Eco-Apartheid and Global Greenwaves: African Diasporic Environmental Justice Movements

Perhaps no current struggle more strongly links the fate of African-descended peoples than the struggle for environmental justice. Colonialism, segregation, and legalized racism may have become officially obsolete, but the legacy of such processes has left many of the peoples of the African diaspora vulnerable to social and ecological degradation. In turn, the ever-growing demand for cheap and disposable goods, coupled with neoliberal economic policies, has dispossessed these people of their land, traditions, health, and livelihoods—resources that were especially hard won, given histories of enslavement and subjugation. Indeed, environmental-justice activists refer to the increasingly unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens as ‘‘eco-apartheid.’’ The advent of global warming portends a worsening of such conditions, inasmuch as poor and minority people are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, whether it takes the shape of dwindling natural resources or of violent storms and other severe weather.

At the same time, those who bear the brunt of these inequalities refuse to accept environmental degradation and injustice. Their grassroots movement, known as environmental justice, grows out of civil-and human-rights concerns, and not necessarily with a view to preserving and conserving nature. In fact, as this article shows, conservation and regulation measures established by international environmental movements frequently backfire on people of color. For instance, in developing nations, biodiversity equals big business. Conservation projects financed by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and aid agencies may preserve wetlands and wildlife, for instance, but they destroy livelihoods and traditional ways of life. In the United States, regulations established by environmental activists in the 1970s have been harnessed by middle-class whites, leading to a proliferation of toxic sites in African–American communities (Bullard et al. 2007). Environmental justice thus distinguishes itself from mainstream environmentalism by prioritizing questions of social justice and by addressing a wide range of social-justice issues. In doing so, it stakes fresh ground from which to wage time-honored civil-rights battles for autonomy, self-determination, and equal protection.

Environmental-justice battles are very different from civil-rights struggles, though. Activists must challenge subtle and insidious processes of discrimination that are masked by neoliberal discourses promoting superficial versions of diversity, participation, and sustainability.

In its broadest form, neoliberalism can be described as a set of political and economic structures, as well as ideas, that promote global trade and investment as a mechanism by which all nations prosper and develop fairly and equitably. In short, it grows from the idea that an unregulated market benefits everyone (di Leonardo 2008). Critics, however, point out that capital accumulation almost always involves a process of dispossession (see Harvey 2005). In environmental contexts, the deregulation of industries to promote capital growth has allowed lenient environmental standards, resulting in a proliferation of contaminated sites. Often, these sites are located in communities of color.

For instance, in the United States in metropolitan areas that host hazardous-waste facilities approximately 57 percent of residents are people of color, whereas in areas that do not host facilities, approximately 33 percent of residents are people of color (Bullard et al. 2007). In turn, such inequities dispossess African–Americans of their health and safety. For example, studies show that the hospitalization rate for asthma for African–Americans is three to four times the rate for whites, and as of 1998, African–Americans were almost three times more likely than whites to die from asthma (Bullard 2000). In the more rural global South, the privatization of formerly common natural resources (under neoliberal policies) means that people are divested of their access to food and water as well as their livelihoods. As the North increasingly exports waste to developing nations, marginalized communities are also deprived of clean air, water, and soil. In all cases, neoliberal discourses that promise but do not deliver inclusion mask these processes of dispossession.

This article explores how environmental-justice activists in the contemporary African diaspora navigate neoliberal discourses and ideologies. Particularly complex is the degree to which neoliberal projects undermine activists’ efforts by incorporating and diluting the terms of their struggles. More specifically, diligent lobbying by grassroots environmental-justice activists has influenced conservation, environmental, and development efforts to be more inclusive, at least on a rhetorical level. Environmental siting processes in the United States and conservation projects in the global South now almost always claim to be ‘‘community-based’’ and ‘‘participatory.’’ But activists find that so-called community-based projects apply cookie-cutter approaches and give scant attention to complex political, economic, and cultural contexts, and thus ignore and exclude the specific communities they are meant to serve (Busher and Wande 2007; see also Mullings 2005).

These ‘‘sustainable’’ projects also exemplify dramatic shifts in the past several decades that shape our ideas about the significance of race and multiculturalism. With the advent of neoliberal economic policies, a supposedly neutral, open market guides natural-resource use and the placement of environmental hazards. This idea of neutrality jibes with the outlawing of racial discrimination and valorizing of diversity and multiculturalism in the post-civil rights era. Yet, numerous scholars point out the superficiality of state-sanctioned ‘‘diversity.’’ Anthropologist Charles Hale describes ‘‘neoliberal multiculturalism’’ as a gloss that offers only ‘‘the limited recognition of cultural rights, the strengthening of civil society, and endorsement of the principle of intercultural equality. When combined with neoliberal economic policies, these progressive measures have unexpected effects, including a deepened state capacity to shape and neutralize political opposition, and a remaking of racial hierarchies across the region’’ (2005:10). For example, Latin American states have constructed an ‘‘authorized Indian,’’ thus establishing an acceptable cultural recognition of indigenous peoples that is constrained by the interests of a free market. Thus, Hale notes, ‘‘certain rights are to be enjoyed on the implicit condition that others will not be raised’’ (2004:18). As anthropologist Leith Mullings has observed, such multicultural and race-neutral frameworks are especially insidious as they ‘‘appropriate the language and concepts derived from contemporary oppositional struggles, such as multiculturalism, equal opportunity, and the right to be different. They function not only to rationalize inequality, but also to delegitimize antiracist activities’’ (2005:679).

