Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

I don't want to review this video here. It is in its way an excellent video on the implications of peak oil. It is however from the perspective of the above demographic, and blithely ignores the impacts of peak oil - and proposed solutions - on non-white and economically disadvantaged communities in the United States. It leaves out the inherent racism of "resource wars." When I wrote to the creators of the documentary, I got back the response that while the video does indeed not deal with the issues of race, it is because "We wanted to make a video that would introduce as many people as possible to the issue in a way that they could relate to, and 190 million people live in some kind of suburban arrangement. Do most of these people care about the poor or minorities? Likely not, although their actions affect them. And soon many of them will be among the poor."

The response pained, but did not surprise me. I have heard various renditions of this response on a variety of social issues. The women's movement for a period of time tried to keep lesbians hidden away because they didn't want to detract from the larger movement. The early environmental movement also (quietly) as people of color and gays and lesbians and feminists to keep quiet to not detract from the environmental focus. The "left" of the 1960s and '70s (regardless of race) kept women in the background. The same thing is happening now with the peak oil "movement" and the sustainability movement, and generally, the environmental movement as a whole. The glaring exception is that there is an environmental justice movement, but it still is largely not venturing into the areas of peak oil.

A recent, and excellent, article including environmental justice is Joseph Mangano's piece - Reactors and Racism - in the Nation. The focus is on the approval of two new nuclear reactors at the Grand Gulf facility in Mississippi and how that affects the largely African American (and poor) community.

Mangano's article is not on peak oil, and doesn't even mention it. However, part of the Bush administration's "solution" to the oil crisis (and the same is true of Europe) is to increase nuclear plants. The "solution" dramatically impacts the communities where such plants are built - poor communities, communities of color, and rural communities.

The same is true of numerous other posited strategies for dealing with life after cheap oil. The new urbanism proposes "reclaiming" urban spaces and making sustainable communities. Those communities are being "reclaimed" by the white's who fled to the suburbs (financed at taxpayer expense) to escape from people of color who were largely denied access to suburbia. Where will the "displaced" go? Do the "new urbanites" even care, or think beyond their own self interest?

A common suggestion is for individuals to prepare for the crash. transforming yards into high yield gardens; getting off the grid through installation of solar, wind, and other alternative technologies; buying hybrid vehicles or converting existing vehicles to bio-fuel sources; learning skills such as food preservation, manual construction, solar construction, and how to shoot a gun. These require resources (including home ownership) that the most of the working and lower classes (and many people of color) don't have.

Who will be the "enemy?" Who will come looking for food and alternative fuel vehicles? Those who were not "prepared." In hearing and reading people's (white people's) comments, there is all too frequently a "survivalist" mentality. Save yourself and your family (from the rampaging hordes). When the issue of the racist underpinnings of the issue does come up directly, it is frequently responded to as "not a race issue." That is white privilege speaking loud and clear.

There is a clear threat of "resource wars" in the face of increasing scarcity of oil (and soon other resources such as natural gas, water, etc). Currently, the U.S. volunteer army is having recruiting problems, but disproportionately, it is those with blocked opportunity who have joined up. That is likely to continue as the economic impacts of price escalation and scarcity increases. The poor, the non-white, those from small and rural communities, the immigrant hoping for U.S. citizenship will continue to be the most likely recruits. They will be sent to fight others (largely in the same situation) for resources around the world.

Those who have less access to societal resources will be impacted in the same ways (though sooner and more extremely) than the privileged groups. They will also be disproportionately impacted by the "solutions."

It is clear that we will have to transform societies in order to survive the oil crash and its broad impacts. Since things need to change dramatically, couldn't we also change the levels of inequality that are rooted in the racist, classist, sexists, anglo-ethnocentric ideologies that have led to many of the world's current problems?

If we do not address the inequality and blindness within the current systems, we will certainly end up with darker and uglier versions of them under an extended (or permanent) crisis.