Issues of environmentalism and racial justice are inextricably linked, proclaimed Van Jones at his keynote speech for the Environmental Studies 50th Anniversary last Thursday night. Jones, an acclaimed environmental and human rights activist, is best known for his efforts to provide opportunities for people of color in under-resourced, inner city communities with access to jobs in green energy infrastructure development. Much of Jones’ recent efforts work to address the monstrosity that is our country’s military industrial prison complex through legislation to reduce the number of incarcerated nonviolent offenders and cut the prison population by 50 percent over the next decade. In short, the prison system seeks to profit from the enslavement of people of color.
If able to survive passage through our ever corrupt political environment, Jones’ plans would result in a drastic cut in governmental funding for the prison system and open up funds which could instead be transferred to green job programs benefitting people of color who have so long born the brunt of the broken prison system.
The large crowd – composed of students and community members of all stripes, cheered elatedly for Jones’ plans and I too, was overjoyed, in part because of the parallels I identified between Jones’ work and my own as a divestment organizer. For those unfamiliar with Divest Middlebury, we are a group of student activists who seek to compel Middlebury to withdraw all of its investments in the top 200 fossil fuel companies and, similar to Jones, reinvest this money in ways that will support the growth of a more sustainable economy.
But when I speak with people about the need to divest our holdings in the fossil fuel industry I don’t receive the same response as Jones did regarding the divestment of funds from the prison system. Many tell me that divestment is “too negative.” For me, this response signals not the ineffectiveness of divestment as a strategy to instigate action on climate change, but rather the great work we still have to accomplish in stigmatizing the fossil fuel industry so that people will cheer for fossil fuel divestment as they cheered for Jones’ call to transfer money away from the prison system.
Thus, here is the truth of the fossil fuel industry – according to research completed by the Carbon Tracker initiative, the fossil fuel industry has five times more carbon dioxide in their proven reserves than the atmosphere can absorb in order that we may stay below the conservative two degrees Celsius marker, which is largely accepted as the threshold for calamitous changes in our climate. The fossil fuel industry shows no qualms towards burning these carbon reserves and the wave of environmental injustices that will result, such as displacement of millions of people of color in the global south.
What’s more, the fossil fuel industry has sought to hinder the debate about climate change through the promotion of disinformation on their own accord and by membership in trade organizations that work to diminish the findings and suggestions of university researchers and policy experts who have built overwhelming consensus around the idea that the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of the combustion of fossil fuels has and will continue to result in incredibly destructive changes to our climate and must therefore be mitigated immediately.
For an institution of higher education, the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns should feel especially disgusting and convince us even more of divestment’s importance. As Harvard professor Naomi Oreskes writes: “Why should universities invest in an industry that has deliberately sought to undermine the knowledge that we have produced?”
With this view of the fossil fuel industry, I’m hard pressed to imagine someone who would not deem Middlebury’s divestment campaign, along with the national divestment movement, as partaking in a “positive” step towards changing our culture’s conception of the fossil fuel industry, which proves especially necessary when we realize its most abhorrent of practices – the exploitation of communities of color through the placement of refineries and other health hazards related to the extraction and production of fossil fuels in their neighborhoods. In light of these injustices divestment provides me with the hope that we can rip the fossil fuel industry of its social license to exploit the health and livelihoods of marginalized communities in the same way that the prison system has been dethroned of its license to incarcerate people by virtue of their race and then deem them disposable, a casualty of our throw-away society.
But this is not to say the injustices wrought by the fossil fuel industry are not inextricably connected to those caused by the prison system. Indeed, that was Jones’ whole point, and many of our “reinvestment” options for the divested funds that we take out of the fossil fuel industry are in line with his green jobs programs as I will discuss more in a later column.
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