As a result, African-descended people claiming ‘‘environmental racism’’ in a seemingly color-blind society are taken to task by pro-growth proponents who label them divisive and separatist, accusing them of advocating for the contamination of non- Black communities instead of their own. In industrializing countries, where natural resources are more plentiful (for the moment), conservation and preservation projects also charge Black and indigenous people with gratuitously destroying natural habitats. Moreover, the political unrest and violence that plagues the developing and debt-ridden countries in which many African-diasporic people live is often expressed in interethnic antagonism. Accordingly, Black environmental activists in both the North and the South navigate their oppositional identities in complex ways. For example, some activists underscore their African heritage, while others downplay it and emphasize instead their aboriginal, class, or geographic identities. In some cases, the environmental struggles of African-descended people are fairly inextricable from those of indigenous populations, and activists would have it no other way. In other cases, long-standing ethnic, racial, and cultural divisions make such alliances impractical. In still other cases, activists strategically shift between identities based on race, ethnicity, and class. The following sections review these different strategies by grounding them in specific cases, focusing on the siting of toxic waste sites in the United States and on conservation and ecotourism programs in the global South. Ultimately, the complexities of these cases raise important questions about regional and transnational alliances, diasporic identities, and North/South differences.

The Changing African-American Environmental-Justice Movement

In the United States, people of color make up 56 percent of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous-waste facilities and more than 69 percent of residents in neighborhoods where several facilities are clustered. One- fifth of people living in host neighborhoods are African–American (Bullard et al. 2007). In 1987, the United Church of Christ (UCC) released a landmark study documenting that race, not income, is a higher predictor of whether or not a community will host a toxic-waste site (Commission for Racial Justice 1987; U.S. GAO 1983). The study came on the heels of an enormously successful public protest in Warren County, North Carolina, where a rural, poor, and mostly African–American community challenged the unwarranted siting of a landfill for carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in their neighborhood (Bryant and Hockman 2005). That protest, the UCC report, and another study demonstrating significant race-based disparities in the enforcement of environmental regulations [1] introduced the term ‘‘environmental racism’’ and fueled the rise of a grassroots movement for environmental justice among people of color. [2]

In combining civil rights and environmentalism, the environmental-justice movement encapsulates many of the complexities of race-based organizing in a post–civil rights era, and it marks a significant shift for African–Americans. First, owing to cumulative forms of institutional racism, African–Americans tend to live in areas with lower property values and have fewer assets, lower levels of educational attainment, and less political power. Thus, local governments and companies tend to consider minority neighborhoods attractive locations for polluting industries. Often, they emphasize the jobs that these industries offer and downplay their potential dangers. In their immediate need for economic development, minority communities have been slow to recognize that they are polluted. [3] Second, the U.S. environmental movement grew out of a concern for preserving and conserving nature. [4] Middle-class opposition to toxic industries frequently called for the closing of factories that employed minority workers, a significant proportion of the workforce there. As a result, minority groups often viewed urban environmental activists as a threat to their employment (Brosius 1999; Bosso 1991; Bryner 2001; Szasz 1994). Clean-air and water legislation in the 1970s also allowed affluent white neighborhoods to harness stiffer environmental regulations and oppose permits for hazardous-waste-generating facilities in their neighborhoods. Many middle-class whites protested, ‘‘Not in my backyard’’ (NIMBY), when garbage dumps, incinerators, and landfills were proposed for their neighborhoods. These facilities, which had to go somewhere, routinely ended up in poor, powerless communities of color; as sociologist Robert Bullard observes, public officials and private industries ‘‘responded to the NIMBY phenomenon using the place-in-blacks’-backyards (PIBBY) principle’’ (Bullard 2000:4). Toxic industries thus proliferated in minority communities, which became the prime targets for solving ‘‘facility siting gridlock’’ (Bullard 1993:12).

As they increasingly recognized the unintended consequences of mainstream environmentalism, environmental-justice activists also recognized that mainstream environmental groups did not represent people of color in terms of membership or leadership. For example, a 1989 study showed that of the nation’s largest ten environmental groups, racial or ethnic minorities comprised only 16.8 percent of these groups’ employees. Of those, all but 1.8 percent worked in administrative or ‘‘blue collar’’ roles. [5] In 1990, one hundred grassroots environmental-justice leaders signed a letter to ten of the nation’s largest environmental groups, accusing them of racism in their hiring and policy practices. Many responded by diversifying their staffs and adding environmental justice to their official priority agendas (see Gottlieb 1993), as did other environmental organizations. This reaction not only represents a success for environmental Justice activists, but it also presents a rare case of intermovement influences working in a ‘‘bottom up’’ direction (Checker 2005a).

Importantly, those influences also occurred on discursive levels. From the outset, Black environmental-justice activists distinguished themselves from mainstream environmentalists by defining the environment as ‘‘where we live, work, play and pray.’’ In other words, for grassroots activists, the environment includes air, water, and soil as well as housing, schools, employment, and all of the resources to which they have historically been denied access (see Checker 2005a; Harvey 1996; Novotny 1995, 1998). Some mainstream environmental groups have adopted this expansive definition. For example, in the late 1990s the Sierra Club’s new executive director announced that the enviroment ‘‘is not just about Yosemite and the beauty of the wilderness. It is about cities—the air we breathe and the water we drink’’ (Hornblower 1997:667). Thus, people of color have successfully altered the discourses of the U.S. environmental movement. Environmental-justice activists have exerted similar kinds of rhetorical (if not substantive) influence on local, state, and federal governments. In 1994, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12898, which called for federal agencies and federally sponsored programs to strive for equitable distribution of potentially toxic facilities. Following this event, and thanks to sustained pressure from grassroots environmental-justice activists, facility-siting procedures across the United States now include greater opportunities for public participation, mainly through public hearings. Despite these gains, a 2007 study confirmed that disproportionately large numbers of people of color still lived in hazardous-waste host communities and that the existing environmental laws did not protect those people equally. If anything, the study showed environmental injustices growing more pronounced since the 1980s. What explains this paradoxical increase in activism and, at the same time, in environmental disparities within U.S. minority communities?

