Socialism and Environmentalism

For most Americans, the beginning of the environmental movement can be pinpointed with uncommon precision: Earth Day, April 22, 1970. In the small New England town where I was teaching at the time, school children and townspeople showed support by picking up trash along Route 201. Ten million others were reported to have participated in one form or another, including large rallies in New York and Washington D.C. and a special message from Richard Nixon. The media caught the spirit with stories about the "new environmentalism"; the "dawning of the Environmental decade" and the like.

It's hard to believe that the almost festive atmosphere of Earth Day occurred at the height of the anti-war protests in the United States. Within weeks of Earth Day, four student protesters were killed at Kent State and six others at Jackson State in Mississippi.

It is probably not surprising that a movement which was born with this de politicized attitude has failed to articulate an adequate political vision. Instead, we have a mainstream environmental movement which relies by and large on individualized action (e.g., recycling) and on technological controls over large pollution sources. Until recently, environmentalists have had very little to say about the systemic causes of pollution or the methods which will be necessary to address the excesses of our current means of production, let alone about racism, poverty or other significant issues of our troubled times. Indeed, some environmentalists make a virtue of this failure in such slogans as "Neither left nor right, but straight ahead".

One important reason for this lack of political critique is the unexamined acceptance of the assumption that there is one environmental movement and that it was born, full-grown on Earth Day. In fact, there are a number of environmentalisms in this country: wilderness preservation, animal rights and the like. But it is in the rich, class-based struggle to control the excesses of unrestrained industrialism where environmentalism and socialism can most easily be seen to meet. It is this history we must now recapture and learn from. In the United States, this history dates back at least to Jane Addams and her fellow urban reformers (some of whom were labeled "sewer socialists"). This is the history of the Factory Laws which regulated business activity and of the

first Smoke Laws enacted in the early industrial cities of Chicago and Pittsburgh, and of the struggle for workplace health and safety protections.

Urbanization may be the most significant phenomenon of the 20th century, and the urban reformers who endeavored to improve conditions for the urban poor during the first part of the century were nothing if not environmentalists. Alice Hamilton, long-time resident at Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago founded by Jane Addams in the 1890's, was a pioneer industrial environmentalist. She reported on lead contamination, suggested changes in the production of matches to reduce the use of white phosphorous, and investigated the connection between sewage and typhoid. Jane Addams herself was garbage inspector for the 19th ward in Chicago.

The problems endemic to the period of Jane Addams parallel those of today: water quality, sewage and sanitation, solid and hazardous waste, air quality. Urban reformers of the 19th century learned that to improve the living conditions of poor neighborhoods, they had to engage in what we would now call environmental struggles. This is similar to what Frederich Engels observed about 1840's Manchester: that dirty air, dirty water and dirty industries are invariably located in poor neighborhoods far removed from middle-class suburbs.

These are lessons which remain important today. For many city dwellers, especially those in poor neighborhoods, the environment has come to be a distant, middle-class "amenity" issue. In the same way that the symbols of open spaces and wild nature are distant from the lives of most urban dwellers, the environment as a political issue has also become distant, abstract and de politicized.

But this need not be the case as the history of urban reform demonstrates. We need to relearn that the environment is not only about preserving wilderness in some faraway place, but as Dana Alston told the delegates to the first national People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, the environment is "where we live, where we work and where we play".

This is exactly the message that comes increasingly from grass-roots organizations all over the United States. These organizations comprise what is sometimes called the Environmental Justice movement. Some of the most vibrant of these organizations are located within the Chicagoland area: People for Community Recovery, headed by Hazel Johnson (the "mother" of the environmental justice movement) who is located in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the Southside and the coalition of groups which have recently come together to advocate with great success designating portions of the Calumet area in Southeast Chicago as a National Heritage area.

The issues which spark these organizations are intensely local and varied: opposition to a proposed land fill or incinerator, cleaning up a local waterway,

reclaiming an abandoned lot. Yet there are two themes which emerge again and again: (1) the need for greater community control over the local environment; and (2) the need to prevent some communities (usually poor or minority) from bearing disproportionate risks of environmental harm from our industrialized system of production.

The implications of this struggle are profound. The Environmental Justice movement calls into question environmental regulations which over rely on pollution control rather than pollution prevention. Take, for example, lead contamination, probably the most significant urban environmental issue. The sources of lead pollution (lead in gasoline, lead in paint and lead in plumbing fixtures) cannot be addressed by controlling lead emissions from factories. Addressing lead contamination, then, requires changing the way we produce gasoline and paint and how we install piping. In short, it calls for greater community control over the economic decisions which affect people's lives.

When our understanding of what constitutes an environmental issue expands to include the whole range of community concerns, the environmental movement can begin to speak to the most profound issues of our times. Why, in the United States, are three out of four hazardous waste sites located in minority communities; or why do nearly 70% of all inner-city African-American children have blood-lead levels higher than established trigger-levels; or why are our cities pock-marked with unused lots which have been abandoned and trashed?

It is well-established that health correlates to race and income. For the first time this century African-American life expectancy actually declined during the 1980s. Age-specific death rates are higher for Blacks in all age groups from 0-84 compared to Whites, and death rates from cancer are 33% greater for Black males and 16% greater for black females. Two examples are particularly illustrative. Asthma is on the rise in the United States among all children, but African-American children have the greatest impairments from asthma and the most frequent hospitalizations. Death rates from asthma are far greater for Blacks than for Whites.

These questions beg for a systemic analysis - not only of industrialization and the economic sphere, but the relationship between environmental degradation and capitalism. These are large issues which hold the potential for reconsidering the basic structure of our environmental laws. Not only does this force us to expand our notion of environmentalism, but, by becoming conscious of who benefits and who suffers from our industrialized economy, it promises a re politicized environmentalism which should be a the heart of any socialist vision.

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