From Economy to Ecology
a speech to Indigenous Environmental Summit, April 2017
I want to begin with a quote from someone much wiser than me, the great activist Grace Lee Boggs, may she rest in power. “People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way, but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the greatest turning points in human history.”
I’ve prepared a speech titled “From Economy to Ecology.” I hope it provides some context on the roots and current activities of Climate Justice movement.
Economy to Ecology. Let’s unpack those words.
Eco. Eco means home.
An ecosystem is all the relationships that make up a home.
Economy is the management of home.
Ecology is the knowledge of home.
My speech began and will end with a quote, so you understand my orientation to the Environmental Justice and Climate Justice movement, but also so you understand that this speech and everything in it are received wisdom, a part of an oral tradition. These aren’t ideas anyone owns. They’re not my ideas. They come from many sources. They’re for everyone.
In that oral tradition, I’ll share a story about how I arrived in this moment. For a time, I was completely disconnected from the environmental movement, and completely disconnected from my tribal heritage. I was born in rural western Pennsylvania and I openly disdained the racist, sexist, homophobic white farmers I grew up around. The outdoors for me as a child was all cow pastures and corn fields – managed systems that were environmentally destructive, and a nuisance, but which seemed at the time inevitable. I wanted to live in a city, away from that toxic place, which is why I came to Portland in 2007. I wanted to live somewhere that had public transit because I don’t drive, and somewhere with lots of Native people.
In early 2013 I was sitting in an airport with two other organizers. We were waiting for a plane to a national gathering. One of them was looking at his phone and read aloud some kind of alarmist headline about climate change. I know you’ve seen these headlines – scientists predict that in five years we’re all screwed, that type of thing. It’s too late!
At that time, I felt helpless in the face of climate change, just like I didn’t see any alternative to cow pastures and corn fields in my youth. So when my white friend read this headline aloud I replied with “environmentalism is for white people.” He seemed a little offended. But we need to acknowledge that conservation in the US, as it was founded, was white supremacist. The Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal, then immediately thereafter calls us merciless Indian savages. The US government took lands out of the stewardship of Native people in the name of conservation. This of course because they believe the myth of the savage – that we don’t know what we’re doing with resources, but rather we’re all drunken rapacious wasteful idiots. Pretty ironic, eh? And one need only look to those headlines, which are still popping up to this day, to see that the white man has done a remarkably bad job at stewarding this planet, in part because they’ve drawn imaginary lines all over it, trying to segment the planet from itself when as we know we are all one ecosystem. We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us, as we say.
Through my connecting more with the local native community, a few years working at the Native American Youth and Family Center, I was given the gift of understanding our peoples’ special role to play in healing the land. We have the traditional knowledge needed to make our knowledge of home work to save ourselves and our planet for the next seven generations.
Today, I work at OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon. I am proud to work at a nonprofit where our staff is 100% people of color, which is no small feat in Portland for a group that has the word “environmental” in our name. It was upon first interacting with OPAL that I found out about a different kind of environmentalism, rooted in justice, instead of in white supremacy.
OPAL and many other organizations are a part of grassroots organizing networks all around the globe. In the Environmental Justice movement we ask one complex question: “who gets to live where and why?” We find often that Indigenous people, like other people of color, and low income people, are forced to live in places that are less safe and less healthy. At OPAL we organize low income people and people of color to achieve a safe and healthy environment in the places we live, work, learn, pray, and play. We work with a wide array of partners, from mainstream to culturally-specific, to achieve these goals.
What is Environmental Justice?
EPA definition is “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with regard to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” And while I see the value in that notion, “fair treatment and meaningful involvement” assumes the EPA and all other government agencies are agents that act upon people – that the EPA must manage our natural world in partnership with communities, as opposed to using the knowledge that comes from community to live in harmony with the natural world.
