Where neoliberalism ends and community resiliency begins

You've heard the news from Detroit (or even from Cleveland, Hartford or the Bronx for that matter). People living in certain parts of the city continue to be subjugated to toxic living conditions. 48217 is the most polluted zipcode in the state of Michigan. Industrial complexes larger than neighbourhoods provide nothing but suffocating air and brownfield land to the people living in their vicinity.

The government--federal, state, or city--provides no favours to these people. It can seem that all the government cares about is tax breaks to the rich and preserving their elite status. That is why public school teachers are continually laid off, and funds for basic city services such as law enforcement and fire protection are hacked. The New International Trade Crossing, the publicly-owned bridge being proposed between Ontario and Detroit, will provide a handful of temporary construction jobs, and even fewer permanent jobs, while cementing the relationship of this culture on large-scale manufacturing and ecologically degrading industrialism. Money laundering, corrupt politicians, government kickbacks run rampant in the City of Detroit, where until recently, city council members were elected at large, thus holding them accountable to no one other than their colleagues and cronies. At the same time, as Ulrich Beck notes in Risk Society, industrial modernity makes it close to impossible to link long-term human health impacts to the slow violence of pollution. People do suffer, the environment does suffer, at the hands of this culture. Regardless of your position on these issues, people such as those in Delray, and our Earth are being continually oppressed and polluted.

In response to these issues, I have wondered whether it is possible to develop community resiliency, which I conjure as a reliance not on changing who is in office or expending energy on failed politics, but rather on dealing with issues at a more tractable level, a level at which community members can participate directly and are appreciated, while at the same time creating small institutions that directly address complicated problems. Recently, urban gardens in Detroit and other cities across the country have provided wonderful models of how community-based, community-scale projects can foster neighbourliness and provide healthful food opportunities for youthful engagement with the land. Are there other ways in which communities of oppressed people can address the problems they face themselves?

In some sense, such community resiliency may seem like a form of the libertarian and neoliberal agenda...People doing it for themselves. YEAH! Screw government. YEAH! Screw regulation. YEAH! (Followed closely by, Lower taxes. YEAH!) However, I see stark differences between the neoliberalism of industrial, corporate capitalism and the community resiliency I describe above. People that have bought into the neoliberal agenda believe that the government hinders their ability to earn money for themselves. They believe that only if the government got out of the way, they would create long-term employment for people and "economic growth", while changing global standards will in time address the massive ecological issues we face. (I haven't drunk that warped Kool-Aid.) On the other hand, community resiliency, like that fostered in the urban gardening movement, first and foremost recognises that the lines between government and the private sector are blurred, that indeed they rely on each other for stability, that they do not care about you or me, let alone oppressed peoples. A government guided by neoliberal principles is not interested in community development or neighbourliness or the capacity of people to endure changes themselves. Community resiliency is the antidote to such principles. Community resiliency is about what we can build for each other, not for our individual selves. Collective, small-scale action allows us to imagine and live new possibilities without reliance on misguided economic and social philosophies.

Of course politics need to change. Of course we must fight corruption and get politicians at every level of government to care about the people they represent and the environment we live in. But who knows, maybe those oppressed know best about what is oppressing them, making them best people to address the problems head on.

Social justice and sustainability - the conflict of time

The way we've posed the problem of sustainability has had a huge impact on the outcomes we've deemed as feasible. As I've written previously, the world has basically defined three pillars of sustainability- environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability, all of which intersect with each other but can also be mutually exclusive. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of "optimisation" of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Add on to this the issue of time - injustice now vs. injustice in the future - and what you have is a full-blown case of complexity and politics.

So how does a contemporary environmental justice problem fit in this paradigm? Not well. We can all agree that what we need to strive for is a world of lasting peace within ourselves and with the Earth we live on. But there are injustices that are happening right now that are a result of massive systems of oppression and violence towards people; we've exposed people to horrific living conditions, and have gotten them mired in a cycle of poverty that they honestly cannot leave. We need to deal with these issues right now. Unfortunately, as we witnessed in Delray, a semi-"just" (I cringe to use this word here.) solution now means affording people the opportunity to leave Delray by buying them out, or by beautifying their streets by funneling some money from the New International Trade Crossing project to the neighbourhood. But the bridge itself is not something that is sustainable in the long term. Rather, it further imprints on us the need for cars and trucks and shipping, while the fourteen thousand trucks passing over the bridge daily will worsen air quality for the residents left behind.

We're stuck in this mindset of trade-offs. We can give people money, but only at the expense of the environment. Short-term social justice trumps long-term sustainability. If we try to do less harm on the environment by not building the bridge, Matty Maroun will continue his monopoly, and people will have no money to leave Delray. Long-term steps toward sustainability might keep oppressive systems in place today. What I've realised is that there is no way we can live in a sustainable world unless everything (except the environment) is on the table for radical change - economy, society, culture, international politics and diplomacy.

We must act now in the best interests of those that have borne the brunt of our actions, and that means allowing these people a nicer place to live in. We must care for the abused, and welcome them into our neighbourhoods and circles, and break down the barriers that have held them back. This means that we, the privileged, need to change. Posing sustainability as a win-win problem ("sustainable development"), a problem in which we can alleviate ecological burdens on some while enjoying the lifestyles and privileges that others currently do, will only continue ecological degradation. We must therefore simultaneously envision a more holistic world - a world in which our human choices (say, of building a bridge or a dam) are tempered by an understanding that the long-term consequences of these choices lead to situations in which future short-term decisions will not be in conflict with future long-term actions needed.