The Environment as Living Space: Reconnecting Social Justice and Urban Environmentalism

2014

The Environment as Living Space: Reconnecting Social Justice and Urban Environmentalism ANTHROPOLOGY 489 – RESEARCH ESSAY JONATHAN FOSTER

Jonathan Foster, 300159596

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Abstract

In this research essay I explore the forces that are shaping the production and use of green spaces,

such as parks, community gardens and other green amenities in urban Western settings. I highlight

how a complex arena driven by market rationales, government planning agendas and a global view

of environmentalism are redefining contemporary use of urban green space. I argue that the

intersection of these neoliberal land reforms with the ‘Greening’ of urban space, is facilitated by an

environmental worldview that draws an ontological distinction between nature and culture, which

produces a depoliticised and homogenised understanding of environmental concerns. It is my

contention that this perception serves to marginalise and displace local space users, who lack the

resources to resist urban land modification, by failing to acknowledge the ways in which local

contexts are determined in relation to their historical, structural and material conditions, further

straining the social dimensions of urban space.


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What is The Environment?

In his book ‘Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference’, anthropologist and social

theorist David Harvey (1996) reminisced on two events he attended around ‘Earthday’ in Baltimore,

1970. Situated in the context of an emerging national environmental discourse, one event was

composed of middle class white radicals while the other was located in an African American jazz

club. At the former event it was quality of air, water and food that was discussed with a general

criticism of materialism and consumerism for its consequences in the form of “resource depletion

and environmental degradation” (Harvey, 1996:117). At the jazz club, Harvey contends that while

the issue was still environmental deterioration, this time it was framed in the context of crumbling

city infrastructure, a “lack of jobs, poor housing (and) racial discrimination” (1996:117). In regards to

the first event, Richard Nixon praised the rise of the environment issue as a ‘non-‐class’ issue, stating

that future generations would judge us on the environment they inherited; while at the second

event, Nixon was perceived to be their greatest environmental problem (1996:117). What struck

Harvey most about the dissonance between these perspectives, was “that the ‘environmental issue’

necessarily means such different things to different people, that in aggregate it encompasses quite

literally everything there is” (1996:117). This paradox is mirrored throughout the work of scholars

who perceive mainstream environmental institutions as focused on technocratic environmental

management, wilderness preservation and conservation efforts, whilst activists of colour are busy

dealing with civil rights and structural violence issues in healthcare, education and housing (Bullard,

1990:22; Di Chiro, 1998; Checker, 2011).

The dissonance observed between these two perceptions of what constitutes an

environmental issue frames my research of the urban environment in an era where environmental

consciousness and neoliberal land reforms intersect. I am interested in how the rise of

contemporary environmental ideals in the Western world is reshaping the urban environmental

arena, and what this entails when alternative perspectives of what constitutes an environmental


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concern arise. To explore this, I have turned my attention to the development and use of green

spaces and infrastructure, such as parks, community gardens and sustainability projects, in urban,

Western settings. I argue that these green spaces and infrastructure have emerged as critical contact

zones between local concerns and contemporary environmental ideals (Brosius, 1999a; 1999b;

Ingold, 2000; Checker, 2011; Newman, 2011; Dooling, 2009; Louise-‐Pratt, 1991). Contact zones,

originally theorised by Louise-‐Pratt describes social spaces “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple

with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (1991:34). In the

context of urban green spaces, these asymmetrical power relations arise when there is a conflict

between alternative notions of what constitutes a legitimate environmental concern. To frame my

analysis of this conflict, I will be using the global/local paradigm, to elucidate the separation of an

emerging global environmental ethic from local practices. I will explore the spatial dialectics of three

ethnographic case studies analysing the production and use of green space in Seattle, Paris, and New

York.

In Seattle, Dooling’s (2009) ethnographic work traverses the world of homeless park users and their

relationship with state institutions and housed residents. While in Paris, Newman (2011) takes us to

a low-‐income immigrant neighbourhood, where he tracks the mobilisation of a local movement

advocating for the production of a park. Checker’s (2011) ethnographic research situates this

dialectical relationship in a Harlem neighbourhood of New York, exploring the effects the

institutionalisation of ‘sustainability’ discourse has had on local ‘Harlemites’. Each example

illustrates the dissonance between global environmental ideals and local concerns in a unique

context, elucidating various aspects of how the institutional privileging of global environmental

discourse, de-‐politicises the environmental arena, separating environmental issues from social

justice, and, thereby rendering the moral imperatives of local green space users meaningless

(Brosius, 1999a:278; Ingold, 2000).


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In this paper, I do not seek to argue against the scientific validity of a biophysical world, or deny the

importance of environmental concerns such as climate change, rather, I aim to deconstruct and

critique the basis on which modern day environmental concerns and policies are legitimised, in

order to open up an inquiry into the way people living in local contexts might better articulate their

own environmental concerns and solutions. By shaking up our preconceptions and critiquing the

hegemony of contemporary global environmental discourse, I hope to illustrate how we might

reimagine the environment as a space for dwelling; exploring what the implications might be, if we

remain sensitive to the ways in which local green space users live within and experience their local

environments first hand. As a framework I will be using Ingold’s ‘dwelling perspective’, in which “the

world continually comes into being around the inhabitant, and its manifold constituents take on

significance through their incorporation into a regular pattern of life activity” (2000:153). Rather

than seeing the environment as a fixed entity, the ‘dwelling perspective’ perceives it to be

processual and fluid in nature, defined in relation to the people who are immersed in it. In this sense

it privileges local knowledge as well as local relationships with the material constituents of the

surrounding environment and their ability to grow and undergo transformation. I will draw on my

own ethnographic research situated in Wellington, New Zealand at the ‘Owhiro Organic Community

Gardens’, run by the Māori organisation ‘Mokai Kainga’, to flesh out how an alternative ontological

understanding of the environment can be applied in the development and use of green spaces

(Foster, 2014). By tying together these various ethnographic accounts with my own research I hope

to demonstrate how by “privileging the understandings that people derive from their lived, everyday

involvement in the world” (Ingold, 2000:189), we might reconnect the lines between urban

environmental concerns and social justice.


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The Environment as a Cultural Construction

A recurring theme within the literature on environmentalism suggests that our relationship with

nature, and the way one conceptualises the ‘environment’, is dependent on their surroundings, both

spatially and culturally (Escobar, 1996; Harvey, 1996; Brosius, 1999; Ingold, 2000). Modern Western

society’s relationship with nature, for example, is characterized by a nature/culture divide also

known as the nature-‐society dichotomy, in which humans live ‘on’ and separately to nature (Ingold,

2000; Harvey, 1996; Brockington et al., 2006). This conceptualisation prevalent in both socialist and

capitalist thought has been expressed earlier in history through the view that nature is to be

dominated and exploited for our benefit and more recently that it is a finite set of resources we

must manage sustainably (Harvey, 1996; Brosius, 1999a; Escobar, 1996; Argyrou, 2005). In contrast

to the Western model, Escobar states “that many rural communities in the Third World “construct”

nature in strikingly different ways from the prevalent modern forms” (1998:61); emphasising that

the cosmologies of indigenous societies often interlink the metaphysical, biophysical and social

worlds as deeply connected (Escobar, 1998:61). Even within a Western context, as observed by

Harvey (1996), understandings of the environment remain culturally contingent.

