[m2c] Rape of the Land by Andrea Smith (Part 3)

[usman x]

Chpater 3 from "Conuest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide"
by Andrea Smith. 2005. pgs 55-78

[continued]

ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM AND SEXISM

In 1991, environmental justice activists converged in Washington, D.C.
to formulate the principles of environmental justice at the People of
Color Environmental Justice Summit. This summit was called because
activists felt that mainstream environmental groups were divorcing
environmental issues from larger social justice issues. Participants
adopted the Principles of Environmental Justice, which called for
environmental protection within the context of "political, cultural
and economic liberation."55 A follow-up summit was held in 2002 in
Washington, D.C. to assess the work of the environmental justice
movement and forge strategies for future work.

While the analysis and organizing of the environmental justice
movement is exemplary, it often marginalizes women of color. That is,
women of color are suffering from not only environmental racism but
environmental sexism. This intersectionality is advanced in what Betsy
Hartmann calls "the greening of hate." The greening of hate describes
the phenomenon of people who acknowledge the importance of
environmental destruction, but place the blame on the Global South,
immigrants, and people of color (primarily women of color) for this
destruction.

Drawing on Malthusian logic, some population alarmists assert that
"overpopulation" is the primary cause of poverty and environmental
destruction in the world: population grows geometrically, they claim,
while food production grows arithmetically. According to this logic,
eventually the number of people on the earth must outstrip the earth's
"carrying capacity." In much of the populationist literature,
overpopulation is "the single greatest threat to the health of the
planet."56 Even the more moderate populationists, such as the Sierra
Club, blame population growth for,

         profound consequences for the global environment, including
         species extinction, deforestation, desertification, climate
         change, and the destruction of natural ecosystems. These
         global environmental impacts pose a significant threat to the
         earth's sustainability and impact our quality of life.57

Since the fertility rates of the industrialized world are stable at
replacement levels, population control advocates can devote their time
and energy to the burgeoning growth rates in the Global South and
immigration issues in the U.S. In effect, women of color, immigrant
women, and women from the Global South then become the perpetrators,
rather than the victims, of environmental degradation.

One flaw of the Malthusian argument is the underlying assumption that
"natural fertility rates" are always high and checked only by the
vicissitudes of famine, war, and disease. To the contrary, women have
always had means of controlling reproduction. Ironically, colonial
powers often tried to stamp out traditional means of birth control to
ensure a large supply of cheap labor and a captive market for their
finished goods.58 In recent years, Nestle has discouraged
breast-feeding, a natural birth spacer, in order to increase sales of
its infant formula among Global South women: more babies means more
formula, more formula means more babies. As Maria Mies and Vandana
Shiva note, the population of India was stable until the advent of
British colonialism.59

Poverty, starvation, environmental degradation, and overpopulation
are the direct result of specific colonial practices. When
colonization forced women into cash economies, it became necessary for
them to have more children in order to raise more cash crops. Also,
increased mortality rates that have resulted from the effects of
colonialism and structural adjustment programs motivate women to have
more children in hopes that some will survive. Over the last 25 to 30
years, structural adjustment programs have cut social services in the
Global South, making children necessary for old age security and for
helping with womens' increased workloads. In fact, by the age of 15,
children in the Global South have repaid their parents' investment in
their upbringing.60

Some populationists say population growth contributes to starvation.
Yet there is actually enough food produced in the world to sustain
every person at a 3,000-calorie-per-day diet.61 However, land is used
inefficiently in order to support livestock for environmentally
unsustainable Western meat-based diets. The same land that is used to
maintain livestock for 250 days worth of food could be used to
cultivate soybeans for 2,200 days.62 By cycling our grain through
livestock, we end up with only 10 percent of the calories for human
consumption as would be available if we ate the grain directly. In
addition, food produced in the Global South is often exported to pay
off debts to the World Bank rather than used to meet local needs.
Consequently, even countries that are stricken by famine export
food.63 Unfortunately, rather than look at the root causes of
environmental destruction, poverty, and rapid population growth,
population alarmists scapegoat "overpopulation" as the primary cause
of all these problems, allowing corporations and governments to remain
unaccountable.

