American Environmentalism Confronts the Global Economy

...These might be the foundational elements for a stance on the world's population problem that started from a position of solidarity with people's lives rather than hostility for their offspring...

...Despite this experience, mainstream American environmentalism lacks a coherent stance toward the brave new world of economic globalism...

...Powerful, globally minded actors can buy a slice of pollution control wherever it happens to be cheapest at the moment, without regard for the impacts on the local communities whose environmental quality is thus being bartered...

...and a yearning for voluntary simplicity...

...The fear is that rich countries might claim that their overseas investments were responsible for improvements that would have occurred anyway, or that governments will cash in recession-induced reductions rather than making needed investments in energy efficiency or cleaner technology...

...If environmentalism is to have that deeper meaning, environmentalists must move beyond some dangerous cartoons—images of a market that doles out nothing but efficiency, or a potentially sustainable fortress America that shuts out problems "over there...

...Framing the problem this way does violence both to justice and to common sense: The upstream and downstream links in the global chain of sneaker production are absolved of responsibility, the Malaysian government is naively assumed to be able to control the global commodity chains that pass through its territory, and the solution to the problem is assumed to be found in the place that is the weakest link in the global chain of economic power...

...In much the same way that neoliberal thinking treats economic growth, trading schemes are based on the dangerously simplistic idea that emissions reduced anywhere are benefits realized everywhere...

...Emphasis during the debate on the need for political-economic analysis and multicultural coalition-building are hopeful signs of recognition that a globalizing world economy will require adjustments in strategy, tactics, and partnerships on a wide range of issues, including population growth...

...Post-Kyoto, WWF's position has been to warn against letting trading schemes be filled with loopholes...

...In the end, they traded their support for promises of access and influence that never materialized...

...Genuinely cooperative mechanisms across national borders are critically important...

...No effort is made to ask who the immigrants are, where they come from, how they lived previously, where and how they actually live in the United States, what cultural or political values they bring with them, or how they enter the streams and currents of American life...

...At a time when environmental organizations are struggling to maintain their financial and (for those that have one) popular base, large and growing numbers of Americans express deep frustration with sprawl, gridlock, their inability to trade income for free time, and a generally eroding quality of life...

...ANYONE OLD enough to remember gas lines, Love Canal, or Three Mile Island will recall a time when the environmental movement focused mainly on domestic issues...

...These industries are not familiar targets of environmental campaigns...

...Riding the wave of Reagan-inspired fundraising, groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, Friends of the Earth, and Sierra Club began to join transnational campaigns on the hazardous waste trade, development financing, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and damage to the ozone layer...

...The classic example is Nike, which owrisr-a set - of marketing and advertising relationships, the public images of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, and the iconic swoosh symbol—but not a single production facility...

...Only 13.5 percent of the Club's more than half-a-million members voted...

...According to one leader of the initiative movement, "The world cannot afford any more North Americans...

...Historically, the big American environmental organizations have downplayed problems of overconsumption and consumerism in their diagnoses of environmental ills...

...Instead, Nike relies on a "flexible" production system of shifting short-term contracts with third-world sweatshops...

...The violent deaths of activists Chico Mendes in the Amazon and Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigeria underscored the importance of basic political rights as a foundation for environmental activism...

...These orthodoxies make it harder to build a progressive green response to economic globalism that is both meaningful and politically muscular...

...Some valuable lessons were learned in the process...

...In this highly stylized world, sovereign governments— DISSENT / Winter 2000 • 73 AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM sharing a concern for global problems but unable to agree on the allocation of responsibility— engage in bargaining to distribute the costs of implementing sound environmental practices...

...In other words, the more marketzealous environmentalists among the majors have run with the notion of buying and selling environmental responsibility, while the more cautious ones have merely walked with it— worrying as they stroll that foreign credits might be claimed for emissions reductions that never AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM really happen or that would have happened anyway...

...Erecting a Pat Buchanan-style fence wouldn't prevent toxics from crossing the Rio Grande or keep Tijuana's sewage off San Diego's beaches...

...They allowed environmental considerations to be shunted to a separate, vague, and largely advisory side agreement...

...EDF sees these so-called "flexible" mechanisms as "important pathways to achieving the multiple objectives" of the climate agreement...

...The problem with this frame of reference is that it individualizes responsibility for the AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM social structures of consumption...

...But the challenge of economic globalization creates new opportunities for potent partnerships...

...The world, it is said, will see the same benefit at lower cost when America can invest in, say, China's energy sector as opposed to electric utilities in the Ohio River Valley or its own rapidly growing fleet of 74 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 sport-utility vehicles...

