This Changes Everything (30 page)

In Latin America
and Africa, moving away from overdependence on raw resource extraction and export, and toward more diversified economies, has always been a central piece of the postcolonial project. And yet some countries where left and center-left governments have come to power over the last decade are moving in the opposite direction. The fact that this tendency is little discussed outside the continent should
not be surprising. Progressives around the world have rightfully cheered Latin America’s electoral “pink tide,” with government after government coming to power promising to reduce inequality, tackle extreme poverty, and take back control over the extractive industries of their respective countries. And purely from the perspective of poverty reduction, the results have often been stunning.

Since
the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and now under the leadership of his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil has reduced its extreme poverty rate by 65 percent in a single decade, according to the government. More than thirty million people have been lifted out of poverty. After the election of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela slashed the percentage of the population living in extreme poverty
by more than half—from 16.6 percent in 1999 to 7 percent in 2011, according to government statistics.
College enrollment has doubled since 2004. Ecuador under Rafael Correa has dropped its poverty rates by 32 per cent, according to the World Bank. In Argentina, urban poverty plummeted from 54.7 percent in 2003 to 6.5 percent in 2011, according to government data collected by the U.N.
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Bolivia’s
record, under the presidency of Evo Morales, is also impressive. It has reduced the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty from 38 percent in 2005 to 21.6 percent in 2012, according to government figures.
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And unemployment rates have been cut in half. Most importantly, while other developing countries have used growth to create societies of big winners and big losers, Bolivia
is actually succeeding in building a more equal society. Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, observes that in Bolivia “the gap between rich and poor has been hugely narrowed.”
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All of this is a marked improvement over what came before, when the wealth extracted from each of these countries was overwhelmingly concentrated
among a tiny elite, with far too much of it fleeing the continent entirely. And yet these left and center-left governments have so far been unable to come up with economic models that do not require extremely high levels of extraction of finite resources, often at tremendous ecological and human cost. This is true for Ecuador, with its growing oil dependence, including oil from the Amazon; Bolivia,
with its huge dependence on natural gas; Argentina, with its continued support for open-pit mining and its “green deserts” of genetically modified soy and other crops; Brazil, with its highly contentious mega-dams and forays into high-risk offshore oil drilling; and of course it has always been the case for petro-dependent Venezuela. Moreover, most of these governments have made very little
progress on the old dream of diversifying their economies away from raw resource exports—in fact, between 2004 and 2011, raw resources as a percentage of overall exports increased in all of these countries except Argentina, though some of this increase was no doubt due to rising commodity prices. It hasn’t helped that China has been throwing easy credit around the continent, in some cases demanding
to be paid back in oil.
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This reliance on high risk and ecologically damaging forms of extraction is particularly disappointing in the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. In their first terms, both had signaled that a new, nonextractive chapter was beginning in their countries. Part of
this involved granting real respect to the Indigenous cultures that had survived
centuries of marginalization and oppression and that form powerful political constituencies in both countries. Under Morales and Correa, the Indigenous concepts of
sumak kawsay
and
buen vivir
, which strive to build societies in harmony with nature (in which everyone has enough, rather than more and more), became the discourse of government, even recognized in law. But in both cases, escalating
industrial-scale development and extraction has overtaken this promising rhetoric. According to Ecuador’s Esperanza Martínez, “Since 2007, Correa’s has been the most extractivist government in the history of the country, in terms of oil and now also mining.” Indeed Latin American intellectuals have invented a new term to describe what they are experiencing: “progressive extractivism.”
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The governments
claim they have no choice—that they need to pursue extractive policies in order to pay for programs that alleviate poverty. And in many ways this explanation comes back to the question of climate debt: Bolivia and Ecuador have been at the forefront of the coalition of governments asking that the countries responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions help to pay for the
Global South’s transition away from dirty energy and toward low-carbon development. These calls have been alternatively ignored and dismissed. Forced to choose between poverty and pollution, these governments are choosing pollution, but those should not be their only options.

The default overreliance on dirty extraction is not only a problem for progressives in the developing world. In Greece
in May 2013, for instance, I was surprised to discover that the left-wing Syriza party—then the country’s official opposition and held up by many progressive Europeans as the great hope for a real political alternative on the continent—did not oppose the governing coalition’s embrace of new oil and gas exploration. Instead, it argued that any funds raised by the effort should be spent on pensions,
not used to pay back creditors. In other words: they were not providing an alternative to extractivism but simply had better plans for distributing the spoils.

Far from seeing climate change as an opportunity to argue for their socialist utopia, as conservative climate change deniers fear, Syriza had simply stopped talking about global warming altogether.

This is something that the party’s leader,
Alexis Tsipras, admitted to me
quite openly in an interview: “We were a party that had the environment and climate change in the center of our interest,” he said. “But after these years of depression in Greece, we forgot climate change.”
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At least he was honest.

