Environment, ‘Justice’, ‘Fairness’
Ben Pile
Apologies for this very long post — things which I felt needed to be said kept occurring to me…
Mike Childs is Head of Climate at the Friends of the Earth, and Chair of FoE Europe. He writes in a blog post at the FoE site today that,
One of the reasons I joined Friends of the Earth over 20 years ago was that it was an environmental group with a strong record of joining up social justice, development and environmental issues. This position has been maintained through the years.
I like the ambiguity of the language. ‘Joining up social justice, development and environmental issues’ doesn’t mean a commitment to ‘social justice and development’. Rather, it means subordinating them to ‘environmental issues’. This has been discussed previously on this blog. One-time ‘development’ agencies such as Oxfam, for instance, have abandoned their emphasis on development, to emphasise instead that ‘pastoral society’ is the best way of life for people in the developing world. It’s ‘sustainable’, you see, whereas life in industrialised, democratic, and wealthy economies — where we’ve moved on from such proximity to nature — isn’t. Never mind what people actually want, the influential, well-funded and ethically-unimpeachable NGO ‘joins up’ the notion of ‘social justice’, ‘development’, and ‘environmental issues’, and decides for them what’s in their best interests. Instead of talking about poverty and the need for development, Oxfam now are concerned with ‘climate poverty’ and are opposed to development. (Climate Resistance)
(The Reference Frame)
