, housing and democracy reform. Some groups are aiming to stir millions of latent Democratic voters across the country; to defeat state-level voter suppression initiatives; to make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states; to end the Senate filibuster and erode structural imbalances favoring red-leaning states.
But in the process they’re stamping global warming as a solely lefty issue, and that is not a clever plan.
One former staffer at Earthjustice, which does environmental law work, who was granted anonymity to discuss confidential interactions, said some funders have told the group to stick to what it knows. That person recalled battles with a member of the board of directors when Earthjustice tried to navigate statements on police brutality, where the group sided with “defund the police” activists who wanted to divert police budgets to mental health funding and community resources. Staff drove the shifts from the inside, the person said.
“For the most part, people funding Earthjustice signed up to protect the polar bears, not defund the police,” the person added.
Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen said in a statement that “Systemic racism and social injustice are at the root of the environmental problems we are trying to address,” and that when “we speak out on injustice, and we are explicit with our donors and supporters about why that is mission critical.”
Are they though? At the root, of all those environmental problems? I get they’re at the root of some of them, like where polluting industries are located and who checks the safety of the water supply, but I don’t think it’s true that they’re at the root of all of them, and especially not planet-heating because that’s going to catch up with everyone.
H/t Sackbut
That. Definitely. But also diverting limited resources from the mission statement of the group, and the important work they are doing.
No, of course they aren’t. They are not the root, they are the most affected groups. The root of them is the money greedheads make or want to make, and the callous disregard for others, whether human or something else. At the root is the “dominion over the earth” thinking. At the root is the idea that man is the focus of all things, one step only below angels. At the root is the fact that few people understand what scientists mean by the words “primitive” and “advanced”, and take them to mean (1) inferior and superior; and (2) everything else and humans.
The Green Party went this direction a long time ago; I guess I’m not surprised at institutional capture by the “woke”. How long until we are told that sexing a red cedar as “male” or “female” runs the risk of misgendering? (Yeah, I didn’t miss that gender was listed…)
I suspect a lot of what it going on here is that nonprofit groups tend to pay less, at least at the rank-and-file level. (There are some nonprofit CEOs who do pretty damn well, but that’s another issue.)
So their staff are essentially looking for “psychic benefits” to compensate — basically, they want to feel good about who they work for and what they’re doing. (And of course that’s all the compensation that volunteers get.) This by itself is fine, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about what you do, or taking a job for less money with a “do-gooder” organization — hell, that’s how such organizations maximize their budgets.
But I suspect it creates tremendous pressure to “pay” more and more of those “psychic benefits.” It’s relatively easy to resist any calls by staffers for more money, because you can just say hey, we have a limited budget, paying you more means we can’t save as many whales or whatever. But if you can placate your staff and volunteers by issuing press releases and tweets on unrelated causes that they care about, that is an awfully tempting option, and the costs aren’t always immediately apparent or easy to identify.
They do exist though, which is what a lot of these organizations are finding out.
Screechy, I think that’s probably part of it. I’ve been involved in environmental organizations for many years, and I suspect that isn’t all of it. The people who staff these organizations tend to be basically liberal in their political leanings, and may very well believe what they are saying. All too many people working in environmental causes have abandoned science for “feel good” which often leads to ignorant, sometimes even dangerous, activities. Even a couple of the students in my program would abandon science whenever it suited them (fortunately, most of us were not doing that, but the younger students often jumped on any ‘liberal’ bandwagon that came by – a lot of them were anti-vax, for instance).
Why so many organizations think they need to add new issues to the ones they are already fighting without enough money? I think because they, too, want to be ‘on the right side of history’. But I think it’s more than that. Many of them are reeling from attacks that paint them as rich white men wanting to go hiking in nice places. They are trying to avoid that accusation.
All across the left, we’re seeing this. It’s because the left have conceptualized the causes we hold dear — the environment, gay rights, anti-racism, women’s reproductive rights — not as fixed, external objectives we’re trying to achieve at this point in time in political history (reduction in greenhouse gases, equal rights for sexual and racial minorities, access to contraception and abortion, etc.) but as relative, internalized political identities on an ever-shifting political spectrum. When a progressive cause gains ground and enters the mainstream zeitgeist, it’s not seen as a victory but a loss: the cause is no longer appealing to the activists who championed it because it doesn’t line up with their internal political identity as being more progressive relative to the mainstream.
This is our old friend the Overton Window of course. But there are two extra effects at play here. One is a sort-of feedback loop that develops between the zeitgeist and progressive politics; it seems to be a repeating pattern in history: the point where progressivism suddenly and rapidly melts down into totalitarianism. (I suppose you could call it a “China Syndrome” in more ways than one?) It goes something like this: progressive cause succeeds in shifting the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist now sees that the progressive side is probably correct, and decides that in future it will be quicker to adopt the progressive position. Progressives now see that their cause is no longer progressive, so they quickly shift to a more progressive position. The zeitgeist moves even faster this time to incorporate the progressive position; the progressive wing moves even faster to an even more hardline-progressive position, yadda yadda the feedback loop has a meltdown and we end up with totalitarianism.