...They argued that a wealthier Mexico would purchase more environmental protection, apparently unaware of Latin America's history of worsening poverty marching in lockstep with rising national wealth...

...Instead, in industries ranging from auto parts and computer software to cut flowers and athletic footwear, power in the global production chain has shifted both upstream and downstream from the factory...

...It showed that American environmentalists lacked anything close to a shared political-economic ideology...

...Trading in emissions also obscures the locus of power in global production systems...

...Walking or running, they move in the same direction...

...The approach includes many different schemes that would let countries count emissions reductions outside their borders as part of their treaty obligations to reduce greenhouse gases...

...But the support of a full 40 percent of those who did vote illustrates the tricky politics involved in preventing a left-nationalist response to globalism from turning into a nativist, xenophobic backlash...

...On the supply side, those same shoes could be made three months hence in Indonesia, Vietnam, or the Philippines...

...The World Wildlife Fund, originally opposed to the complex trading schemes, swung around to accepting the idea of a "wellmonitored" trading system...

...What should have been a united front in defense of national environmental regulations and a warning shot across the bow of hypermobile capital turned instead into a fractious internal debate and a missed political opportunity...

...So too is the Sierra Club's growing activity on human rights issues, which could be a model for progressive coalition building among enviDISSENT / Winter 2000 • 77 AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM ronmentalists...

...With the major organizations divided and operating on unfamiliar terrain, the environment was neutralized as an issue in the NAFTA debate...

...They are increasingly central, however, to labor struggles over de-unionization, organizing, offshoring, and forced labor...

...Labor understood that NAFTA, by creating the constant threat of corporate relocation south of the border, would become a sword hanging over the head of efforts to increase wages— with repercussions far beyond the trading sectors of the economy...

...But popular frames on both sides of the immigration debate showed the same steep learning curve on globalization seen in the climate debate and NAFTA...

...The ozone hole and the loss of biodiversity spoke of damage on a truly planetary scale...

...Fictions of Environmental Diplomacy Nearly a decade later, little has changed...

...Calling for a strong Club stand against U.S...

...The controversy surrounded a ballot initiative for the Club's 1998 elections...

...This is said to promote global efficiency by exploiting the comparative advantage of some countries in emissions reductions...

...The most vocal advocate of emissions trading has been the Environmental Defense Fund, long the intellectual leader in the shift to free-market environmentalism...

...There is a clear response to globalism in this stance— but it is a response that refuses to differentiate in terms of race, class, gender, and power, preferring to hand out 270 million identical indictments...

...In other words, if Russia reduced emissions by more than its treaty obligations, it could sell the surplus reductions to the United States, creating an attractive new export commodity of emissions reductions...

...Similarities to other neoliberal ideas are obvious...

...Some versions would allow a country to meet some or all of its treaty obligations by purchasing another country's surplus emission reductions...

...In order for the American brand of environmentalism to play an effective, responsible role in the response to globalism, some fundamental rethinking of the perils and opportunities in this changed world economy will be necessary...

...After a debate full of recrimination and accusations, the Club's national membership rejected the anti-immigrant initiative by a 60-40 margin and approved the board's take-no-position initiative...

...These frustrations are urban as well as surburban, and resonate well beyond the middle class...

...On the demand side, the affluent consumers of those shoes are exporting the social and ecological costs of their production to places where those costs can be hidden from the global view...

...Greenpeace has also been opposed...

...Sierra Club members know that hiring more border guards or scapegoating immigrants for our country's gargantuan appetites won't help the environment...

...But it would be dangerous to dismiss the initiative's support in these know-nothing terms...

...This approach would require careful analysis of the ecological effects of productionfor-trade, independent monitoring of corporate activity, and the transnational mobilization of political pressure at each link in the global commodity chain—exactly the roles shed by environmental organizations that become too vested in the diplomatic process...

...One critical element is a renewed vision of progressive international coalition building, across movement borders as well as national ones...

...Instead of mounting a central challenge on growth, consumerism, and the consumption trap, they have pushed technological and regu latory controls that address these questions only obliquely...

...Rather than galvanizing a systematic movement for change, however, much of this dissenting energy is dissipated through feel-good measures like recycling, the individualization of responsibility (ten steps YOU can take to stop global warming...

...The myths behind international environmental diplomacy are useful to global captains of industry, to governments strong and weak, and to more than a few nongovernmental organizations that play the game of diplomacy and consulting...

...Channeling this energy requires a more direct confrontation with the demand side of economic globalism, based on explicit resistance to the consumption trap that exposes its impact on work, time, community, health, and political power...

