Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
[Women of colour] are dominated not only by white men but also by men of
colour and by white women. In addition, they work closely with men of colour
who are also dominated by white men. So while eco-feminists perceive a uni-
directional form of domination (in which females do not dominate and in which
their dominator is not dominated), women of colour perceive sexual domination
differently. The domination is multidirectional.
(Taylor, 1997: 63)
The energetic and increasingly well-documented political struggles against pollution,
dumping and health inequalities have required, maybe forced, an inclusivity and
holistic consciousness that has so often eluded many environmentalist philosophies
and worldviews in the past. The struggles of indigenous peoples over their ancient
land rights, urban minorities fighting against prejudice and discrimination, and victims
of natural disasters perceiving institutional racism as a factor behind the slowness
of government relief have all contributed to this development. Many interviewees in
Spike Lee's 2006 documentary about Hurricane Katrina,
When the Levees Broke
,
were in no doubt about this. Environmental justice campaigns are therefore not
confined to any one locality, country or region. They are a truly global phenomena,
as Agyeman
et al
.'s (2003) collection of empirical studies indicates, where the local
and global are seen as being one and the same. For Dobson (1998), however,
fundamental ethical questions regarding the general distribution of environmental
goods and bads remain. Agyeman
et al
. argue:
Sustainability . . . cannot be simply a 'green' or 'environmental' concern, important
though 'environmental' aspects of sustainability are. A truly sustainable society
is one where wider questions of social needs and welfare, and economic
opportunity, are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting
ecosystems.
Although the environmental justice movement emerged in the US in the 1980s
and 1990s, examples of environmental justice campaigns can be found across
the globe. The Chipko movement, for example, was a peasant movement in the
Uttarakhand region of India aiming to prevent the logging of trees and to reclaim
threatened traditional forest rights.
(2002: 78)
The movement began in 1973 and Chipko activists extended their protests to include
limestone mining in the Dehradun Hills and the Tehri Dam. They later founded the
Save the Seeds movement in the face of the growing encroachment of biotech
corporations in their cultures, lives and livelihoods. The Chipko protests were also
significant because of the mass participation of women villagers, on whose work
many local economies depended. Their struggles and campaigns attracted significant
attention from the international environmental movement because they successfully
raised global awareness of ecological concerns. As Guha (2000) notes, the Chipko
activists were seen by many academics and political commentators as being very
different from environmental campaigners in the West, as they represented an
'environmentalism of the poor', seeking both justice and sustainability (Martinez-
Alier, 2002). In Hindi, the word
chipko
means 'to hug' and Chipko activists would
