Tuesday, April 14, 1998
Immigrants not to blame for environment’s problems
ENVIRONMENT: Everyone equally responsible for preventing
destruction
By Garrick Ruiz
Immigrants are blamed for many of the biggest problems facing
society today: poverty, unemployment, crime, disease and public
education failures. Now, the anti-immigrant forces would like to
add environmental degradation to the list of problems blamed on
immigrants. The argument these forces raise attempts to appeal to
"common sense." It goes like this: America’s environmental problems
are caused by overpopulation; therefore, every immigrant who enters
the U.S. is destroying the environment. This simplistic reasoning
may convince sincere but ignorant environmentalists, but it can
only hurt the causes of environmentalism and social justice.
The anti-immigrant forces have sought to legitimize their
neo-Malthusian campaign through an initiative calling for the
Sierra Club to abandon its current position of neutrality and take
a stand against immigration. The Sierra Club is coveted by
anti-immigrant forces because, with 550,000 members, it is the
largest environmental organization in the nation and a powerful
political lobbying group. To their credit, the leaders of the
Sierra Club have denounced the anti-immigration initiative.
However, as a recent New York Times article exposed, news of the
initiative has encouraged white supremacists and right-wing militia
members to join the Sierra Club to help it pass. It has also
attracted the support of Proposition 187 co-author Barbara Coe, who
boasts of recruiting hundreds of anti-immigrant members to the
Sierra Club while freely admitting, "I’m not a tree hugger."
Financial support for the initiative has come from groups with
ties to the Pioneer Fund, which promotes "eugenics" research
designed to prove the superiority of the white race. While guilt by
association is not enough to garner absolute condemnation in and of
itself, we believe it is important to critically examine any
initiative actively supported by these groups.
But many of the anti-immigration Sierra Club members are
dismayed by their association with extremist elements. This is why
they champion Ben Zuckerman as a "respectable" leader of their
campaign. A professor of astronomy at UCLA, Zuckerman is using his
stature to lend credibility to the anti-immigration initiative,
which he claims is backed by scientific research. Worse yet,
Zuckerman is quick to point out that he is a faculty member at the
UCLA Institute of the Environment, as he did in an L.A. Times
opinion piece titled "Cut Immigration, Save the Environment."
Still in the process of shaping its identity, the newly formed
Institute of the Environment is already stained by having its name
associated with Zuckerman’s anti-immigration campaign, which has
generated far more publicity than anything it has done to date.
Zuckerman contends that his anti-immigration position is
motivated not by racism and xenophobia, but by reason and science.
However, the fact is that scapegoating immigrants only distracts us
from the real sources of environmental degradation and does nothing
but inhibit the search for real solutions to the problem. One would
never know from Zuckerman’s rant that the single largest polluter
in the nation is the U.S. military. With less than 5 percent of the
world’s population, the U.S. generates 19 percent of its
wastes.
The problem environmentalists must address is American
consumption patterns. Zuckerman as much as admitted this in the
L.A. Times when he wrote, "we 270 million Americans have as much
worldwide impact as the more than 4 billion people who live in all
of the developing countries of the world combined." Every year, the
consumption of a well-paid astronomy professor probably surpasses
the combined consumption of 100 average persons in the developing
world, yet Zuckerman expects us to believe the problem is that they
are having too many babies. He says it’s only "wishful thinking" to
expect well-off Americans (like himself and the rest of us) to
change their consumption patterns. Zuckerman is all too ready to
condemn the majority of the world’s population to poverty so that a
small minority can continue to be well-off rather than face up to
the global responsibilities that challenge our entire
civilization.
These consumption patterns are fueled by the quest for profit by
transnational corporations, who are far and away the biggest
culprits of waste, pollution, and destruction in the U.S. and
abroad. Policies like NAFTA, which was imposed upon the Mexican
people by American and Mexican elites, pave the way for
transnational corporations to exploit both people and the
environment in developing nations. In the quest for profit,
indigenous people have been uprooted from their land to make room
for corporate development. In the name of "free trade," peasants
who have sustained themselves through agriculture for centuries
have seen their livelihoods destroyed. But narrow-minded,
pseudo-scientists like Zuckerman never mention the real sources of
hardship for immigrants or why they are forced to leave their home
countries in search of work. Zuckerman must be thinking, "Why try
to impress the need for social responsibility upon corporate
America when it’s so much easier to attract attention by
scapegoating immigrants?"
Instead, Zuckerman makes statements like "Mass immigration is
the primary push factor in destroying California’s farmland." Of
course, this is an outlandish statement for any student of
California history who understands that agriculture in our state
was built almost entirely upon the backs of immigrant labor.
Furthermore, immigrant farmworkers have been pioneers in the fight
against toxic pesticides and for industrial policies which will
sustain the environment. Cesar Chavez once went on a 36-day hunger
strike to protest pesticides which were damaging the land, causing
cancer in workers and posing a threat to all consumers.
Immigrants are at the forefront of the environmental justice
movement, which recognizes the connection between race, class,
gender and the environment. Immigrant, working-class and minority
communities are leading the fight to save the environment because
they are disproportionately bearing the brunt of environmental
problems. If you want to find where the most polluting industries,
hazardous waste facilities and unsafe factories are, just go the
nearest low-income African American, American Indian, Asian or
Latino community. Environmentalism for people in these communities
is not about preserving some pristine vision of nature by shutting
out others. It is about eliminating environmental problems which
could mean the difference between life and death for living
beings.
By confronting the cause of environmental degradation rather
than the symptoms, the environmental justice movement has provided
an alternative to "not-in-my-backyard" environmentalism. NIMBY
environmentalism occurs when predominantly white, middle-upper
class neighborhoods use their clout to prevent environmental
hazards from being placed in their communities, thereby pushing
them into low-income communities. Through organizations like
Communities for a Better Environ- ment/La Causa in Huntington Park,
immigrants have organized to fight for stricter environmental
standards and to shut down the most egregious polluters. This
benefits all of us because pollution generated in southeast L.A.
will ultimately harm the quality of life for everyone in Los
Angeles.
UCLA contributes to environmental degradation by recycling a
paltry 18 percent of its waste stream and sending the majority of
its trash to be burnt in southeast L.A. A wiser and more efficient
recycling program would reduce UCLA’s reliance on incineration and
reduce the production of toxic chemicals like dioxin which result
from this process. Current regulations are not strict enough to
prevent incinerators from legally poisoning the air we breathe. How
much more constructive would Zuckerman’s efforts be if he devoted
only a fraction of the resources he has spent on the
anti-immigration campaign to the UCLA recycling campaign
instead?
The anti-immigration campaign led by Zuckerman does nothing to
address the source of environmental degradation. This is why it is
a distortion of science and true academic pursuits. It blames
immigrants for problems which they are at the forefront of solving.
This is why it is xenophobic. It fuels a climate of hatred in which
people of color become the target of white resentment. This is why
it is racist.
The Environmental Coalition believes that the environmental
movement can be a site in which the fight for environmental
preservation, civil rights, workers rights, women’s rights and
immigrant rights are brought together in the interest of advancing
all of these causes. These movements must go hand in hand if they
are to be successful. Environmentalists who only appeal to elites
as Zuckerman does are doomed to failure.
We invite you to join the protest against the Sierra Club
anti-immigrant initiative.