White Environmentalism and the Corporate University
Universities and corporations are teaming up to fix the climate crisis-—-and ensure that they can continue to amass power through racial capitalism.
Photo by j zamora.
On April 16th, 2019, a slick press release appeared on Morgan Stanley’s website. The multinational investment bank’s Institute for Sustainable Investing had announced an initiative to reduce global plastic waste by 50 million metric tons by 2030. As part of a sweeping investment strategy aimed at “[scaling] the innovations and business-based solutions to reduce plastic waste,” the bank announced that they were partnering with the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) to establish a Plastic Waste Reduction fellowship for graduate students at the school. For his part, Jonathan Overpeck, the Dean at SEAS, expressed excitement about the partnership and its potential to advance “cutting-edge scholarship” that could “help inform the field to make smarter investments that matter and have real, lasting impact.”
Many students at SEAS, where I am currently a graduate student, were considerably less enthused. The prospect of partnering with Morgan Stanley to reduce plastic waste while the company remained the 11th-largest funder of fossil fuels in the world reeked of greenwashing–the common corporate tactic of engaging in superficially sustainable projects in order to distract from problematic environmental records. In Morgan Stanley’s case, that record is particularly sordid: from funding the Dakota Access Pipeline to investing in global deforestation to targeting communities of color with predatory loans in Detroit, the list of abuses committed by Morgan Stanley is considerable. Student discontent boiled over in the fall of 2019, when SEAS announced further collaboration with Morgan Stanley in the form of a project for Master’s students. In response, students and staff (myself included) circulated an open letter in opposition to the partnership, arguing that it was “fundamentally at odds with SEAS’s stated commitments to environmental and social justice.”
The increasing prevalence of corporate partnerships in academia has been characterized as “invisible colonization”, and there has been some documentation of the negative impacts these partnerships often have on the integrity of scientific research. These are legitimate concerns, but they are a symptom of a much deeper rot. The corporatization of the environmental academy is ultimately a consolidation of power driven by the hegemony of racial capitalism within the ivory towers, itself steadily enabled and reified by the ideology at the heart of American conservationism: white environmentalism.
White environmentalism is the unifying element among most dominant schools of thought within the American environmental movement. Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, often seen as the fathers of environmental conservation, took part in the eugenics movement and believed in the superiority of the white race. During Roosevelt’s presidency, as Pinchot served as chief of the Forest Service, the two presided over the transfer of millions of acres of forested Indigenous land to the national forests and opened up thousands more for white settlement. The violation of Indigenous treaty rights for land theft was driven by Roosevelt and Pinchot’s white, aristocratic vision of conservation. In a rejection of Indigenous notions that humans and nature are co-constitutive, Roosevelt and Pinchot sought to protect an idealized, untouched wilderness for consumption by wealthy whites- at the expense of the Indigenous and rural communities that already lived there.
This constructed separation of humanity and nature and the systematic violation of Indigenous rights that accompanied it continued to serve as the foundation of American environmental conservation over the following decades. The 1916 National Park Service Organic Act, which created the National Park Service, made no acknowledgement of the Indigenous peoples that inhabited America’s so-called public lands. The Wilderness Act of 1964, signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson, formally codified white conservationist erasure of Indigenous peoples, defining wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” and thereby denying the presence of Indigenous peoples in such areas. In this way, white environmentalist discourses enabled the creation of America’s public lands through the genocide of Native peoples.
The text of the Wilderness Act also expressed concern about the potential effects of “increasing population” on nature, which proved to be somewhat prophetic. In 1968, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara named Garrett Hardin published The Tragedy of the Commons. Hardin argued against the collective ownership of natural resources. It was also an overtly racist and eugenicist screed that reflected Hardin’s affiliations with white nationalist hate groups and formed the basis of what he would later call “lifeboat ethics,” a metaphor in which rich countries were “lifeboats” that were justified in keeping the residents of poor countries (“swimmers”) immiserated due to limited space and resources. That same year, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, a book that espoused a similar perspective of developing (and overwhelmingly non-white) nations and openly argued for compulsory population control.
These two publications remain hugely influential in white environmentalist thought even today. The Tragedy of the Commons has been cited over 40,000 times and is uncritically taught in environmental science curricula across the country—including at SEAS. The Population Bomb was an early contributor to persistent racist overpopulation narratives among white environmentalists that place the responsibility for climate change and ecological degradation at the feet of poor people in the Global South, despite the fact that the global poor are responsible for only 10% of carbon emissions worldwide.
