Why We Need Environmental Justice Part 2 of 2

PART 2 Mark Williams Hi. I’m Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, and host of the “New Frontiers” podcast. If you’re just joining us, this is part 2 of my conversation with political scientist Kemi Fuentes-George. In this episode, we’ll continue our discussion about how colonialism and racism have helped generate environmental injustice—and some of the challenges we face in achieving effective environmental management. If you like this conversation, check out some of the other episodes of the “New Frontiers” podcasts—available wherever you get your podcasts. Mark Williams Again, you may have partially answered a question that I wanted to ask you. I'll go ahead and ask it and see whether or not more remains to be said. Some of the work that you've been doing focuses on the impact that colonialism has had on the way that resources are exploited and how environmental degradation takes place, and how environmental injustices get created and perpetuated. Can you briefly elaborate on some of those points about colonialism and its impact? Kemi Fuentes-George Yeah, it's a lot. All right. So one of which is—I kind of mentioned this just now with the Nigerian case—one of the ways in which colonialism has affected environmental injustice globally is that it's shaped the primary means of economic revenue in developing countries. Nigeria would be one example. Another great example would be Jamaica. So Jamaica is one of the top three producers of bauxite, which is used to make what Americans say aluminum, where they should be pronounced aluminum. So it's Australia, China, and then Jamaica. So we're a massive producer of bauxite. And bauxite was discovered while we were under British colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s. And has since been one of our top earners of foreign revenue. I think it's like 10 percent of GDP, roughly equivalent to tourism, which is another major earner. And so bauxite mining started and was facilitated in the countryside of Jamaica by the fact that we had a British colonial government, the people who lived in the countryside of Jamaica were either low income farmers without secure land tenure or like large land owners, right? Who were descendants or inheritors of plantations, slavery plantations. So when the British government began expanding the extraction of bauxite in Jamaica, which requires entirely removing the ground cover over a bauxite deposit so you destroy all the biodiversity, all the trees, all the vegetation and so on. You mine out the bauxite minerals, which uses a lot of caustic chemicals and toxic chemicals. And then you leave these massive red mud leaks, okay? Which dry and then this toxic dust goes into the atmosphere; lands on people's clothes, their houses, their skin; creates respiratory illnesses; just like really devastating. That was made possible by the fact that this was a colonial system in which a colonial government wanted to manufacture these goods for the international market for aviation and airplanes in particular. And that process has remained virtually unchanged since Jamaica became independent in 1962. In fact, when I was doing research on this process for my book, one of the people in one of the rural regions where bauxite deposits were found, said that the problem with bauxite is that first it was colonialism under the British, and now it's colonialism under the Black man in Kingston. It's the same basic idea. Another way in which we see colonialism affecting environmental injustice. Mark Williams Can I stop you before you proceed to another example? You're a native of Jamaica, you grew up there. I know that you've studied this as part of your research, but growing up, at what point did you become cognizant of some of the things that you later began to study? Kemi Fuentes-George Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, to be honest, and I feel kind of bad saying this, but not until, probably like not until I started doing this research, honestly, like 2006 or 2007. Mark Williams Well after you reached maturity. Kemi Fuentes-George And a large part of that was something that I find very interesting is that in the United States, this idea of Black identities has historically been very kind of binary. You're Black or you're White. And then if you're mixed Black and White, well, you're Black, you know what I mean? Like Iced Tea—dude is Black, right? Mariah Carey Black, you know what I mean? But in Jamaica it's a little bit different. So even though I'm coded as Black here, in Jamaica I'm coded as brown, my family was like middle income. I found out interestingly, that one of my relatives was actually a slave owner, which is that's wild. But yeah, so my family, you know, my grandfather on my mother’s side was pretty light skinned. And so I grew up with some social privilege. Not as much as like an actual White person in Jamaica but a lot more than like low income inner city people. Like really Black people in the inner city, and certainly not much connection with people in the countryside, the Maroons and the Black, rural dwellers and so on. So I had the luxury or privilege, I guess, of just kind of growing up and not really being aware of how much the legacy of colonialism was still shaping Jamaica while I was in it. And after I left and then started studying it and seeing this issue in the United States and in other countries, then I could go back to Jamaica and be like “Oh my God. Like what, what have I missed, you know, all these 20 something years.” Mark Williams Growing up, were you aware or did you see evidence of some of the environmental damage that you later began to study? Kemi Fuentes-George Yeah, I mean, there’s another thing is that just like in the United States, a lot of these environmental hazards were externalized really well. So one of the issues that we face in Kingston, which is kind of where I'm based out of, is garbage dumping. And so in the Kingston metropolitan area, a lot of the garbage goes to dumps, which are in inner city neighborhoods. And one of the most famous ones is the Riverton dump. And again, this was all established during colonialism, like where Black people lived, for port labor and downtown labor and so on, it was very different from like where upper income Brown