Race, class, and country music
The Gristmill today pointed me in the direction of 'One Nation, Under Elvis', an article by Rebecca Solnit. It is, essentially, an article about the current 'culture wars' in the US, which is less a war than a massive childish spat between groups of people who all think they're better than everyone else.
Says Solnit,
"Grubby, furry, childless pseudo-nomads who could screw up all they wanted and live hand to mouth until something went wrong and the long arm of middle-class parents reached out to rescue them scorned the tough economic choices of people with kids, mortgages, and no bail-out plan or white-collar options. Some of them did great things for trees, but their approach wasn’t always, to say the least, coalition-building. It also wasn’t ubiquitous. There were some broad-minded people in the movement, and some who even hailed from these rural and poor cultures, and Earth First! always had a self-proclaimed redneck contingent-but the scorn was widespread enough to be a major problem. And it seemed to be part of the reason why a lot of rural people despise environmentalists."
This is not to say there isn't a lot of narrow-minded hate directed at earnest lefty tree-huggers, which is just as bad as the long-standing joke that everyone in between the coasts is Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel*. But the environmental movement has spent the last 100 years waiting for people to come to us. Time to climb down from the high horses and go to other people for a change. Solnit also points out something that I think ALL justice-minded greenies (particularly in America) need to remember every day:
"The Sierra Club, which Muir cofounded with a group of University of California professors in 1892, saw nature as not where one lived or worked but where one vacationed. And traditional American environmentalism still largely imagines nature as vacationland and as wilderness, ignoring the working landscapes and agricultural lands, whose beauties and meanings are widely celebrated in European art."
In other words, this is fundamentally a class issue. Deep in the American environmental psyche is the idea that people and nature are somehow separate, and that more importantly only 'wild' land is 'natural'. But humans are animals too, and have their part to play in natural cycles of environmental management. The trick is to live in our environment responsibly, to restrain our pine-beetleish tendedncies to overwhelm and exhaust the resources available to us. Responsible ranchers, farmers, and loggers have been doing this for millennia, and we urban environmentalists have a lot to learn from that. As long as people in cities - particularly rich people who drive their Range Rovers to rustic inns in the mountains - see the people who actually work the land, and love it as a livelihood, as unworthy, we're never going to solve our common problems.
* Although I would like to point out that I have actually seen Cletus, but that's another story.