Rob Nixon:«Ecology?Today it is only a luxury for the rich.We need the environmentalism of the poor"

The Princeton professor:the battles for the environment must be rethought by involving the populations who are victims of exploitation

Rob Nixon, professor at Princeton and columnist for major international newspapers, explains today in an interview with Republic that ecology «is only a luxury for the wealthy».And that the battles for the environment and the planet must be rethought.Involving populations who are victims of resource exploitation.Nixon explains that environmental justice rests on three pillars:"Equal protection from environmental risks and damage for all, the possibility of accessing resources and common goods and the right to express these requests."But here lies the problem:«It is proven that often the communities most exposed to environmental risks are the poorest ones.It happened in the USA with the Love Canal toxic landfills or in India with the Bhopal disaster."

The Great Outdoors

And therefore, explains Nixon, "in the same way, the use of clean water and air, access to common lands or even to natural places where to spend free time - so important for psychophysical balance - are often a privilege".In America the experience of Great Outdoors, the great outdoors, «is predominantly white.It's as if African Americans or Hispanics are by nature rooted in urban spaces."According to him «we need to reinstate the voices from below.When we talk about environmental defenders, the large NGOs come to mind, from the WWF to Greenpeace, but often the environmentalism of which they are interpreters does not take into account the social fractures or - in postcolonial contexts - the cultures and knowledge of those in the lands that those organizations would like to protect has always lived there."

The environmentalism of the poor

Finally, Nixon takes up the concept of environmentalism of the poor:«That term served to draw attention to the fact that for a long time the dominant idea of ​​environmentalism was the traditional American one, according to which it was necessary to preserve the "wild nature" from human presence.But this doesn't work everywhere.Indigenous peoples possess ecological skills essential to the survival of the ecosystems in which they live.However, it is wrong to represent them as "pious guardians" of the earth.Seeing them instead as holders of ancestral knowledge capable of adapting to new circumstances such as global warming, and learning from them, helps us imagine alternative strategies."