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- Info
Nature as community: The convergence of environment and social justice
| Author: |
Di'Chiro, Giovanna |
| Date: |
1995 |
| Periodical: |
In: Cronon, W., ed. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc. |
| Abstract: |
Addressing this question of the discrepancy between what does and does not count as "environmental" is, I believe, crucial to the effort to produce a broadly based environmental movement that really works. Part of this effort requires a close analysis and historical reading of how different groups of people have understood their relationship to "nature" and the environments in which they live. What, for example, are the diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings and metaphors that different people deal with when negotiating the multiple environments they encounter in their everyday lives? What does it mean to talk about nature as a "benevolent mother," as "wild places unspoiled by human hands," or as the "place where family and community convene and share life experiences"? We can also learn a lot about how people understand, live in, and change their environments, not only by studying diverse ideas about "nature" or human/environment interconnections, but by examining social practice. What are the complex forms and structures of social and cultural organization that emerge in diverse locales to resist the destruction of particular human/ environment relationships and to support specific ways of life? In other words, how do people mobilize through action in order to sustain or transform certain relationships with "nature" and their environment? In this essay, I examine the emergence of the environmental justice movement, a social movement strongest in low-income communities of color that, like Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles, conceive of "nature" and "environment" as those places and sets of relationships that sustain a local community's way of life. The grassroots organizations that make up the movement identify such issues as social justice, local economic sustainability, health, and community governance as falling under the purview of "environment." |
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