Is social justice compatible with environmental justice? If social justice requires economic expansion and environmental justice requires industrial regulation, aren’t these two concerns moving in the opposite direction? Solidarity is one of the principles of ecojustice but it is also an ethical concept drawn from struggles between people. It is union members that sing solidarity forever, isn’t it?
Another ecojustice principle is “socially just participation”. This makes sense when we are talking about the American presidential primaries; how can it make sense in an environmental sense?
Let’s start with money! Canada’s currency is closely tied to the values of our commodity exports. As oil reaches $100 per barrel, investors look at all the profits being made in the oil patch and bid up the price of Canadian assets. This increases the pressure to eliminate the barriers to resource exploitation. Profits are there to be made now. Ethical concerns for the state of Creation tomorrow don’t calculate as easily.
The logic of the oil patch also applies to the rising price of gold and other minerals. Mining often happens in remote regions and frequently occurs on land where title is disputed by indigenous peoples. For example, the Canadian company Goldcorp, owner of a Red Lake, Ontario gold mine, currently operates a mine in Guatemala in defiance of the wishes of local indigenous communities. When Canadians express their solidarity with aboriginal groups in Canada or Central America, they are expressing their concern for social justice and environmental justice simultaneously.
One of the concerns of the indigenous communities in Guatemala was over the use of cyanide in the mining process. This is also a concern of Canadians. Mining companies routinely use Canadian fresh water lakes as industrial waste dumps (called Tailings Impoundment Areas) complete with toxic chemicals. According to Mining Watch (a Canadian non-for-profit environmental and social justice coalition), there are currently applications to engage in this activity in Sandy Pond, Newfoundland, Bucko Lake, Manitoba and Fish Lake, British Columbia along with 10 other sites across the country. While current figures from the Canadian Mining industry are not available, in 2005 the US mining industry released 530 million kgs. of pollutants. The chemicals released in tailings and waste rock included almost 840,000 kg of cyanide, 1.6 million kg of mercury and 77 million kg of arsenic. It’s no wonder the Canadian Catholic Bishops said “the Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor are One”.
The Canadian Churches have also been reflecting on these issues of social and environmental justice. In a document reflecting on guidelines for biotechnology, the Canadian Council of Churches include the following principles:
• We carefully and comprehensively consider benefits and/or harm to all creation both now and in the future.
• We share responsibility for the common good of all people and creation.
• We pay particular attention to the implications for the poor, the marginalized, the weakest, as we seek to do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.
• We advocate and nurture dialogue across the whole community to ensure all voices are heard and considered.
In these guidelines you can clearly see the ethical standards of solidarity and socially just participation being applied. Ecojustice is neither a contradiction nor an option. If we want to build a moral economy in a sustainable society we will require a relationship with all of Creation that has sufficient resources for all.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
What if the Earth Could Speak?
What if the Earth could speak? What would it say? Would it laugh with joy or cry out in pain? This is a hard concept for us to grasp. Increasingly people are beginning to realize that thinking of the Earth as the third rock from the sun is a product of old ways of thinking and also a major problem. It is more helpful to think of Earth as an interdependent set of communities that move through cycles of life in fragile ecosystems.
Humans represent one system of life but not the only one. All living things that breathe, share the same molecules of oxygen and carbon. The water that makes up most of the human body is the same water in which fish swim. Earth includes rocks but it is primarily a place of life. That’s why we call it Creation. When the Earth speaks, it is the communities of the Earth that are speaking. As the ancient wisdom of Job puts it:
“ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you. (Job 12: 7-8)
Over the last 50 years, we have been struggling to find language to describe the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. Rachel Carson cautioned us about chemicals and silence in her book The Silent Spring. Aldo Leopold encouraged us to recognize ourselves as one part of the biotic community in his Sand County Almanac. Increasingly people are using the language of ecojustice to call for a different relationship between ourselves and the rest of Creation.
Ecojustice calls for a right relationship among all the communities of Earth. It takes as its starting point that humans do not stand apart from Creation but are one integral part of a complex system of living relationships. Ecojustice generates standards of sustainability, sufficiency, participation and solidarity that need to be met for justice to be achieved.
How do these standards apply? In Alberta, an area the size of Florida is being mined for heavy oil saturating ancient layers of sand. This is four times larger than Vancouver Island. Much of the oil is mined using steam and processed with water. The oil mining operations are licensed to divert 349 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River, twice the amount used by the city of Calgary. The oil companies are required to rehabilitate the mined land to the state of its previous biological productivity but since none of this has yet happened on a large scale, the standard of sustainability has not yet been achieved.
The standard of sufficiency seems the most difficult test to meet. It seems obvious that Canadians are extremely wasteful of both fossil fuels and water. The only country more wasteful is the United States, which is the destination of most of this mined oil. Surely only a radical change in consumption patterns could justify an extraction process that produces five times as many greenhouse gases as conventional light crude.
These are only two of the four standards and so far we are not meeting them. The oil industry is the economic engine of western Canada and nobody wishes for rain during a parade. However, the claims of Creation for ecojustice are serious ones. When Earth catches a fever, everyone gets sick.
Humans represent one system of life but not the only one. All living things that breathe, share the same molecules of oxygen and carbon. The water that makes up most of the human body is the same water in which fish swim. Earth includes rocks but it is primarily a place of life. That’s why we call it Creation. When the Earth speaks, it is the communities of the Earth that are speaking. As the ancient wisdom of Job puts it:
“ask the animals, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you. (Job 12: 7-8)
Over the last 50 years, we have been struggling to find language to describe the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. Rachel Carson cautioned us about chemicals and silence in her book The Silent Spring. Aldo Leopold encouraged us to recognize ourselves as one part of the biotic community in his Sand County Almanac. Increasingly people are using the language of ecojustice to call for a different relationship between ourselves and the rest of Creation.
Ecojustice calls for a right relationship among all the communities of Earth. It takes as its starting point that humans do not stand apart from Creation but are one integral part of a complex system of living relationships. Ecojustice generates standards of sustainability, sufficiency, participation and solidarity that need to be met for justice to be achieved.
How do these standards apply? In Alberta, an area the size of Florida is being mined for heavy oil saturating ancient layers of sand. This is four times larger than Vancouver Island. Much of the oil is mined using steam and processed with water. The oil mining operations are licensed to divert 349 million cubic meters of water from the Athabasca River, twice the amount used by the city of Calgary. The oil companies are required to rehabilitate the mined land to the state of its previous biological productivity but since none of this has yet happened on a large scale, the standard of sustainability has not yet been achieved.
The standard of sufficiency seems the most difficult test to meet. It seems obvious that Canadians are extremely wasteful of both fossil fuels and water. The only country more wasteful is the United States, which is the destination of most of this mined oil. Surely only a radical change in consumption patterns could justify an extraction process that produces five times as many greenhouse gases as conventional light crude.
These are only two of the four standards and so far we are not meeting them. The oil industry is the economic engine of western Canada and nobody wishes for rain during a parade. However, the claims of Creation for ecojustice are serious ones. When Earth catches a fever, everyone gets sick.
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