By Syontoni Hattori-Chatterjee
After the results of the U.S. presidential election became decisively known around the world, I admittedly spent the rest of Wednesday, November 6th, in a depressive slump. I was scared not only for the future of American democracy, economic management, and domestic climate policy, but also worried about the potential regressive impacts of this closely watched election on global environmental governance. Dr. Fengshi Wu’s talk with students the following day on the dynamics of environmental protests worldwide gave me a much needed boost of hope.
The Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at UNSW Sydney first passionately presented her work on the history of environmentalist movements around the world. But as she critically emphasized, most of the activists of these movements, including Filipino protesters against World Bank-funded hydropower dams that would displace Indigenous communities in the 1980s, did not define themselves as environmentalists. The resistance of activists like Chico Mendes to protect the Amazon rainforest consisted of directly impacted individuals and communities fighting for the land that they lived on, the air they breathed, and the water and food sources they needed to survive. These kinds of deeply local struggles for survival were and still are shared across societies, from democratic to authoritarian and everything in between. I was convinced by Dr. Wu’s assertion that the lifeblood of environmental movements lies in their ability to take climate change and biodiversity issues from the global level to the local, and thereby speak to the immediate needs of communities facing these issues now. I also found it striking how she connected ground-level mobilization of communities addressed to direct threats such as air pollution in Pakistan or the disappearance of a river representing a sole potable water source in Kazakhstan to the triple influence of local laws, national policy, and international funding from organizations like the World Bank.
I was reminded of the work of Julian Aguon, Chamorro human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, a Guam-based international law firm specializing in Indigenous rights and self-determination and environmental justice cases in the Pacific. I heard him speak two years ago at California State University Northridge’s Fifth Civil Discourse and Social Change initiative Social Justice Student Research Conference. Also an author, Aguon discussed using environmental activism as responsible grief work to process the loss of lifeways, family, and tradition as a result of climate change and a means of driving people past cynicism to environmental justice action through personal stories. Both Aguon and Wu’s presentations were factual but passionate, analyzing a web of international organization-state-community interactions at the level of people and their immediate survival. The presentations moreover advocated vigorously for the centrality of the most marginalized and most impacted communities in our notion of environmental activism.
I also appreciated how Dr. Wu clearly and deftly illustrated some key distinctions between environmental movements in different contexts. Her research showed her that the major difference between protests occurring within a democratic context of rule of law versus a context without these guarantees was the level of repression, violence, and loss of life that protestors faced from the state. Nevertheless, she demonstrated that environmental movements worldwide are facing increasing repression, a symptom of democratic backsliding given that such movements have often pushed for political liberalization. She responded to audience questions clarifying that environmental politics’ being depicted as a left-wing, abstract political issue is a problem within Western democracies that does not translate to many other political contexts where the issue is more universalized. She also discussed national and global environmental governance in China, a uniquely high-functioning authoritarian regime whose renewable energy tradition is more driven by fossil-fuel-poor geographic conditions than existential concerns about the ecosystem. I found it especially illuminating to compare this strongly state-led environmental policy model to the contrasting behavior of the rising Chinese middle class, finally able to enjoy comfortable lifestyles of overconsumption that the middle classes of Western democracies have for decades, and thus, understandably, reluctant to forego its new lifestyle. As an American concerned about further U.S. removal from global climate governance, it was interesting to observe a different model that could become the future of environmental leadership in international relations.
I am sure that I speak for my peers in expressing my gratitude to Havrais Dire for organizing this conference amidst what is always a busy (and perhaps draining) time studying political science in the tumultuous world we live in today. I hope that sharing some of my reflections on Dr. Fengshi Wu’s presentation through this article gives other students a similar renewed hope in our power to affect local change for global environmental progress.
Le Dragon Déchaîné 