This "greening of hate" particularly victimizes women of color. A
glaring example is the work of Center for Research on Population and
Security, headed by Stephen Mumford and Elton Kessel. Mumford and
Kessel have been involved with a number of mainstream environmental
organizations to form a National Optimum Population Commission, which
would determine how many people should live in the U.S. to promote
ecological sustainability. These same individuals are involved with
the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and have stated
on the BBC's /Human Laboratory/ that immigration is a threat to the
national security of the U.S. To forestall this national security
risk, Mumford and Kessel globally distribute a drug for sterilization,
Quinacrine.

Quinacrine is a drug that is used to treat malaria. It can also be
inserted into the uterus, where it dissolves, causing the fallopian
tubes to scar and rendering the woman irreversibly sterile. Family
Health International conducted four in-vitro studies and found
Quinacrine to be mutagenic in three of them. As a result, Family
Health International and the World Health Organization recommended
against further trials for female sterilization, and no regulatory
body supports Quinacrine for sterilization. However, the North
Carolina-based Center for Research on Population and Security has
circumvented these bodies through private funding from such
organizations as the Turner Foundation and the Leland Fykes
Organization, which has been distributing it for free to researchers
and government health agencies. Field trials are underway in 11
countries, with over 70,000 women sterilized. In Vietnam, 100 female
rubber plant workers were given routine pelvic exams during which the
doctor inserted the Quinacrine without their consent.

Thus far, the side effects linked with the drug include ectopic
pregnancy, puncturing of the uterus during insertion, pelvic
inflammatory disease, and severe abdominal pain. Other possible
concerns include heart and liver damage, and the exacerbation of
preexisting viral conditions. In one of the trials in Vietnam, a large
number of cases in which women had serious side effects were excluded
from the data.64 Yet Mumford and Kessel publicly stated at the Beijing
U.N. Conference on Women that they plan to supply Quinacrine to
clinicians in the U.S. for female sterilization. Other physicians seem
to be following suit. For example, a clinical trial on Quinacrine is
currently underway at the Children's Hospital of Buffalo under the
supervision of Jack Lippes, M.D. And in its July 2002 newsletter, the
Women's Global Network for Reproductive Rights reported that
Quinacrine sterilizations were advertised and offered at Family
Planning Inc., a private clinic run by Randall Switney, M.D., in
Daytona Beach.

Despite the attacks they've made on womens' reproductive rights,
mainstream environmental organizations cooperate with Mumford and
Kessel in campaigning for an optimum-population commission. Yet in
their efforts to further population control, many environmentalists
argue that the need to control population hikes precedence over
women's reproductive freedom. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute
favors China's one-child policy, as did the late Garrett Hardin,
activist and author of /Tragedy of the Commons/. Hardin, former vice
president of the American Eugenics Society, was a popular thinker in
the environmental movement, and sat on the board of Washington
D.C.-based Population Environment Balance. In a 1997 interview with
the /Wall Street Journal,/ Hardin argued that the problem is not simply
that there are too many people in the world, but there are too many of
*the wrong kind of people.* "It would be better to encourage the
breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent,"
he said. In fact, Hardin argued that the one-child policy was not
strict enough, and that he supported infanticide as another viable
component of population control.65 Similarly, at an ecofeminist
conference, Population-Environment Balance, an anti-immigration
environmentalist group, advocated that "at risk" teenagers be
subjected to mandatory Norplant.66

THE POPULATION PARADIGM

Rather than being caused by overpopulation, significant environmental
damage is actually caused by the environmentally destructive Western
development projects, such as hydroelectric dams, uranium development,
militarism, and livestock production. These projects ultimately
benefit the wealthy living in industrialized countries, which are
responsible for producing over 75 percent of the world's pollution.67
Development projects also cause unparalleled environmental damage,
such as damming programs that flood entire biosystems or projects that
rely on massive deforestation. More than one third of World Bank
projects completed in 1993 were judged failures by its own staff, with
some countries experiencing a success rate of less then 50 percent.68
Any damage done by indigenous people, peasants, and Global South
farmers cannot compare to the damage done by multinationals and the
World Bank, so the claim that stopping the "overpopulation" of
peasants and indigenous peoples in Global South countries will "save
the environment" is baseless. Furthermore, Fatima Mello of FASE
(Federation of Educational and Social Assistance Organizations — a
Brazilian environmental and development NGO), notes that in Brazil, a
higher density of population in certain areas of the Amazon often
helps to *stop* encroachment by the World Bank or multinational
corporations and their environmentally disastrous projects.69