and White people live which is where I live now. And so the waste would go down to Riverton and the dump—these are dumps that are not lined, they're not covered, they're poorly managed. It’s just like an open air dump where you have televisions and food and scraps and medical waste and diapers and just like everything. And people will, in these areas, will go through, they'll sort through the dump, they’ll look for food, they’ll look for clothes, they’ll look for things that they can use. There's rats, there's disease vectors. And sometimes because they have batteries like, lithium-ion batteries, which will catch fire. So then the dump will start burning, and then you’ll have air pollution and all these things. And what I thought was interesting was that we never spoke about it in Upper Saint Andrew in Barbican until the dump caught on fire and then the smoke came to our neighborhoods. So if there's no fire, like nobody talks about Riverton, it's just, ah, you know, kind of there in the background. But as soon as the smoke happens, it's like, oh my goodness, we have to do something about this terrible situation. Mark Williams So basically it's out of sight, out of mind until it begins to invade your turf. Kemi Fuentes-George Yeah. And, you know, because of that, I guess I kind of understand how easy it is for some people to not see injustice. Because I mean I lived it, a lot of my family lived it, right, a lot of my friends it and continue to live it in some ways. Mark Williams Yes. Well, moving on, environmental injustice often is conceived of as a byproduct of industrialization, of development, of resource exploitation and so forth. But your research, I think, makes it clear that issues of race are also an important subtext. And this has made me wonder whether or not the inverse of that might be true. How does race fit into achieving effective environmental management? Kemi Fuentes-George So there's two examples of this that I hope kind of demonstrate how it could be positive. One of which is racial identity can be a very good transboundary global or international mobilization tool. And so going back to…. Mark Williams In favor of environmental management perhaps? Kemi Fuentes-George Exactly, right? Where you can get like resources, whether financial or cognitive—things like research or a greater political voice, or what have you—in defense of some kind of issue. And I think going back, I'd mentioned Haiti for instance, right? So 1987 this toxic ash is dumped in Haiti and it was initially marked as fertilizer, right? This was industrial ash that came from Philadelphia. Okay. I guess cheaper to dump it in Haiti than to treat it in the United States. So it's like, I want to say like 10,000 tons or some ridiculous number. And so, you know, the Haitians, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, like small, like half island country, found this ash and then they were like, what do we do about this? And so they tried to petition the Haitian government, and the Haitian government said, well, there's nothing we can do about it. We're just this small little country. But they made an appeal to the United States and then the news got out about it and picked up by Black American activists in the United States. So remember, this is coming out of the 1980s environmental racism movement in the American South. So even though this was a totally different country, this narrative of toxic colonialism and toxic pollution accruing to Black people resonated with people in the United States. And so they participated in this transborder campaign. They got ash from Haiti and then they mailed it to the municipal government of Philadelphia. They wrote letters about it, they publicized, they sent people to help study the waste and they brought it to a international audience. And it took a while, I think it was not until the 1990s when the waste got cleaned up and taken by some company in New York. It certainly took a long time, but with this kind of transboundary mobilization and identity politics it certainly helped the people in Haiti to do things that would've been very difficult for them to do by themselves. Another example of this kind of the role that identity plays, I think is very visible in indigenous politics. There's this guy Clayton Thomas Mueller, he's a Mathias Colomb Cree from Canada, and he has participated in climate change advocacy with indigenous people from all different countries in the Western hemisphere. Like even going as far as working with La Via Campesina in Mexico at the climate change UNFCCC Cop in Cancun in I think it was 2012. And so again, very different country, but this idea of, as a First Nations person, as an indigenous person, we have a shared fight in this battle for environmental sustainability. It’s a great way to mobilize resources across borders. Mark Williams Very interesting. Well, let me our focus just a bit. Your recent work is a project that examines some of the post-colonial barriers to indigenous participation in environmental management. You bring up the concept of stories, narratives as things that can actually shape environmentalism. And I'd like to probe this idea a little bit more deeply. Why do stories matter and what do they have to do with environmental governance? Kemi Fuentes-George I came across this when I was trying to understand from conservation scientists what an ecosystem was . And this had to do with one of the issues I was looking at, which was this protected area called Cockpit Country in Jamaica. And this same kind of process I saw take place in in Egypt and in Mexico. But the short version is there was this idea that in Jamaica they want to protect an endangered place called the Cockpit Country from bauxite mining. And then I said, “Okay, great. I know the Cockpit Country is somewhere in the western part of the island in this place called Trelawny, but what exactly is the area?” And so I spoke to the scientists and they said, “Well, you know, the Cockpit Country is defined by, you know, this species of plant, which you find here because it's unique to this area, and you can find traces of the plant in this site and this site and this site. And then there's this hydrological feature which also defines Cockpit Country. So Cockpit Country is this.” And then they had this one ecological