Yet, despite this recognition of the diversity of understandings people hold in relation to what

constitutes their ‘environment’, the contemporary environmental arena has become increasingly

engulfed by a global environmental discourse that perceives the environmental issue to be a singular

and coherent concern (Newman, 2011; Forsyth, 2003; Harvey, 1996). As the importance of issues

such as climate change and large scale deforestation gained traction over the 20th century, a global

view of environmental ethics focused on the preservation of biodiversity, sustainability and

environmental managerialism arose (Argyrou, 2005). Reflected recently at the 2014 Climate Change

Summit in a statement released by Ban Ki-‐Moon, aiming:


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To mobilise political will for a universal and meaningful climate agreement next year in Paris;

and second to generate ambitious steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen

resilience (UN Climate Change Summit, 2014).

This global discourse, predicated on a set of environmental ethics similar to those articulated by

Nixon and the radicals, has proliferated the agendas of civil societies, environmental movements,

government policies and urban planning developments throughout the world during the latter half

of the 20th century (Brosius, 1999; Harvey, 1996; Dooling, 2009; Kingston, 2008; Hagerman, 2007;

Escobar, 1996). However, those espousing this global perspective of environmentalism, tinged by an

Anglo-‐European, class-‐based centrism, are often far removed from the people who live and operate

in local contexts; people, who are frequently left out of the discussions on how to reach said

‘universal and meaningful agreements’.

Thus, as a result of the vast and varying conceptualisations people hold in relation to nature and the

environment, anthropologists and scholars have remained suspicious of the way in which

contemporary environmental movements frame their concerns as global and universal issues

(Brosius, 1999a; 1999b; Harvey, 1996; Escobar, 1998; Escobar, 1996; Ingold, 2000). If our

environments are socially constructed, and our social worlds environmentally constructed, defined

in relation to a variety of cultural, historical, and spatial determinations, we should abstain from

applying our “own dualistic view of the universe… as an ontological paradigm onto the many

cultures where it does not apply” (Descola, 1996:82). Scholars argue that more often than not these

mainstream environmental movements agendas are constitutive of an industrialised, western

hegemonic discourse that displaces or oppresses local practices. As this global discourse becomes

increasingly institutionalised, the perspectives of environmental justice movements and local

residents are overridden, leading to the “systematic disempowerment of local communities, taking

from them – in the name of preserving biodiversity – the responsibility to care for their own

environments” (Ingold, 2000:155; Cronon, 1995; Newman, 2011; Dooling, 2009; Checker, 2011).


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Global/Local Paradigm

To flesh out the digression between global ideals and local concerns, I have drawn on Ingold’s

interpretation of the ideas that form the base of our current environmental worldview. In his book

‘The Perception of the Environment’, Ingold (2000) uses the imagery of a globe and a sphere to

illustrate two distinct constructions of the environment. He argues the image of the globe is

suggestive of the relationship between man and nature informing contemporary global

environmental discourse. Based on the Enlightenment divide between nature and culture, the image

of a globe perceives a world ‘out there’, as an already unproblematically predefined earth (Harvey,

1996; Cronon, 1995; Forsyth, 2008). Rather than constituting a lifeworld, such a view manifests a

world apart from life, in which humanity does not live within the world but instead occupies it. This

led Ingold to suggest that “the notion of the global environment, far from marking humanity’s

reintegration into the world, signals the culmination of a process of separation (Ingold, 2000:209).

The globe, which has its roots in colonialism, proposes that there is a surface waiting to be colonised

by human (usually Western) civilisation, where it can then become an object of appropriation to

meet humanity’s needs and desires. In this sense rather than belonging to the fluxes and rhythms of

the world, it is the world which belongs to us (Ingold, 2000); a view synonymous with Western

modes of production.

The environment, or rather, ‘nature’ as it used to be called, was perceived not too long ago as a site

of capital assets and resources to be exploited for the benefits of an industrial, capitalist economy

(Harvey, 1996). Seen as a path to emancipation and self-‐realisation, the domination of nature was

necessary in order to manipulate it to human advantage, to both control our own destiny, and, to

transform nature into a commodity with which we could apply an exchange value (Harvey,

1996:124; Argyrou, 2005). Now, due to a series of events, its position has shifted, leading us to enter

into a relationship with nature, where we categorise it less by its value as an exploitable commodity,

and rather, by its physical health and wellbeing, using words such as biosphere, biodiversity and


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ecosystem, as well as emphasising its qualities as a ‘natural resource base’ recognising that it has

both exhaustive assets and those that are reproducible (Harvey, 1996:118; Escobar, 1996;

Whatmore, 2002). Thus, from its rugged origins as ‘nature’, it emerged as the ‘environment’, a

delicate and fragile ecosystem with which we must learn to use sustainably. In turn, man

transitioned from earth’s master, to its steward, responsible as Nixon articulated in the 70’s, to hand

earth down “to our successors in reasonably good condition” (Ingold, 2000:214; Argyrou, 2005:41;

Harvey, 1996).

This ‘global’ worldview has manifested itself in contemporary environmentalism through the

language and practices of environmental managerialism and intervention (Brosius, 1999a; 1999b).

While seemingly more considerate than its predecessor, it still reproduces the same divide between

nature and culture that denies humanity’s immersion within the world. The separation entailed in

global environmentalism privileges the earths ‘natural’ processes and landscapes, which are

uninhabited by humans, focusing rather, on the importance of biological diversity, untouched

ecosystems and conservation. Though, by perceiving nature as that which is ‘out there’, and where

human presence is considered to be a detrimental force, we manifest a juxtaposition between

nature and the world as we live in it (Cronon, 1995; Ingold, 2000). Especially for those of us who

dwell in urban settings, where human habitation makes it ‘less than natural’. As Ingold states,

“Perhaps most striking about the contemporary discourse of global environmental change is

the immensity of the gulf that divides the world as it is lived and experienced by the practitioners of

this discourse, and the world of which they speak under the rubric of ‘the globe’” (2000:215).

This global perception insinuates that as an object of our interest, the environment can be

observed, left alone, reconstructed, fixed or destroyed depending on our attitudes towards it and

how efficiently we manage it from some far off location (Ingold, 2000:215; Forsyth, 2003). However,

by framing environmentalism in this depoliticised language of environmental managerialism and

sustainability, the capitalist values and power structures that underpin global environmentalism are


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cloaked in a veil of environmental sensitivity (Harvey, 1996; Argyrou, 2005; Forsyth, 2003). The view

of the globe reifies the detached gaze of the Western scientist, justifying his position as speaker for

the earth, aided by a variety of planners and administrators (Brosius, 1999b; Escobar, 1996). This has

resulted from what Ingold has called, the triumph of technology over cosmology (2000). Cosmology,

which places humans at the centre of an “ordered universe of meaningful relations” (Ingold,

2000:216), forms the foundation for how those who follow the cosmology interact with their

environment. While modern technology, on the other hand, places humanity outside the ordered

relations of a physical world, thus giving it control over the world as it is lived in the cosmology

(Ingold, 2000:216). So, whereas cosmology guided human action from within the world, technology

allows us to act ‘on’ the world. Cosmologies, familiar to the worldviews of many indigenous

societies, are being replaced by the technologies and worldview that extends from the detached

gaze of the Western scientist (Ingold, 2000:216).

Take Carl Linnaeus’s ‘Systema nature’ published in 1758 as an example (Whatmore, 2002). This

system prescribed members of the animal and plant kingdom with a fixed identity based on the

clinical observations of the scientific community. As European colonialism spread throughout the

world, so too did it’s scientific practices, systemically coding and classifying all the world’s living

beings in our scientific inventories, in the process removing them from their social and

environmental contexts (Whatmore, 2002:21). This systematic account of scientific surveillance

became an authoritative cornerstone of government exercises of control over nature’s resources.

