In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Environment

Hipsters, Hasidim and a Bike Lane in Brooklyn

I’ve been following this story for a while now, not only because I also live in a gentrifying/gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood, but because it’s an interesting clash of liberal ideals — religious tolerance, feminism, environmentalism, skepticism about gentrification. Basically, Williamsburg is a Brooklyn neighborhood that is currently synonymous with hipster-ism (even though like everyone else I kind of hate that term and I think it’s vague and encompasses a lot of different types of people, I will use it here because it’s handy short-hand). Williamsburg is Ground Zero for hipsters — for plaid shirts, beards, dive bars and fixed-gear bikes (and students and artists and some professionals and whatnot thrown in too). It’s also a neighborhood with large Hasidic, Latino and Polish populations. Here’s how New York Magazine sums up the most recent neighborhood fight:

At immediate issue is the Bedford Avenue bike lane. It’s the longest in Brooklyn and runs through every imaginable ethnic enclave—including the South Williamsburg redoubt of the Satmars, the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish sect. In December, after many complaints from the Satmars about “scantily clad” female riders, the city sandblasted off a small stretch of the lane; some enterprising bikers painted it back in protest; the city then painted over the unauthorized paint job. Now two activists are up on criminal-mischief charges, the lane is gone, and the two groups are glowering at each other with even less empathy than usual. Worse yet, each group finds itself standing in for a larger one in a larger fight: the Satmars for all Orthodox Jews and the bikers for all young secular Williamsburgers, i.e. hipsters.

The Satmars have been in Williamsburg since after WWII, and the neighbhorhood is home to the largest Hasidic enclave in the world. Traditionally, the Hasidim lived on one side of the tracks, and Latinos lived on the other. Then, in the 1990s, more and more young white folks started moving in — mostly artistic types who were looking for cheap space. That didn’t go over very well:

But after a while, says one Hasidic real-estate developer, “People started talking to the rabbis—‘Hey, something’s happening, all these young white people are moving in.’ ” When the Satmars realized that the Artisten—the Yiddish name they used for the bewildering newcomers—were there to stay, something like panic set in. Rabbis exhorted landlords not to rent to the Artisten, builders not to build for them. One flyer asked God to “please remove from upon us the plague of the artists, so that we shall not drown in evil waters, and so that they shall not come to our residence to ruin it.’’ Rabbi Zalman Leib Fulop announced that the Artisten were “a bitter decree from Heaven,” a biblical trial.

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One woman takes on King Coal. And wins.

Back in my home state of Kentucky, there is perhaps no greater tragedy than mountaintop removal coal mining (MTR). This is a method of mining where mountains are literally blown up and leveled, with the remaining debris dumped into the valleys. This creates not only horrific wastelands in its wake, but pollutes valley streams and the water supply all who live around it. MTR in Appalachia has destroyed an estimated 470 mountains and has buried or polluted 2,000 miles of waterways. But coal companies do this in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia because it is cheaper and requires less labor.

Why is this allowed to happen? Because in WV, and to a large extent in KY, the coal industry owns the state government. To cite just one of many examples in KY, the chairman of the House environmental committee is a staunch global warming denier who every year blocks a hearing or a vote on the bill seeking to end MTR practices. For the past 100 years, “King Coal” has gotten exactly whatever policy it wanted. However, the benefits for these communities have not “trickled down” to the citizens, as this region of Appalachia remains one of the poorest, least healthy, and least happy regions in the entire country.

Many grassroots activists have fought against MTR in this region, but they are at a severe disadvantage. Not only from their state government, but from coal company goons who threaten and intimidate anyone who stands in their way.

But in a small WV town, one woman fought the coal industry and won. Meet Maria Gunnoe:

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Leaving Us Behind

What We Leave Behind by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay
(Seven Stories Press)

Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis by Vandana Shiva
(South End Press)

Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay’s What We Leave Behind begins with a story about shit. It sounds snarky and unfair when I describe it that way, but that’s because shit occupies a rather maligned place in Western culture; the story itself is quite lovely. One of the authors (they intentionally avoid saying who writes which chapter, and although it’s often easy to tell, I’ll refrain from naming them individually), reluctant to “flush all those nutrients down the toilet,” goes outside of his house in the woods to contribute to the food chain by depositing his shit on the soil. If waste is something that’s no longer usable by anyone or anything, he explains, then the concept of “waste” doesn’t exist in nature, and sure enough, he soon sees slugs and bacteria breaking the piles down and plants growing in their places. However, he notices that when he’s prescribed antibiotics – which pass through a human’s system more or less intact – his poop starts to kill plants and soil life. “The soil in the two main spots where I relieved myself became bare,” he says. “[They] remained bare for the next two years.”

