Climate Justice: The emerging movement against green capitalism

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 109, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 313-338

  Dawson, Ashley ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950801881     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2009-036     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. On the ecological or so-called second contradiction of capitalism, see James O'Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press, 1998)
2. and Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York: Zed Books, 2007)
3. Although there are many works on neoliberalism and its contradictions, the ones that I have found most useful are David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)
4. and Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2005)
5. For a succinct account of this new phase of capital, see Tadzio Mueller and Alexis Passa- dakis, "20 Theses against Green Capitalism," InterActivist, http://info.interactivist.net/node/11656 (accessed July 20, 2009)
6. See Zoe Young, A New Green Order? The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility (London: Pluto Press, 2002)
7. Fred Krupp quoted in Brian Tokar, "Politics-as-Usual while the Planet Burns," ZSpace, July 2, 2009, www.zcommunications.org/zspace/ commentaries/3913
8. For a clear explanation of the science behind these figures and a program for achieving the necessary cuts, see George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2009)
9. On ACES, see Tokar, "Politics-as-Usual."
10. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 5
11. Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young, "Carbon CO2 lonialism," Climate and Capitalism, June 5, 2007, http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=105
12. On neoliberalism's production of slums, see Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2007)
13. According to a report recently presented to European Union heads of state by two senior foreign policy officials, for example, climate change threatens to significantly intensify global political instability. Javier Solana, "Before the Flood," Guardian, March 10, 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/mar/10/beforetheflood
14. Center for Naval Analyses, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, 2007, www.securityandclimate.cna.org/report
15. The classic and still timely work on popular authoritarianism is Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Macmillan, 1978)
16. For more recent analysis of this dynamic, see Lo'ic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
17. For a discussion of the disparities in North-South environmental activism, see Rama-chandra Guha and Juan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (New York: Earthscan, 1997)
18. See, for example, Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly, "Crude Wars," in Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice, ed. Heather Gautney et al. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 31-44
19. Obviously, a lot of ink has been spilled about the Katrina disaster. Some of the texts that I have found most useful include Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright, Race, Place, and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009)
20. Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
21. Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006)
22. Chester W. Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, eds., There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class, and Hurricane Katrina (New York: Rout- ledge, 2006)
23. Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, eds., Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
24. South End Press Collective, ed., What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007)
25. and David Dante Troutt, ed., After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina (New York: New Press, 2006)
26. Ross Gelbspan, "Nature Fights Back," in What Lies Beneath, 23
27. On the geographical history of New Orleans, see Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2005)
28. Neil Smith, "There's No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster," Understanding Katrina, June 11, 2006, http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/ Smith/
29. Rob Nixon, "Unimagined Communities: Developmental Refugees, Megadams, and Monumental Modernity," in "New Enclosures," ed. Ashley Dawson, special issue, New Formations, no.69 (forthcoming)
30. For an extended discussion of this process, see Ashley Dawson, "The New Enclosures," in "New Enclosures," ed. Ashley Dawson, special issue, New Formations, no.69 (forthcoming)
31. On accumulation by dispossession, see David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
32. On contemporary black social death, see Cheryl I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado, "Loot or Find: Fact or Frame?" in After the Storm, 87-110
33. and Dylan Rodriguez, "The Meaning of 'Disaster' under the Dominance of White Life," in What Lies Beneath, 132-156
34. This point is made forcefully by Giroux, Stormy Weather, 20
35. Philip E. Steinberg, "What Is a City? Katrina's Answers," in What Is a City?: Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina, ed. Philip E. Steinberg and Rob Shields (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 12
36. On the history of New Orleans's precarious site, see Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis
37. and Peirce F. Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003)
38. For a brilliant exposition of the flawed policies of the Army Corps of Engineers in Louisiana, see John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)
39. Kalamu Ya Salaam, "Introduction: Below the Water Line," in What Lies Beneath, x-xi