Eventually resulting in the regulatory practices of biodiversity, seen here at the first convention on

biological diversity (CBD),

The conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair

and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilisation of genetic resources” (1992: Article

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Such language and practices assign a “universal exchange, between the scientific value of animal

(and plant) life, measured in units of biological rarity, and that most pervasive of human currencies –

economic value” (Whatmore, 2002:22). Harvey (1996) argues that the term sustainability in this

context reflects the dynamics of an ecological-‐economic situation. Because it is difficult to rationally

argue that one doesn’t want to be ‘sustainable’, the capitalist values that underpin its use are given

a sense of environmental sensitivity (Harvey, 1996:148). As an organising principle, different species

of an ecosystem are placed in a range of categories relating to their population status, giving the

institutions that control these technologies a platform to organise and manage the use of the earth.

For example, “organising ‘sustainable’ agriculture in Malawi to facilitate debt repayments to keep

them in business” (Harvey, 1996:147). More so, Whatmore (2002:26-‐27) attended a ‘Convention on

International Trade in Endangered Species’ (CITES) meeting that was attempting to establish the

status of a crocodile previously listed as endangered. She observed that a complex arena was being

shaped by an eclectic mix of conservation, commercial, scientific, and “policy interests and

rationales” in the reclassification of the crocodile’s availability status (Whatmore, 2002:27). Thus, by

perceiving global environmental issues as ‘scientific’ concerns, free from social, political or economic

origins, the image of a ‘globe’ fails to acknowledge the unequal distribution of resources and power

that underpin the production of knowledge in the environmental arena (Brosius, 1999a; 1999b;

Forsyth, 2003).

In contrast to the image of the globe prevalent in Western society, however, is the image of the

sphere, characteristic of the worldviews in many pre-‐modern societies (Ingold, 2000). In a sphere,

the inhabitants are immersed within the world; it is anthropocentric, yet draws no distinction

between nature and humanity. The cosmologies of the Yup’ik Inuit, for example, conceptualise the

world as constantly coming into being around them, in relation to their everyday cycles and seasonal

movements. Rather than a world out there ready for occupation, to the Yup’ik, the centre of the

world is their home. While the globe rests on notions of a detached observation of a world apart, the


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sphere is based “on an active, perceptual engagement with components of the dwelt-‐in world, in the

practical business of life” (Ingold, 2000:42).

In this sense, knowledge of the world emerges through a person’s constant interaction with

that which surrounds them (Ingold, 2000). As opposed to the singular global perspective, a world

composed of spheres can host an almost infinite number of local understandings (Ingold, 2000:216).

This is because the sphere, as that which surrounds us, extends from the centre outwards, and the

view afforded by each centre will be constituted in relation to that which makes up their spatial and

temporal landscape. So while the singular, global view of the world is disinterested in place and

context, local perspectives are innately rooted in their place and context (Ingold, 2000). This does

not mean to say that they are short sighted, incomplete or mere parts of a whole, rather, the sphere

is an open-‐ended, transformational space that is continually coming into being around the people

immersed in it (Ingold, 2000). However, once their differences are classified in global environmental

discourse, their once open-‐ended boundaries of knowledge are converted into fixed boundaries in

which the local view can be contained, thereby reducing their knowledge to mere symbolic meaning

and cultural representation imposed on a landscape that is better understood through the lens of

the global environmental hegemony (Ingold, 2000). The privileging of this global ontology based on

detachment, over the local ontology predicated on engagement, has been used to warrant the

marginalisation of “local people in the management of their environments” (Ingold, 2000:216).


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Ethnographic Case Studies


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Ecological Gentrification: Homelessness and Green Space in Seattle

In her ethnographic research, situated in Seattle, Dooling explores the lives of homeless residences

who live in encampments located in green spaces such as public parks (2009). As a response to

Harvey’s (1996) challenge for scholars to probe the “spatial dialectics associated with environmental

and social changes” (2009:621), Dooling aimed to reconnect the links between nature and justice in

urban environments. By rendering visible how the city’s government, urban planning agencies, and

more generally, how Western thought constructs ideal notions of home, homelessness and proper

green space use, Dooling illustrates the current injustices that are inflicted on the local homeless

population under the guise of global environmental rhetoric and ecological rationality (2009:625).

She refers to this convergence of ecological ideals with the displacement of homeless people as

‘ecological gentrification’ (Dooling, 2009).

To elucidate the contrasting perspectives of green space use, Dooling introduces four of her

participants who are, or were, homeless park users. One of her participants, 50 year old David, no

longer lives in the park due to the expulsion of his camp. He described his experiences of living in a

park homeless camp as the only real family he ever knew despite the apparent hardships of being

‘homeless’. The expulsion of his camp resulted in David moving indoors to a single occupancy hotel,

which Dooling states “led to a disconnection [in] the social networks which he had established living

together… thus he now felt more homeless than when he lived in a camp” (2009:626). For David,

ideal notions of home was based on a sense of belonging to a group of caring people, and sharing in

a common space (Dooling, 2009:626). Michael on the other hand, had extreme difficulties

maintaining social connections due to a highly abusive childhood. In his case, the mainstream notion

of home was an extremely traumatic location, so living outside in the vast expanse allowed him the

space he needed to recover himself (Dooling, 2009:626). Pablo, a younger male had been living in a

public park close to a wealthy neighbourhood. He sustained lung damage from working a

construction job in Miami, and while living in Seattle, worked as a day labourer earning minimal


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amounts of money. He managed to make friends with some of the long term residents, and in the

summer time they would pool money and food stamps to have barbeques together. Pablo embodied

the park as a place where he could heal himself in nature, bond with other campers and explore his

spiritual connections with the surrounding landscape (Dooling, 2009:627). For Mel, a 61 year-‐old

Native American, his desire to live in a green space related to his cosmological orientation,

preferring the openness of the urban environment in contrast to a home defined by four walls. It is

about the spaces where he and his friends congregate, socialise and sleep (Dooling, 2009:627). Thus,

while there is a variance in ideal notions of home amongst the four participants, common themes of

“autonomy, freedom, a sense of belonging to a community, the recovery of oneself, healing oneself

in nature and a dwelling not bounded by walls” run through their desires for living in the parks

(Dooling, 2009:627).

Rather than seeking to glamorise homelessness or living in green spaces, Dooling aims to

elucidate that the homeless park users she interviewed have chosen to live there for lack of a better

option due to poor social housing alternatives (2009:627). Night shelters are viewed by her homeless

participants as spaces of crime and violence, where meals are accompanied by a religious agenda

that they find alienating or insulting. While the single-‐room occupancy hotels, such as the one David

was placed in, have a pervasive drug culture and with their frequent inspections carry a sense of

constant surveillance (Dooling, 2009). In the case of the homeless park users their primary

‘environmental’ conditions had led them to the park as their ideal notions of home were unable to

be satisfied by the current options afforded to them.

However, they did not fit into the ideological constructions of green space use as espoused

by the city’s parks department, which perceived it to be “land set aside to protect natural amenities

and ecological functioning” (2009:629). Such a view excludes human dwelling and actively enforces

the expulsion of homeless people found living in the parks (2009:629). This reveals the first conflict

in understanding of what constitutes the ‘environment’ -‐ while her participants, the local users,


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consider the park to be their home for lack of a better option, the park department denies their right

to live in green spaces and evicts them when they are found or when housed residents complain of

their presence. Reflected in the anxiety experienced by Pablo as he tries to return to his camp

unseen from work (2009:626-‐628).

Thus, when the city designed an ‘ecological project’ that aimed to make Seattle an

“ecologically sustainable city through the construction of green infrastructure”, housed residents

who were asked to contribute to a future plan of green spaces, conceived of “homelessness… only in

terms of threats to the safety of housed residents who entered public spaces” (Dooling, 2009:630).

