July 6, 2012
Snippet from “Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation ” in Discourse Vol. 29, Numbers 2 & 3, Spring & Fall 2007.

In his preface to The Future of Environmental Criticism, Lawrence Buell writes,

W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the great public issue of the twentieth century would be the problem of the color line. In the century just begun, that problem shows no sign of abating. But ultimately a still more pressing question may prove to be whether planetary life will remain viable for most of the earth’s inhabitants without major changes in the way we live now.1

Climate change, deforestation, food and water shortages, and the steady increase in nuclear and chemical pollutants are just some of the risk factors that might affect the viability of “planetary life.” Still, as Buell points out, the increasing prominence of ecological catastrophe does not signal a shift away from the problem of the color line. Race continues to play an active role in distinguishing between those who are relatively protected from (or compensated for) environmental harm and “most of the earth’s inhabitants,” who are left with the disproportionate burdens and not the material benefits of resource depletion, toxic dumping, and climate change. The distribution of environmental burdens and risks reflects the legacies of racialization and colonialism, and cannot be analyzed or remedied without attending to problems of racial inequality and geographically uneven development. If environmental criticism endorses anecocentric outlook or land ethic that includes the earth itself in our sense of community, it must also come to terms with Du Bois’s observation that “whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”2

3:47pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLQR3yOqFVdF
(Notes: 12)
  
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