40. Billy Sothern, Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 213-282
41. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990)
42. For a powerful counter-narrative to such corporate news accounts, see Spike Lee, dir., When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (New York: HBO Films, 2006)
43. Dyson, Come Hell or High Water, 166
44. and Alisa Bierra, Mayaba Liebenthal, and INCITE! "To Render Ourselves Visible: Women of Color Organizing and Hurricane Katrina," in What Lies Beneath, 31-47
45. Giroux, Stormy Weather, 54
46. John Valery White, "The Persistence of Race Politics," in Troutt, After the Storm, 41-62
47. On disaster capitalism in New Orleans, see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), 406-422
48. See Bierra, Liebenthal, and INCITE! "To Render Ourselves Visible," 39
49. On this redevelopment plan, see Sothern, Down in New Orleans, 215-28
50. and David Dante Troutt, "Many Thousands Gone, Again," in After the Storm, 3-28
51. For a critique of Common Ground and similar organizations, see Bierra, Liebenthal, and INCITE! "To Render Ourselves Visible," 40-41
52. Brad Richard, interview with author, June 28, 2009
53. Tremaine, interview
54. Historical details concerning the environmental justice movement are largely drawn from Melissa Checker, Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (New York: New York University Press, 2005)
55. On gender and environmental justice, see Rachel Stein, ed., New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004)
56. See, for example, the pathbreaking collection edited by Robert D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994)
57. For a timeline of WE ACT's activities and further information about the organization, see the group's Web site, www.weact.org (accessed August 26, 2009)
58. On WE ACT's struggle with public health authorities, see Julie Sze, "Gender, Asthma Politics, and Urban Environmental Justice Activism," in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, 177-190
59. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie
60. For more information on the summit, including policy papers that emerged from the meeting, see the Environmental Justice Resource Center's Web site, www.ejrc.cau.edu/EJSUMMITwelcome.html (accessed August 26, 2009)
61. J. Timmons Roberts, "Globalizing Environmental Justice," in Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement, ed. Ronald Sandler and Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 289
62. Miquela Craytor, interview, July 23, 2009. For more information about Sustainable South Bronx, see the group's Web site, www.ssbx.org (accessed August 26, 2009)
63. Kenny Bruno, Joshua Karliner, and China Brotsky, Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice (San Francisco: Transnational Resource and Action Center, 1999), available at www.corpwatch.org/downloads/greenhousegangsters.pdf (accessed August 26, 2009)
64. For a blistering investigation of Big Oil's funding of climate change denial, see Monbiot, Heat, 20-42
65. On new, transnational scales of social justice and activism, see Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
66. On Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni struggle, see Rob Nixon, "Pipe Dreams: Ken Saro-Wiwa, Environmental Justice, and Micro-minority Rights," Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 1 (FaU 199
67. Bruno, Karliner, and Brotsky, Greenhouse Gangsters vs. Climate Justice, 19
68. Heidi Bachram, "Climate Fraud and Carbon Colonialism: The New Trade in Greenhouse Gases," Capitalism Nature Socialism 15.4 (December 2004): 1-16
69. J. Andrew Hoerner and Nia Robinson, A Climate of Change: African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy for the U.S. (Oakland, CA: Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, 2008), available at www.rprogress.org/publications/2008/ climateofchange.pdf (accessed August 26, 2009)
70. For further discussion of the climate justice movement's goals, see Michael Dorsey, "Exploring Climate Justice," podcast, February 16, 2009, www.dartmouth.edu/news/features/podcasts/2009/dorsey.html (accessed July 23, 2009)
71. For a text of Hansen's recent testimony before a House committee, see James Hansen, "The New Testimony before Congress," June 23, 2008, available at http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/6/23/164650/123
72. James Randerson, "Climate Change: Prepare for Global Temperature Rise of 4C, Warns Top Scientist," Guardian, August 7, 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/ aug/06/climatechange. scienceofclimatechange
73. On the controversial report to the Pentagon, for example, see Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, "Now the Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us," Observer, February 22, 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/environment/ 2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
74. and Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security (San Francisco: Global Business Network, 2003), available at www.mindfully.org/Air/2003/Pentagon- Climate-Change1oct03.htm (accessed August 26, 2009)
75. For a fuller discussion of the pitfalls of apocalyptic environmentalist]!, see Cindy Katz, "Under the Falling Sky: Apocalyptic Environmentalism and the Production of Nature," in Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting the New World Order, ed. Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 276-282
76. EJCC, "The 10 Principles of Just Climate Change Policies in the U.S.," http://ejcc.org/cj/tenprinciples/ (accessed September 29, 2009)
77. Roberts, "Globalizing Environmental Justice," 297
78. For a discussion of the global justice movement's organizing principles, see Notes from Nowhere, ed., We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2003)
79. Mobilization for Climate Justice, www.actforclimatejustice.org (accessed July 23, 2009)