...Many of the initiative's backers did present a global vision: they stressed the status of the United States as chief global polluter and the role of Americans' consumerist lifestyle in attaining that dubious distinction...

...population growth, a group of activists launched a ballot referendum that explicitly targeted immigration as well as domestic fertility...

...Perhaps feeling burned by NAFTA, the major environmental groups did forge a solid front to oppose giving the Clinton administration fasttrack negotiating authority for further trade liberalization...

...The major American environmental organizations active in the climate talks have taken different positions on the details of emissionstrading schemes...

...But lapsing into a generic indictment of "too many people" risks the same undifferentiated view of the problem that spawned the anti-immigrant backlash in the first place...

...The basic idea is to reduce the emissions causing this "global" problem wherever it is most efficient (cheapest) to do so...

...they ventured seriously into the international fray only in the 1980s...

...T T HE DANGERS of this approach can be seen in the ongoing talks on global warming...

...So are the political parallels: at the 1997 Kyoto climate meeting, the Clinton administration made it clear that any international agreement gaining U.S...

...downstream are the retailers, brand-name firms, and advertisers who add the hype-induced value to what otherwise would be just a toy, a shoe, a grape, or a spark plug...

...But as with NAFTA, the willingness of several prominent organizations to sign on, mute their opposition, or tinker with the details provides invaluable green camouflage for neoliberal policies...

...The deep split among the major organizations into pro- and anti-NAFTA camps did more than just neutralize the environment as an issue in the NAFTA debate...

...Spike Lee's Summer of Sam was nothing compared to the drought-plagued summer of 1988, which focused attention on scary scientific projections of global warming and turned climate change into the granddad of all global threats...

...In contrast, allowing polluters to find abstractly "offsetting" savings in remote places undercuts the threat to prevailing structures and practices in favor of the same old single-issue tinkering, with public anxiety salved by accounting manipulations of the global green ledger...

...If high-consumption societies were to trace the offshoring of their pollution back to its specific geographic locale and pay the price of environmental protection in that location—say through a pollution tax on imports that would be invested in environmental clean-up at the site of production— then we might have the foundation for something closer to a truly sustainable cooperative mechanism...

...And to outsource the problem as one of Mexican toxics and Tijuana sewage is to ignore the reality of American overconsump tion and flirt with scapegoating the world's poor...

...Other organizations have been wary that the trading scheme will be poorly crafted or executed, thereby allowing rich countries simply to purchase credits overseas rather than setting their own economies on cleaner trajectories...

...Worse, environmental liberals allowed themselves to be drawn into the fictional but decisive packaging of NAFTA as a "trade" agreement, rather than the more elaborate framework for the internationalization of production that it actually represented...

...Two decades of turbulent economic change have altered the international environmental agenda fundamentally, rearranging both the problems and the pressure points in ways that many of the big organizations seem not to grasp...

...Worse, as individual communities are sacrificed in this manner, so is the effort to create a broadly progressive green movement...

...support would have to include an emissions-trading scheme...

...As a result, NAFTA was a missed opportunity to galvanize a potentially potent red-green coalition...

...Groups opposing NAFTA, including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, were not so easily duped...

...But the problems with tradable emissions are more fundamental than potential loopholes or double-counting...

...The Natural Resources Defense Council has urged "substantial" domestic emissions reductions among the rich countries and warned about potential loopholes in trading mechanisms...

...it does not address the fact that communities from Bhopal to Chernobyl to Love Canal lack the power to choose the forms of production in their midst...

...The labor movement, environmentalists, human rights activists, and consumer groups in the United States have only occasionally found common cause...

...They were responding to a 1996 decision by the board of directors to avoid an explicitly antiimmigrant stand in the Club's official position on population issues...

...Some simply argued that the population problem was globally additive and needed to be addressed in those terms rather than in terms of its distribution...

...They pointed to the impact of NAFTA on rural Mexican communities and the role of International Monetary Fund conditions imposed during the Asian financial crisis...

...The flip side of "efficiency" in these schemes is unaccountability...

...But such mechanisms will work only when they tie together the production process, the financing mechanism, and the consuming interests ultimately served by production...

...Upstream lie the institutional investors and well-heeled global speculators who provide the capital (until a better opportunity comes along...

...They argued that immigrants were shedding more sustainable forms of living to join the ranks of the overconsumers on entering the United States...

...Missing are some basic truths of the global casino economy...

...This example illustrates what the initiative's backers, and some of its opponents, chose to ignore— that analysis of population and immigration issues must begin with where and how people actually live, not with cartoonish notions of overconsuming Americans and desperate third worlders...

