Whiteness and Sustainability: Reflecting on Race, Class, and Green Living

Is the movement for environmental sustainability a white, middleclass phenomenon? I imagine that many of us have heard this allegation, and, unfortunately, with the exception of the environmental justice movement, it seems to be, for the most part, accurate. Yet many in the movement respond to this observation with perplexity. The typical attitude can be summed up in questions like: "Why don't these people (working class people, people of color, low income people) recognize the urgency of the ecological crisis?" and "How can we reach them?" We've been asking these questions for four decades and gotten no satisfactory answers. Perhaps the time has come to ask new questions. Rather than asking why they don't get it, maybe we need to think deeply about what we (white middleclass people) are not getting. I think a good way to start would be by exploring how the agenda and worldview of the ecology movement is shaped by unacknowledged race and class privilege, such that it has simply not been able to make itself relevant to people from other race and class backgrounds.

The reason privilege is such a potent source of unquestioned beliefs is that it is itself quite stealth, at least to those who possess it. Indeed, it is in the very nature of privilege to remain unnoticed by those who benefit from it, while it is almost always blatantly obvious to everyone else. This is the result of a psychological process called cognitive dissonance, whereby the brain essentially rewires itself so as to not perceive aspects of the world that present painful contradictions or challenge one's sense of identity. In the context of privilege, this means that we structure our experience of the world so that our social advantages seem natural and/or deserved. Another result is that those who are clearly struggling may be seen as somehow different or deficient. A useful example of this sort of post hoc rationalization is physical ability.[1] Physical access is obviously far easier for those of us who possess physical abilities that have been coded as "normal." After all, who among us thinks about our physical ability as an unearned privilege? Yet that is exactly what it is. Our built environments have mostly been constructed by able-bodied people, for able-bodied people. That we have mostly missed this fact, of course, does not by itself make us bad people. It just makes us human.  

Similar to able-bodied privilege, race and class privilege are unearned and they are built into the structures and institutions of our society. Moreover, cognitive dissonance operates in the same way, ensuring that those of us possessing privilege experience a reality radically different from those who do not. The social consequences of this disconnect are enormous, and include the makeup of the ecology movement and the particular race and class-based perspective that shapes its agenda.  

One example of the race/class perspective of environmentalism is its traditional concern for preservation. Going back at least to John Muir, advocates of environmental protection have been motivated largely by their veneration for the wild, especially for the beauty of so-called untouched wilderness and for the majesty of large charismatic mammals. Even appeals to scientifically legitimate concerns such as biodiversity and ecosystem integrity often tap into these deeper emotional currents, which are rooted in a Romantic or aesthetic attitude, and which are more typical of city dwellers who conceive their relationship to the natural world in terms of leisure outdoor activities. People who depend on nature for their livelihood as well, as those trapped in inner-city settings lacking access to wild spaces, are understandably unmoved by the Romantic appeals of traditional preservationism.  

We also need to recognize the ways in which so-called green consumption, as a response to ecological

concerns, is bound up with race and class privilege. There is certainly no question that those with resources ought to make ecologically responsible consumer choices. The problem is with casting what amounts to luxury consumption in moral terms. Unfortunately, certain forms of consumption, such as buying local, driving a hybrid, or even voluntary simplicity, are often conferred moral weight, despite the fact that the ability to make such choices relies on the systemic unearned privileges that go with being white and middleclass in the U.S.

In the spirit of this examination and with apologies to Peggy McIntosh, I have assembled a partial and provisional list of specific race and class privilege that seem to be taken for granted in the culture of white middleclass environmentalism or sustainability.

