Evan Halper and Anna M Phillips -
When Joe Biden in December was mulling whom to name as his Interior secretary, entrusted with hundreds of millions of acres of public land, a network of nascent environmental groups eager for clout made a move that defied the usual Washington playbook.
They launched a campaign to publicly shame the person believed to beat the top of the president-elect’s shortlist — retiring New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, a longtime Biden friend and former aide whose father held the post in John F Kennedy’s Cabinet.
“It would not be right for two Udalls to lead the Interior before a single Native American,” they wrote in a public letter to Udall.
Soon after, Udall was passed over in favour of another New Mexico Democrat less familiar to Biden: Rep Deb Haaland, who, if confirmed, would be the first Native American to run a Cabinet level agency.
Similarly, California air quality regulator Mary Nichols, the perceived front-runner to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, was derailed — much to the dismay of some big, old-line environmental groups — by opposition led by local activists from California.
As Democrats have taken power in the White House and Congress, long-simmering tensions within the environmental movement are coming to the forefront, leaving established leaders pushed aside by activists who see them as too white, cautious and out of touch with the effects of industrial pollution on communities of colour.
“It used to be that these mostly white, mainstream environmental groups would be in those rooms, making the decisions and then call us to say what was decided,” said Robert Bullard, an author and co-chair of the Black Environmental Justice Network, known to some as the father of environmental justice. “We said, ‘Never again. We are not going to leave it to other folks to speak for us.’”
“The tension has been there for a long time,” said Ramón Cruz, who last year was elected the first Latino president of the 128-year-old Sierra Club. “Organisations like ours have done harm in the past. We have supported policies seen by many environmental justice groups as displacing pollution into what we see now were ‘sacrifice zones. ‘That is no more.”
new administration
The realignment creates both political opportunities and risks for the new administration. Biden benefited from the more liberal groups’ organising power and resonance with young and nonwhite voters to win election and to help Democrats retake the Senate.
And yet, though he delighted the groups with his Cabinet picks, delivering on their policy expectations could prove fraught, given Democrats’ tight majorities in the Senate and House. Biden will be beholden to centrists including West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, an ally of fossil fuel companies. — dpa
The last time a Democratic Congress considered a major climate bill, in 2010, the coal-state senator made a political ad in which he fired a bullet through a copy of the legislation.
“The environmental justice groups this election did the grass-roots work of mobilising voters and getting their agenda recognised by the Democratic Party for the first time in history,” said Phaedra Pezzullo, a scholar of the movement at the University of Colorado. “Now they are going to be assessing whether it made a difference.”
This moment has been long in coming. Backlash against the environmental establishment first erupted in 1990, when dozens of grass-roots groups sent a letter to 10 of the nation’s largest conservation organisations accusing them of racism and of ignoring pollution in communities of colour. Along with the Sierra Club, groups targeted in the letter included the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society.
“Some of those organisations responded by saying ‘We can do better,’”said Ozawa Bineshi Albert, an organiser at the Indigenous Environmental Movement. “Some were like, ‘We are going to do our thing.’”
In recent years, the grass-roots organisations coalesced to increase their power and grabbed attention last year amid the national reckoning over racial violence and discrimination.
Before that, environmental justice was the inspiration for New York Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to first run for office - after her 2017 visit to Indigenous activists fighting the Dakota Access pipeline. The congresswoman, who quickly became a leader of the party’s left flank, went on to co-author the Green New Deal - an ambitious agenda for fighting climate change that links joblessness and public health crises in marginalised communities to environmental neglect.
The blueprint’s influence grew as groups like the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented climate-justice organisation, led efforts to oust congressional Democrats perceived as moving with too little urgency. A week after Democrats took control of the House in 2018, Sunrise activists were protesting at the office of House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. By 2020, the Green New Deal had helped shape the climate plans of every major Democratic presidential candidate, though Biden’s wasn’t nearly so bold.
The actions that initially confounded some in the mainstream organisations ultimately proved successful in pushing Democrats to embrace more ambitious climate goals and make environmental justice a priority.
The pressure drove then-candidate Biden to bolster his climate agenda, vowing an emissions-free power grid by 2035 and that 40per cent of spending in his $2 trillion climate plan would go to polluted,low-income communities.
The tension between the old and new guards is spilling over into one of the most sensitive areas: funding. The grass-roots groups now compete for large philanthropies’ donations.
“There’s been a marked shift in funders’ attitudes in the last two years, and a monumental ground shift in the last year,” said Marce Gutiérrez-Graudin?, the founder and director of Azul, an Oakland, California-based group that works with Latinos on ocean conservation. — dpa
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