The good news, and it is significant, is that large and growing social movements in all of these countries are pushing back against
the idea that extraction-and-redistribution is the only route out of poverty and economic crisis. There are massive movements against gold mining in Greece, so large that Syriza has become a significant opponent of the mines. In Latin America, meanwhile, progressive governments are increasingly finding themselves in direct conflict with many of the people who elected them, facing accusations that
their new model of what Hugo Chávez called “Twenty-first-Century Socialism” simply isn’t new enough. Huge hydro dams in Brazil, highways through sensitive areas in Bolivia, and oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon have all become internal flashpoints. Yes, the wealth is better distributed, particularly among the urban poor, but outside the cities, the ways of life of Indigenous peoples and peasants
are still being endangered without their consent, and they are still being made landless by ecosystem destruction. What is needed, writes Bolivian environmentalist Patricia Molina, is a new definition of development, “so that the goal is the elimination of poverty, and not of the poor.”
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This critique represents more than just the push and pull of politics; it is a fundamental shift in the way
an increasingly large and vocal political constituency views the goal of economic activity and the meaning of development. Space is opening up for a growing influence of Indigenous thought on new generations of activists, beginning, most significantly, with Mexico’s Zapatista uprising in 1994, and continuing, as we will see, with the important leadership role that Indigenous land-rights movements
are playing in pivotal anti-extraction struggles in North America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. In part through these struggles, non-Indigenous progressive movements are being exposed to worldviews based on relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the natural world that are the antithesis of extractivism. These movements have truly heard the message of climate change
and are winning battles to keep significant amounts of carbon in the ground.

There is one other group that might have provided a challenge to Western culture’s disastrous view of nature as a bottomless vending machine. That group, of course, is the environmental movement, the network of organizations that exists to protect the natural world from being devoured by human
activity. And yet the movement has not played this role, at least not in a sustained and coherent manner.

In part, that has to do with the movement’s unusually elite history, particularly in North America. When conservationism emerged as a powerful force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was primarily about men of privilege who enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking
and who recognized that many of their favorite wilderness spots were under threat from the rapid expansion of industrialization. For the most part, these men did not call into question the frenetic economic project that was devouring natural landscapes all over the continent—they simply wanted to make sure that some particularly spectacular pockets were set aside for their recreation and aesthetic
appreciation. Like the Christian missionaries who traveled with traders and soldiers, most early preservationists saw their work as a civilizing addendum to the colonial and industrial projects—not as a challenge to them. Writing in 1914, Bronx Zoo director William Temple Hornaday summed up this ethos, urging American educators to “take up their share of the white man’s burden” and help to “preserve
the wild life of our country.”
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This task was accomplished not with disruptive protests, which would have been unseemly for a movement so entrenched in the upper stratum of society. Instead, it was achieved through quiet lobbying, with well-bred men appealing to the noblesse oblige of other men of their class to save a cherished area by turning it into a national or state park, or a private
family preserve—often at the direct expense of Indigenous people who lost access to these lands as hunting and fishing grounds.

There were those in the movement, however, who saw in the threats to their country’s most beautiful places signs of a deeper cultural crisis. For instance, John Muir, the great naturalist writer who helped found the Sierra Club in 1892, excoriated the industrialists
who dammed wild rivers and
drowned beautiful valleys. To him they were heathens—“devotees of ravaging commercialism” who “instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”
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He was not the only heretic. A strain of radicalism drove some of the early Western ecological thinkers to argue for doing more than protecting isolated landscapes. Though frequently
unacknowledged, these thinkers often drew heavily on Eastern beliefs about the interconnectedness of all life, as well as on Native American cosmologies that see all living creatures as our “relations.”

In the mid-1800s, Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever
particle of that spirit is in me.”
^I
This was a straight repudiation of Francis Bacon’s casting of the earth as an inert machine whose mysteries could be mastered by the human mind. And almost a century after Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, whose book
A Sand County Almanac
was the touchstone for a second wave of environmentalists, similarly called for an ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community
to include soils, waters, plants, and animals” and that recognizes “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.” A “land ethic,” as he called it, “changes the role of
Homo sapiens
from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”
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These ideas were hugely influential
in the evolution of ecological thought, but unattached to populist movements, they posed little threat to galloping industrialization. The dominant worldview continued to see humans as a conquering army, subduing and mechanizing the natural world. Even so, by the 1930s, with socialism on the rise around the world, the more conservative elements of the growing environmental movement sought to
distance themselves from Leopold’s “radical” suggestion that nature had an inherent value beyond its utility to man. If watersheds and old-growth forests had a “right to continued existence,” as Leopold argued (a preview of the “rights of nature” debates that would emerge several decades later), then an owner’s right to do what he wished with his land could be called into question. In 1935, Jay
Norwood “Ding” Darling, who would later help found the National Wildlife Federation, wrote to Leopold warning him, “I can’t get away from the idea that you are getting us out into water over our depth by your new philosophy of wildlife environment. The end of that road leads to socialization of property.”
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By the time Rachel Carson published
Silent Spring
in 1962, the attempts to turn nature
into a mere cog in the American industrial machine had grown so aggressive, so overtly militaristic, that it was no longer possible to pretend that combining capitalism with conservation was simply a matter of protecting a few pockets of green. Carson’s book boiled over with righteous condemnations of a chemical industry that used aerial bombardment to wipe out insects, thoughtlessly endangering
human and animal life in the process. The marine biologist-turned-social-critic painted a vivid picture of the arrogant “control men” who, enthralled with “a bright new toy,” hurled poisons “against the fabric of life.”
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