One explanation lies in the myriad ways that neoliberal policy agendas adopt grassroots oppositional language but ultimately counteract grassroots efforts. For example, environmental-justice activists find that public hearings are sometimes held during regular work hours and are often not well publicized or appropriately translated. One activist from the South Bronx in New York City, for example, described how a hearing about the building of a new jail on land designated for a park was posted in only one community newspaper that was available at only one remote newsstand (Carter 2007). When residents do arrive at meetings to challenge siting decisions, local governments blame them for blocking progress and economic development in neighborhoods that desperately need it (see Daniels 2000).

Indeed, the promise of economic development and job creation is the carrot that governments and corporations wave in seeking local support for the siting of polluting facilities, in a process that sociologist Robert Bullard refers to as ‘‘job blackmail’’ (Bullard 2000). Additionally, activists point out that, with increasing automating and technological advances, rarely today do industries locating in poor and minority neighborhoods actually hire people from those neighborhoods (Bullard 2000). Activists’ efforts to offset job blackmail have had varied success, for, as mentioned, communities continue to believe that they must choose between development and progress and the environment. Significantly, then, environmental-justice activists challenge prevailing neoliberal ideas that equate economic growth with broad-based economic opportunity.

The fact that very few environmental-justice lawsuits succeed also exemplifies the insidiousness of neoliberal ideology. First, cases filed under the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution (in other words, specifically claiming environmental racism) are almost never successful (see Lawrence 1987; Lazarus 1993; Moss 1996). [6] Since 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court has defined ‘‘race discrimination’’ as ‘‘intentional or purposeful conduct on the basis of race, or at least some consciousness of race as a factor motivating conduct.’’ To prove that a community is contaminated because of its racial or ethnic makeup, a plaintiff must provide evidence that a specific person or group of people deliberately caused the contamination as a race-conscious act. But most instances of contamination happen over long periods of time, and intent to contaminate must be attached to individual actors (Cole and Foster 2001:63).

Second, the intent clause encapsulates larger challenges for contemporary race-based social movements. What George Lipsitz refers to as ‘‘the language of liberal individualism’’ makes any discussion of non-individual-based racism nearly impossible (see Lipsitz 1995, 2006). Such language has come into prominence in the United States following the civil-rights era, and it fits well with popular discourses about multiculturalism and race neutrality—ideologies that recognize multiple identities as long as they are divorced from economic and social justice (di Leonardo 2004). Diversity and race-neutral discourses easily cloud and ultimately dilute environmental-justice claims. For example, in 2004, the Bush administration altered the federal definition of environmental justice. Initially, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established the Office of Environmental Justice 1994, it stipulated that the term meant that ‘‘no group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic groups, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local and tribal programs and policies.’’ Ten years later, the EPA revised its official definition of environmental justice to include ‘‘all people—regardless of race, ethnicity, income, or education level.’’Thus, in an ostensible move toward inclusion, the administration discounted existing environmental disparities (see Checker 2005b).

These changes point to some of the dilemmas facing environmental-justice activists today. Although they are certainly in favor of environmental justice for all people, they also recognize the importance of continuing to call attention to environmental racism. My own fieldwork with African–American justice activists in the U.S. South reveals some of the ways in which activists navigate questions of racial neutrality versus racial specificity. For instance, Charles Utley, president of a local environmental-justice association in Augusta, Georgia, frequently emphasizes publicly that the environment affects everyone and is ‘‘not about black or white, but all colors.’’ At the same time, more privately or in the company of other activists of color, Utley asserts that his community’s problems have ‘‘95 percent to do with race’’ and refers to their situation as ‘‘environmental apart- heid’’ or ‘‘environmental genocide.’’ Thus, Utley strategically alternates between race- neutral and race-specific discourses, developing a complex environmental narrative that at times stresses racial victimization and at other times emphasizes a polluted environment’s potential to threaten all races alike.

Utley admits that he does not always mention the part about racism, saying, ‘‘You have to get a feel for your audience.’’ In other words, certain audiences prefer to hear only the first part of his message—interracial harmony. Utley and his colleagues are well aware of multiculturalism’s political currency, and by emphasizing diversity they increase their chances of winning political favor. Moreover, by casting the environment as color-blind and by putting little emphasis on racial concerns, HAPIC appears attractive to professional environmental groups that want to diversify their memberships but may not want to work with separatist or African–American groups they perceive as threatening.

This deliberate tacking back and forth highlights how political actors, even though they might use them, do not necessarily embrace the prevailing discourses. Moreover, it underscores how naming and challenging racism, given contemporary emphases on neutrality, requires complicated negotiations of discourse and identity (see Checker 2008).