That casually terrifying observation sets the tone for the rest of the book. True to the title, What We Leave Behind is an exploration of what industrial civilization’s various endeavors – disposable products, plastics, mining, medicine, embalming and burial practices – leave behind, and the effects of capitalist priorities, “green” or otherwise, on the environment. Part I outlines each major form of pollution, from solid waste products to toxic gases, and for the most part, it’s as engrossing as it is important. The facts Jensen and McBay present should horrify you. The “Eastern Garbage Patch,” a floating island of garbage nearly the size of Africa, is only one of six six patches that cover 40% of the world’s oceans. The breast milk of women living across the Arctic, about as far from industrial civilization as one can get, contains levels of toxic chemicals that are “literally off the charts” because of wind and ocean currents. If facts like these don’t spur readers into action, then nothing will.

However.

Despite its many merits, this book is riddled with sexism and racism, empty and often bizarre rhetoric, and sheer White American Dude ego.

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Ways I Will NOT Be Celebrating Earth Day

By trying to figure out how to get my ass down to an arbitrarily approved size that will not result in my being accused of attempting to destroy the planet.

Of course, there is no discussion here of the fact that many “overweight” people do not overeat, do exercise, are vegetarians, and/or do not eat in a way that is necessarily or uniquely unhealthy as compared to “thin” people.  It also ignores the fact that there are plenty of ways to be “green” that don’t involve starving yourself through dieting (I’m quite sure that many overweight and obese people use public transportation, choose vehicles that are not gas-guzzling, support public policies that cut down on pollution, and more), or the fact that our personal environmental choices are important, but not nearly as much as those made by the world’s biggest polluters.

And best of all, in talking about what people who don’t meet a certain BMI requirement should be doing to end global warming, there’s no mention made whatsoever of the connection between obesity and poverty, how healthy foods can be downright unavailable in low-income neighborhoods, the way that our government subsidizes less healthy foods and therefore makes them far more affordable, or that while certain kinds of exercise may be “free” in a monetary sense, it does in fact cost time (which is something that not everyone, particularly those who are low-income, have).

No excuse is a bad excuse, it seems, to not-so-subtly shame fat people for the sin of existing.

Thanks to Rich for the link.

Air-Breathing, Water-Drinking Earthlings

Last night Ethan’s third grade class put on an Earth Day celebration, a “Prairie Home Companion” styled radio show, that was packed full of epic recorder songs and appeals to their parents to recycle and consume water and electricity in more responsible ways. Even though it was relatively standard in the school recital sense, what piqued my interest were the really slick rhetorical appeals, the kinds of environmental appeals about the health of the planet and its inhabitants that probably had all the Republican climate-change-naysayer parents in the audience squirming. For one, the aesthetic of the show was classically hippie. Between the twee recorders, marimbas and bongo drums, and the “We *Heart* Earth” posters with a heart-shaped Planet Earth in the middle, the musical and visual stylings of the show definitely borrowed the optimism from the early days of the environmental, one earth movement.

But what I thought was really slick and cool was the appeal for all of us to value and respect the rights of all “air-breathing, water-drinking earthlings,” an appeal repeated through the whole of the radio show, that was remarkably inclusive without being schlocky. The language of the show included all peoples, animals, and plants, all life on earth, as beings with inherent value and rights that should be protected. Talking with E after the show, it appeared that not only had their teachers put all the work into this complicated, rhythmic performance, but that the kids also had numerous lessons about the importance of maintaining ecological balance as a moral issue and reducing our footprint on the planet and its resources. But the language of inclusiveness — to me, that was so subtle and so amazing.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this kind of subtlety employed in Ethan’s classrooms — he learns more and more about the U.S. civil rights movement every February, not only about Martin Luther King but Malcolm X, and they’ve begun to discuss the conflicts in the Thanksgiving narratives every November. I wonder, though, if part of it is that although he’s in a public school he’s in a very ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse public school, a rich school, with parents involved and vocal enough to devote time and energy to making sure their histories aren’t erased from the curriculum. I mean, I have friends and coworkers who were in school in the 70s and 80s who fondly remember their white teachers showing up at school in blackface to teach black American history. This year, when E’s teachers invited the kids to dress up as black leaders on Martin Luther King Day, I held my breath. I had a headache about it for two days, imagining the possibilities, the conversations I was going to have to have, but I cut out a little mustache, goatee, and bow tie from construction paper so E could dress like W.E.B. DuBois and teach his classmates about The Souls of Black Folk, a book I’d studied in college for a whole semester. I was ready to storm the school if a parent sent in a kid in blackface, but nobody did.

