Is This the End? - NYTimes.com

Is This the End? - NYTimes.com.

The topic of the environment has gripped me since Al Gore's documentary. Increasingly, I see it bearing in everything I do.  Notwithstanding my dedication to protecting the environment, the critical scholar of religion in me emerged while reading this wonderfully written piece.

The obvious: the current environmentalist rhetoric (the movement for protecting the environment), its sense of urgency, its totalitarian impulses, together with the movement's tendency towards fragmentation, fits naturally within the Western eschatological tradition.

And perhaps, this is even more so within the United States' model. Those familiar with the Millenarianism texts of the so-called Second Great Awaking, particularly those of the Millerist type (William Miller), will recognize the similar emotional effect of doom. It was not until the disaster-like pitch subsided and gave way to more practical and social concerns (i.e., social health, family issues) that these movements became lauded reforming forces in society (i.e. Adventism).

Some of the most interesting current environmental literature seems closer to a particular action-driven Abolitionist/Anti-slavery rhetoric. The 1820s began seeing a grassroots reaction against the traditional gradualist approach. Some Black and White anti-slavery/abolitionists began putting forward freedom projects with broad appeal among Blacks that challenged the status quo (Unfortunately, social and political structural problems particular to the U.S. highjacked this collaborative movement).  Abolitionism, in all its forms, is doubtlessly part of the Christian eschatological tradition, but for the most part it placed more emphasis on a rhetoric of action than on annihilation. This  experience may serve us well today.

As we near the imminent environmental crisis an increasing number of films and publications will hammer on our sense of guilt and fear, pressing those primal buttons of horror, and crippling those who consume it. In a way, we have been here before. The inevitable result, unfortunately, will be what is currently starting to happen:

Running against the pro-environmental education is an ever growing dubious yet popular literate of deniers. And then, there is the large majority of people who simply cannot be bothered with issues they feel out of their control.

Instead, we should develop a rhetoric that would accompany a broad and practical campaign for change and reform. It should be one that empowers people and clearly show them a path they can take. Shedding the extreme sense of doom for a more action-led vocabulary should be the first step.

Haiti's Earthquake and the Environmental Crisis

I thought I should post a link to an older entry considering the current crisis in Haiti:
http://dennishidalgo.blogspot.com/2009/06/haitis-environment-and-social-justice.html

The Case for a Green and Global Caribbean History

We should consider studying Caribbean History from an environmental and global perspective because the region is just part of a whole, and only as such could we make better sense of it. Should a student attempt to study a relatively “short” history, say about 500 years, of any given region without first firmly being acquainted with the histo ry of the world, such student will invariably develop a terribly incomplete and unclearview of that region’s past.

This is so because neither history happens nor it is understood in a vacuum. The Caribbean owes its existence, its names and its history to what happened before “written history” (prior to 1400s) and to what happened around the world afterward as much as what happened in the Caribbean itself. In other words, it is part of a milieu (context); what environmentalists would call a “historical ecosystem.”

When the word “Caribbean” is invoked, images of sugar, slavery, pirates, and tourism would come to most people’s minds. But, even while these terms fail miserably to encompass the wholeness of the region, either past or present, they are in every sense the product of global forces interacting in the region. So, the specific makes sense solely within the broad, and the general only adds up with the particular.

Sugar became the foremost cash-crop in the Caribbean not because people there wanted to consume excesses of it. In fact, it had little to do with the wishes of the locals and lots with the intentions of the colonial masters. Even though the sugar cane was first cultivated in India many centuries ago the Europeans found it most convenient to plant it in their nearest tropics to satiate their growing sweet addiction. Indeed, a scandalously close look at the production of sugar in the Caribbean reveals the foreignness of its industry, and yet, its impact in the region is literally immeasurable.

Enslaved Africans too arrived in the Caribbean by and large as a result of Europeans’ commercial convenience. They were neither looking forward to the “middle-passage” as a recreational trip nor were they happy at the sight of the islands’ shorelines. European merchants, instead of creating slaving plantations in Africa, where well-armed natives firmly controlled the land, found it easier to ship slaves to the Caribbean, which they controlled (against the Native Americans’ will, of course).

It is true that pirates in the Caribbean were named Buccaneers because they learned to cook meat from locals. This in itself may flaunt them as the personification of Caribbeanness. Then again, they were actually foreign- born who had come to the region with a foreign requisition on behalf of a global task. Yes, they turned up in the Caribbean chiefly to help destroy the mighty Spanish Empire at its weakest spot. And since they had been, as a rule, disinherited individuals in Europe they had no better place

to make a name for themselves. Therefore, in a twist of irony, European social and imperial histories would certainly help understand pirates in the Caribbean.

