The Environmental State is in Danger. Here’s How We Can Fight Back.
Fostering collective action against retrenchment during COVID-19 gives us the opportunity to win some unlikely allies.
Photo by Patrick Hendry.
I have long lost track of the days in which my home state of Oregon has been under quarantine. Now, I count other looming numbers that have come to mark our existence. Like many, I assume, I dwell on the growing number of coronavirus cases and death rates, the time that’s passed since I last embraced family members, and the days since I was laid off. Amid these challenges, I also count the number of environmental rollbacks the Trump administration has pushed through during this time of great fear and uncertainty.
Since COVID-19 was first detected in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has moved forward with a laundry list of regulatory rollbacks. Chief among them is a rule suspending enforcement of industry pollution monitoring and reporting, allowing some of the country’s biggest corporate polluters to self-regulate. The rule is extremely broad, covering oil and gas facilities, chemical manufacturing, coal-fired power plants, factory farming, steel manufacturing, toxic waste dumps, and more; it pertains to more than 100,000 facilities and sites across the country. The EPA’s new policy, in short, is a textbook example of disaster capitalism—a mere favor to industries that have long poisoned the communities and workers that live in and near them. As writer Sharon Zhang put it, “They [the EPA] have decided to potentially trade lives for their industry darlings - and they’re hardly trying to hide it.”
Communities of color most often bear the burden of environmental injustice. They are disproportionately located near toxic waste dumps, oil refineries, power plants and other polluting industries, and therefore experience higher rates of cancer and respiratory-related sickness and death. It isn't a surprise, then, that data released by several cities and states show a stark disparity in the number of Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities that are becoming infected with and dying from the coronavirus compared to white Americans.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 swiftly evades boundaries. The virus is now growing more in rural, predominantly white areas compared with metropolitan areas. Many rural American towns are home to workers in the oil and gas, coal, big agriculture and chemical manufacturing industries, to name a few. Regardless of race or socio-economic status, working in and living near these facilities poses a detriment to health. Similar to many cities, rural towns are increasingly fraught with health care disparities, limited economic resources, a declining job market, and lack of health infrastructure. Nevertheless, while poor rural America is at risk more than ever, rural-urban polarization and the politicization of COVID-19 has led many of these communities to deny the threat of the virus and, in addition, to deny environmental deregulation poses a profound public health risk. This dangerous disconnect is largely responsible for our inability to fight rollbacks and address the crises of our time.
However, given that the United States has all but failed to protect its citizens from both COVID-19 and industrial pollution, a common recognition of our government’s shortcomings is growing. This moment provides a unique opportunity to build solidarity across communities often at political odds. Though epistemic obstacles stand in the way, they can be overcome by acknowledging how Trump’s EPA has failed both the left and the right. Broken promises given to rural and urban Americans can shed light on common struggles: disinvestment, declining legitimacy, a global pandemic, and a rapidly changing climate.
Milton Friedman once said, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Take it from Friedman, the godfather of neoliberal economics, to know something about transforming the world. Ironically, leftists can use this lesson against Friedman’s political descendants to transform the EPA, dissolve polarization and build the political bloc necessary for a Green New Deal (GND): one that can pave the way for a sustainable, equitable, and resilient recovery from COVID-19.
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I grew up across a collection of towns and cities in Washington state and Oregon. My grandfather was a logger in the 1970s, and today he still lives in the same backwoods town with a population of under 40 people. Practically none of my rural family is conservative, and neither are their neighbors. Growing up, I didn’t realize that rural America is synonymous with conservatism in the cultural imagination. I learned from my grandfather that having a connection to nature is important. The members of my family who voted for Donald Trump, on the other hand, all live, quite ironically, in the liberal hub of Portland, Oregon.
I share this narrative to speak to the assumptions the left—which, in its organized form, is overwhelmingly urban—tends to make about rural America. My story is small and does not intend to ignore the masses of rural America that possess wildly different, often reactionary beliefs. However, in recognizing the existence of rural communities that do care about the environment—that didn’t vote for Trump and don’t have racist beliefs—we can work to identify allies we may otherwise ignore. Our perceptions must acknowledge the nuances that exist within them, and therefore abandoning the equation of rural America with white America is also essential. For those rural communities that do fulfill the stereotype, on the other hand, we must engage them differently in order to change minds.
Agreeing on a Green New Deal program is essential for emerging from the coronavirus depression. In material terms, rural Americans are our vital allies. We depend on them for fundamental services such as farming, ranching and forestry management. As a practical matter, rural Americans also hold a great deal of power over the plausibility of winning a GND, due to the disproportionate influence they enjoy from malapportionment in the US Senate. Why is it, though, that rural demographics are so often adamantly opposed to a GND? Research shows that distaste for ideas from the so-called “radical left,” such as climate change and a GND, aren’t the result of rural folks caring less about their environment. An expansive study completed by Duke researchers examined rural environmentalism and found that the rural/urban divide is not a function of who cares more about the environment, nor who is more knowledgeable about its destruction. Rather, the divide is based on differing attitudes towards rule by a centralized monolith.
Many participants in the Duke study expressed the feeling that climate policies were centered around urban issues, such as public transportation and building efficiency, which don't always provide opportunities for rural communities. Farmers and farmworkers felt left out of big technological changes, and said they wanted to benefit from the innovations and job creation coming from climate change policy. At the same time, they conveyed a preference for policies that are overseen by state and local governance, rather than by the federal government. Aversion to federal policy is one of the biggest obstacles standing in the way of rural, archetypically more conservative folks accepting a GND. While many constituents accepted the need for the government to regulate corporate activity, they felt that federal regulation in their own communities threatened their livelihood.