The other effect at play is that the “extremification” of the left isn’t just becoming more hardline about progressive causes, it eventually turns hostile to the very causes it started with. In the end, the Chinese Communist Revolution did the exact opposite of abolishing the ruling class and ushering in equality and freedom. Trans is an especially good (bad) example, because it is fundamentally about an inversion: flipping the sexes, thus flipping the polarity of the power structure behind sexism and homophobia, literally putting men and straights (even misogynist men and anti-gay straights) at the forefront of women’s rights and gay rights. Lots of people have pointed out that some of the more extreme “anti-racist” positions around things like cultural appropriation are sounding more and more like old-fashioned segregationism.
As for the environment, I won’t be surprised if eventually some self-styled environmentalists start embracing pro-coal and pro-oil policies under some Byzantine rubric of anti-racism or queer whatever. It sounds absurd, but hey, so much on the left has gone absurd lately. I can already picture a future Greenpeace news release:
“Why shutting down coal power plants is literal violence because it disproportionately harms BAME and Queer Bodies.”
Artymorty #4 wrote:
That, and the intellectual left exhibiting an otherwise laudatory tendency to conceptualize the causes we hold dear as dependent on other factors — factors which should be addressed first if any progress is to be made. Couple that with a Manichean world view of a conflict between light and dark and suddenly the problems with the environment came out of racism. Blame racists. Mission Creep eventually ends up killing the original mission.
I remember a divide in the atheist community a few years back, between atheists who felt that atheism meant nothing if it wasn’t helping make the world a better place through social justice causes, and those atheists who wanted to remain united fighting causes more specific to atheism, such as Creationism and Church/State separation. Even before Atheism+ (which was originally introduced as something like a special interest group so I saw no problem) I recall a heated discussion at an atheist convention about the importance of focusing the organization on abortion rights. It was a cause that would not only unite us, but show the world that atheists stand up for what is right.
I raised my hand with an objection: “Not all atheists are in favor of abortion. There are conservative atheists. Shouldn’t we be able to put aside political differences and work together on common causes which still need attention?”
I was basically told that conservative atheists weren’t atheists: they were traitors to the rational principles which ought to underlie atheism. The last thing we needed to do was keep them in. I’m liberal; I’m in favor of abortion rights; but I thought that was wrong. It was wrong according to the rational principles which ought to underlie atheism. But I wasn’t sure, so sat on it awhile, watching. And it didn’t end up up well, in my opinion.
That’s what they’re saying about gays now. It’s no longer about such concrete principles as the equal rights of same-sex attracted people. It’s a progressive movement. One that is enthusiastically hostile to any same-sex attracted person who doesn’t agree with the movement’s increasingly sinister tenets.
(Mmm that word, sinister, with its original meaning of “on the left” and its newfound meaning of “super shady.” How apt.)
[…] a comment by Artymorty on A broader range of social justice […]
Slashing good points here.
“The root of them is the money greedheads make or want to make, and the callous disregard for others, whether human or something else. At the root is the “dominion over the earth” thinking. At the root is the idea that man is the focus of all things, one step only below angels.” iknklast #1
… So one of the core lessons of Silent Spring was that things labelled progress weren’t necessarily good. Another was that the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real; the inside of your body is connected to the world around you, and your body too has its ecology, and what goes into it–whether eaten or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin–has a profound impact on you. … Nature was an “it”, an impersonal and unconscious force: or, worse, malignant: a Nature red in tooth and claw bent on afflicting humanity with all the weapons at its disposal. Against brute Nature stood “we”, with out consciousness and intelligence. We were a higher order of being, and this we had a mandate to tame Nature as if it were a horse, subdue it as if it were an enemy and “develop” it …
Three streams of thinking fed into this civilization/savagery construct. Biblical dominionism. Machine metaphors during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Social Darwinism, Man was fitter than the animals. …
from Margaret Atwood’s appreciation of Rachel Carson in Burning Questions
I do think we need to keep in mind the environment these shifts are occurring in. The hyper-politicization of virtually every aspect of life, and in particular the GOP’s relentless drive to push ever-more-rightwing, has created a perfect storm. Republican politicians have instituted a purity test so extreme that they have begun cannibalizing themselves. Who would have bet twenty years ago that Dick Cheney’s daughter would become a Republican pariah?
The GOP is so willfully, deliberately wrong on so many issues that it becomes very difficult to accept they might have the right of any particular one. Given all that, it’s not utterly surprising, especially for the young (who usually lack the ability to embrace nuance, anyway–good God, I’d like to go back in time and smack my late-teen libertarian self around the block a few times), to have decided that “If these assholes support it, it must be bad.” And really, they’re not even totally incorrect there. As I’ve argued here before, their ‘correctness’ on many trans issues arises from a wrongness that proves the adage about stopped clocks. They want to yoke gender and sex even more tightly than the most extreme trans activists; they just want to swap around the cart and the horse. I doubt the Handmaid’s Tale-esque world sought by the GOP would be particularly kind to either GCFs or TRAs.