Hi, my name is Rob Nixon.
I'm a professor in the English Department
and the High Meadows Environmental Institute.
And I'm talking today on the contest
over the commons in relation
to environmental justice.
Now for
twenty-five years I've been teaching,
writing, thinking about environmental
justice, and one of the most gratifying
elements of our current moment,
for me, is the movement of environmental
justice concerns from the margins of
environmentalism towards the center.
And this means that we're able
to make much stronger connections
between environmental health
and public health, in particular.
So, two fundamental precepts
of environmental justice
are first, the effort to
gain wider access for more people to the
fundamental goods of life. By which I
mean breathable air, drinkable water,
safe, relaxing places to walk, parks,
beaches; to maintain or achieve a more
equitable access to those resources.
The second precept of environmental
justice and the flip side of
that is, how to redress
the unequally distributed environmental
harms that certain communities
are exposed to disproportionately.
So, on the basis of race or class or
ethnicity or immigration status, certain
communities are likely to be situated
in what is sometimes called sacrifice zones.
Zones where it's clearly unhealthy to live.
These could be next to
factories spewing effluents.
These could be next to
incinerators, landfills, and so forth.
So that the long-term health impacts
of the concentration of harms, in some
communities as opposed to others, is a key
issue for environmental justice activists.
All of this connects up with the question
of the commons and perhaps the most obvious
place to enter into discussion of the
commons is what is by far the most famous
piece of writing on the commons.
Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the
Commons.” And why this is important is it has
played a very important role in the ideology
of neoliberal globalization, which has
sort of mounted an assault
on the idea of the public
good, and has operated on the assumption
that privatization is an unqualified ideal.
So, what Hardin argued in his essay
was that the freedom in the
commons produces ruin for all.
And the pivotal example that he uses
is that of a common grazing pasture.
Whereby, the more and more people
graze their cattle on the pasture,
and eventually the pasture becomes unusable
because of human greed, because nobody
is motivated to manage the load of
livestock on their particular grazing area.
And so the solution to that
is then privatization because people
are invested in ownership and therefore
will look after that land better.
And a pivotal figure that Hardin
alludes to is a British writer,
William Forster Lloyd. In 1833, Lloyd
delivered two lectures at Oxford University
and one of the points that he
makes in those lectures is that in
traveling around Britain, he had noticed
that on fenced-off private lands,
the cattle looked healthy and plump
and well fed and on the commonage
cattle looked puny, scrawny, under nourished.
And so he concluded from this,
that people were not
careful in managing the commons.
And so, they ruined the commons for all.
And so this became an argument, both
for Forster Lloyd and for
Hardin, an argument for privatization.
So what neither Forster Lloyd nor Hardin
mentions is that in the decades prior
to his observations about the health of
these cattle, in the preceding decades
we had a wave after wave of enclosure
laws in Britain whereby public land
was appropriated, and fenced off,
and privatized.
And so what you had was a
concentration of land ownership
and a shrinking of the commons.
So, those laws effectively reduced the
commons to a considerable degree and stress
out those commons because you had the same
number of cattle with less grazing access.
So, how did these questions play
out in the real world today?
So Jennifer Price, who was a
visiting Barron professor at Princeton
a couple of years ago, lives in L.A.
and she had noticed that in Malibu
and other wealthier coastal areas,
private homeowners were de facto
privatizing many of the public beaches.
And how are they doing this was
that they were concealing
public rights of way, public
access paths down to the beach.
If people don't know those paths are there
effectively, you can privatize the beach.
What she noticed was that people were putting
up hedges, vines, gates, fake
garage facades obscuring these paths.
And so she produced an
app that mapped out
all of the legal pathways and encourage
people to actively walk these pathways
and to photograph instances and
expose instances of land owners who
were trying to seal off the beaches.
Okay.
So that's one example of an initiative
trying to protect the commons.
Uh, it's also valuable to remember that in
different historical periods, in different
societies, the relationship between
private ownership and public ownership
is configured in many different ways.
So for instance, I've been
walking in Scotland and in Sweden, and
what's very interesting
there is, effectively it's much
harder to trespass than it is in the U.S.
In Scotland,
they have something called, The Right
to Roam, which means that anybody can
cross private property and the owners
have only limited resources in terms
of keeping people off their property.
Now, again, there's a kind of a gray
zone between the private and the public
but there are protocols managing how
you need to behave on that property.
So, you cannot enter somebody’s house.
I think in Sweden that you have to stay a
a hundred yards away from the house.
You can't go trampling across a cornfield.
So, there are certain arrangements to the
benefit of the access granted to the regular
public, and at the same time, attempting to
prevent destruction of the private property.
Now in France, dating back to the 16th
century, they have a practice called
gleaning that is instituted by law.
And in the context of gleaning after
the harvest is completed on a farm.
So, it could be an apple orchard, could
be a vineyard, potato farm, a wheat farm.
