7gen Bloc

I celebrated Earth Day by participating in a discussion of race, class, and environmentalism at a community event in Poughkeepsie, NY, sponsored by Vassar College. Because my son had just come out of the hospital, I was late and unprepared. In fact, I hadn’t stopped to check on the subject of the talk, let alone gather my comments prior to the trip up from New York City. My first reaction was, “Oh my god (the Pope was in town) what am I going to say?”

As the event's organizers explained the event on the Vassar website, "Environmentalism is often seen as an elitist movement, and we wanted to try and break that stereotype. Our panel will focus on environmental racism, the notion that people of color are both disproportionately affected by environmental degradation, and have less agency to address these situations."

While driving north from the City, I decided to discuss Seventh Generation’s challenges and failures dealing with the issues of race and class as well as some minor success stories: our involvement with WAGES, a program that helps low-income Hispanic women in San Francisco run their own cleaning businesses; our work with the Whole Planet Foundation, which makes micro-loans to poor farmers in Central America; our Change-It program with Greenpeace; and our deliberations not to sell to Wal-Mart, in part because of its terrible history of taking advantage of low-income people.

I was speaking along with Dwaine Lee, from the non-profit organization Sustainable South Bronx, who is a Field Manager for the group’s B.E.S.T. (Bronx Environmental Steward Training) program and Greenway Steward Initiative. He recruits and equips Bronx residents to address environmental threats both to global sustainability and to the local community's quality of life. Clearly, our success would pale in comparison.

And it did.

The crowd did not want to hear about what we were doing in San Francisco or Costa Rica. They wanted to know why some working-class folks couldn't afford our products, why they weren't available at the corner stores in their community, why we weren't educating low-income people about the dangers of traditional-cleaning products, and which of the city's non-profits we were supporting.

They were not interested in my notions of how you need to think systemically about issues of environmental justice -- that you can't entirely eliminate the problem without changing the system that produces the problem. They wanted to know what we were doing for them –- and the answer was, not a lot. Perhaps even nothing.

I had plenty to think about on my trip home.