Majority-white environmental advocacy groups co-produced the white environmentalist narratives emerging from within the halls of academia, creating deep divides in the racial dynamics of environmental activism in the United States. The Sierra Club, a well-known conservation organization, is a notable example. The organization was in fact responsible for publishing The Population Bomb, and has repeatedly failed to integrate into its work issues of environmental justice such as racial discrimination and immigration reform that come into conflict with white environmentalist ideals. In recent years, the Sierra Club has taken steps to recognize and remedy these problems, largely due to pressure and organizing by the largely Black and brown-led environmental justice movement that emerged in the 1980s. But due to the past and present pervasiveness of white environmentalism, large environmental organizations remain white-dominated and largely separated from the environmental justice movement. A 2014 report that studied nearly 300 major environmental organizations spanning nonprofits, government agencies, and grantmaking organizations found that not a single one was less than 84 percent white.
White environmentalism, then, is a powerful ideology which has served as a tool by which the exploitative power relations within the professionalized sectors of the American environmental movement are maintained. But what determines the specific purposes for which this tool has been used? Why is white environmentalism enabling the increasing corporatization of universities? We can look to the work of esteemed social theorist Cedric Robinson for answers. Robinson argued that racialized oppression is integral to capitalism, and coined the term “racial capitalism” to describe how capitalism emerged from racialized feudalism in Europe and proceeded to proliferate racial oppression across the world in the form of colonialism, genocide, and slavery. White environmentalism, itself characterized by colonial and racist processes of dispossession and enclosure of land and resources, can thus be seen as a constituent element of racial capitalism. As such, it fits neatly into the agenda of the capitalist university. That American universities are deeply invested in racial capitalism needs little explanation: just as the University of California system steadfastly refuses to properly compensate its graduate workers, Harvard maintains financial interests in the racist carceral system and the University of Michigan invests in companies that aid the occupation of Palestine. The American university system itself was built on land grants created by the expropriation of nearly 11 million acres of Indigenous land. The capitalist university is fundamentally dependent on the fragmentation, enclosure, and privatization of land, resources, and knowledge as a means of maintaining and reproducing class and racial hierarchies. This dependency is expressed within the environmental academy by the construction of visions of a “sustainable” future defined by an environmentalism that reinforces the structures of colonialism, racism, and accumulation that define racial capitalism. This iteration of white environmentalist discourse can be seen as what Eve Tuck calls settler futurity: a narrow vision of the future that prioritizes and reproduces colonial hierarchies. Because the environmental academy has a vested interest in maintaining these structures, it adheres to such narratives to justify them. White environmentalism is the sugar that helps the medicine go down.
The relationship between the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability and Morgan Stanley can be cast in a new light when contextualized within this lens. Morgan Stanley’s aforementioned abuses of communities of color, Indigenous people, and the poor are widely known. However, when questioned on the origins of the Morgan Stanley partnership, the faculty who had spearheaded the relationship admitted that they did not consider the implications for communities of color because environmental justice is not their area of expertise. Their ignorance is not strictly a personal failing, but rather a product of the racial power gradients created by racial capitalism and perpetuated by white environmentalism. It is no coincidence that SEAS also has no criteria for evaluating the environmental justice impacts of its partners; the erasure of racist and colonial abuses is essential to the settler futurist project. Acknowledging and reconciling these contradictions would require a change in power relations that the racial capitalist university cannot abide. Left unchallenged, corporate partnerships enabled by white environmentalism will create new white environmentalisms, entrenching the current power structures that keep white supremacy and racial capitalism alive.
So what can we do to challenge them? It is incumbent on students, faculty, and staff in the environmental field to recognize and repair the fissures created by white environmentalism and challenge racial capitalism at every turn. That means going beyond sanitized, university-endorsed notions of diversity and inclusion and engaging in the hard work of anti-racism, decolonization, and redistributing the means of knowledge production. We must be vigilant in our criticism of corporate partnerships and relationships that legitimize harmful and racist practices, but these partnerships are merely one manifestation of white environmentalism. We can take steps toward dismantling its hegemony more broadly by looking to the work of grassroots environmental justice activists and radical scholars of color. We can decolonize our research methodologies and incorporate marginalized communities into our knowledge production in substantive, mutually liberatory ways. We can demand more inclusive curricula that incorporate critical histories of environmental movements. We can look to the “divest and reinvest” model to push our universities to divest from harmful institutions and partnerships and instead engage in meaningful partnerships and community-building with our neighbors who exist on the frontlines of ecological degradation and climate change. We can push for reparations and the return of Indigenous lands to dismantle the power of white environmentalist narratives and begin processes of reconciliation.
If we are to truly tackle the problems of the climate crisis and achieve the just, equitable transition toward which we claim to be working, then we must remake our institutions of teaching and learning with a commitment to applying environmental justice to all we do and an explicit rejection of white environmentalism. Let’s get to work.
Roshan Krishnan is a graduate student and climate justice activist at the University of Michigan. He tweets about ecosocialism, anti-racism, and emo revival music @papa_rosh.
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