On a national stage, however, oppositional identities have less room for fluidity. In recent years, difficult questions about identity, autonomy, and priorities have created much tension among environmental-justice leaders (see Brulle and Pellow 2005). More specifically, in 1999, the African American Environmental Justice Action Network (AAEJAN) held a meeting in Washington, D.C., to discuss critical issues in the future of their movement. At the meeting, activists debated whether to use the term ‘‘African American’’ or ‘‘black’’ in the name of their organization. Some activists believed that ‘‘African American’’ linked them to their African heritage, while others preferred ‘‘black,’’ inasmuch as the term connoted their specific experiences in the United States. As the meeting wore on, it became apparent that those who favored ‘‘African American’’ tended to be middle-stratum, better-educated activists while ‘‘black’’ was associated with activists considered to be more grassroots (Checker 2004). Several months later, at an ‘‘emergency’’ gathering in New Orleans, environmental-justice leaders disagreed over whether to focus their energies globally or domestically. Those in favor of the latter strategy did not oppose globalizing the movement in principle; rather, they believed that given the limited resources available, they ought to concentrate on the United States first. As Martin Clemons commented, ‘‘International is good, but let’s get the America thing together first.’’ Ultimately, then, these debates reflect anxieties over who would lead the movement, and how accountable leaders would be to their constituents (Checker 2004, 2008).

Disagreements have continued into the current century. For instance, in 2002, activists organized the second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (Summit II) to review the accomplishments of the movement since its inception in the late 1980s. Yet, the summit was beset by dissension. As one activist wrote in reflection, ‘‘Prioritization of issues became a topic of debate among participants along with how to best utilize funding sources and grant monies’’ (Southwest Research and Information Center 2003). In both cases, those advocating for global outreach tended to be academics and professionals. Those more domestically focused were more likely to be from working-class backgrounds. Again, these debates amounted to worries that academics and other professionals are asserting agendas that do not necessarily prioritize ‘‘grassroots’’ interests. [7] Unfortunately, however, disagreements in the U.S. have led environmental-justice activists in other countries to characterize their colleagues in the United States as ‘‘contentious’’ (Kalan and Peek 2005:257; see also Brulle and Pellow 2005).

Some U.S. activists blamed outsiders for stirring up strife in the age-old strategy of ‘‘divide and conquer.’’ As Arthur Smith, an activist from Augusta, Georgia, explained to me, infighting played right into the hands of those who wanted environmental justice to fail. ‘‘Fighting and having hissy fits is just what the polluters want us to do,’’ he said, ‘‘the enemy ain’t in the room, it’s outside the room.’’ For these people, ‘‘polluters’’ (read: capital interests, or what some activists refer to as the ‘‘anti environmental justice cabal’’ [8]) set intramovement dissension in motion to distract activists from their cause.

Whatever their source, controversies in the U.S. environmental-justice movement reflect the complexities of diverse versus race-based organizing in a neoliberal age. For example, Summit II organizers came under fire for not making greater efforts to include more poor and working-class white communities (Brulle and Pellow 2005). These debates again raise important questions. How can environmental Justice activists challenge the fact that race is a greater predictor of environmental pollution than income without dis- counting the very real experiences of poor whites? How important is it to maintain a message of ‘‘environmental racism’’? In answer to this question, Black environmental-justice activists in the United States are increasingly moving away from race-based organizing, and even the term ‘‘environmental racism.’’ For example, in 2004, Tamara Carter of Atlanta, Georgia, and a founding member of the movement, cautioned, ‘‘we’re not calling it the ‘Civil Rights of the New Millennium,’ it’s the ‘Human Rights of the New Millennium.’’’ While more inclusive language can indicate the coalition-building that is essential to the success of any movement, shifting away from race-based language represents another kind of neoliberal dispossession. In other words, not only does the disproportionate siting of toxic industries in their neighborhoods dispossess African–Americans of health and opportunity, but also conforming to neoliberal multicultural rhetoric dispossesses African–Americans of the significance of their specific experiences of racism.

Ecocolonialism, a.k.a. Conservation

Transnational environmental-justice activism is set against a backdrop of the rampant appropriation of land and resources by international agribusiness and economic development projects. More concretely, during the 20th century, development claimed half the world’s wetlands, and logging and land conversion shrank the world’s forests by half (Rees and Westra 2003:106). Not coincidentally, the same time period witnessed the advent of neoliberal economic policies and practices, which promote unrestricted open markets, flexible labor, and self-regulation (Mullings 2005). Underlying and justifying these policies and practices is the idea that the value of goods and services, and of humans themselves, could be measured by market demand, or exchange value. Thus, such ideas commodify both human labor by redirecting it from household subsistence to global markets (Johnston 1997:23), and flora and fauna by transforming them into ‘‘natural resources’’ ripe for commodification (Buscher and Wande 2007).

To counteract the widespread degradation and usurpation of land and resources, environmentalist groups launched campaigns in the latter part of the 20th century for the protection of endangered species and the preservation of biodiversity. These efforts led to a proliferation of national parks, game reserves, and other kinds of conservation areas, financed in large part through partnerships between national governments and international NGOs and aid agencies. But, in their lack of consideration for human lives, many conservation programs amounted to neocolonialism in the guise of nature preservation. [9] First, environmentalist campaigns wrongly portrayed these areas as devoid of human beings. Thousands of people who did live on the land were then resettled in underfunded programs that not only disrupted their traditional ways of life but also left them impoverished, dispossessed, and angry. [10] Second, these programs denied local people access to preservation areas, cutting them off from traditional livelihoods. Third, programs positioned indigenous people as exploiters of land and wildlife. These characterizations were then used to justify jailing or even killing large numbers of people in the name of conservation and preservation. [11] Some reports estimate that in a single year in one southern African country, as many as 96 people were shot and killed by local authorities, some only for gathering wild plants or obtaining water on conservation preserves (Hitchcock 1997:83). In another example, the imposition of ivory bans in 1989 led to a rise in the elephant population in Zimbabwe and Botswana. Elephants quickly became a major source of crop damage (as well as a danger to children), but shooting them remained illegal, even for self-protection (Hitchcock 1997:83–84). [12]