The existence of the Environmental Justice movement is to resist subjugation – to say that we know what’s best, as experts of our experience. As native people we don’t need to be reminded of this, but we must acknowledge that everyone – the settler and the slave, the immigrant or the refugee, as well as the indigenous person – we all have a right to have a say in the way our home, our ecosystem, is maintained. An equal say, not one dictated by race, color, national origin. Native history in this and other countries is the history of settlers preventing us from controlling resources or existing on land, and of disrupting the harmony that exists between people and land. The economy of this continent and truly this globe is not working for anyone except a very select few wealthy, mostly white, mostly men, mostly in western, developed nations. And even for them, the benefits are temporary. Around the globe, ecological destruction – the destruction of both places but also the loss of the knowledge of how those places can thrive, is rampant. All so a few folks can profit in the medium term. In the long term, we’re all toast.
We need to be very clear about why these people can manage the economy of the world, and destroy it, all for their own temporary gain. It is white supremacy. It is hyperindividualism. This is imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism and classism. They maintain their management through privatization of resources and enclosure of land, and they maintain enclosure of land – borders – through militarism.
Climate justice requires that we move away from a global economy and toward global ecologies – plural. From one system of top-down management of home, to many systems of applied communities’ knowledge of home. We don’t own the land, rather our knowledge and connectedness to the land sustains us. If we remain disconnected from the land, and we fail to heed the many warnings the land is giving us that the world is out of balance – we will perish.
The things we truly need to shift are our governance, our worldview, and our collective purpose. Not just the ones we hear about on TV, but the ones that actually exist.
The way we are actually governed is militarism. The professed governance model may be democracy but clearly we do not have nationally what we democratically elected, and we often find that even when we get the politician we want, they don’t do what the people know is best. They do what the military demands. When people take to the street, police show up. When we defend our water, they send in tanks.
The actual purpose of our economy is enclosure of wealth. Enclosure is using violence to take something from the commons and own it privately. Including land, and erected borders. Including the profits from our work. Including the natural resources that are dug, burned, and dumped to keep our system going. If they could bottle the air and sell it to us, they would. When they sell us medicine for the asthma their pollution gave us, they’re making our bodies into commodities.
The actual worldview of this economy is white supremacist, individualistic, and patriarchal. That’s the justification for treating the world as a subject, for invading other nations, for erecting walls, for prisons for profit filled with black and indigenous people. There’s explicit white supremacy in the founding documents of the nation – and it’s implied in hiring practices, mortgage requirements, and standardized tests, and disproportionate sentencing.
This economy is not traditional, and the Earth is rejecting it with climate change. If we want to stay on this Earth, we must live ecologically.
Ecology requires deep, democratic governance – in our communities, in our workplaces, and in all decisions that are made.
Ecology’s purpose is to care for everyone, from the tiny microbes in our own stomachs to the megaflora and fauna of our untouched natural areas. These are all our relatives, and caring for all of them is now humans’ responsibility. We can’t shy away from fixing what humanity has broken.
Ecology’s worldview is one of spirit, or interconnectedness, and of caring and appreciation for this ecosystem. When the dominant ideology shifts toward cooperation, valuing everyone’s diversity, heritage, and beauty, we can then justify doing what is right to save this planet from ourselves.
We want a Just Transition. A transition from economy to ecology. From military management of borders to applied knowledge of bioregions. That’s what the climate justice movement is today: a movement of many movements – against racism, against imperialism, against materialism, and toward real, global justice for all people, no matter the nation, no matter the race, no matter the level of wealth. Climate justice intersects all the issues of our time: housing, education, energy, transportation, wealth inequality, prisons, policing, and more.
On April 29th, we’re marching for that very purpose. I want to let everyone know that OPAL, as part of the Oregon Just Transition Alliance, and pretty much every other organization and person in the city and state, we’re coming together for the Portland People’s Climate Movement. We’re getting ready to announce the full details, but you can find us and follow us on Facebook – OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon – to stay involved and build power with us.
I want to end with a quote from someone much wiser than me, Winona LaDuke
“Power is not brute force and money. Power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth. It is in your relationship to the Earth.”
Thank you.