Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology

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The Nature of Justice 3 As a result of environmentalism’s association under apartheid with the priorities of a relatively affluent white minority and with racial oppression, black South Africans were often “hostile to what was perceived as an elitist concern peripheral to their struggle for survival” (Khan 15). Throughout much of the twentieth century, the state spent vast sums on wildlife and wilderness conservation and forcibly removed nonwhites from their lands in order to create national parks. Meanwhile, the majority of South Africans were left increasingly destitute, the laws of racial segregation barred them from enjoying “the country’s rich natural heritage, and draconian poaching laws kept the rural poor from desperately needed resources” (McDonald, “Environmental ” 257). However, the past two decades have seen the rise of an alternative environmental justice movement that views “environmental issues as deeply . . . ​ embedded in access to power and resources in society” and refuses to separate questions of environmental policy from problems of socialinjustice(CockandFig16).Thedefiningmomentofchangeisoften traced to an Earthlife Africa conference in 1992 focused on environmental justice and the subsequent creation of the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF), which grew to include over four hundred member organizations by 2000. Environmental justice in South Africa was strongly influenced by movements in the United States as a result of the parallels between environmental racism in the two countries, as well as between the civil rights and antiapartheid struggles.1 The movement shifted the landscape of environmentalism in South Africa by linking the definition of “environmental issues” with “broader development concerns that . . . ​ reflect relations to resources and power” (Hallowes and Butler 57). Environmental justice advocates insisted that the sites of environmental problems include the townships and homelands and foregrounded the relationship between environmental projects and the social injustices generated by the dynamics of power, privilege, and race in South Africa. As the newsletter of the South African Environmental Justice Networking Forum announced, “Environmental justice is about 76 different shades of green social transformation directed towards meeting basic human needs and enhancing our quality of life—economic quality, health care, housing, human rights, environmental protection, and democracy” (MacDonald , “What” 4). Yet the rise of environmental justice in South Africa has by no means represented the end of green imperialism; the latter has continued under the guise of “ecological modernization.” Often packaged as “sustainable development,” ecological modernization focuses on the mitigation of environmental degradation through “technical and institutional solutions” and ascribes responsibility for these solutions to “scientific experts and managers” (Oelofse et al. 62–63). Its technocentric scientific orientation has been criticized as all too easily suppressing the significance of political and economic relationships and dealing inadequately “with the social questions related to assessing who benefits from and who bears the impact of development processes” (Oelofse et al. 64). Scholars and activists in South Africa have also noted the parallels between ecological modernization and colonial environmental management, which similarly sought to preserve the long-term viability of natural resources through ecologically informed management and insisted on technical rather than political framings of environmental threat.2 Driving colonial sustainability programs was “the belief that the state and its scientists perceived natural resource use more rationally than the local inhabitants. In their eyes, this legitimized their role as ultimate stewards of the land” (Beinart and Hughes 270).3 Those theorizing environmental justice have argued that ecological modernization in postapartheid South Africa similarly works to naturalize (neo)imperial identities and authority.4 Ecological modernization and, more generally, mainstream environmentalism have placed significant pressures on the environmental justice movement in South Africa over the past twenty years. “Historically white, suburban-based environmental groups” have continued to account for “the lion’s share of financial resources and organizational capacity,” and these groups “have been blamed for not taking environmental degradation in the townships and former homelands seriously” (McDonald, “Environmental” 260–61). Meanwhile, tensions and problems have cropped up within and among environmental justice groups in terms of the efficacy of working within hegemonic (technical and legal) channels and through the market economy. For example, research on the movement in Durban has suggested how groups can be co-opted the nature of justice 77 and protest curtailed as they work collaboratively, rather than confrontationally , with industry and the state (Leonard and Pelling 143; Barnett and Scott). According to David McDonald, among the biggest challenges faced by the environmental justice movement in South Africa is the growing relationship between environmental injustice and neoliberalism...