...Powerful global images—Amazonia in flames, toxic-laden garbage scows trolling international waters—took their place beside then-Secretary of the Interior James Watt as tools to fan public outrage and raise funds...

...Instead, all American consumers are created equal...

...A classic example is the willingness to work with fast-food companies to improve their packaging or eliminate rainforest beef—but not to confront the role of Big Fast Food in the toxification of agriculture, the destruction of local food supply networks, sprawl, and the merchandising of culture...

...But having positioned itself over the years as a single-issue "environmental" lobby, environmentalism's liberal wing lacked strong ties to potential allies among labor and community organizations...

...Environmentalists, focused more narrowly on the rules of the trading game, were slow to grasp that environmental regulations too could be targeted, postNAFTA, as an unacceptable cost of doing business in America...

...Their paralysis was conceptual as well as political...

...For Nike and others organized this way, control of the means of production flows from their leverage over an almost endless supply of potential suppliers and from their grip on marketing, retailing, and advertising at the consuming end of the commodity chain...

...An international pollution tax is not a panacea...

...Another promising avenue is a more direct confrontation with the problem of consumption and the demand side of economic globalism...

...They are also practices that stand in marked contrast to the rampant suburbanization and sprawl of predominantly white and more affluent communities in the Washington and Baltimore suburbs, where few recent immigrants live...

...A strong theme in Sierra Club public pronouncements after the balloting was that the way to address the "root" of the problem was to stop the U.S...

...But at least it would admit where power and responsibility lie, while bringing home some of the costs...

...The NAFTA Split Most big American environmental organizations have domestic origins...

...Friends of the Earth has rejected the whole approach, stressing that the primary architects of the global economy should take the lead in reducing their own emissions...

...A Better Response to Glebalism How then to craft a progressive green response to globalization...

...As the debate showed, the Sierra Club is far from monolithic...

...NAFTA also exposed environmentalists' unfamiliarity with the terrain of international political economy, as groups on both sides of the debate struggled to make sense of a landscape that included maquiladoras, foreign direct investment, and nontariff barriers as well as the more familiar forests, grasslands, and watersheds...

...Some support for the anti-immigration initiative was not grounded in environmental concerns at all, but came from right-wing anti-immigrant groups...

...KEN CONCA is associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland...

...But simple assumptions about economic competition and sovereign diplomacy continue to dominate their approach to transnational issues and globalization...

...Organization Web sites provide glitzy reports from the front lines of global summitry, which often contain little more than general assurance for the donors back home that a crack team of hardworking experts is on the case...

...Instead, we are moving toward an abstract scheme that lets high-consumption societies buy or steal generic credits anywhere they choose, completely unlinked from their own responsibility...

...A A N EQUALLY troubling aspect of the Sierra Club controversy was that opponents of the anti-immigration initiative sometimes flirted with a similarly undifferentiated view...

...In an essay widely circulated by e-mail prior to the vote, Michael Dorsey used the example of Maryland to show that immigrant communities were playing a key role in sustainability by "resettling and revitalizing" neglected neighborhoods around Baltimore and Washington...

...To be sure, the idea of a fragile planet was always part of the logic of ecology...

...Not all of the major organizations have accepted the political marketing of tradable emissions...

...A disturbingly wide swath of American environmentalism seems stuck in the three-decades-old, apocalyptic soundings of The Population Bomb, unable to differentiate the human species into its component social parts...

...Other versions would allow credits for foreign investments that promote such reductions through, say, energy efficiency or fuel switching—thereby drawing investment to the places where the cheapest gains can be purchased...

...78 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...

...Change is thought to come from elite influence—pressing governments to cooperate or, better yet, insinuating one's organization into an advisory position on the national delegation to the latest treaty talks or "conference of the parties...

...And some seemed to be grounded in a narrow "not in my (national) backyard" mentality—let's preserve our lifestyle by closing the door behind us...

...For an ever-larger swath of the world economy, the central model is no longer the vertically integrated, production-driven multinationals of the post-World War II variety, whose power flowed from control of manufacturing...

...Green Border Guardians If the climate case shows that economistic logic and misunderstandings of global political economy can draw environmentalists into dubious alliances, then the Sierra Club's recent 76 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 brouhaha on immigration policy shows the opposite danger—the risk of a destructive, nominally green backlash against all things international...

...campaigns organized around trade issues, multinational investment, and sustainable livelihoods are emerging alongside the traditional (and still important) focus on endangered species, pub 72...