In this context, contrary to the perceptions of homeless park users such as Pablo who views green

space as a home “where he can heal his body, connect to nature and develop friendships” (Dooling,

2009:627), the local homeless park users are perceived as hostile to an imagined middle class

‘ecological functionality’, which in turn, is informed by wider reaching environmental ethics and a

global sustainability discourse (Dooling, 2009).

By privileging the biophysical processes of the park, the Parks Department draws on

contemporary global environmental ideals that perceive the environment to be a delicate and fragile

eco-‐system. This discourse, demonstrated in the form of Ingold’s ‘globe’, has its roots in Nineteenth

century romanticism that nature is something ‘out there’, pristine and not to be disturbed by the all

too detrimental consequences of human contact (Cronon, 1995; Harvey, 1996; Forsyth, 2003). Such

a premise fails to acknowledge the role that a Western imaginary has played in its construction.

Take, for example, the public design charrette in Seattle that “invited housed citizens to plan out

future green spaces over the next 100 years… [Where] people huddled around maps creating an

ecologically sustainable city through the construction of green infrastructure” (Dooling, 2009:629-‐

630). The team members involved with the environmental planning agenda designated areas around

the city to become future green spaces. In their effort to improve the ecological functioning of

Seattle, they replaced spaces occupied by low-‐income housing and shelters, which were viewed as


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polluting, with green spaces reserved for ‘natural amenities’ (Dooling, 2009:630). As a result, the

production of green spaces in this ecologically minded planning agenda led “to the displacement or

exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population – homeless people – while

espousing an environmental ethic” (Dooling, 2009:630).

In this instance, the displacement and exclusion of the homeless park users from their

homes and everyday activities reflects the displacement of indigenous Native Americans from

national parks during the early twentieth century. Pervasive at this time period was the American

frontier ideology, which Cronon (1996) argues has had a crucial role in shaping contemporary North

American environmentalism. Beginning with the creation of national parks during the early

twentieth century, the ‘wilderness’ ideology of the frontier became entangled with ideals of what

constituted national American character (1996:13). The ‘wilderness’ was conceived of as a place on

the margins of society untouched by humans, a place of rugged beauty and awe where nature

dominated. Its vast landscapes evoked spiritual connotations of being ‘Gods-‐own’, and was seen as a

place that inspired creativity, masculinity, and the democratic conventions that America was

founded on. However, as colonial America began to realise that the frontier was coming to an end,

they decided to establish national parks, “to protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect

the nation’s most sacred myth of origin” (Cronon, 1996:13). This situates the preservation of

wilderness within an ideology based on nationalism, nostalgia, and American character traits such as

individualism and masculinity. However the protection of these pristine and untouched,

transcendental landscapes, so representative of the heart of American vigour, were innately

founded on the massacre and displacement of large portions of indigenous Native Americans

(Cronon, 1996).

In the same sense that social housing alternatives were removed by housed residents for the

sake of green space, Cronon (1996) highlights that in the case of Glacier National Park, the

establishment of its carefully policed boundaries by the state, involved forcing out its original Native


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American inhabitants, redefining their earlier use of the land as illegal (1995:15). Still in the present,

the Blackfeet are accused of illegally hunting in the Glacier National park “that originally belonged to

them and that was ceded by treaty only with the provision that they be permitted to hunt there”

(Cronon, 1995:15).

This reflects Milton’s (1996:5) sentiments that environmental policies formulated by

governmental agencies are of direct concern to local communities, as they may find their everyday

activities and behaviours banned by the new laws. Thus the park users were expelled from the park

through anti-‐camping ordinances issued by the state, reifying their “ideological notion[s] of what

constitutes legitimate use of public green space, constructed in the service of an ecological agenda”

(Dooling, 2009:629). This rationality incurs a commitment to minimise the impacts of humanity on

biophysical processes. But these were the places where Mel socialised with his friends, where Pablo

recovered his health and where David found his sense of family (Dooling, 2009). Excluding humanity

from the ‘ecosystems’ of the city, perpetuates the invisibility of the social issues that may arise from

urban landscape modification (Harvey, 1996; Dooling, 2009:630). Emphasising that biodiversity and

ecosystems are best left to function without humans’ results in the exclusion and displacement of

those without the social resources to fight the imposition of such environmental ideals. More so,

because poverty is often perceived to be a cause of environmental degradation, homeless people

were considered polluting to the park’s functionality as an untouched ecosystem and to the housed

residents enjoyment of these ecological amenities (Dooling, 2009; Harvey, 1996). As Cronon states,

“If we set too high a stock on wilderness too many other corners of the earth become less than

natural and too many other people become less than human, thereby giving us permission not to

care much about their suffering or fate” (1996:20).

The extent to which urban city dwellers justify their lifestyles through the production of

ecologically minded parks, they evade responsibility of their reliance on the urbanised, capitalist

machine and its relationship with ecological degradation. Our dependence on capitalism is


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encapsulated in the cars we drive, food we eat, and the institutions with which we work in (Cronon,

1996:17). By rationalising our entanglement with capitalism through the establishment of green

amenities and natural parks we perpetuate the ideal of nature as an entity that is best left alone,

reproducing the “dualism that sets human beings outside of nature… pos[ing] a serious threat to

responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century” (Cronon, 1995:17). The

benefactors of this detached ecological rationality are often the white, middle-‐class, and in this case,

housed Westerners, while marginalised groups, such as the homeless park users, end up bearing the

brunt. Similarly, the frontier ideology that pervaded the early twentieth century, which saw nature,

as that which was untouched, categorised certain actions, such as labouring the land or living on it

inappropriate and hostile to mainstream perceptions of the ‘wilderness’ (1996:14). Local users’

customs and practices were banned and instead the parks became spaces of recreation and

restoration for wealthy city folk, usually white, to regenerate their souls from the ills of city living, in

the great outdoors (Cronon, 1996). Leading Cronon to argue that the idea of an unworked land free

from the damaging touches of humankind is the fantasy of people who have never relied on

surviving off the land,

“only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a

model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for

human beings actually to make their lives from the land” (Cronon, 1996:17).

Ironically, those espousing these seemingly antimodernist, ‘return to nature’ bourgeois ideals, such

as Theodore Roosevelt and his contemporaries, were often from elite class backgrounds and

profited heavily from urban industrial capitalism (Cronon, 1996:14).

Still today, the local practices of groups are banned when they come into conflict with the

ethics of the global environmental hegemony, whether it’s struggling, subsistence farmers in the

Greek islands, whose farming and land use are restricted by externally imposed conservation parks

(Theodossopoulos, 2003); or the slave-‐descended mine workers of the Brazilian Rainforest who


20

experience economic and social marginalisation at the hands of Western environmental

managerialism (Slater, 2002); or rural Icelandic fishing villages, whose economic livelihood that

relied on the abundant Minke whale for generations is suddenly banned due to the international

demonization of whaling (Einarsson, 1993). Many of these groups livelihoods depends on their

interaction with the landscapes they live in, yet their lifestyles and practices are considered hostile

to conservation ethic espoused by contemporary global environmentalism. Like the homeless park

users, by ignoring the social, historical and spatial contexts of their relationship with the

environment, the contemporary environmental arena displaces the moral imperatives of local

groups, while failing to account for the Western industrial economy’s own complicity in ecological

degradation. This reflects aspects of the inherent power relations at play in the environmental arena

at a larger scale as stated by McLaren (2003:21), who emphasises the disparities between the

environmental degradation of local groups who often remain the victims of environmentally

enforced decisions, while the multinational investors and large scale commercial enterprises who

are involved in economic and environmentally exploitative practices evade responsibility.

To the degree that we conceive of the environment as that which excludes humanity, setting

us and nature at opposite ends of the pole, we dismantle little hope of discovering what an ethically

sustainable landscape might look like (Cronon, 1995:17).


