AROUND Grounds and Charlottesville, I've seen so many environmentally conscious people driving hybrids. Although hybrids have a positive impact on local pollution, I question some of the supposed global impacts. The fact is that hybrids have a big and messy carbon footprint. The nickel that is a key element of the hybrid battery is mined in Ontario using big machines. Other key ingredients that go into the manufacturing of hybrids are mined in other far away places using big machinery. The carbon impact of mining these parts, plus the carbon impact of shipping them from far away places, greatly reduces or completely obliterates the supposed global environmental benefits of driving the hybrid. Sorry to burst your bubbles, hybrid driving Wahoos, but this "lets all do our part and consume green" nonsense will not end the truly catastrophic effects of global climate change.
Those of you who think that biofuel buses are a legitimate alternative must also rethink what it means to be green for a better world. The current push to run our vehicles on corn ethanol has had dramatically adverse effects on the ability of many people around the world who rely on corn as the base of their food supplies to procure basic amounts of food. In Latin America, for example, the prices of tortillas and other corn based food products have gone up because of the rush to grow corn to feed our vehicles. Feeding our cars while people starve is antithetical to the humanist rhetoric of environmentalism. Sorry to burst your bubbles again, environmental Wahoos, but an environmental movement isolated from social justice movements dramatically hinders the task of building a better world.
The current environmental protection movement is thus little more than a politically defunct, consumerist frenzy. If people are truly concerned with the global environment then they must reject the simplistic solutions being espoused to us in the news, by politicians, and by corporate interests. This current approach, which I term Jeffersonian consumerism, calls for us to buy ourselves out of environmental degradation rather than demand that our federal government appropriately regulate big and messy industry. As I have demonstrated, this form of environmentalism benefits the industries savvy enough to adopt green market ploys in their advertising campaigns, and not the planet or most of the people on it. Thus, Honda and Toyota are pulling profits higher than ever before, while the threat of Katrina-like catastrophes grows each year.
The Jeffersonian consumerist framework is also antithetical to the idea of making a better world for all because it often places potential profit from green spending over the lives of the people who will ironically be the most vulnerable to environmental degradation. In order to become politically relevant and more importantly, efficacious, the environmental movement must reorient itself away from exploitative global capitalism and re-integrate itself into larger discourses and movements of social and economic justice. For example, we must take up the fights of the racialized and impoverished women and men who are being kept from their homes in New Orleans. (Remember Katrina?)
Thus, those of us concerned about the environment (and this should be everyone who has to live on the planet) must adopt a new paradigm for interrogating and interrupting the march toward environmental destruction. We must link environmentalism with social justice movements. We must recognize the interconnections between racism, class exploitation and environmental degradation, and build political coalitions accordingly. We must challenge the orthodox notion of capitalist consumption and the market as our solutions for everything. We must reorient environmentalism.
J.T. Roane is a fourth-year student in the College.
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