Dying planet, deadly people: "race"-sex anxieties and alternative globalizations.

• Author: Gosine, Andil

WHAT WERE ONCE HERALDED AS "ANTI-GLOBALIZATION" MOVEMENTS ARE FAST becoming reconstituted as networks championing "alternative" globalizations. No longer presented as entirely opposed to the intensification of cross-border economic relationships (as was the case in the 1990s), activists now appear to place much more emphasis on negotiations about the form of these relationships. Some organizations, such as those engaged in the World Social Forum meetings, propose a "globalization in solidarity" that prioritizes "universal human rights" and the achievement of "democratic international systems" and institutions "at the service of social justice, equality, and the sovereignty of peoples" ("Revised World Social Forum Charter of Principles," in Sen et al., 2004: 70). Others advocate "globalization from below," whereby "people at the grass roots around the world link up to impose their own needs and interests on the process of globalization" (Brecher, Costello, and Smith, 2000). A key reason for this shifting emphasis is found in Stephanie Guilloud's "Open letter to anti-globalization protestors":

I visited [Nicaragua] after the Seattle protests and engaged in a conversation with a good friend.... He struggles to keep good-paying work and hide his Sandinista identity in a time when Nicaragua is the second poorest country in this hemisphere. He said, "Global finance institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the WTO are killing us. But without them, we would die. What do you propose to replace them?" I felt a profound shift in my understanding, and I appreciate his challenge (http://colours.mahost.org/articles/guilloud.html). The growing consensus is that critique is simply not enough: alternative institutions and relationships are needed.

Guilloud's position is noteworthy given her participation in "Colours of Resistance" (COR). A Montreal-based transnational "think-tank/action-tank" of nonwhite, anti-globalization activists, CoR was formed as a response:

to [a] growing feeling of a gap between what has been labelled as the "anti-globalization" movement in the "West" and the day-to-day organizing efforts in communities of colour to resist the impacts of global capitalism (http://colours.mahost.org/index.html). CoR's web site hosts bulletin board discussions, articles, and resource tools that consider, critique, and propose resolution to the myriad ways in which "race"-racism is implicated in the pursuit and intensification of capital accumulation, as well as in the responses formed in opposition to it. Guilloud's (and many of her CoR colleagues') embrace of "alternative" globalizations bears witness to the salience of this approach across movements, including ones more critically engaged in questions about power and justice.

CoR participants cast a wide net in their analysis of "race"-racism and globalization, and address diverse themes in their contributions to the site, including free trade, privatization of public services, war and terrorism, immigration, marginalization of indigenous communities, environmental justice, colonialism, American/AngloSaxon imperialism, North-South relations, as well as same-sex marriage, prisons, punk rock, and black liberation. This essay attempts to contribute to this already lively debate by examining the work of "race"-racism in constitutions of one popularly touted "alternative" globalization, global environmentalism. Referencing work by Richard Dyer, Hazel Carby, bell hooks, Ali Rattansi, and others, I bring attention to the ways in which sex-"race" anxieties shape explanations of global environmental degradation, as well as responses formed and promoted by environmentalists. I make no claims to represent the full breadth of activities, conversations, and ideas that comprise environmentalism, nor do I provide a full analysis of the movements' many conflicts and contradictions. Rather, I point to the ways in which some celebrated configurations of global environmentalism assume a cultural logic that privileges whiteness and racial hierarchy, as evidenced in the expression of "race"-sex anxieties. Evaluation of the more recent aspirations for "alternative" globalizations must include critical review of the histories that preceded them. Thus, in my consideration of "race" in contemporary, global environmentalisms, I draw attention to historical moments and processes that shaped their production. In particular, I examine how overpopulation discourses efficiently and effectively justified racism in arguments about social and, later, ecological well-being. The purpose of this critical reflection, therefore, is to encourage continued commitment to anti-racist critique as activists strive to make--to use an increasingly repeated phrase--"another world possible."

Global Environmentalism

The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development is widely cited as a watershed moment in the history of transnational activism. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) came together in unprecedented numbers at this conference, in Rio de Janeiro, and found common ground across different interests and geographies. Their collective show of force at that event, some suggest, precipitated greater cooperation between movements, leading up to the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization.

The alliances built at Rio were preceded by a long history of transnational imagination on the part of environmentalists. Since the 1950s, environmental degradation has been mostly regarded as a global issue requiring a global response. Rather than perceiving a world of independent states, policymakers and the general public increasingly view the planet as a single interconnected system with natural linkages among large-scale, ecological systems of land, oceans, atmosphere, and biosphere. Between 1930 and 1970, only 48 international conventions or treaties on the environment were in existence. But between 1971 and 1980, another 47 were signed, and by the end of the 1980s, more than 250 international agreements were on the books (Thiele, 1999: 117). In 1990, one researcher found that 87% of Americans believed that the environment is a global issue that demanded an organized global response (Ibid.: 118).

In Canada, the most active environmental groups are branches of global networks. Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth, among others, have promoted a global sensibility in their environmental campaigns. Friends of the Earth (Canada) has an international mandate that includes "influencing Canada's role in global institutions" and climate change and water campaigns aimed at a global audience; World Wildlife Fund (Canada) shares with its other branches the mission to "to stop the degradation of the planet's natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature"; Greenpeace and Sierra Club have recently refocused their programs at a national level, but historically, they too have relied on promoting a globalist imagination to advance campaigns. Indeed, so powerful is the idea that environmentalism is a necessarily global endeavor that it is taken to be an assumption in most expressions of environmentalism.

Consider this recruitment poster for the undergraduate Environmental Studies program at York University:

Asked to explain the poster, students enrolled in the program suggested that the faculty probably used this image to emphasize its international outlook, its interest in development work, or to attract international students. One student contended--and all others agreed--that the faculty probably used the image because "that's what people think environmentalism is--saving the world" (Gosine, 2002: 13-14).

Environmentalists have come to be recognized as the keepers of earth, and activists have put a great deal of effort into getting people--as the saying goes--"to think global." According to Steven Yearley (1996: viii), "we may say that to talk of 'the planet' in this way assumes the acceptance of an environmentalist 'discourse,' and to look at the earth in this way is to employ an environmental gaze."

Environmentalists have compelling reasons to regard the global community as their natural constituency. As earth is a whole, physical entity, and as its natural systems and ecological processes do not conform to political boundaries or other socially constructed divisions, people--indeed, all living beings--on one part of the planet are inextricably linked to those on other parts. The spread of industrialization has also meant that the physical threats to the environment are now more similarly experienced all over the world. Unlike socialists or capitalists, "it is not a common consciousness they are promoting, but a common response to the physical and health-threatening effects of air pollution or to the threat of shortages if the world's resources are used up" (Ibid.: 64). But is it really possible to promote a "common response" without also demanding a "common consciousness"? In the negotiations toward a "common response"--whether to environmental degradation or capitalist globalization--I wonder what kinds of consciousness about power, inequality, and justice are being proposed? How are different interpretations of framings of knowledge and culture being valued and relationally positioned? As argued below, some attempts to configure a "common response" have rested on a colonialist consciousness that articulates global environmentalism around tropes of "race," sex, and gender and, in so doing, promotes a cultural privileging of whiteness. Underlying dominant tenets of (global) environmental theory and practice, I suggest, is an anxious preoccupation with the sexualities of nonwhite peoples, which undermines their rights and denigrates the fullness of their humanity, while affirming the authority of whites to colonize and govern the world.

"Race"-Sex Anxieties

The articulation of "race" around and...