map. I was also speaking with Maroons who lived in Cockpit Country. And so Maroons were or are descendants of runaway slaves and Taino or indigenous people in Jamaica who had been living in the area more or less since colonialism and wars against the British. And so I was speaking to them about Cockpit Country and they said, “Well, you know, Cockpit Country is where we fought the wars against the British and there's these colonial sites and we have burial grounds of some of our heroes and you know, this archeological site and the environment is a part of Cockpit Country, but it's not the whole story of Cockpit Country.” And even though the scientists and the Maroons—I don't want to say like the Maroons were not scientists; there were scientists who were Maroons—but even though these two different populations agree that Cockpit Country should be saved, they didn't have the same ideas about where the boundaries of Cockpit Country were. And they didn't have the same ideas about what saving Cockpit Country meant. And this was because they were telling different stories about, “Well what is it?” Is Cockpit Country, a historical site of colonial resistance? Or is it this environmental feature defined by this very specific ecological species that they wanted to talk about. And so the different kind of stories that are told are going to have different effects on what policies and approaches are considered appropriate and which are not. Mark Williams Is this also a reason why it matters whose voice gets heard? Who might be included in the environmental management discussions and who might be excluded from them? They're likely to tell different stories? Kemi Fuentes-George Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's a little bit more than just whose voices gets heard, but how we understand what's being said. And one of the concerns that indigenous people have is that when they do get to go to conventions like the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP, or Conference of the Parties, one of the problems they have is what they can talk about with regard to the environment are things like carbon credits and carbon sinks and conservation in these very kind of limited ways that fit with this neoliberal sense of what the environment is. And nobody listens to them when they talk about the earth as sacred or these sacred sites or the earth as a living ancestor or mother nature. So even though they participate, the kinds of stories they can tell are constrained in a way that that effectively limits their participation in shaping what governance looks like. Mark Williams Kemi, I think that conventional wisdom holds that good environmental management and conservation actually require having strong, robust, trustworthy science. Otherwise you're just going to wind up guessing about issues of cause and effect or abatement and best conservation practices. But your work seems a bit skeptical about the role that scientists play in promoting or achieving environmental justice. Can you explain why? Are you saying it's counterproductive to rely on science to achieve environmental justice? Kemi Fuentes-George I wouldn't say it's counterproductive because I definitely think that you need to have good science in order to get good environmental management. The concern I have with using science is that we manage an area with a technocratic scientific approach and ignore potential cultural values, there's a way in which we could exacerbate issues of environmental injustice. The other issue is that scientists, even though they might not want to admit it, are fallible. They're not omniscient, which is fine. But the issue is that when we're speaking about conservation and management of large ecosystems, especially global ecosystems, there are going to be gaps of uncertainty in scientific data in which scientists, and I've seen this play out, end up using models or assumptions about likely events that are built around certain beliefs or biases or frameworks. And it would be a danger to accept these as kind of an ahistoric permanent, unbiased truth. So this sounds a little bit abstract, so I'll give an example. Or maybe two, if you have time. So one of which is, has to do with geoengineering and this process called ocean iron fertilization. And so what that is taking iron ore as dust and dumping it in the ocean and creating a plankton bloom, and then this plankton bloom will absorb, in theory, absorb carbon dioxide because it's a plant. So absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean, and basically function as a fast growing carbon sink. So the theories behind ocean iron fertilization were developed in 1990, by this scientist called John Martin, who was an oceanographer and became adopted, because that was about the time that the UNFCCC—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, so kind of the umbrella convention under which the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Paris Agreement are based. So the UNFCCC was being designed and in 1992, right? Or started 1988 to 1992. And so there was a lot of excitement around this idea of, oh, we've, you found a solution to climate change. And John Martin himself said in a Doctor Strangelove accent, “With ocean iron fertilization, I will bring about the next ice age.” And so over the next decade or so, there was research done by Woods Hole, by *MBARI by corporations like Green Sea Ventures to find out how exactly to create a large scale ocean iron fertilization process to generate carbon credits and then sell it on the international market in the climate change regime. And very soon scientists who were studying this process kind of split off into two different camps. And they were all dealing with a problem of uncertainty. And so there was uncertainty about whether or not the plankton would actually sink to the bottom fast enough. Whether they would generate the necessary blooms. There was uncertainty about what would this mean for the ocean's ecosystem. Would you create underwater eutrophication or the loss of oxygen underwater? There was kind of a moral uncertainty. Like if you told people that you could throw a bunch of iron in the ocean and it was suck carbon out of the air, would people say, “Okay, great I can pollute as much as I want.” There was all of this uncertainty and