Here is my list so far. Please feel free to suggest other privileges that I missed:

1. I can, if I wish, purchase fresh local produce at my neighborhood farmer’s market. 
2. I have the means to access organic produce and other environmentally friendly products at local coops, and other eco-conscious merchants. 
3. I can, if I wish reduce my carbon footprint by driving a hybrid vehicle.
4. I can choose to live in a neighborhood where many local services are accessible by walking or bicycling. 
5. Because I have had access to an abundance of consumer products all my life, I am able to derive both material and moral satisfaction from choosing a simplicity based lifestyle.
6. I can imagine that the consequences of environmental destruction constitute a threat of future calamity rather than an ongoing disaster.
7. I can choose to live in a neighborhood where I feel close to nature and wildlife. 
8. I can choose to take advantage of incentives provided by my workplace to carpool or take public transit.
9. I have access to wild places, where I may deepen my appreciation for the natural world and its diversity of life forms.
10. When I cannot get to wild places, I can enjoy parks and other pockets of natural beauty in my neighborhood.
11. If I spend time in wild places, I will encounter people who look like me, and I can count on feeling welcome there.
12. I am able to appreciate spending time in wild places because outdoor activities have always been accessible to me and my kin.
13. Wild places do not provoke cultural memories that associate the woods with the torture and killing of people who look like me.
14. I can take a nap in a public park without it being assumed that I might be homeless.
15. I can spend time in the deserts of the Southwest without anyone asking to see my papers.
16. My sense of intimacy with the land does not entail spending all day in the hot sun picking strawberries or tending someone else’s lawn.
17. I can work in my own yard or garden without people assuming I am the gardener.
18. I can choose to spend time outdoors only when the weather is agreeable.
19. Because the satisfaction of my basic needs is buffered from the vicissitudes of nature, such as storms, droughts and bad harvests, I can approach the natural world in predominantly aesthetic or spiritual terms.
20. I can enjoy National Parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone, imagining them as intact wildernesses because their establishment did not involve the forcible removal of my ancestors.
21. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering the struggles of actual Native Americans to preserve their culture in the face of genocide and forced assimilation.
22. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering how Native Americans may feel upon seeing their culture appropriated (and often profited on) by non-native people.
23. I can take part in Native American ceremonies and adorn myself with their cultural artifacts without considering how Native Americans continue to be oppressed and impoverished and have their culture imperiled by U.S. policies.
24. I can adopt an uncompromising attitude about the protection of ecosystems & wild land habitat without worrying that my own livelihood will be threatened or that I will be unable to access the products I use in my daily life.
25. I can choose to blame the whole human species for the ecological crisis, rather than looking at how my lifestyle depends not only on ecological destruction, but also on inter-human violence, exploitation, and oppression.
26. Because my children attend a relatively safe school, are not suffering from asthma due to poor local air quality, and are not harassed by the police or surrounded by gang culture, I have the emotional space to feel agony over the imminent loss of iconic species such as polar bears, African lions, and dolphins.
27. For the most part, I do not have to concern myself with the impacts of the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on illegal immigration, or the right-wing war on the social safetynet because none of these action directly target me or people who look or live like me, leaving me time and energy to focus on ecology.
28. I have time and energy to think abstractly about ecology because my lifestyle is supported by a vast and semi-invisible labor force.
29. I can choose to focus my energies on causes that appeal to me, and I prefer ecology because nature is beautiful and the wildlife does not express anger toward me or cause me to feel guilty about the crimes of my ancestors.
30. I can work on environmental issues and feel good about myself for my good intentions rather than feeling guilt and shame for stuff that feels beyond my control.  
31. Unlike much of the human family, I can believe that ecological destruction is separate from and more urgent than racism, sexism, or other forms of ‘merely’ human oppression
32. My decisions about which issues to focus on have no direct or immediate impact on my physical well being.

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[1] I owe this example to Reverend Deborah Johnson. 

Reflections on Whiteness and the Ecospiritual Movement

I consider myself somewhat of a veteran of the Northern California counterculture, or at least the Ecospiritual aspect of it. I graduated from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I studied, among other things, the history of the modern worldview as it has developed in politics, economics, philosophy, and especially science. My own research examined the roots of mechanism and vitalism in biology and the alternative paradigm that is now taking shape at the intersection of evolutionary and developmental genetics. Yet, some of my deepest learning took place well beyond the academy, at places like Esalen and at workshops and retreats, where practices such as talking circles, ceremonies, and encounters with nature were employed to cultivate deep personal and full-bodied integration of the alternative paradigm to which the movement is committed. Indeed, this integral approach comprises the true heart of the Ecospiritual movement.