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Earth Day

Tomorrow is Earth Day — and according to the New Yorker, it isn’t what it used to be:

The first celebration of Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was a raucously exuberant affair. In New York, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic. People picnicked on the sidewalk; dead fish were dragged through midtown; and Governor Nelson Rockefeller rode a bicycle across Prospect Park. Students in Richmond, Virginia, handed out bags of dirt (to represent the “good earth”); demonstrators in Washington poured oil onto the sidewalk in front of the Interior Department (to protest recent oil spills); and in Bloomington, Indiana, women dressed as witches threw birth-control pills into the crowd (no one was quite sure why). All told, some twenty million Americans took part—far more than the man who thought up the occasion, Senator Gaylord Nelson, Democrat of Wisconsin, had expected. “That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day,” Nelson later said. “It organized itself.”

I have a sneaking suspicion that were the Earth Day of 1970 recreated, Feministe readers would be the witches throwing out birth control pills (and in Indiana at that. Hmm).

So other than tossing birth control pills at unsuspecting crowds, what are you all doing to honor Earth Day? Any big plans? Any small environmentally-friendly efforts?

What Sustainability Can Mean

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
(Process Media)

Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew
(South End Press)

The Planner’s Guide to the Urban Food System by Arly Cassidy and Bowen Patterson
(Self-published; via Post Carbon Cities)

From 1994 to 2006, South Central Farm – the largest community garden in the United States – provided 360 families in Los Angeles with food, medicine, and other useful crops.  But when Ralph Horowitz, a former partner in the Alameda-Barbara Investment Company, decided to cash in on the undeveloped land, he had the farmers evicted to make way for a Forever 21 warehouse.  In what has become one of the dominant patterns of the 20th and early 21st centuries, a thriving, semi-self-sufficient community was gutted to make way for a business that sapped resources without giving anything in return.  It isn’t hard to spot the racism and classism behind the land-grab – those who had the land were working-class Latina/o families, and those who wanted it were wealthy and white.  However, there was another force at work behind the seizure of South Central Farm: a profound sense of detachment, on the part of the local government, from its citizens’ food sources.  After the eviction, farmers hung signs around the outside fences that read “SOUTH CENTRAL FARM FEEDS FAMILIES.”  The need to hang the signs was very telling – after all, shouldn’t the idea of a farm producing food be self-evident?

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The Pope vs. “Gender”

(Piny just posted on this, but I was working on a longer post so I figured I’d finish it.)

When I heard earlier this week that Ratzy was railing against the gays again, I didn’t really take much notice. What else is new? I guess it’s soooort of interesting that the Catholic Church has managed to jump on the bandwagon with a few other religious denominations in publicly acknowledging the necessity for ecological conservation, unlike some of the conservative religious right in this country. As a result, we get a papal analogy of saving the rainforest to saving mankind from the Horrible Creeping Plague O’ Gayness. How about they figure out how to save altar boys from predatory priests first, etc. etc. usual accusations of hypocrisy, blog post over.

Yesterday, I saw a more complete translation, and the controversial part of his annual Christmas proclamation caught my eye:

And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender”, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator.

Watch out for gender this Christmas, kids!

Of course, it’s not hard to grasp that he doesn’t mean gender is dangerous in the sense of “the power structure through which bodies are classified as male and female, and assigned sets of gender roles, proscribed and mandatory behaviors, and different levels of privilege, creating an upper class and a lower class.” He means that naming this system, questioning it, attempting to empancipate yourself from it,

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