Affected communities have resisted the violence wrought by conservation and fought to participate in the management and implementation of preservation areas. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, their voices resonated with the rising popularity of multicultural discourse, and words such as ‘‘community-based’’ and ‘‘participatory’’ came to dominate conservation narratives. Today community-based conservation efforts (CBCs) tout ‘‘win-win’’ schemes that promise to conserve nature while promoting sustainable employment opportunities for local people. In actuality, however, CBCs have met with varying degrees of success. Most scholars agree that such efforts have usually been more superficial or semantic than substantive, inasmuch as they rarely preserve local economies and nature simultaneously (see Buscher and Wande 2007; Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau 2006; Mavhunga and Dressler 2007). Instead of increasing access to financial and ecological resources, they actually have shrunk them, thereby intensifying ethnic and racial divisions (Finley-Brook 2007:121). As a result, CBCs mask the same kinds of environmental discrimination that they are supposed to correct.

Importantly, CBCs have generated widespread opposition among African-descended people, reflecting their insistence on maintaining autonomy over traditional lands, as well as their resistance to neoliberal ideas themselves. For instance, in the examples that follow, environmental-justice activists question whether the ability to own businesses and compete in the market is necessarily synonymous with racial and ethnic equity (Finley-Brook 2007), as well as whether land can be divorced from people and culture in the first place.

Biodiversity: Black Colombians’ Struggle to Reclaim and Redefine Territorial Rights

African-descended people make up nearly one-third of Colombia’s population. For generations, they have maintained distinct material and cultural practices, although it was not until 1991 that the state officially recognized their rights to cultural difference (Escobar and Paulson 2005; Oslender 2002). Follow-up legislation, known as Ley (Law) 70, granted Afro-Colombians legal recognition as a distinct ethnicity with cultural and territorial rights to the lands along the Pacific Coast that they have populated for hundreds of years (Oslender 2002). Yet, the law directly conflicts with neoliberal policies in Colombia that allow foreign capital to enter largely unrestricted. Since 1990 development projects have displaced an estimated two to three million people, most of whom are African-descended. Making matters more complicated, Afro-Colombians have found themselves in the line of fire between government forces, drug mafias, left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries (Escobar and Paulson 2005). In fact, ironically, Ley 70 has intensified violence in the region, as some multinational capital interests are linked to paramilitaries, which use force and intimidation to dissuade local people from harnessing the law (Oslender 2002:24). Violent conflicts over both land and politics have resulted in the massacre and displacement of more than one million Afro-Colombians, and in some cases of entire villages. [13]

Recognizing the urgent need for territorial rights, in the early 1990s, Black activists in Colombia formed the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (Process of Black Communities, or PCN), now made up of 120 member organizations. The PCN was instrumental in passing Ley 70. Since then, despite efforts of the government to flout the law, the PCN has proactively taken advantage of it and has successfully challenged some destructive projects that include logging, African palm-oil plantations, mechanized gold mining, and industrial shrimp farming. PCN has also secured increased government restrictions to mitigate environmental and cultural damage along the coast. [14] Much of this work has come without assistance from Colombia’s conservation establishment (including state agencies and NGOs), which concentrates on habitat protection rather than on the ecocultural demands of the local people. Moreover, conservationist stereotypes blame Afro-Colombians for destroying the forest (Escobar and Paulson 2005).

PCN’s struggle is therefore as much about establishing discourses that counter discrimination as it is about traditional land rights. For example, PCN documents explicitly affirm their ‘‘right to be black’’ and ‘‘solidarity with the struggles of rights for black people throughout the world’’ (Escobar and Paulson 2005:265–266). In addition, just as African–American environmental-justice activists have redefined ‘‘the environment,’’ PCN members have asserted a definition of biodiversity as ‘‘territory plus culture.’’ In other words, for them, territories cannot be seen merely as natural landscapes but also as including the human beings indigenous to them and their culture. Thus, PCN activists resist the neoliberal idea that natural resources can be divided into discrete units and commodified or legislated accordingly. Rather, they see the Pacific rainforest region as comprising interlocking ecological and cultural units constructed in a dynamic process. In recognizing cultural diversity and interdependence, activists accommodate identities that are at once race-based and part of a larger ecocultural system. Moreover, by drawing parallels between their own cultural identities and the features of a biologically diverse ecology, PCN activists have found a way to retain a simultaneously distinct and integrated cultural identity.

Finally, like African–American environmental-justice activists, PCN members emphasize ‘‘the right to social, economic, cultural and political autonomy.’’ In this case, they include the ‘‘right to an autonomous perspective of the future, particularly an autonomous vision of development based on black culture’’ (Escobar and Paulson 2005:266). Here, while they acknowledge and honor the importance of traditional practices in defining culture, Afro-Colombians also leave open possibilities for innovation both in terms of development and of defining what it means to be Black. In this way, PCN members assert control over their past as well as their future.