Related to these neocolonial policies is the resulting immigration to
the U.S. from poor countries/the Global South. As the U.S. extracts
resources from the Global South, people naturally follow these
resources to the U.S. Yet, some mainstream environmentalists complain
that the U.S. is now "overpopulated" by immigrants. Immigrants,
Garrett Hardin claims, cause "global warming, species extinction, acid
rain, and deforestation. ...Immigration...is threatening the carrying
capacity limits of the natural environment." Because of "their
excessive reproductive rates," immigrants cause mass environmental
damage, "compete with our poor for jobs," and burden the taxpayer
through "increased funding obligations in AFDC, Medicare, Food Stamps,
School Lunch, Unemployment Compensation, [etc.]."70 The Garrett Hardin
Society links concerns about the environment to concerns about
terrorism on its Web site:

              The fact is that the huge annual legal immigrant flow
              (1.5 million in 2001), coupled with hundreds of
              thousands of illegal crossings, not only provides
              opportunities for terrorism, but also causes population
              growth, which increasingly stresses our overburdened
              environment. The threats to our national security from
              massive legal and illegal immigration are immediate and
              increasing daily. Are we prepared for another 9-11? 71

Anti-immigration forces also lead a campaign in 1998 to get Sierra
Club members to pass an anti-immigration platform under the rationale
that immigration was destroying the environment. Fortunately, this
campaign was defeated through the leadership of a San Francisco-based
environmental justice organization, the Political Ecology Group.72
Then, in 2004, anti-immigration activists tried to take control of the
organization by running for five open seats on the board of directors.
However, all of the anti-immigration candidates were defeated by a
landslide. Board members have aagreed to ask members again if the
Sierra Club should take a posit ion on immigration.73

Again, anti-immigrant environmentalists presume that all people
consume equally. But the impact of an immigrant family living in a
one-bedroom apartment and taking mass transit pales in comparison to
that of a wealthy family living in a single family home with a
swimming pool and two cars. Much of the environmental decline in this
country has nothing to do with population growth or individual
consumer choices. For example, in the 1930s and the 1940s, General
Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil (or Chevron) bought out and
dismantled the electric trolley systems in Los Angeles and 75 other
cities to create demand for their products.74

Such organizations ignore the consumption patterns of the more
well-to-do, the role of U.S. businesses, and the role of the U.S.
military in causing environmental degradation. Despite these facts,
increasingly, right-wing environmental organizations, such as Carrying
Capacity Network (CCN), Population-Environment Balance and Negative
Population Growth, are urging a closing of the borders in order to
"save the environment." Underlying these politics is an ideology
implicitly based on eugenics. Virginia Abernathy of CCN and Population
Environment Balance has advocated withholding aid to poor countries
because, she incorrectly argues, poor people have more children?75 CCN
has argued, "The Anglo-Saxon civil culture of the nation must continue
to reign supreme in the interest of stability and prosperity for
everyone."76

Unfortunately, some of these groups have used the rhetoric of "women's
liberation” to support their white supremacist population control
ideology. CCN argues that true feminists must restrict the immigration
of non-European cultures into the U.S. because they are too sexist.
"There's a choice to be made between feminism and multiculturalism....
[The West] is the only civilization that made an effort to overcome
its sexist traditions."77 The influence of the eugenics movement is
also evident in the work of the Pioneer Fund, a eugenics organization
started in 1987 by a millionaire, Ron May, who advocated sending
African Americans back to Africa. The Pioneer Fund has also supported
Nazi eugenicist work and eugenicist research in the U.S., including
Charles Murray's "bell curve" studies, and it funds FAIR, the
anti-immigration organization, which was very active in organizing
around the anti-immigration ballot in the Sierra Club in 1997-1998.