Ironically, devolving power to rural communities may keep power in the hands of the same corporations that lock these communities into fossil fuel dependency. This is due to the fact that state and local governments are generally more susceptible to regulatory capture, wherein special interests are prioritized over the general interests of the public. Many rural communities fell captive to the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries, among others, where the promise of jobs and a flourishing economy allowed for the sacrifice of the well-being and autonomy of the community for a perceived greater societal benefit. In the paper “Distributive Justice and Rural America,” Ann M. Eisenberg discusses the gradual disenfranchisement of rural America, writing, “In agriculture, policies favoring consolidated agribusiness hollowed out once multidimensional farm communities. In the extractive sector, lackluster oversight enabled the environmental and economic devastation of fossil fuel communities.” After these communities were no longer useful for profit, they became “forgotten” and “left behind.”
State and local governments can be made less vulnerable to capture if they are willing to accept guidance from the federal government. Yet, the central government certainly isn’t immune to capture either: Trump’s EPA has made this exceptionally evident. We need not less or more government, but rather a re-shaping of the current system, with a direct emphasis on divestment from the oil and gas, coal and large-scale factory farming industries. The externalities of these such industries can be felt across the rural-urban divide. Naomi Klein writes of the many existing and abandoned hazardous waste sites scattered throughout the country as eerie representations of an extraction-obsessed society:
“Entire landscapes have been left to waste after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners and drillers. It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s what has been done to so many workers in the neo-liberal period, using them up and then abandoning them to addiction and despair.”
Coronavirus-related economic downturn has provided a strong incentive for the type of ideological conversion needed to forge a successful GND coalition. However, there is a misunderstanding across the political spectrum that a transition to green energy means top-down, centralized control. Many believe that the GND will result in a shift of political power away from rural areas and back into the government: an America where “customers outside dense urban areas will get stuck with huge electric bills.” Rural people often nostalgically contrast this perceived nightmare with existing rural electric cooperatives and the New Deal-era Rural Electrification Act of 1936, which delivered low-cost, federally backed loans to energy co-ops, allowing them to build their own electric grids and be independent of big utilities.
However, evidence shows that the original co-ops that helped electrify rural America in the 30s have lost their way. Klein writes, “Rather than serve the people, they charge top dollar for dirty energy while making decisions behind closed doors.” Therefore, it makes sense to take the original idea of the co-op from the New Deal, scrap what is no longer working and create something better: a system based in the community empowerment that rural people nostalgically appeal to with an emphasis on renewable energy.
There are many examples of rural and urban frontline communities that have scrapped New-Deal era co-ops in place of GND-inspired Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) models and other forms of decentralized governance that give more power to localities. CCAs allow local governments to procure power on behalf of their residents, businesses and municipalities from an alternative supplier while receiving transmission and distribution service from their existing utility provider. CCAs are a great option for communities that want greater control over the source of their electricity. CCA prices are up to 15 to 20 percent lower than the local residential retail price for electricity, thanks to the collective buying power of the entire community. A GND could facilitate the expansion of CCAs across rural and urban areas, thereby giving less power to fossil-fuel dependent utilities and greater autonomy for community members to make decisions on behalf of public health.
Rural residents in the Mississippi Delta, for example, are reclaiming control of New-Deal era co-ops that many claimed were overpriced. Cleotra Tanner, a local NAACP leader and citizen of the small town of Isola, Mississippi, said it took him more than 60 years to learn that he was a member of the local co-op. He was then introduced to the group One Voice, a non-profit that offers free training on how to engage, vote and run for boards of electric co-ops, aiming to “empower people to challenge an unequal racial and economic power dynamic among cooperatives in the state, lower costly utility bills, and push energy leaders to reinvest in rural communities.” In Oakland, California, the People Power Solar Cooperative empowers everyday, working-class individuals to actively participate in the transition to green energy. It is a community-led, financed and owned co-op that works to close the gap between utility and consumer, teaching citizens how to be involved in solar development.
Currently, CCAs only exist in eight states. Given the distinct role of co-ops and other community-led programs in empowering localities and encouraging more vigilant participation in government, CCA’s should be mandated across the country under the GND vision. Other forms of outreach are necessary in building a cross-racial, rural-urban alliance through abandonment of one-size-fits-all solutions in place of direct engagement with constituencies based on their specific wants and needs. Policymakers should implement programs that explicitly encourage participation in government, and cede ownership of the transition to the people whose livelihoods they sustain. In addition, in order for a GND to deliver equity and localized democracy, leftists must relinquish their assumptions of rural America and instead engage these communities as the complex, diverse places that they are.
Despite our divisions, there are certain things we all struggle with, especially during the spread of COVID-19. We're all counting the days locked in our houses or working on the frontlines. We are becoming more and more disillusioned with the media and lack faith in the systems we're supposed to be able to trust. That is why it is important, now more than ever, to look out for one another, and pay attention to the opportunities presented by those freshly open to new narratives. Only then can the government’s failure be our political gain.
Ayla Burnett is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon with a degree in Environmental Studies, Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of Oregon. She writes about the environment, politics and human rights on justice-journalism.com. You can find her music writing and poetry at culture-of-the-underground.blog.
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