Ecotourism and Resistance to ‘‘Win-Lose’’ Scenarios in Belize

In the past two decades, the market for ecotourist areas and conference centers set in nature has increased significantly (Belsky 1999; Buscher and Wande 2007). In its ideal form, ecotourism makes up for a local economy lost to conservation by bringing upscale tourists to experience conservation areas and enjoy local culture through tours, hotels, and facilities that are owned and operated by neighboring people (Boo 1990; Brandon 1996). Known for ethnically homogenous villages, Belize appears to be both a physically and culturally picturesque location for ecotourism. Yet, its homogeneity is shaped by colonial discourses about nature and race that historically marginalized and excluded rural Afro-Belizeans from economic and political power. In turn, these exclusions frame villagers’ responses to tourism.

For example, in the early 1990s, an all-American team of NGOs and scientists conceived a plan for a community-based cooperative ecotourism project in Gales Point, Manatee, an area in rural Belize (Belsky 1999). Ten years after its inception, however, only a few villagers benefited from the project. First, membership in the cooperative required paying a fee too high for most households. Second, although the program provided loans for building and operating bed-and-breakfasts, unforeseen costs made their upkeep barely feasible. Third, a decline in ecotourism in the mid-1990s reduced profit margins, and many families had to find additional work to pay back loans. Finally, tourism siphoned off local water and electricity, a situation compounded by nearby deforestation. Thus, community-based ecotourism not only failed to compensate for conservation programs by replacing resources, but it also actually added to their depletion.

In addition to creating material deficits, project leaders ignored the specific historic experiences of Gales Point residents. Cooperatives, for example, had a fraught history in Belize in the 1970s, and many people were disinclined to join them. Tourist marketing images portrayed villagers as ‘‘in the bush’’ and recalled common and detrimental stereotypes. Other residents took exception to directives telling them which crops to plant, and they resented the substantial funding that went toward ‘‘beautifying’’ the village for tourists. Project planners also blamed local fisherman for depleting fish stocks, but fishermen pointed to an American-owned fishing lodge. In the end, one villager compared his current situation to ‘‘the days of slavery’’ (Belsky 1999:664).

Villagers challenged ecotourism through daily resistances that recalled similar types of microlevel opposition typically employed by enslaved people. For instance, Gales Point villagers refused to deliver phone messages to tourists, and they continued to hunt ‘‘off-limits’’ species and engage in traditional forms of waste disposal (such as burning garbage on the beach) that would alienate tourists. Finally, in one dramatic example, someone set fire to a ‘‘community center’’ (Belsky 1999). Belizean scholars have noted similar power imbalances inherent in other Belizean ecotourist projects. However, despite the island’s relatively small size and a confluence of interests among various groups, resistance has generally remained small-scale and atomized. This factionalization again reflects specific historic contexts. Indeed, the homogeneity of Belizean villages also indicates the degree to which marginalized Belizeans have historically competed over resources and remained in opposition with one another (Johnson 2005; see also Medina 1997). Ironically, while the future promises an increase in ecotourist projects, these interventions also bring the potential for more substantive and collective opposition. For as the eco-tourism industry continues to deplete natural and social resources, it forces migration, which may ultimately render rural villages more heterogeneous and inspire greater cooperation and resistance.

Nicaraguan Responses to Green Neoliberalism

Nicaragua represents another case of a small nation replete with natural resources—and with internal strife. Political unrest generally plays out in a shifting array of alliances and divisions between ethnic groups—which roughly include Indians, Mestizos (of mixed Indian and white ancestry), Black Nicaraguans, and Creoles (of mixed Black and white ancestry)—the leftist FSLN or Sandinista party, and the right-wing Contras. For example, when the Sandinistas first came to power in 1979, its leaders promised greater equality for Miskitu Indians and Creoles. But when Miskitu groups demanded concrete autonomy over their land, the Sandinista government resisted them (Wade 1997). Miskitus then sided with the Contras in the early 1980s, during the insurgency against the Sandinistas. In 1984, the Sandinista government relented and granted limited legal autonomy to Atlantic coast minorities (Hale 1994). However, as in the Colombian case, that government disregarded the ambiguously worded laws and continued to encroach on minority lands (Wade 1997).

Some of those lands were folded into the Bosawas biosphere preserve, the largest conservation area in Central America. In 1990, just after defeating the Sandinistas in a democratic election, President Violeta Chamorro established the Bosawas reserve, funded in large part by the Nature Conservancy and the World Bank. Although new civil laws enhanced regional governments’ rights to regulate natural resources and recognized indigenous people’s right to the territories they traditionally occupied, the Chamorro government made the Bosawas decision unilaterally (Gordon, Gurdian, and Hale 2003; Kaimowitz, Faune, and Mendoza 2003). Regional governments and local communities ‘‘were informed after the fact that they now lived within or near a ‘national’ reserve, more- over a reserve that began with restrictive land-use policies that were poorly thought out, poorly communicated, and totally unenforced’’ (Stocks 1995:14). At the time, about half of the 250,000 people living in Bosawas were indigenous, and most of the rest were Creoles. Hundreds more people (largely Mestizos) were returning annually from Honduras, where they had fled during the civil war (Finely-Brook 2007:112). Altogether, thousands of people lived in the project’s protected core area, where they farmed, ranched, mined, and logged, all of which were now off-limits to them.

