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whether you think so or not by James Case |
These days everyone has to have a label. One can be a Queer, an African-American, a Conser-vative, an Athlete, a Feminist. The same rules always apply. It doesn’t matter what you think about that label because people will think of you in terms of it no matter what. It does, however, become extremely difficult to draw the lines between people of different labels when one really tries to separate them. They might overlap. They might be true only some of the time. But regardless of why, they can often become a burden.
I have often been called an Environmentalist by people who seem to think that that label somehow separates me from them. I often stop to think, do these people really think that a poisoned environment could take the lives of me and my children and not them and theirs? Can they really believe that I, an Environmentalist, depend upon a healthy environment for my life, but they somehow don’t?
An Environmentalist can be many different things. Perhaps this is where the misunderstanding occurs. Does one define an Environmentalist as a person involved in activism for environmental issues? Perhaps it is someone who researches theories in ecology or someone who lives in the wilderness eating berries, roots, and dirt to stay alive. I, however, would call these people activists, ecologists, and tree-huggers (all of which I aspire to be), not just Environmentalists.
An Environmentalist is someone who depends on the environment for her or his life. We are all Environmentalists whether we recognize it or not. You are an Environmentalist for the same reason I am, Newt Gingrich is, and Pat Buchanan is. It’s a label that should really be thought of more as a term like human or living being.
This is possibly the hardest concept to get across to people. It’s the source of almost all the frustration one feels as an environmental activist. How can people not understand that when I ask them to drive their car less, it’s to save their children as well as mine from lung cancer? How can people feel that only I am dependant on a healthy ecosystem and that they aren’t? Do they think that when they must weigh the environment against jobs, it comes down to their jobs versus my life? Don’t they see that it’s their jobs versus our lives? Or, for that matter, that it’s our jobs versus our lives?
This problem goes all the way back to the original creation of the United States. When the Native Americans were forced off the land, they saw the invaders treat the land like it was there for their exploitation and profits only. They simply couldn’t conceive of how a people could feel like they had no connection to the natural world. They couldn’t even accurately express the problem to their invaders. They instead formulated theories such as that the white man must be born of another mother and not the Mother Earth. For how could an entire people rape its own mother and sell the lives of its own children?
Not only is the environment imminently important to all of us and every living thing here on Earth, but it relates to all other issues in our society in many ways as well. When someone tells us that the North Hartford community is being poisoned by our waste and waste from all around the area as it is dumped in their backyards, they don’t just mean that it’s causing lead-related brain damage in the children of the community. They don’t just mean that it’s causing Wesleyan’s drinking water to become toxic here in our down-river location. They mean that the poor Black and Latino neighborhood the waste is dumped into is targeted specifically for the fact that it’s a racial minority area and it can’t afford the proper representation needed to protect itself, a situation found around virtually every landfill our waste goes into at home as well.
So when someone asks you to try not to throw as much away, they are trying to protect someone’s civil rights. When someone asks you to buy things with less disposable packaging, they are trying to save your sanity and your life. When someone asks you to boycott rainforest-destroying industries, they mean to save the natives, they mean to save themselves, and they mean to save you. It’s no reason to put a derogatory label on them or to feel like they’re trying to take away your rights. After all, it’s your rights they’re trying to protect.