In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five probing questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David Naguib Pellow, co-authors of The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden.
In 1999, the town of Aspen, Colorado, citing environmental concerns, passed resolutions limiting immigration. Park and Pellow argue that such a policy is characteristic of those who enjoy “environmental privilege”-the power of certain groups to enjoy, at the expense of others, access to unspoiled forests, parks, coastal property, and open land.
1) You argue that instead of going to the barrio to understand immigration politics, we should “go to Aspen.” What good will that do?
Those of us wishing to understand a range of critical social problems should stop focusing exclusively on poor communities and turn our eyes toward the people and institutions creating poverty (and environmental destruction) in the first place: those places in our societies where the economically wealthy, the politically powerful, and the racially dominant live, work, and play.
Scholars rarely do this, primarily because many sociological studies continue to rely on ahistorical and individual-based methodologies. In these studies, poverty is solely the problem of the poor, and the underlying question seems to always be, “What is wrong with these people?”
The volumes of scholarly books and articles written on the ghetto and el barrio as the source of social ills towers over the meager literature that centers on the role of wealthy and politically powerful institutions in that process. In fact, sometimes social scientists can become complicit in the very problems they study.
Fortunately, a growing number of scholars across the social sciences and humanities are doing research that seeks to paint a more comprehensive portrait of what drives many social problems and how they might be more effectively addressed.
2) In The Slums of Aspen, you argue that environmentalism and capitalism are incompatible. Isn’t that a stretch?
We came to this conclusion after carefully assessing many of the environmental “solutions” routinely suggested by activists, governments, and corporations that, in the end, maintain current inequalities or even exacerbate them. We understand capitalism as a hierarchical system of unequal power. The purpose of capitalism, whether green or mean, is to create profits for some, to the detriment of the majority.
The Aspen Logic contends that we can pay closer attention to nature’s limits without sacrificing profits. Subsequently, environmental change requires no real social change at all. Think of the “green wash” that occurs when the Dell corporation publicizes the fact that it plants trees, even as it uses tons of toxic waste to manufacture its computers. The selling point is how easy it is to be green. As we pat ourselves on the back, we ignore inconvenient truths and the roots of innumerable social and environmental problems.
In the city of Aspen, we repeatedly witnessed how those who enjoy social and economic privileges are conveniently viewed as the source of environmental solutions, while those groups struggling with economic disadvantages are labeled as the source of environmental problems.
3) Capitalism seems likely to stick around. Does that mean we’re environmentally doomed?
Not at all. Call us optimists, but all things, including global economic systems, change. Still, most systemic change takes time, and we must address the environmental problems that are fundamental to the current political economic structure. It makes no sense to devise environmental solutions based upon a capitalist vision of a green economy. Such efforts tend to usurp the radical possibilities of the environmental movement in order to sell yet another product, which in the end does more to harm than help our ecosystem and social systems. In The Slums of Aspen, we show the detrimental social costs of various “greening” campaigns and we call for better alternatives.
4) But what leads you to believe that capitalism as we know it is on its way out?
We see certain notable trends. First, capitalism is increasingly proliferating into non-western nations like Brazil, Russia, India, and China, which are developing stronger economies and becoming hubs for mass production and consumption (even when, in the Chinese case, it is not entirely market-centered). This will likely mean that capitalism will continue to transform and evolve in ways that few scholars could have anticipated even a decade ago. Second, capitalism will continue to push people across national borders in search of work and refuge and this will place new political and economic pressures on nation-states and local communities. Third, we live in a time of dramatic and growing economic inequality in the U.S. and globally. While capitalism thrives on inequality, the chasm has its limits. Fourth, capitalism takes advantage of this inequality to exhaust our planet’s ecosystems, pushing up against its own limitations and inherent flaws. Capitalism is a system that is premised on a physical impossibility: infinite growth with finite ecological resources.
If markets can be made to work, the system must be transformed in ways that value humans, animals, and ecosystems. Whether that would constitute a new kind of capitalism or something different altogether remains to be seen.
5) Capitalism isn’t the only economic system that’s caused damage to the environment. What makes you think whatever new system might emerge might do any better?
Again, we’re optimists. We’re hopeful that we will pay attention to the grave environmental damage caused by current systems of production, consumption, commerce, and governance. Environmental privilege means that some people get exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, coastal property, organic and pesticide-free foods, neighborhoods with good air, and energy and other products siphoned from the living environments of other peoples. Meanwhile, the majority of people suffer from lack of access to clean air, land, water, or open spaces.
Communities of color and working-class communities are more likely than others to suffer from industrial pollution or “natural” disasters. But if we are to fully understand these inequalities, then we must examine both disadvantage and advantage, misery and luxury, and poverty and wealth. Within our current economic system, environmental privilege cannot exist without environmental injustice. So when the city council of Aspen, Colorado passed a resolution calling on the federal government to keep immigrants out of the U.S. in order to achieve ecological sustainability, we witnessed a powerful example of environmental privilege in action.
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*Photo courtesy of OutdoorPDK.