Almost immediately, these people immediately organized to manage the reserve themselves, asserting that its designation violated their historical rights to their land (Howard 1996:6). But political strife within the preserve quickly intensified, inasmuch as it had already become a hotspot for drug trafficking and harboring armed groups (Finley-Brook 2007:113). In 2003, in an effort to control the situation, President Enrique Bolanos forcibly relocated newcomers from the park, permitting only indigenous populations with customary claims to stay. Distinctions between indigenous and Black populations quickly emerged; those with African diasporic roots were seen as having less valid claims than those with indigenous roots. Whereas socioeconomic hierarchies traditionally ranked Creoles higher than indigenous people, and Creoles had carefully distinguished themselves from other ethnic groups, in a dramatic departure, some Creoles downplayed their African heritage and cast themselves as indigenous (Gordon et al. 2003; see also Gordon 1998). Significantly, Creoles thus demonstrated the degree to which they valued land and autonomy over social status.

In the end, emphasizing indigenousness did not translate into cooperative alliances; neither did it stem conflict in and around the biosphere. Long-standing regional and ethnic competition for territorial rights continued to leave groups living around the biosphere in conflict with one another, as well as with the government and international NGOs. Despite promises to resolve land-tenure disputes and to grant greater local autonomy, the Nicaraguan government continued to make decisions in conjunction with international NGOs rather than with local people. Adding insult to injury, they enforced those decisions through the military, again reminding people all too well of violence between the Sandinistas and the Contras (some of whom were former members of the hated National Guard of the repressive Somoza regime, which the Sandinista revolution overthrew). According to geographer Mary Finley-Brook, by 2000 the project ‘‘appeared to have been co-opted by a state with little commitment to the environment, but eager to access donor funding’’ (Finely-Brook 2007:113).

Perpetuating interethnic strife and confusion over land tenure is reminiscent of the ‘‘divide and conquer’’ strategy that African–American activists decry. Certainly, such a strategy serves the interests of the central government, the World Bank, and international corporations—as long as ownership is disputed, land can more easily be privatized and used for profit—and today, more than ever, there is much money to be made from protecting natural resources under neoliberal conservation schemes.

Although the Sandinistas returned to power in 2006 with the election of Daniel Ortega Saavedra, privatization, as well as ‘‘neoliberal multiculturalism,’’ continues in and around the Bosawas reserve. In particular, a public–private partnership has designated a large swath of land on the edge of the preserve for a carbon-offset program. Carbon offsetting is a process by which consumers can supposedly ‘‘offset’’ their green- house-gas emissions (from personal air travel, for instance, or the use of automobiles) by paying a set amount of money that is then channeled to programs that compensate for such emissions (by, for example, tree planting or methane trapping). In July 2007, Carbonfund.org, the leading provider of climate credits in the United States, and Paso Pacifico, a nonprofit organization dedicated to restoring endangered tropical forests, launched Phase I of the Nicaragua Return to Forest Project (RTF). Located on the edge of the Bosawas reserve, the project will restore large areas of tropical dry forest habitat in Nicaragua while ostensibly offsetting 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide. [15] Promotional materials promise to benefit local people through ecotourism and other kinds of sustainable development, yet nowhere do they mention local involvement in project planning. Rather, those materials state that the project will involve ‘‘landowner partners’’ at every stage in the implementation process. However, the definition of ‘‘landowner’’ is extremely contentious in this area. [16] In the end, even the current socialist government is sanctioning land privatization, while neutralizing resistance to it through rhetoric about sustainability and participation.

Ominously, not only are the ecological benefits of carbon offset programs highly debatable, [17] but their human costs are also already evident (see Zarembo 2007). For example, in a project similar to but better-established than RTF, in the early 1990s the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and the FACE (Forests Absorbing Carbon Dioxide Emissions) Foundation set aside large swaths of national parks as ‘‘offset’’ areas, where they plant trees funded by carbon-credit purchases. However, since the project’s inception, the UWA has evicted thousands of people from the park. Even worse, UWA authorities have been known to beat and shoot villagers in order to prevent them from using the parks (Lohmann 2007). In short, the potential for large-scale profits through carbon-offset projects only intensifies the violence that often accompanies the ‘‘safeguarding’’ of conservation areas.

On a more positive note, just as the cresting global ‘‘greenwave’’ carries new opportunities for profit-making, it may also bring new opportunities for alliances and activism. In Central America, robust opposition to the Central American Free Trade Agreement over the past few years has spawned new international alliances. Some of those are now joining with environmental groups organizing against carbon trading. Moreover, recently, indigenous and Black Nicaraguans have begun organizing for autonomy in the form of multicommunal bloques, or territories that would be controlled by multi-ethnic and decentralized local governments (Hale 2005). In all these efforts, the links between free trade and environmental and human exploitation are clear, and activists insist that ‘‘environmental and indigenous development policies do not inherently need to be neoliberal and may not be best implemented within un-wieldy mega-projects’’ (Finley-Brook 2007:121).

Such resistance to neoliberalism is ever more pressing as world leaders turn to market- based solutions to climate change, which threaten to exacerbate environmental injustice and further endanger the lives of the peoples of the African diaspora. In the context of ever-shifting global economies and political climates, activists continually readjust the relative significance they place on their diasporic experiences and their positioning within the global economy.

Connecting the Global South with the South of the North

Founded in 1993, the South African Exchange Program on Environmental Justice (SAEPEJ) brought South Africans living in polluted environments together with African–Americans facing similar problems. According to its founders, the program grew out of the increasing recognition among former anti-apartheid organizers that one of the most dangerous legacies of apartheid was an infrastructure that facilitated the location of toxic industries in poor areas (Kalan and Peek 2005). Moreover, the same companies polluting South African communities were also polluting African– American neighborhoods. For example, Sasol, a key player in the South African oil industry, owns and operates a vinyl and petrochemical manufacturing facility in Mossville, Louisiana, whose African–American community claims that Sasol is behind dangerous levels of toxic chemicals, hazardous accidents, and fishery and groundwater contamination.18 In 2004, SAEPEJ brought one of Mossville’s environmental-justice leaders to Sasolburg, South Africa, the company’s headquarters. That exchange was one of four that SAEPEJ organized between 1998 and 2004; twice it brought South African organizers to the United States, and twice the reverse. Exchanges focused on issues such as waste, air quality, and youth activism.