Similarly, tourism in the Caribbean has become the most important industry in the region, but not because the people there are innately servile and had nothing better to do. It has been, instead, in large measure because the unstoppable economic forces from the industrialized world. Their push has help determined these places as the most suitable for “first-world” countries’ overworked middle-class to once a year let off steam. So, the extremely popular Caribbean tourism owes its success to its pristine beaches as much as it does to the economics shaping the labor history of the industrialized West.

Perhaps no influence on the Caribbean has been more significant than simply its natural milieu and the way humans have related to it, in other words, its geography and environment. The powerful and dry trade winds, which initially seek out the arctic flowing from the South Atlantic, are soon thrust toward the Caribbean islands by the blustery weather of the Sahara Desert streaming west. The sandy currents pierce the Caribbean archipelago from the bottom to enter the Mexican Gulf where it heats even more. It then exits warm and gasping for the North Atlantic, squirting through the Florida Straits at 2-5 knots. At this speed it squeezes out from between the coast of Florida and the island of the Bahamas, as an uncontainable monster, swiping first through the Havana harbor, and producing one of the world’s greatest ocean currents, namely, the Gulf Stream.

This powerful stream, which has for many centuries warmed the otherwise cold Europe, had also pushed back frustrated European sailors from reaching the Americas. No wonder lost fishermen and daring sailors prior to 1492 never returned. It took a brainy yet holy fool like Christopher Columbus to find out about the foyer which the Saharan breeze unlocks a few hundred miles south of Europe. As he suspected it, after reaching the Canary Islands the wind flowing west irremediably drove Columbus four times towards the Caribbean islands.

It must have felt like a modern highway in a Ferrari. But for those attempting an entrance through the north, it was not until the 1600s, when the European navigational technology could face against the challenge of the ocean winds that Europeans would attempt to cross the North Atlantic. It was then, more than a century after Columbus, that northern Europeans began colonizing the American northern hemisphere—what today is the United States and Canada. So, the Caribbean opened up the European experiment in the Americas thanks, but no thanks, to its environment and the way people related to it.

And now, I will make perhaps a controversial argument. Global History as it is commonly presented in popular university courses is already obsolete. This is so neither because the traditional White men of history are irrelevant, nor because women and other ethnicities are not being included in the global narrative. They are, sometimes. Instead, it is because the more we learn about science and nature the more we learn about how human history is ultimately shaped by the interaction with the environment. Up to just recently, history courses overlooked this cardinal point. We should attempt to correct the flaw by addressing the subject of global natural history from the outset.

As important as world history, the history of the Caribbean is also vital to understand the histories of the Atlantic, North America, Africa, Europe and Latin America. These groups of islands and the continental shores that embrace these waters have been enormously influential in most historical developments concerning the four continents around the Atlantic Ocean. The people who have inhabited the Caribbean have been affected and have affected profoundly the events in Latin America, North American, Europe and Africa. So, the study of Caribbean History would help us learn more about ourselves and others in reference to global history as well as to the present.

Haiti’s Environment and Social Justice

Haiti presents us with a complicated environmental and social justice problem. Columbus marveled because of its slush and green, but as many popular films and books are displaying, brown has been replacing the green lately.

Though it is true that French colonialism exploited its agriculture as no other colonial power did in the Western Hemisphere, the intense harvesting of trees for lumber export after independence and the essential usage of domestic charcoal have been the main reasons for its depleted forests. With little industrial base Haiti had relied heavily on its woods for everything, starting with family residences, institutional buildings, to badly needed woods for export. 

Unfortunately, with a chronically exhausted central government, Haiti had not been able to follow any meaningful conservation or replanting policies. And international interventions have not helped much either. Whereas the United States occupation in neighboring Dominican Republic helped spark interest in Dominican nature conservation (one of the few positive effects it had), the U.S. occupation of Haiti did exactly the opposite. Later international intrusions like the one that wiped out the Haitian Pig population (pay attention to a similar case in Egypt and the Coptic Pigs) followed the same pattern of worsening of the peasant condition and thus of the forest conservation: the poorer the peasantry is, the poorer the forests are.  

Haitian history is also differently from most other histories in the sense that the Haitian peasantry successfully resisted (to a large extent) the seizing of their lands from large Hacendados (the elite resorted to other means for exploitation). Pétion began land redistribution, and Boyer continued it. So, one legacy from the Revolution that has persisted has been the image of the peasant with its own plot of land, which explains why Haiti did not have to go through the same profound land-reforms that other Latin American nations experienced. 

But these little plots of lands have had to be split in even smaller pieces as families grew. Moreover, with a governing class unconcerned with the peasantry (watch the Agronomist), the growing population had no other place to go, but to the city slums, while the peasant only had its plot to rely upon. The fierce grasp peasants had on their land made it even more difficult for any government to practice conservation. That the peasant relies only on its land, make our cause for action even more desperate: this is an endangered species, namely, peasants owning their own land, but losing it to environmental degradation.