one group of scientists looked at the uncertainty and they said, there are too many ethical problems around this. We don't have the answers to this. And so therefore we think that ocean iron fertilization should not be used as a carbon solution and should definitely not be sold as a carbon credit mechanism because it will incentivize as bad behavior. Then yet another group of scientists who said, well, we have this uncertainty, but we know that climate change is terrible. And so we have to do everything we can in order to deal with climate change, including using OIF or ocean iron fertilization as much as possible until, we have better information. The scientists who were more cautious managed to ally with indigenous people including but not exclusively in Canada, and Green Peace, and I can't remember the other organization, but put pressure on the London convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity to pass resolutions between 2008 and 2012 to bar the use of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon mechanism. So it's currently banned on the international law. But if the pro OIF scientists had won out, we would've had a mechanism that was scientifically justified, I suppose, but that may have led to a variety of moral or practical problems. And that was one example among many of scientists having uncertainty and creating an argument, incorporating that uncertainty and coming to two different possible conclusions. And that tends to be a hallmark of science when it comes to policy making. Mark Williams So you're not saying that a reliance on science is not needed for environmental management. You're saying something a bit different, something more nuanced? Kemi Fuentes-George Yes. Yes, exactly. That science is good, but it's not infallible. That scientists have uncertainty and doubt and lack of information like everybody else. And that this uncertainty and doubt is going to be mediated by the scientists’ perspectives, their life experiences, their positionality, right. And that could lead to very different scientific arguments for why we should or shouldn't do something. Mark Williams Okay. Well, thank you. I think if I could sum up a lot of our discussion about your research, it's this, your work illustrates that classism, colonialism, racism, and gendered power all intersect in ways that can drive environmental degradation. These are powerful forces and this makes the fate of our environment seem pretty grim. So I'm curious, are there any instances of success or progress in promoting environmental management and justice that make you more optimistic about our environmental future? Kemi Fuentes-George I always try to talk about these things with my students because the very first time I taught environmental politics, I wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation. And so at the end of the semester, all their eyes were dead and their souls were shattered. And so I decided, you know what? I'm going to also talk about the successes. One that I studied is the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park in Jamaica. And so it's very similar to the Cockpit Country case on the western part of the island, although this on the eastern part of the island, in that it was an area that was threatened for over-exportation, in this case logging. It was a site of Maroon history another site of battles against the British and slavery. And between 1990 to 2015, the Jamaican government with advocacy from the forest department and Maroons and Jamaicans in the diaspora abroad created a management area registered under the World Heritage Convention that protects the site as a culturally and ecologically important zone. So it's a management protocol with international support that includes the cultural wishes and the interests of these local marginalized populations and conservation scientists. Mark Williams And so it was both inclusive and it had strong international support. Kemi Fuentes-George Right, right. Exactly. Mark Williams And there are probably many more examples similar to that. Kemi Fuentes-George So another one that I studied called the Parque Nacional de Xcalak. And it's a protected area in the very southern part of Mexico near the Belize border in the state of Quintana Roo. And so this was a coastal area, this beach fishing area, that was inhabited primarily by indigenous and Mestizo people that was possibly targeted for tourist development. Kind of like what you see in Cancun and the Riviera Maya. And so the local people when they heard about this, these are local fishing people, they wanted to conserve the zone because they didn't want tourists to come down, strip the vegetation, destroy the mangroves, kick them off the land. And so they advocated the government to create a national park managed by local fishermen and local people to respect their ability to fish, but also to prevent it from over exploitation again with international support. And so these are all examples and there are many such examples. Not as much as I would like, but there are some that point to the possibility of environmentally just management. Mark Williams This has been a really wide ranging and truly fascinating conversation. I'm really glad that you stopped by. We've been talking with political scientists, Kemi Fuentes-George, about his research on conservation, environmental management, and environmental justice. Kemi, it's been such a pleasure visiting with you. Thanks so much for spending time with us today on New Frontiers. Kemi Fuentes-George It's been great. Thank you. Jonah Benjamin Roberts (Middlebury ’23) A native of Jamaica, Professor Kemi Fuentes-George now resides in East Middlebury, where—along with his wife, children, and gaggle of chickens and ducks—he enjoys living the Vermont life. Outside of the classroom, he’s likely to be seen cycling around campus, at the Athletic Center tuning up his jiu jitsu skills or jamming on the trumpet with fellow bandmates in the local Vermont group Las Almendras. Mark Williams This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Our theme music is by Ketsa. If you like the show, leave us a rating or review on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode of New Frontiers. Thanks a lot. *MBARI stands for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.