21

Contested Ecologies: Environmental Activism and Urban Space in Immigrant Paris

Newman’s ethnographic fieldwork takes us across the world to immigrant housing projects

in the northeast district of Paris, revealing vast entanglements of political actors, social movements,

local people, the state and nature in the creation and use of green spaces (2011). Located in a

neighbourhood predominantly occupied by postcolonial ethnic minority immigrants from West

Africa and the Maghreb region of North Africa, Newman’s work follows a campaign by residents and

the activist group ‘Alliance Jardins d’Eole’ (AJE) to convert an abandoned industrial site, once a

railway station named ‘Cour du Maroc’ (Court of Morocco), into a public park.

The neighbourhood had been subjected to a history of problematic spatial structuring within

the city limits. It was a post-‐industrial town with a condensed population located on the outskirts of

Paris. It experienced high levels of industrial air pollution and had been exposed to unevenly

distributed environmental burdens, such as toxic waste illegally dumped by a tenant leasing the site

from France’s National Railway Service (SNCF) in 1994 (Newman, 2011:194-‐196). This history, as well

as a proposal in 1998 to construct a warehouse space on the site belonging to a major soft drink

distributor, a plan backed by then socialist mayor Daniel Valliant, mobilised residents across ethnic

and class boundaries to act and contest the proposition. The warehouse, which would result in

further pollution, led the AJE to instead assert their own demands for green space in the form of a

park (Newman, 2011:195-‐196).

The desire for green space drew links between environmentalism and social justice.

Northeast Paris was a low-‐income, working class immigrant neighbourhood, where residents lived in

overcrowded projects. A long standing housing crisis in Paris had forced many immigrant origin

families to enter a ‘shadow housing’ market, where apartments were often falling apart and lacked

access to appropriate facilities (Newman, 2011). More so, the large population of youth

compounded local interest in developing a park because the post-‐industrial area had been devoid of

any such amenities and the relationship between poor housing, lack of green space and high


22

pollution levels, had placed the greatest strain on parents and children (Newman, 2011). Local

mothers’ desired a “green space where one can see nature at work and show young Parisians of the

neighbourhood the cycle of the seasons and how plants grow” (Newman, 2011:199). In this context,

much like Giddens’s (1991) postmodern analyses of the relationship between morality and

modernity, the residents desires related to the ability of nature to affect youth morality which they

felt was being negatively impacted by overcrowded housing and living in an ‘industrial wasteland’

(Newman, 2011:197). Reflected in a protest flyer stating, “Everyone knows that a family of seven

can’t live in a two room apartment and that the problems of the overburdened classes are

corrupting the youth of this country” (Newman, 2011:197).

By invoking health and ecology related metaphors, such as the message in this flyer, “there

is an emergency need to respond to the inhabitants’ suffering” (Newman, 2011:197), the AJE’s

campaign, framed the proposition of a park in a wider context of grievances, related to the material,

social and economic conditions of their neighbourhood (Newman, 2011:198). This discourse linked

the realms of nature and culture, evoking images of their own local ontology, which perceived the

urban park as a space of life, for cultural production, pollution elimination, and for its ability to affect

youth morality. As argued by Di Chiro in relation to her work with Los Angeles based environmental

justive activists, if we see the ‘environment’ as “those places and sets of relationships that sustain a

local community’s way of life” (1995:300), we can begin to understand the demands of the AJE and

the local residents.

However, along its journey to completion, as momentum to create the park grew, Newman

highlights that a “complex environmental arena is reshaping the urbanisation process in

contradictory ways, at times providing residents a new means to confront injustices, while at other

moments reproducing socio-‐spatial inequalities” (2011:192). While demands for the park were a

strategy to contest socio-‐spatial inequalities, once the mobilisation of the park gathered

momentum, the direction of its movement shifted. During an election year, left wing mayor


23

Bertrand Delanoë rose to power and his new administration was “quick to tout a park at the Cour du

Maroc as one of its first new projects, using it to promote a new approach to urbanism away from

‘monuments’, and towards ‘neighbourhoods’” (2011:199). Suddenly, under the newly elected mayor

the park became symbolic of Paris’s emergence on the world scene as an ecological city. State

appointed architects and experts took over the reins from the locals, and the park’s development

became entangled in global environmental discourses, preaching sustainability and the preservation

of biophysical processes, which was a significant contrast to the environmental demands asserted by

AJE and local residents (2011:199). By drawing on this global discourse, the state deterritorialised

the construction of the green space, detaching it from its local relevance, and instead emphasised its

universal qualities (Kearny, 1995:553). In doing so, they were able to restore power to the state as

signifier, reorganising the spatial dialectics of the city to match their own interests, which were

closely tied to capitalist urbanisation and the ‘Reconquest’ of Paris from its ‘ethnic ghettoization’

(Newman, 2011:203).

As the 21st century commences, the environmental arena has become home to a multitude

of national bureaucracies and institutions focused on efforts of environmental governance and

management. As this “globalised political space” grows in size, “new forms of political agency are

being invented and contested against both established and newly reconfigured structures of

domination” (Brosius, 1999a:277). While local residents and the AJE had managed to advocate for

the production of green space by framing their concerns in the rhetoric of environmental ethics,

once the project was controlled by the state, the meaning of its production was altered. By

introducing municipal planning agencies and architects, the state overshadowed local residents’

demands for the park with a depoliticised, environmental rhetoric focused on urban sustainability

(Newman, 2011:193). Thus, while locals had embodied the park as a space to raise their kids outside

of heavily overcrowded housing projects, or to ensure the cultural reproduction of the

neighbourhood, it instead became about “energy conservation and the use of renewable resources”

fitting in with global sustainability discourse and denying the recognition of contentious issues such


24

as ethnic identity politics (Newman, 2011:199). A belief further reflected through the production of

“symbolic elements such as a miniature wind turbine (a token with a minimal power yield)”

(Newman, 2011:200).

If the globe is a colonial concept, than it is with little wonder that the implication of its

presence in the environmental arena results in outsiders trying to remake local landscapes and

cultural practices in their own images (Kottak, 1999). Much like the symbolic wind turbine, this is

particularly evident in the construction of a ‘gravel garden’, which was originally defined by the

architects as a “self-‐sustaining, human-‐made analogy of a naturally balanced ecosystem, a statement

of the imperative for resource conservation” (Newman, 2011:200). The ‘imperative of resource

conservation’ as an ideal is significantly out of touch with the demands and desires of the AJE and

local residents, who are likely much more preoccupied by their overcrowded housing issues, and the

continual displacement of their neighbourhood. It was met with confusion and indifference,

residents colloquially dismissing it as an ‘architects thingy’ (Newman, 2011:202). As a feature, it has

no practical relevance to the ‘sustainability’ of the park and exists purely as an aesthetically symbolic

reminder of Paris’s status as a global ecological city. Environmentally sensitive urban planning

historically has a record of designing parks based around aesthetics that are more representative of

a bourgeois ideal than serving a practical community function (Harvey, 1996). Inevitably these

ecological aesthetics are co-‐opted into economic development processes that aim to expand home

ownership for middle class home-‐buyers.

