ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
5 6
of color. WomanEarth most particularly reflected the simultaneity of these
challenges as white women active in both feminist and ecology movements
began to prioritize the issue of race within both the feminist and ecological
agenda.
While WomanEarth was forming, two other forums emerged in which
women
addressed
questions
of race,
culture,
class,
and ecology:
the
environmental justice movement and the movement surrounding feminist
international environmental politics. I include a discussion of these movements
as a way to depict the wider, politicized climate of the environmental
movement in which ecofeminism was located in the mid-1980s to better
contextualize concerns faced by ecofeminists during this time.
During the mid 1980s, the grassroots anti-toxics movement, which had
previously been composed of mostly white communities fighting toxic
dumping, also began to undergo a transformation. Activists of color who had
fought for decades
against environmental
injustices
that
targeted
their
communities throughout the U.S., began to take leadership in this movement,
and within the wider environmental movement, linking questions of social,
political, and economic justice to the ecological question. They began to recast
issues previously regarded as ‘community’ or ‘social’ problems in ‘ecological’
terms. In so doing, they appropriated an ecological discourse from which they
had been marginalized.
The anti-racist wing of the environmental justice movement emerged in
response to the marginalization of people of color from the mainly white
ecological million. To mainstream white environmentalists, community-based
struggles of activists of color are often understood as ‘social’ rather than
‘environmental’.24 Ongoing attempts within poor communities of color to
secure services such as paved streets, sewers, indoor plumbing in addition to
struggles for a pleasurable quality of everyday life, have been largely ignored
by mainstream environmentalists as such issues often fall outside of, or
between, the boundary that separates ‘the city5 and ‘the country’; a boundary
that exists within the Euro-American environmental imagination. In this way,
then, neither the cityscape nor the poor rural community in which activists of
color work to achieve quality of life, fit white categories of ‘social’ and
‘environmental’.
Indeed, according to activist and theorist Dorceta E. Taylor,
the myth that people of color are unconcerned with environmental issues is
allowed to continue due to the way that white mainstream environmentalists
frame and strategically address ecological problems.
However, by the late 1980’s an environmental coalition of activists
emerged from within the African American, Native American, Puerto Rican,
Latino, and Asian and Pacific Islander communities: a coalition to fight
environmental racism. Environmental racism includes the official sanctioning