The reason the Ecospiritual movement emphasizes the integration of personal/spiritual growth and intellectual development derives from the way knowledge itself is understood within the new paradigm. The dominant worldview, which sees the universe as a collection of essentially disconnected things moving in space and interacting according to fixed laws, tends to imagine the human mind in terms of a disembodied rationality, passively receiving information and analyzing it to arrive at an objective representation of the world. The last hundred years of science, however, has revealed that the universe consists of an intricate web of interdependent relationships and processes. Science has demonstrated the embeddedness of human cognition in that web and is reconceiving knowledge itself as a profoundly participatory process, inseparable from the lived body and its milieu. For the Ecospiritual movement, therefore, knowing involves embodiment, rather than merely memorization, and education is part of a much larger agenda, namely, the creative transformation of our civilization.

What, you may be thinking, does any of this have to do with the cosmology of whiteness? Well, it is an open secret that the Ecospiritual movement is overwhelmingly white. In the decade I spent in graduate school in San Francisco, my classmates were almost exclusively people of Anglo-European descent. Outside of the academy, the situation is better, but only slightly. When this lack of racial diversity is pointed out, folks often express some regret, but, in my experience, their attitude is just as often characterized by bewilderment and defensiveness. After all, their reasoning goes, everyone is welcome. It would be nice if there were more people of color around, but we can’t be blamed for who shows up and who doesn’t.

So why does it really matter that there are so few people of color in this movement? Given that the goal of the movement is to transform our civilization in order to head off the catastrophic human and ecological consequences of unsustainable industrial growth, it matters for a couple key reasons. First, never in the history of humanity has a social movement led by the people who benefit from the prevailing order succeeded in bringing about real change.[i] Every major advance in human liberation has been won through the struggle of those seeking to liberate themselves. Second, there already is a massive global liberation movement underway, which is responding to the ongoing catastrophes wrought by the industrial expansion. This unnamed and leaderless movement, documented by Paul Hawken in his book Blessed Unrest, is comprised of and led by those people and communities of color directly impacted by the hyper-exploitation of the Earth and the large scale ecological instabilities generated by these practices. Can the Ecospiritual movement be relevant if it fails to align itself with this larger revolutionary force?

The question remains: what is it about the Ecospiritual movement that makes it appealing predominantly to white people? How might it be expressing itself in ways that reproduce the cosmology of whiteness? I think part of an answer can be found by looking at the Human Potential Movement, which has had a foundational influence on the Ecospiritual movement. The Human Potential Movement (HPM) emerged in Northern California in the mid 1960s based largely on the humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. HPM is rooted in the conviction that people are inherently good and endowed with much greater potential than they ever realize. Our highest capacities usually remain unrealized because we are, in various ways, conditioned to accept a limiting story about who we are and what we are capable of. Once we recognize the ways in which we have been mistaken about our limitations, we can become empowered to transcend our self-limiting stories, take responsibility for our lives and, most importantly, begin to make a positive difference in the world.

This sounds pretty good, but there are a couple of things we need to consider. First, I want to suggest that the presumption of individual self-determination, central to HPM, depends crucially on white privilege. The right to determine one’s life conditions has not, by and large, been something people of color in this country can take for granted. From slavery and genocide, to Jim Crow and Native American boarding schools, to Japanese American internment, to the war on drugs and racist anti-immigrant laws, people of color in the U.S. have been and continue to be denied the sort of control over their lives to which those of us who identify as white often feel entitled. The assumption that genuine personal power is equally available to anyone with sufficient self-awareness reflects an obliviousness I encounter all too often among my Ecospiritual co-travelers.  