The production of this park, which is a part of a renovation process of Paris’ urban

landscape, reproduces the class and race based divides that characterise the city (Newman,

2011:203). As the state invests in the rejuvenation of its urban landscape, land values have

dramatically increased, accompanied by mass evictions of immigrant residents from the northeast

area (Newman, 2011). 350 apartment projects have been demolished since 2001 alone (Newman,

2011:203). In the media, the framing of the parks development began to resemble a civilising project


25

which took on class-‐based, and ethno-‐racial tones (Newman, 2011:203). The development of the

park was even referred to by a high-‐ranking official in the Atelier Parisian dUrbanisme “as a strategic

anchor in the reconquest of all of this territory” (Newman, 2011:203). Articles were printed

deploring the foreign essence of the northeast Parisian neighbourhood, commenting on shop signs

written in Arabic and the presence of black areas. Thus the global environmentalism that

overshadowed the production of the park, renamed ‘Jardins d’Eole’, was part of an effort to reclaim

these areas from their emergent state as ghettos. Sustainability discourse then, through the

‘reconquest of Paris’ was used to reify a social order based along ethno-‐racial lines reproducing

socio-‐spatial inequalities for France’s postcolonial minorities through redevelopment and

gentrification (2011:204).

A poignant example of this divide between local demands for the park and global

environmentalism occurred during Mayor Delanoë’s speech at the opening of the Jardins d’Eole

(Newman, 2011:204). While he described the park as the “fruit of an environmentalist ambition

present in each of our public policies, utilising techniques that are most respectful to the air, water,

and soil”, a group of protesters belonging to a housing rights movement gathered outside protesting

the demolition of housing projects in the area, demanding the Mayor to construct more affordable

housing (Newman, 2011:204). The digression between these two views of environmentalism in this

particular case, is illustrated vividly and violently, through the removal of protesters by riot police.

The Arabic and West African protestors, predominantly female, were apprehended by the

authorities, arrested and detained, while the white, upper class officials, visibly frustrated, looked on

(Newman, 2011:204). Thus, by ignoring the political, social and economic framings woven into the

tapestry of contemporary global environmental discourse, it’s institutionalisation displaces the

moral imperatives of the local park users in favour of an ‘urban sustainability’ that is tied to a

process of capitalist urbanisation resulting in displacement along ethnic and class based lines.


26

A case of ‘sustainability’ in Harlem, but again, ‘Sustainable’ for who?

Melissa Checker takes us back to America, to her ethnographic research in a Harlem

neighbourhood of New York City, revealing a complex environmental arena filled with a vast array of

actors. She explored the spatial dialectics of the neighbourhood using a meeting that took place

between local long-‐term Harlem residents and city councillors from the Harlem Community

Development Corporation (HCDC) as a starting point (2011). This meeting about the HCDC’s proposal

to ‘green’ two triangle parks in the area, highlighted the divergence between the needs and desires

of local harlemites and the ‘green’ propositions of the city councillors, ending in confrontation and a

disagreement, much to the surprise of the councillors (Checker, 2011:211). Residents of the

neighbourhood, which had some of the highest levels of poverty and asthma rates in the borough,

were sceptical of the city’s sudden desire to respond to the lack of green space and environmental

degradation. They complained that they had been campaigning for years to have the city improve

local conditions as well as the state of the two parks in question, yet nothing had been done until

the development of nearby luxury condos (Checker, 2011:211).

More so, the parks that “would ‘green’ the physical environment, improve local air quality

and give some more breathing room to Harlem’s increasingly dense residential population” (Harlem

CDC, 2010:2), failed to meet the needs of what local residents were actually after, due to a lack of

consultation. This led residents to openly contest the assumptions the councillors had made about

what was needed for the neighbourhood, one lady stating “Kids have plenty of places to play around

here. We already have three parks nearby. We need an adult park. I need a place to go… and hang

out and shoot the shit… This is retarded” (Checker, 2011:211). Others questioned who was going to

look out for the homeless people currently using the park and whether residents could establish a

greenhouse to grow produce to sell at markets.


27

Checker found that the plans did little to address the long history of unevenly distributed

environmental burdens such as being host to the majority of the Metro Transport Authority’s bus

depots for the neighbouring boroughs as well as Manhattan’s waste processing facilities (2011).

Unfortunately, the perception of the environment as a fragile ecosystem safe from human contact,

results in the assumption that urban areas are inherently polluted and unworthy of environmental

movements attention, beyond being causes of environmental degradation (Di Chiro, 1995; Bullard,

1993; Newman, 2011; Checker, 2011). By thinking of the environment as that which is ‘wild and

natural’, and privileging the conservation of untouched natural processes, mainstream

environmental movements strip the agency of environmental justice activists like the group West

Harlem Environmental Action Coalition (WE ACT), and others whose environmental concerns

fundamentally rest in their own socio-‐spatial context (Checker, 2011; Di Chiro, 1998; Bullard, 1993).

The global framework concentrates on issues such as how to reduce our contribution to climate

change and the construction of environmental amenities, while completely overlooking the

disproportionate distribution of environmental burdens in “low income neighbourhoods and

communities of colour” (Checker, 2011:214). This discourse privileges a technocratic approach to

urban environmental planning, using interventionist policies concerned with technological or

managerial fixes to our global issues (Ingold, 2000; Checker, 2011; Forsyth, 2003). By focusing on the

survival of the planet, for example climate change, global sustainability eclipses local voices and their

immediate concerns, ignoring the numerous studies that argue low-‐income communities of colour

become the targets of industrial waste from both states and corporations at rates significantly

higher than their upper class counterparts (Bullard, 1993; McLaren, 2001; Di Chiro, 1995).

While the dumping of these environmental burdens may not always be an intentional act,

without the social or economic resources to fight their implementation unlike wealthier

neighbourhoods, these low income communities have historically faced much higher levels of

ecologically related harm (Bryant & Mohai, 1991:4; Harvey, 1996). In fact, certain environmental

policies over the years, such as the ‘Clean Air and Clean Water Acts’ of the 1970’s, which allowed


28

well-‐resourced communities to fight the placement of toxic facilities in their neighbourhoods,

frequently resulted in these facilities being placed in low-‐income communities, where they were out

of sight (Checker, 2011217; Di Chiro, 1998). One such example, comes from downtown Manhattan,

where residents contested the city’s proposal to construct a medical waste incinerator that was

instead relocated to the South Bronx (Checker, 2011; Sze, 2007). Similarly, as Manhattan grew in

size, a large sewage treatment plant was proposed to deal with the extra burden on the city.

However, this contradicted the plans of local developers and the neighbourhoods political and

economic strength made it a politically unattractive destination (Checker, 2011:218). Thus, they re-‐

evaluated their decision and moved their plans for the plant construction to Harlem, despite

community opposition.

Ironically, the HCDC’s plans to green the parks appropriated the sustainability rhetoric of WE

ACT, who originally mobilised in response to this community level environmental degradation. By

analysing the dialectical relationship of WE ACT and the state, Checker addresses the sometimes

“unintended consequences of environmental justice activism and how it gets swept up in the

multiplicity of factors that foment gentrification and displacement” (2011:212). She (Checker,

2011:212) uses the phrase ‘environmental gentrification’ to acknowledge the links between urban

redevelopment, ecologically conscious initiatives, and environmental justice activism in the era of

neoliberalism. By fighting the environmental burdens of their neighbourhoods and advocating for

the development of green amenities, groups like WE ACT, unintentionally increase the attractiveness

of their neighbourhoods leading to an influx of wealthy residents. By using the rhetoric of

sustainability, urban planners, and the state mask profit-‐minded development using an ecological

rationality that appears socially sensitive (Checker, 2011). Similar to the production of Jardins d’Eole,

the New York city councillors displaced the moral imperatives of WE ACT “with a conspicuously

depoliticised institutional apparatus that is by turns legal, financial, bureaucratic and

technoscientific” (Brosius, 1999a:278).