Currently the lack of enough trees in Haiti is not simply affecting the current peasant economy, but it is washing away the top soil, which is essential for any type of future agriculture and sustainable ecosystem. This means that our inaction not only is affecting the people there today, but will affect the people there tomorrow. We need to help restore the forests, help create the type of conditions in which trees could survive on Haitian soil, and peasants could continue living off their land without being exploited. I feel compel to save one of the few remnants of the Haitian Revolution as well as helping prevent mass emigrations and environmental refugees.

Like most problems in the world, the Haitian environmental degradation stemmed from a combination of external and internal forces. The same type of arrangement has to bring the solution. Haitians and non-Haitians have to work in collaboration to bring an end to the environmental chaos that exists there today. But there are plenty organizations that work on Haiti, sometimes even in opposition. That is why I urge you to support an organization that its main objective is to help save the Haitian environment in cooperation with other institutions, and not in isolation.

Please, consider giving and getting involved with this organization: Reforest Haiti

The Hidalgo Family Celebrates Earth/Arbor Day in Blacksburg, VA

Just today a friend asked me why, considering the controversy around the politics of the environment and the few but loud dissenting voices about climate change, I celebrated the arbor and earth day with my family. In short, I told him that the way I thought about history compelled me to do it, and that if I was to err I would err on the side of precaution.

To use Logic and reason rather than emotion and tradition is what we try to teach our kids. This is the same lesson that my colleagues and I try to impart when we challenge students to study the past through critical analysis, instead of habitual ways of interpreting history. Applying the same thought processes to present times should be so simple choice as to require no further thought. And yet, it is not that easy to view our lives as historical because we are frequently caught in the same web of daily contingencies as the people from the past were.

We indeed live in a historical age, as every other individual in history has lived, and taking responsibility for our actions today is in a way applying logic and reason over emotion and tradition. In scholarly jargon this is akin to the awareness of personal agency. And as students of the past we are certain that our shifting relationship with nature has always had consequences.

We study the long term effect of human actions, and understand that often historical individuals do not realize how their behavior may translate into reverberations for generations to come. But we have no excuse now: because of the long view that history affords us we do notice the cost.

The logic is that even if we did not know the future in its fullest extent we can still figure out its probabilities. If we play with fire we run the risk of getting burned. Reason, the same analytical tool we ask our students to employ, requires us to weigh our prospects carefully.

The scientific community has reached a rare consensus about the human causes of global warming—a consensus that could easily leave other disciplines green with envy. Historians, for example, have not even reached a consensus on fundamentals like the origins of modern racism, and the impact of modernity.

This is not to say that the green consensus is uniform. Most scientists are scholars, and as scholars we tend to perceive the world in complex ways. We are likely to appreciate ideas as in transition and could definitely hold opposing views. Thus, not all of the scientists that have thrown their lot with the green community necessarily think like Al Gore.

Yet, that most scientists admit that the changes in climate and the environment that we are starting to witness are largely our responsibility should move us to action, not because they are unquestionably correct, but because they may just be right.

Scientists have erred before. There was broad scientific consensus on the biological formation of races, and similar support for eugenics. Indeed, most late nineteenth century scientists believed that geography determined race and social temper.

This racialism helped them explain why races living in the southern hemisphere appeared inferior and uncivilized. These premises resulted in large part because of poor empiricism and cultural myopia. They also suspiciously collaborated with Western imperial longings of domination and preservation of the status quo. But it was the scientific practice of unrelenting skepticism in sync with political activism that successfully challenged them.

The scientific community today, however, is not advocating conservatism. In fact, climate-change scientists are launching a frontal assault on the status quo, and reformists, taking their cue from them, are again on the streets holding everyone accountable.

The underlying message resonates with that of the 19th Century abolitionists. They asked their audiences to recognize how the consumption of sugar and cotton related to slavery. Today environmentalists and social justice activists continue to draw attention to seemingly indiscernible links that may also render our society immoral. For example, they say, New Englanders should know that Colombian coal, from one of the most hazardous open pits in the world, fuels their electricity. In other words, you may not know the origins of what you consume, but that ignorance is dearly expensive and cumulative.

That we have chosen to celebrate Earth Day by planting trees and by appropriating measures that will gradually decrease our carbon footprint, should not be seen as illogical fanaticism. It is, actually, the most reasonable course of action: it would be totally reckless to have seen the possibility of disaster and not have done anything about it. If by any chance it happens that our modern way of living turns out to be harmless, and that the green community’s suggestions for change were unnecessary, nobody is hurt, and nothing terrible would have come from this movement for change. What we would have, regardless, is a more politically and socially aware community.