Notably, many members of the Sierra Club, including Allan Weeden,
belong to FAIR. Weeden controls the multimillion-dollar Frank Weeden
Foundation, which funds environmental and population/immigration
groups, including FAIR. It's been estimated that Weeden spent over a
million dollars to pressure Sierra Club members to vote for the
anti-immigration platform on the Sierra Club ballot in 1998.78 Popular
population alarmist/environmentalist Paul Ehrlich of CCN also sits on
the executive board of FAIR.

Another initiative on the part of the anti-immigrant sector of the
environmental movement is the campaign to pressure George W. Bush to
create the previously described National Optimum Population
Commission. The NOPC would determine an "ideal" population size for
the U.S. and answer the following question: "How many people can we
support in perpetuity under the most favorable circumstances with the
highest quality of life?" The commission would determine an "optimum"
population based "upon an assessment of the nation's climate,
geography, renewable resource base, cultural preferences and other
factors." NOPC recommendations would likely include drastic reductions
in legal immigration and sharp decreases in birthrates, particularly
among poor women and women of color.

Some environmentalists have also espoused immigration restrictions,
opposed family reunification, and advocated coercive contraceptive
policies for immigrant women. For instance, Bill DeValle, a leader in
the deep ecology movement, has said that he will support immigration
into his "bioregion" only if immigrants promise to have no children,
if they do not bring their families with them, and if they devote
their lives to preserving the environment.79 Anti-immigration activism
also negatively affects immigrant women's reproductive health because
it drives women underground and makes it more difficult for them to
organize and access health care.

Not surprisingly, many far-right organizations are finding the
xenophobic and racist agendas of these organizations attractive. The
Aryan Women's League has described their strategy for gaining public
legitimacy:

          The way to do this is to make ourselves known as
          environmentalists and wildlife advocates. There are many
          groups out there helping wildlife and the environment. They
          are not necessarily white power advocates like ourselves,
          but if we make contributions to these groups, we achieve two
          things, 1) we break out of our media stereotype and 2) we
          gain recognition.80

One of the reasons why this racist ideology is so popular is because
it is the continuing legacy of sexual violence against Native peoples
and peoples of color that has rendered them inherently impure and
dirty in the U.S. psyche. The images proffered by the environmental
movement are ones in which Native peoples are depicted as "ruining our
environment." "They" are crowding "us" out. Women of color, who have
the ability to reproduce the next generations, are a particular
threat, and consequently their fertility must be monitored and
controlled.

For instance, Paul Ehrlich describes his conversion to population
politics:

      I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a
      long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot
      night in Delhi a few years ago. The streets seemed alive with
      people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People
      defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People
      herding animals. People, people, people...Since that night I've
      known the feel of overpopulation.81

As another example, I was giving a talk at a population conference. I
asked everyone to tell me what word came up when they thought of
India. Almost everyone said "dirty," "polluted," "crowded."

In 1990, I spoke to a largely white audience in Illinois on the issues
of mining in northern Wisconsin. After explaining the devastating
impact mining companies might have on Native peoples, and non-Native
peoples in the area, the response I received was, "But don't you think
the real reason Native peoples have environmental problems is because
they're having too many children?"

The racism in the population movement, as well as in society at large,
is usually more subtle. Consequently, racist ideology is often framed
by "race-neutral" language. For instance, anti-immigration activists
may argue that they support immigration restrictions, regardless of
race. Nevertheless, when mainstream (and far-right) activists are
pushing immigration restrictions, they are thinking about protecting
"the border." When they talk about population reduction, they usually
have GlobaI South women in mind, since the First World is at
replacement-level fertility rates.

Often, in my experience, population control groups will assert that
they are concerned with eradicating economic inequality, racism, and
colonialism. However, since these organizations address these issues
through a population paradigm, inevitably their efforts are directed
toward reducing population growth of all peoples in theory and of
people of color in reality. In 1998, I gave a presentation about
population control at the Environmental Law Conference in Eugene,
Oregon. Several audience members contended that their groups, while
concerned about population growth, were equally concerned about
eradicating racism, colonialism, and sexism. So I asked them what
percentage of their organizing was actually devoted to working on
those issues. Every single person answered "none." With allies like
this, it is no wonder that the statement made on this issue at the
first People of Color Environmental Justice summit was, "We're not
interested in controlling our population for the sake of your
population."


-- 
"Until all of us are free, the few who think they are remain tainted 
with enslavement." Lee Maracle
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