29

Checker states that the ‘Green X: Change’, which the HCDC’s proposition was a part of, is

linked to Mayor Bloomberg’s wider, long-‐term sustainability based ‘PlaNYC 2030’. This plan, which

institutionalises ‘sustainability’ discourse, espoused a very different version of ‘sustainability’ than

that of local Harlem residents and WE ACT. Reflected in an article written by WE ACT’s director

Peggy Shepard, who had been asked to sit in on a council run sustainability planning board,

“It soon became clear that the long-‐term vision for the plan would focus narrowly on

infrastructure needs and metrics that would enable the city to effectively track and evaluate its

progress. PlaNYC was never envisioned as a broad-‐based planning process that engaged area

residents” (Shepard, Tyree and Corbin-‐Mark, 2007).

Despite hinting at a planning process based on consultation, the entire chapter in the PlaNYC2030

outline on community participation was almost solely written by an independent consulting firm

(Checker, 2011:213; Angotti, 2010). The depoliticised arena established by PlaNYC2030,

concentrated less on community participation, and rather on technocratic governance, which was

enmeshed in a wider process of capitalist urbanisation, surveillance and gentrification shrouded in

environmental rhetoric (Checker, 2011).

In the year that the HCDC had come along to the Harlem neighbourhood with plans to

‘green’ the suburb, it was already seeing a penetration of economic development and soaring

housing prices, thus residents had reason to be sceptical (2011:211). Reiterating themes from

earlier discourses about ‘urban revitalisation’ and ‘renewal’, sustainability, reflecting modern day

concerns, masks urban redevelopment and promotes an ecologically and socially sensitive model of

town planning that appeals to “affluent, eco-‐conscious residents, and a technocratic, politically

neutral approach to solving environmental problems” (Checker, 2011:212). Once again, as

articulated through the various examples in this paper, in the case of New York, global

environmental ideals reserved a particular kind of nature for a particular group of people, markedly


30

those from urban, well-‐to-‐do backgrounds (Cronon, 1996). At the same time redefining the

appropriate customs and use of green space and natural amenities (Checker, 2011).

This is firstly reflected in the city’s controversial approval of plans that aimed to rezone areas

of the neighbourhood, to allow the construction of office towers and 2,100 market rise

condominiums (Checker, 2011:220), and secondly in the advertisement for New York’s first certified

green townhouse located in Harlem,

“You don’t have to pretend to be environmentally friendly anymore; with ownership of this

trophy landmark you are entitled. You can now live in decadence and snub your nose to all when

you purchase this GREEN Master Piece” (Checker, 2011:223).

While a humorous display of marketable elitism, the matter took on a serious tone when it resulted

in a conflict between residents over the event ‘Black Woodstock’. A community park in Central

Harlem had been the site of a longstanding local cultural festival, which featured a range of acts,

including a group of African American drummers. Residents from the nearby, newly constructed high

rises complained about the noise, which was not necessarily unusual in itself as there had been

complaints in the past, but this time the police were sent in to forcibly remove the drummers,

resulting in widespread animosity (Checker, 2011:223).

Similarly in another park that had undergone restoration, the development of green

amenities was accompanied by harsh rules and strict regulations about what kind of activity was

allowed in the park. This resulted in the police patrolling it frequently, and cracking down on those

they saw as not complying with the guidelines. Ironically this led to the disruption of a Father’s Day

event, in which 30 or so local families gathered for an annual barbeque were dispelled, again leading

to widespread discontent, the locals questioning who the park was meant to be serving (Checker,

2011). Checker maintains that “in both cases, the enforcement of park rules privileged the needs

and desires of Harlem’s newer, affluent community while disallowing the recreative customs and

expressive culture of its old-‐timers” (2011:224).


31

Thus, the bourgeoning question in this situation is once again, sustainable, but for whom? By

using sustainability rhetoric, urban city plans and policies fail to address “unequally distributed

environmental burdens (i.e. toxic waste facilities…) in low income neighbourhoods and communities

of colour” (2011:214). And, by perceiving environmentalism through this rubric, as a singular and

global concern, state institutions and capitalist development schemes detach politics and

environmental concerns, “de-‐link[ing] sustainability from justice… [and]… disabl[ing] meaningful

resistance”, instead reproducing socio-‐spatial inequalities and the ongoing displacement of Harlem’s

local population (2011:212).


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The Dwelling Perspective

“We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things,

from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word

‘home’. Home, after all, is the place where finally we make our living. It is the

place for which we take responsibility, the place we try to sustain so we can

pass on what is best in it to our children” (Cronon, 1996:24)

By privileging the idea of a singular, coherent biophysical understanding of the world, the

institutionalisation of global environmental discourse depoliticises the contemporary environmental

arena, subjugating the moral imperatives and desires of local green space users, illustrated through

the various experiences of the homeless park users in Seattle, the AJE and local residents in

northeast Paris, as well as Harlemites and WE ACT in New York. Perceiving the environment as

something ‘out there’, whose delicate and fragile system must be managed, places the western

scientist in a dominant position to speak for the earth and nullifies alternative ontological

relationships with the environment, denying our placement within the world and its ecosystems,

evident for example, in the expulsion of homeless people from Seattle’s park system (Argyrou, 2005;

Dooling, 2009). This view, founded on a divide between nature and culture, overrides local practices

and presupposes that there is a self-‐evident environmental problem that requires an equally self-‐

evident rational solution, such as the HCDC councillors proposal to build more green space in Harlem

without consultation (Brosius, 1999a:278; Checker, 2011). Unfortunately, in urban Western settings,

this assumption lends itself to the imposition of a global environmental hegemony whose version of

environmentalism and sustainability is often far removed from the demands and desires of those

living in the local context (Newman, 2011). Rather, those espousing this global environmentalist


33

discourse, such as state institutions and urban planning agendas, are often caught up in neoliberal

regimes of capitalist urbanisation and surveillance (Newman, 2011; Checker, 2011).

By perceiving nature as that which is out there, or what is best left untouched, we fail to

turn our attention to environmental injustices happening at home in urban Western settings

(Cronon, 1996; Harvey, 1996). We need to develop an environmental ethic that will teach us as

much about living in the environment as respecting it, if we are to reconnect the lines between

social justice and urban environmentalism. After all, the bulk of our environmental problems begin

at home, many arising from the very alienation of humanity from the world that is entailed in the

global environmental discourse (Ingold, 2000:215; Cronon, 1996:21).

I argue that by resituating our perceptions of humanity as living within the flux of the

environment, blurring the lines between artificial and natural landscapes we can begin to imagine

how people dwell within, and experience the world around them. By adopting the ‘dwelling’

perspective, we can bring the environment home and dissolve the divide between nature and

culture that has formed the backbone of the global environmental hegemony. Thus an

environmental ethic influenced by the dwelling perspective, which seeks the knowledge that is

learnt by people through their phenomenological interaction with the immediate landscape, can

instead privilege the “understandings that people derive from their lived, everyday involvement in

the world” (Ingold, 2000:189). Through seeing ourselves as a part of the urban ecosystem, accepting

our presence within its processes as an inevitable result of our immanence in the world, we can stop

imposing the idea that nature is to be preserved and carefully managed from an abstracted position,

such as the case in the technocratic governance of both northeast Paris and Harlem or in the

displacement of homeless park users in Seattle (Ingold, 2000:189). Rather, an environmental

planning agenda created with this perspective in mind, can promote a culturally sensitive and

considerate model of ecological planning, which privileges the local ontologies that people develop

in relation to the urban environment surrounding and sustaining them (Theodossopoulos, 2003).