Once the harvest is completed, in the
ensuing days, it could be a few days.
It could be a week.
The general public can access
those farms and pick what remains.
So, it could be fallen apples or grapes
or potatoes that the harvester missed,
and they can legally access those farms.
So in a certain sense, there’s
a brief season where privately
owned farms become a sort of commonage
and then that is closed down.
And again, there are protocols,
you can't break the branches of
the apple trees and so forth.
So, there are efforts to balance
accessibility with
protection of the property.
So, I've talked a little bit about the
commons in relation to land, and I wanted
to move on to the second part of the
talk, which is focusing on the question
of breathing room, of air quality,
as an environmental justice issue
and the air as a absolutely fundamental
commons that we all depend on.
Now, this image may look unexceptional in the
era of COVID, masked bicyclists in Beijing, but
in fact, it was taken 10 years ago and given
the appalling air quality in Beijing, there
have been a series of very vocal protests
against the degradation of that essential
commons. Chai Jing, a filmmaker in China,
in, I think 2015, made a documentary
called, Under the Dome.
And the dome in question is the perpetually gray
sky that hangs over many Chinese cities.
And she made this film because she
was concerned her a daughter would
grow up and never see a blue sky.
And so, this film was watched by
150 million Chinese people in two
weeks before the authorities shut it down.
And it points to another aspect
of environmental justice, which
is intergenerational justice.
What kind of commonage are we
bequeathing to younger generations?
What kind of ancestors do we want
to be in relation to the state of
the commons that we are passing down?
to young people.
And so it's not surprising that in China,
young people have been the most active
in the most vocal in protesting the
environmental burdens of polluted air.
And so in these images, we see a marriage
ceremony conducted with breathing masks.
In the second image, we have an image
of two young activists sealed behind
plastic and with an X over their mouths.
And this is a reminder that
the mouth is both a breathing
apparatus and it's also the aperture
through which we speak and protest.
And so the X over the mouth, it's a
very economic way of signifying both a
physiological trauma and the trauma of speech
in relation to an authoritarian government.
So, all of this clearly loops back
to the question of the movement.
Black Lives Matter movement
and "we can't breathe"
that was kicked off by the
killing of Eric Garner in 2012, where
11 times he said I can't breathe.
And he was an asthmatic, who was
in a choke hold, put in a choke hold.
And then of course, George Floyd last year.
And so, this
question of environmental justice in
relation to Black Lives Matter movement
becomes absolutely critical because
breathing is so fundamental to being human
that it's not surprising that in
English, we have so many figurative
ways of referring to that.
Somebody will say, I
need more breathing room.
Somebody sucks all the
oxygen out of the room.
In the case of this cartoon, the
reference is to Emma Lazarus's poem.
Give us your tired, your poor, your
huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
And so yearning to be three has
been crossed out in the wake of
the Black Lives Matter movement.
So, it's not surprising to me
that this meme, we can't breathe,
has resonated across the world.
Here's a cover from an Indian
magazine, "i can't breathe", referring to
the terrible air quality in Delhi.
In the summer, when you have diesel
generators, you have car fumes, you have
stubble fields around the city burning.
You have fireworks displays for Diwali
There are many contributing factors.
And, again, the health hazards are unequally
imposed on the wealthy and the poor.
And then, this final image is of
something that a street artist
put up on a wall in Cape Town.
I can't breathe.
And what's so resonant about this is that
the highway that links the airport and
the city center, down which tourists
pour, is lined by informal settlements.
And so to obscure these so-called
eyesores of informal settlements, the
local government erected these big walls.
And so, I can't breathe here
has a physiological dimension
from the traffic fumes.
and also there's a big coal fired
plant just next to the settlements.
But it also has this other metaphoric
dimension that the poor, as in many parts
of the world, are brutally policed and they
are living in overcrowded circumstances.
So, both at a physiological and a
metaphoric level, you can understand
why poor communities around
the world have really taken up
this cry.
So, to come back finally to Hardin's essay, The
Tragedy of the Commons. In most societies,
whether these indigenous societies,
peasant communities or others,
the comments has always existed within
a context of protocols and restraints.
In other words, it's not a free for all
where people can just pile in and be as
greedy as possible, but there are certain
regulations, certain controls that seek to
maintain the commons for future generations.
The commons involve a set
of sustainable practices.
Now, clearly in many instances, these
have been imperfectly maintained or
imperfectly pursued, but contrary to Hardin's
argument the commons is not just an
open unmanaged space and, indeed, towards the
end of his life, Hardin acknowledged this
and he said he wished that he had
called his essay, The Tragedy of the
Unregulated Commons.
Which has a very different set of implications.
And unfortunately the horse has bolted
the barn and the meme, the tragedy of the
commons, the assumption that the commons
would result in economic failure had
taken off and the Chicago School of
Economics and many other neoliberal think tanks
had jumped on it and mobilized it in
the name of the supposed universally
more efficient systems of privatization.
Thank you.