The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture

Conclusion: Toward an Inclusive Environmentalism

179 Conclusion Toward an Inclusive Environmentalism I have argued in this book that the examples of the invalid, the Indian, and the immigrant are three examples of the ways in which environmentalism is complicit in maintaining social hierarchies. I have outlined some of the ways in which environmentalist discourse legitimizes and perpetuates these relations. I showed how discourses of environmentalist disgust and belief in the purity of nature reinforce distinctions between those who are ecologically correct and those who are ecologically other. Environmentalism as a social movement and as a field of study cannot continue to be successful without addressing these issues and the injustices they imply. Gayatri Spivak’s famous question “Can the subaltern speak?” captures the dilemma facing postcolonial and indigenous writers and activists. How can they articulate their own identity and political claims when the only language they wield is the language of their colonizers, and when their words and acts are so often appropriated by dominant society? To theorize an inclusive environmentalism, it is necessary to ask whether environmentalism’s others can articulate —and even more importantly achieve—their own claims without “performing” or mimicking mainstream models and discourse. But ecological others are not always postcolonial subalterns. They can also be poor whites, rural people, inner-city dwellers, border crossers, climate refugees, the Chinese, American mothers (as I have argued elsewhere),1 or any individual or group that is perceived by the ecological other 180 dominant environmental thought as a threat to the environment, but whose tenuous relationship vis-à-vis nature is blamed for environmental crisis, even as it is more a symptom of broader power relations. Can their discourses be read as forms of resistance? Do the strategic advantages of performing mainstream environmentalism outweigh the problems with “using the master’s tools”? In other words, can the ecological other speak? Environmentalism’s others are not silent about their exclusion; neither do they ignore environmental concerns. They negotiate their claims in ways that both challenge and reinforce, even as they tap into the power of, mainstream environmental paradigms. Environmental discourses and practices must seek more expansive ways to conceive of inclusivity, drawing on what Chela Sandoval calls “affinities ,” which emphasize finding common ground with others with “oppositional consciousness” and identifying along the lines of common struggles, as opposed to identity politics, which roots activism in static categories of subjectivity, such as gender, race, and class. Such traditional gender politics can make sense in some contexts, but they can be limiting in others, as Almanac, for example, powerfully illustrated. Thus, it is not enough to ask, as the environmental movement and ecocritics often do, “How can we make room for difference?” This approach exemplifies the tendency of pluralist and multicultural discourses to tokenize identity politics without scrutinizing the ways in which the movement fails to identify shared affinities with groups. As environmental scholars, we ignore important texts and discourses that address environmental and social justice concerns when we look only for conventional environmental themes, satirized by Sherman Alexie as “pine trees,” “grizzly bears,” and “rivers and streams.” Instead, a more inclusive environmentalism needs to ask, “How do othered perspectives revise mainstream environmentalism entirely and challenge assumptions of what ‘environmental’ means?” If identity shapes how different groups encounter and define environmental concerns, then these “may entail entirely different solutions and courses of action” from those proposed and practiced by mainstream writers and activists (Pulido, Environmentalism 28). There are many kinds of environmentalisms, and so new texts, genres, and Conclusion 181 voices emerge when we take seriously texts that do not center on environmental phenomena, but rather on, for example, sex tourism, food culture, genetic modification, organ theft, domestic violence, national security, and even genocide. If, like the environmentalists in Arizona who saw no relationship between immigration policy and the mandate to protect wilderness and wildlife, we fail to see the connection between these phenomena, we not only fail to “add more voices” to the movement but are actively complicit in their exclusion . An inclusive environmentalism can emerge only when it is fed by many, varying, and even competing estuaries of concern. Competing narratives are critical because they shed light on the way that environmental discourses can be used, by environmentalists but also by others, to reinforce the status quo. In many of the narratives that I described in this book, environment rapidly becomes a form of strategic essentialism. Communities “perform” various environmental identities to align with...