Bird on Fire, or smart bird that's avoided the bonfire of neighboring state?
NYU professor Andrew Ross is an errant preacher of the eco-apocalypse, damning the ravages of humanity (more especially of humanity’s most execrable construct: Anglo-American free market capitalism) on the planet; in this book he’s a voice crying out in the Arizona desert for repentance, offering salvation through social and environmental justice. He has no truck with the “green-washing” strategies of the capitalist hypocrites and their government lackeys, which only disguise the pursuit of even more profits and tax revenues with CSR departments, sustainability quotients and technological quick-fixes, He demands of all a true change of heart that will lead to an egalitarian Utopia, along the way redressing past sins with restoration of the planet and, preferably, reparations to the affected social classes, and ethic (especially indigenous) groups.
Wow! That’s a pretty heady brew from a book that I, in my innocence and ignorance, thought was going to be about history and possible future(s) of Phoenix. To be fair, scattered amongst the millenarian diatribe, there are elements of the latter two, and I enjoyed those bits thoroughly.
Meanwhile Ross opened my eyes to some obvious, but completely overlooked (at least by me) “facts”. I had no idea, for instance, that the boom in migration of Mexicans and Central Americans to Arizona was correlated with Phoenix’s carbon emissions (“However indirectly, the emissions pumped into the desert air above central Arizona were responsible for the presence of some 500,000 undocumented Mexicans in the state”). The immigrants are actually “climate refugees”! Of course he could be right for the wrong reasons: the aforementioned emissions come from a far more prosperous economy than that from whence they came and, therefore, are responsible for attracting them. In other words they were and are poor folk looking for opportunity in a free(-er) market economy where wages, even at the bottom end of the scale, are far better than at home. Or they’re leaving areas ravaged by narco-conflict, civil war; corrupt, repressive and parasitical governments that denied all but a privileged few the chance for making a decent living, chasing the dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Oops! I guess by Ross’ description they somehow made a wrong turn and ended up coming to a land cursed with a surfeit those same sins: Arizona!
Ross characterizes Latino immigrants as “with conservation habits formed from long experience with meager resources”. This guy has obviously never spent any time in or around a Mexican ejido! He does throw some light on the anti-immigrant arm of the environmental movement, a group called the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR), which grew out of the Sierra Club and their historical restrictionist policy on immigration. FAIR “greenwashed” its advocacy of racist, coercive, anti-immigration policies with a gloss of environmentalism….or did they? And are the latter really not part-and-parcel of the apocalyptic and misanthropic Edward Abbey branch of environmentalism’s “final solution”?? Which involves depopulating the earth of its most noxious and destructive species…humanity? Ross claims that the infamous Arizona immigration enforcement bill SB 1070 was actually drafted by FAIR’s legal arm. And that its passage was due to latent racism amongst white retirees and at least some environmentalists, seeing the demographic writing on the wall, in a state already plagued by fears of over-allocation of scarce resources. As Phoenix Chicano activist Tupac Enrique Acosta says, “In the past it was the stated policy for mainstream environmental organizations that we can’t have so many Mexicans coming into North America because it is going to be unsustainable”.
On the positive side, based on personal experience living on the edge of Phoenix, I found Ross’ critique of the unholy cocktail of rapacious real estate developers and growth-crazy right wing politicians that dominate the state, to be spot-on. His chronicle of the consolidation and growth the of Roosevelt and Grand Ave arts districts, which I can see from my office window, catalyzed by the threat of a downtown Cardinals stadium, was very interesting. Likewise, his tale of the toxic groundwater plumes spun off from the supposedly “clean” high-tech industry (Motorola and Intel) is engrossing. And his story of ASU’s transformation under Michael Crow from a party school to a top-tier sustainability research institute, also caught my attention.
The descendants of the Hohokam, the Pima (Tohono O’odam) and the Maricopa (Pee Posh), who together comprise the Gila River Indian Communities (GRIC), live along the Gila River and their ancestors were famed as the good Samaritans of the Old West whose verdant fields and abundant crops saved many an Anglo traveller and immigrant and from starvation in the 19thC. The Gila dried up starting in the 1880s, due to watershed degradation from ranching, mining and logging, diversions by white settlers upstream etc., followed by damming of both the Salt and Gila. The GRIC went into precipitous decline. They further exacerbated the decimation of the Gila Valley by, out of economic desperation, cutting down the mesquite bosques along the river for firewood and charcoal. Finally, the 2004 settlement of a series of water lawsuits initiated by the GRIC in 1921, gave them 653,000 acre-feet of Arizona’s 2.8 million acre-feet of Colorado River water. They are now looking at a return to traditional crops and farming practices as well as expanding current industrial agriculture. Having visited their lands recently and seen the parlous state of these people, plagued by obesity and diabetes, I’d have to agree that this really could be qualified as (environmental) justice.
While Ross spends a reasonable part of the book looking at sustainability solutions developed from the bottom-up, I get the sense that he’s really not too comfortable with the pace or uncertain outcome of this approach. In parallel, he advocates for more regulation, “expert” guidance and top-down enactment and enforcement of environmental and social justice solutions. This is really the heart of the matter, and he addresses it briefly in his final chapter: Is the only way that the coming environmental apocalypse can be averted and the planet saved, to “put democracy on hold for a while” (quoted from eco-doyen James Lovelock) and institute an eco-dictatorship? Does this noble end justify any means? While he denies that he supports this proposition, much of the book could be read as his case for doing so! As is the case with many “experts”, he mistrusts the “bottom-up” evolutionary style of the market, with its messy and inefficient reliance on trial and error, free choice and (God forbid!) the profit motive.
Good antidotes to this book, previous reviewed by me, are The Tyranny of Experts by William Easterly (also of NYU) and the Fanaticism of the Apocalypse by Pascal Bruckner.
