Processes of Struggle & In Defense of Mother Earth

The 2 above chapters I found, elaborated further on the "problem" that environmental decisions are made by different interests groups at all levels which leads to a flaw in the system of which the end result is deemed environmental injustice. In Chapter 6, it talks about how the activism of grassroots movements are shaped by current environmental laws, available resources and of course...reaction to the movement.

As I was reading Chapter 6, I felt really frustrated at the fact that there was so many dissimilarities in the goals of the grassroots movement, the government and of course, the perpetrating waste companies. Firstly, it was hard to get together various grassroots movements to form a large enough movement with a similar goal because of different cultural practices and deep-rooted distrust among communities of different income levels and ethnicities. Current laws and processes only seem to be discouraging further active participation by grassroots movements in carrying out essential civil rights due to the fact that there are so many procedures to go through and jargon to get by that the average Joe would rather be in denial or sit back and not care about what goes on in his backyard.

The ironic thing is that the laws that were created such as NEPA were supposed to be inclusive and protect the people but somehow ended up making things more complicated than they should be just because of the pleuralistic background of such acts. I can see how the idea of implementing a multi-faceted approach to decision-making seemed like a good idea in the beginning. How corporations, the government and interested parties are technically given a chance to voice out their concerns or ideas as to why a waste plant should or should not be located in a certain area. However, as highlighted in the book it also shows how much disparity of current available resources go on between large corporations and grassroots movements.

A small local community with limited private funds, when pitted against a multimillion dollar corporation has a small...possibly miniscule chance of winning any attention let alone deterring a proposed project. The system was intended to be fair but somehow, due to economic resources seem like an unfair situation indeed.

Chapter 7 gives an idea as to how such a situation can be somewhat resolved. The solution of the Native American tribes was to partner with well-established and well-funded international environmental groups such as Greenpeace. I can see where such groups will take interest in defending and helping smaller grassroots movements but I find it hard to imagine that Greenpeace will be able to fund small movements every where. After all, their pockets are not that deep. Another question that came to mind is that sometimes, affiliation with such groups may not be helpful to gain the attention of environmental decision-makers because such groups may be considered too liberal or extreme by conservative decision-makers that are in power.

It would be nice if we could just say..."Change the damned system" so that things would work out but if only things worked that way. What started out with good intentions as a democratic system turned out not to be very democratic afterall when "free" market and economic forces came into play.

How do we make this a fair fight then? Any ideas?

I'll have to think about mine.