...A better approach to thinking about immigration was suggested by some opponents to the initiative, both inside and outside the Club, who stressed the need to place immigration in political and economic context...

...Shedding these dated notions and following power in a changing global economy to its source will be the key to a progressive green response to globalism, with or without mainstream American environmentalism...

...Making these connections is the key to building a more broadly based and firmly grounded political movement for sustainable livelihoods, meaningful work, and livable communities...

...Buying progress on climate change in remote locations makes it easy to obscure back home that "separate" issues such as acid rain, local smog, chronic respiratory disease, and global climate change are intimately linked through the same polluting practices...

...But the fractious debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement exposed American environmentalism as out of touch with the changing agenda of environmentalism AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM in a global economy...

...The key sectors of the new world economy of flexible specialization include apparel, footwear, textiles, toys, produce, household products, and consumer nondurables in general, as well as large chunks of the burgeoning service and information-technology sectors...

...Some progress has been made...

...In a world of economic globalization, the basic frame for the NAFTA debate—that it constituted a "free trade" agreement between sovereign nations—was as archaic as David Ricardo's nineteenth-century model of comparative advantage in English cloth and Portuguese wine...

...To argue whether the problem is "too many people" or "too many Americans" is to ignore almost everything that has been learned about the complexities of both population growth and immigration in recent decades...

...Creating diverse communities in and near urban centers, renovating the existing stock of housing, bringing people closer to work, school, shopping, and recreation—these are key elements of any model of sustainability for today's overconsuming America...

...The debate has settled into arcane haggling over who could transfer which emissions reductions to whom, or whether past reductions should count against future obligations—underscoring how deeply the concept is embedded in the framework of the climate talks...

...The numbers on the table in global summitry say that a place called Malaysia is accountable for the greenhouse-gas emissions that go into making an American's Nike tennis shoes...

...But they offer little hope as the DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 75 AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTALISM foundation for serious environmental protection...

...There are signs that the time is ripe for a more explicitly environmental focus on these issues...

...In the wake of the vague commitments made at the 1992 Earth Summit, governments continue to haggle over the shape of a global climate agreement...

...It was during the Reagan era that the biggest American environmental organizations discovered ecology without borders...

...In an op-ed rebuttal to Georgie Anne Geyer's fulminations about its timidity on the immigrant question, the Club's executive director Carl Pope wrote that "the crux of the problem is too many people, not their whereabouts...

...In fact, the location of emissions reductions, irrelevant in the neoliberal model, has enormous consequences in the real world...

...The campaign to green the World Bank showed the leverage of international finance and the value of networking with local opposition groups around the planet...

...Environmental groups were relegated to the sidelines during NAFTA's critical endgame as Clinton, desperate to salvage the deal in Congress, feverishly distributed exemptions and special arrangements for everything, literally, from soup to nuts...

...The more conservative organizations in particular seem to have embraced a fantasy world of international environmental diplomacy...

...To their credit, Pope and others did call attention during the debate to underlying economic structural adjustments as drivers of migration...

...They spoke of making Mexico a model of third-world environmental policy, despite the extensive environmental legislation already on the books and the state's skill in coopting the Mexican green movement...

...They expended most of their energy pushing for green er trade rules, but failed to forge a consensus position on the core issues of capital mobility and the denationalization of public policy...

...And they could form the front lines of a new ecological agenda centered on toxics, pollution havens in freetrade zones, environmental health in the workplace, and the export of consumerism...

...But the actual work of lobbying for clean air and water, defending endangered species, protecting wilderness, and challenging toxic polluters was mainly a local and national affair...

...The hot concept in the climate talks is the buying and selling of responsibility, referred to euphemistically as "cooperative mechanisms...

...T T HESE NEW realities of power in a rapidly shifting global economy are barely hinted at in international climate diplomacy...

...Several of the more conservative organizations— including the National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, World Wildlife Fund, Audubon Society, and Natural Resources Defense Council—were easily coopted into supporting the NAFTA negotiating process and the resulting agreement...

...Congress from meddling in third world family planning programs...

...Alarmed by the political ramifications of targeting immigrants, the board of directors placed a counter- initiative on the ballot, calling for the Club to focus on underlying causes of global population growth and migration pressures rather than a symptomdriven attack on immigration policy...

...n DISSENT / Winter 2000 lic lands, watersheds, and wetlands...

...But when confronted with the challenge of neoliberal globalism, mainstream American environmentalism has had a disturbing tendency to split into competing camps of economistic liberalism and nativist rejectionism—both poorly suited for the new world economy we actually live in...