Another potentially problematic tendency within HPM is the emphasis it often places on sudden and dramatic personal change, due to some revelation about one's personal history. I have heard seemingly countless stories of individuals experiencing remarkable transformations after coming to see the self-limiting ways in which they had been interpreting their lives. My point is not that these sorts of personal shifts never happen. I’ve had a breakthrough or two of my own, after all. Rather, it’s the exaggerated way that these personal transformations tend to be characterized. I too often hear these personal breakthroughs described in transcendent terms, as if one’s personal and collective history can simply be sloughed off as so much dead skin. Though rhetorically compelling, the discourse of radical personal renewal tends to discount the very real power of social and structural influences and the dependence of those influences on legacies of oppression and privilege. Of course, everyone can benefit from less fear and greater self-awareness, but I suspect that people of color suffering real daily oppression might feel less than supported by white people telling them that their problems are self-imposed.

The Ecospiritual movement inherits these tendencies from HPM, but it goes a step further, imagining that transforming individuals is sufficient to transform society at large. Having blamed Descartes and Newton for the mind-body dualism and mechanistic materialism that characterize modern thought, we Ecospiritual types seem to think that once everyone understands the new paradigm of self-organization and interdependence, social change will somehow just follow. Once everyone sees how the universe works, and how everything and everyone is interconnected, we’ll be able bring forth the equitable, peaceful, and sustainable world we all want. Let me be clear. I’m not saying that the people I know actually believe it’s this simple. But whether we believe it or not, its logic still haunts our conversations.[ii] This attitude, however, exemplifies the individualism and habitual innocence that characterizes the white American psyche. Like colorblindness, it denies the momentum of history and disregards the immense institutional power invested in the prevailing order.

Finally, while it might plausibly be argued that the foregoing tendencies are distortions of valid HPM principles, there is a deeper problem, I think, which goes to HPM's philosophical underpinnings. Recall that one of the main forebears of HPM is Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow’s theory, the pinnacle of human potential, self-actualization, exists atop a hierarchy of human needs. Before people experience higher needs, such as the need for self-actualization, they are expected to have met what he called their “deficiency needs,” which begin with food and shelter, and culminate in esteem and respect. Given this structure, the fact that HPM, and, by extension, the Ecospiritual movement, attracts a relatively privileged population should surprise no one. Personal growth workshops must seem pretty extravagant to someone struggling just to keep themselves and their kids safe and fed. 

Needless to say (if you read my previous post or any of the many other accounts of  institutional and systemic white privilege) people of color in the U.S. continue to face significant extra burdens in trying to meet their most basic needs. Besides this obvious fact, Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t necessarily even work the same way for people of color in this country. It may not be possible for black and brown folks in the contemporary U.S. to have their deficiency needs reliably met. Being elected to the highest office in the land was not enough to garner President Obama sufficient respect that he could escape the humiliation of having to show his papers. And, as the recent murder of two Sikh men in Sacramento demonstrates, not even physical safety can be taken for granted when you are perceived as different than the white norm. 

So where does all this leave us? Clearly, if my analysis is correct, white privilege is practically written into the charter of the Ecospiritual movement. But I want to be clear that it is not my intention simply to critique the movement. I consider myself hopelessly committed to it, and I think it has a valuable role to play. I do believe, however, that in order to have the impact we wish to have in the world, we must build genuine alliances with the wider movement for human liberation and justice, which is lead primarily by people of color. And this cannot happen unless the white folks in the Ecospiritual movement are willing to confront our own racial privileges. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I am convinced that the Ecospiritual movement is going to be rendered irrelevant unless challenging racism and white privilege becomes a basic premise of our work.  

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[i] I have no research to support this negative claim, but if anyone has an example to disprove it, I’d love to hear it. BTW, I certainly don’t mean to suggest that individuals cannot be committed, to the point of risking their lives, to causes that do not serve their personal or collective interests. The Civil Rights movement provides plenty of counterexamples to that, and the US military is one big counterexample.

[ii] This habit of thought draws its psychic sustenance, I suppose, from the millennialism that continues to characterize Western thinking about the future.