34

Regarding the many different conceptualisations people hold in relation to their

environment throughout the ethnographic examples, it seems foolish to apply our own dualistic

divide between nature and culture on to those contexts where it does not apply (Ingold, 2000;

Descola, 1995). Yet the view of a globe constitutes only one perspective, while there are many

different local understandings. This is where the dwelling perspective is particularly relevant,

recalling Ingold’s (2000) discussion of the globe and its alternative, the sphere. The sphere seems

like an appropriate model to account for the variety of ontological relationships people derive from

their everyday engagement with the world via a process of dwelling (Ingold, 2000). Because life

extends from an experiential centre, the spherical model enables us to perceive the world as

composed of many spheres with many centres. Each centre with its own particular local

understanding. These understandings do not produce a fragmented and confined vision of the

world, which can only be understood through a detached global analogy, rather they embody a

nuanced, open-‐ended recognition of the landscapes temporality with which they reside in (Ingold,

2000:217). The open-‐endedness of such an approach allows for the convergence of a variety of ideas

and experiences as conditions change, thus global ideas of sustainability can be embodied through

the practices and customs of local green space users rather than overriding them.

The Yup’ik Inuit’s worldview, which places the home at the centre of their sphere, could

perhaps provide us a better framework for understanding the environmental concerns that affect

people in local contexts (Ingold, 2000). After all, the Greek root of the word ‘ecology’ translates to

‘Management of the house” (Dooling, 2009:631). Quite clearly, local groups such as environmental

activists WE ACT, already define their ontological orientations in this light, “The environment is

where we live, work, play, pray and learn” (WE ACT, 2014). Moreover, their mission statement

“achieving environmental justice by building healthy communities since 1988” (WE ACT, 2014),

indicates that the environment is not just about the ecological situation that surrounds us, but the

social relationships and material conditions that contribute to our everyday existence. Home is not

just the place or space we occupy, it’s the relationships we develop with both people and our


35

surroundings, as described by David who felt more homeless once he was moved into a single

occupancy hotel, or Mel who derived his sense of home from the relationships he maintained with

his friends and the vast open expanse of the park (Dooling, 2009).

In my own research, it was also relationships that defined the Māori organisation, Mokai

Kāinga’s interaction with the surrounding environment (Foster, 2014). Mokai Kāinga, who are the

guardians of the Owhiro Organic Community Gardens where I carried out my fieldwork, was set up

by a group of Māori families with the intent of forming a protective whānau for “Māori who have

come into the city and haven’t been able to survive” (John Raku, 2014). In order to support those

who have lost their connections with their iwi, the concept of whānau, which constitutes the core

relationships of a family, were intrinsic to the organisation’s practices. In fact the relationship

between Mokai Kāinga and the Gardens drew on a wide variety of linkages between people, land,

justice, family and a Māori worldview (Foster, 2014). Their understanding of the surrounding

environment was enmeshed in their practices and customs, which were predicated on an ontology

of engagement rather than detachment (Foster, 2014).

Poignantly expressed by Hannah, a Harakeke weaver at Mokai Kāinga, as she taught some

younger Māori men who had arrived at the organisation on probation, how to correctly prune

harakeke plants in line with the principles of Tikanga Māori (Foster, 2014). Hannah stated that it was

through this engagement that the knowledge of their tīpuna could be shared with others. She

argued that many people who come through Mokai Kāinga are dislocated, sometimes from the on

flow effects of colonisation and the interaction with the environment is a way to transmit cultural

knowledge and reconnect them with their Māori identity (Foster, 2014).

“Like weaving, it’s about weaving our lives and healing our lives. And in this environment,

that’s really pertinent because a lot of the people coming in are quite dislocated and out of balance

so this is just an opportunity to share with them a way to go inside themselves, find that place of

balance and start bringing it out” (Hannah Smith, 2014).


36

More so, when I asked Hannah what the relationship between the work of Mokai Kāinga and the

Owhiro gardens meant to her, she replied,

“I think for me being a weaver, it isn’t about doing something, it’s actually about being and

about connecting. It’s about being inspired by the past from our tipuna… it’s about being generous

and sharing that’s all part of manaakitanga. And then, kaitiatikanga – what we have out there, being

a guardian for it and enabling it to thrive again… it’s a lot about healing, thriving, relationships,

connection, old knowledge, making it relevant, and just having fun being a whānau!” (Hannah Smith,

2014)

As an organisation focused on serving the community in need, especially those of Māori background,

their demands to establish the Owhiro Organic Community Gardens were intrinsically linked to their

worldview which draws no divide between people and land (Foster, 2014). Encapsulated in Hannah’s

statement then, is the privileging of cosmology over technology. Rather than ‘doing’, which indicates

a process of abstraction, Hannah says that it’s about ‘being’, indicating her immersion in the

surroundings (Foster, 2014).

Many of the current helpers had arrived at Mokai Kāinga in precarious positions, some

homeless while others were on probation (Foster, 2014). Yet it was their experience of the

relationships they developed with Mokai Kāinga that fulfilled their ideal notions of home and

fundamental to this was the interaction with both people and the gardens. Dave for example, had a

problematic history dealing with authoritative figures and had spent time both homeless and behind

bars, but the sense of whānau support that he received from Mokai Kāinga enabled him to pick

himself up and utilise his skills as a builder to become a productive member of their community

(Foster, 2014). While Matt who arrived at Mokai Kāinga on probation, had recently found out he was

Māori and through Mokai Kāinga he was able to reconnect with, and explore, his Māori identity. The

gardens for him, grounded his sense of who he was, and who his family was. For Matt, it was

relationships built on respect with both people and the land that shaped his cosmological


37

orientation. Indeed, he saw the connection between social justice and environmentalism as

intrinsically linked, evident in a reflection of his own experience, “from being in that hole in the wall,

to coming out here and experiencing this? To me, that’s what community gardens are all about!”

(Matt Fortes, 2014).

If we perceive the environments to be our home, we can recognise that those who live there

are best equipped and most knowledgeable of its patterns and functions. Indeed, it is Ingold’s stance

and a fundamental tenet of the dwelling perspective, that knowledge is learnt through our practical

engagement with the world around us, that an understanding of our environment is revealed

through the very process of dwelling within it (Ingold, 2000:216). It is in the relational contexts of

peoples’ practical engagement with their surrounding environment, that our ideas and movement

emerge. The AJE’s mobilisation to build a park was not just emergent from a trending sustainability

rhetoric, rather it was created by the residents’ perceptual engagement with inadequate social

housing that surrounded them and the environmental hazards they breathed in every day. While

local Harlem residents didn’t want to deny the benefits of natural amenities, they were fearful that

the development of green spaces would threaten their sense of home and community through

processes of gentrification. Thus, even though they had many environmental concerns they wanted

addressed, the imposition of sustainability and environmental managerialism by the state and urban

planning agencies eclipsed their voices and privileged the position of the Western scientist, aided by

a bevy of planners and administrators to speak for them (Checker, 2011).

If mainstream environmentalism could adopt the position that environmental justice

activists already use, of the environment as “the place you work, the place you live, the place you

play” (Di Chiro, 1998:301), it would have a hope in understanding why the AJE activists and local

residents demands for green space were linked to issues of inadequate housing structures, the

suppression of their cultural identities and suffering from a history of ecological harm as a result of

unevenly distributed environmental burdens (Newman, 2011). They could begin questioning that if


38

the environment is where we live, why are we hostile to homeless people living in parks, and what

environmental conditions led to them residing in these parks (Dooling, 2009). Rather than focusing

on a bourgeois aesthetic, symbolic of global environmentalism, urban planning agencies and the

state could incorporate the ecological processes of the city into understanding the social processes

and experiences of how people interact with urban, green space (Dooling, 2009:632). As Cronon

argues,

“if wilderness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start

being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to

live rightly in the world – not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that

encompasses them both” (1995:25).

If we resituate humanity within nature connecting the ecological and the social in urban ecosystems

we can reconnect the links between social justice and urban environmentalism. If the house is that

which takes form as a result of our dwelling within the world, than it seems like the house might be

the appropriate place to re-‐evaluate how we perceive our relationship with green space.


39

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