SAEPEJ programs thus endeavor to maintain anti-apartheid solidarities by calling attention to the fact that problems in African–American backyards are also problems in South African backyards, and they were premised on the idea that South Africans and African–Americans had a lot to teach one another (Kalan and Peek 2005:255). Toussaint Losier, former project coordinator for SAEPEJ, elaborates, ‘‘South Africans knew a lot about grassroots organizing and in the U.S. people had developed a lot of expertise especially in environmental science.’’ [19] On a more general level, Losier points out that exchange participants deepened their understandings of ‘‘how white supremacy and capitalism operate similarly [in each country].’’ Interestingly, program organizers also sought to dispel stereotypes and foster greater social understanding between activists. Or, as Kalan writes, they wanted to show South African activists that every American is not ‘‘living in a home with a white picket fence and has a nice job and weekends off’’ (Kalan and Peek 2005:256).

Yet, despite establishing common ground, SAEPEJ members encountered significant hemispheric differences. As groundWork [20] (formerly SAEJP) Project Coordinator, Sunita Dubey explained, ‘‘even within the similarities [between South African and African American activists], we found there are more differences.’’ [21] For instance, in South Africa, owing to a differentially developed communication and transportation infrastructure, some communities suffering from environmental injustice are extremely difficult to reach (Kalan and Peek 2005). Moreover, critical issues for South African environmental justice, such as land repatriation, conservation and development, and international aid do not apply to African–American struggles. Finally and most troubling, just as the historic gains made by environmentalists in the United States had negative effects on African–Americans, some environmental-justice gains in the United States have hurt communities in the global South. In fact, victories in the North have sometimes meant compounded environmental degradation in the South, for successful opposition to toxic waste projects often means that they are shipped overseas. As Bobby Peek, an organizer with groundWork South Africa notes, ‘‘The divisions between North and South make things very difficult in terms of environmental progress. Sometimes when you in the North take one step forward, we in the South tend to take two steps back. With every EJ victory there is some bitterness on the other level, on the other side, and for me that’s the sad reality that is quite painful at times’’ (Kalan and Peek 2005:263). groundWork has discontinued its U.S./South Africa exchanges for the time being. Instead, it plans to develop exchanges with Brazil (in 2008) and India (in 2009). Again, Dubey commented that this shift grows out of the organization’s desire to emphasize South Africa’s ties to other developing nations rather than its African diaspora–based ties to the U.S.

Conclusions

Around the world, global anxieties about climate change are giving rise to a new greenwave. At the same time, a neoliberal belief that market growth eventually benefits all people alike continues to inform many environmental groups. Unsurprisingly, then, industrialized nations base their main global-warming strategies on profit-making schemes such as carbon trading and ecotourism. How will those schemes affect people of the African diaspora? Already, long histories of racist practices and marginalization place African-diasporic people on the front lines to bear some of the worst effects of global warming. Unfortunately, neoliberal environmental solutions (no matter how well-dressed they are in sustainable clothing) further contribute to the degradation of these people’s social and ecological environments.

Still, the greenwave is emergent, and it is possible that environmental-justice activists can partially direct its flow. Environmental-justice groups such as New York City’s Sustainable South Bronx and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, are capitalizing on the new ‘‘green economy’’ (or investment in alternative-energy sources) by training low-income youth for ‘‘green-collar’’ jobs that include building green roofs and solar panels, riverbed restoration, and water testing. Indeed, the installation of energy-conservation technology requires in-situ, hands- on expertise, and some activists recognize that it implies exciting new job opportunities for low-income people around the world (see Friedman 2007; Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2007). Green-collar job training programs also open new possibilities for fruitful and instructive transnational exchanges, for despite their differences, environmental justice activists from the North and the South do have much to learn from one another. Not only can they share innovative vocational ideas, but activists from the North have also spent decades addressing toxic waste and can apply their experiences to developing more equitable distribution and prevention programs in the global South. Activists from the global South, on the other hand, have great experience in challenging neoliberalism in general, and so-called sustainable projects more specifically. There is hope that the possibilities brought by a green economy will foster an array of environmental-justice alliances between and within our hemispheres and continents.

On a more theoretical level, of what continued relevance are African-diasporic identities to the cause of environmental justice? Activists themselves are answering that question by moving away from essentialist notions of race. Instead, they favor an emphasis on the processes of racialization that unite them with subaltern groups of all backgrounds (Mullings 2004, 2007, emphasis mine). Certainly, this move is strategic, for organizing requires careful attention in a post–civil-rights, neoliberal era that celebrates multiculturalism as long as it is divorced from justice issues. A broad ‘‘human rights’’ framework allows environmental-justice activists to deploy the most appropriate oppositional identities for particular contexts. Controlling and choosing whether to emphasize or de-emphasize Blackness also establishes the autonomous ground that environmental justice activists seek, at least on a discursive level. Finally, maintaining contingent and flexible identities facilitates activists’ ability to stay one step ahead of neoliberal multiculturalism and the co-optation of their movement—which is essential to their ability to ride, rather than to be swallowed by, the global greenwave.