South African climate justice activist and Greenpeace International Content Editor Angelo C. Louw is breaking ground in the environmental space. His film and literary projects unpack the intersections between race, gender and climate. He shared with us an excerpt from his new book, The Problem with Black People, in which he discusses the dangers of eco-fascism, often disguised as environmentalism.
(Trigger warning: this article refers to a number of racist and violent ideas which it also refutes and debunks.)
"Covid is the world's way of balancing out this overpopulation," they say. "People should stop having so many babies. There are already too many people in the world, it just cannot handle the strain."
In my time with the environmental movement, I'm sometimes left shocked and grossly offended by the ignorance, and casual racism, displayed by some of my peers in the name of saving the planet.
"Human beings are the problem, we should all die," sits right there at the top of the list.
Using the environment as a pretext for racist and eugenic ideas
Let me explain. They don't mean all humans when longing for this mass extermination, they mean human beings having babies at a "disproportionate rate". And with a general lack of access to healthcare in the global majority, let alone access to family planning and reproductive health [and a relatively tiny carbon footprint] they are referring to us: the Black and Brown people of the world that they assume are destroying it with our sex lives. (This adds a whole new dimension to the hypersexualisation of people of colour, but that's a whole other discussion altogether.)
This thinking is so rife within the movement that thought-leaders have even coined a term for it: eco-fascism. It is an ideology blaming the climate crisis on overpopulation, immigration, and over-industrialisation. According to Vice, eco-fascists think we could partly remedy these problems through the mass murder of refugees in Western countries. Oh, and by spaying people of colour like dogs, evidently.
"Overpopulation" is the favourite red herring of racists who claim to care about the environment
The correlation between "overpopulation" and carbon footprint is horribly misinformed. In fact, believing that people who can barely afford to feed their families are the cause of the overconsumption that is responsible for climate change sounds pretty silly when you say it out loud. In my country, South Africa, over 50% of the population lives below the US$1.90 per person per day poverty line. So, we are definitely not the ones to point a finger at.
Who you should be pointing a finger at are the rich in those so-called "developed" countries who, despite their excellent family planning facilities and controlled birth rates, contribute the most to the world's carbon emissions with their luxury lifestyles.
On the contrary, our culture is not wasteful. Being of both African and Asian descent, I can almost categorically say that frugality is instilled in us - probably because there is never really much to go around in our communities. Eco-friendly practices such as reuse, meat-free meals, and subsistence farming have been a part of our culture long before they became trendy in the West.
Who you should be pointing a finger at are the rich in those so-called "developed" countries who, despite their excellent family planning facilities and controlled birth rates, contribute the most to the world's carbon emissions with their luxury lifestyles.
In 2015, Oxfam released a study that found that the richest 10 percent of people worldwide produced half of the planet's individual-consumption-based fossil fuel emissions, while the poorest 50 percent of the world's population - about 3,5 billion people - contributed a mere 10 percent.
Yes. The reality is that carbon emissions are predominantly caused by, and for the comfort of, the wealthy whiter West; but impacts the poorer, Black and brown people of the world at an alarmingly disproportionate rate.
Eco-fascist rhetoric is mistaken in blaming both those who are least responsible and those who are most affected by the climate crisis
A series of recent reports by the United Nations Environment Programme showed time and again that those bearing the brunt of environmental injustice - from pollution, from harmful extraction, from overconsumption - are people of colour, particularly women. One study found, for example, that the differences in gender, social roles and political power in regulating plastic and health standards placed women at high risk of developing cancer and having miscarriages.
As noted by my fellow Fulbright award recipient and climate activist, Dr Alex Lenferna, the global economy is run on the devaluation of Black lives and Black land, often in the service of predominantly white capital and interests. Lenferna wrote that in the end, environmental injustice is in many ways an extension and continuation of colonial injustice - that is, the exploitation of our land and people to benefit former colonial powers.
The belief that people of colour are inherently to blame for everything wrong in the world is a tired and counterproductive narrative that continues to mislead people by shifting focus from the real problem, and those who are really in the wrong. There is no more room for gaslighting. And, right now, we don't have the luxury of being anything but honest with ourselves if we are to stop the crisis on our hands.
Only if we are truthful with ourselves, can we find real and effective solutions to the climate crisis, as well as the environmental injustice faced by the global majority. We can't rely on false solutions that encourage genocide and fuel hate - that is far too big a price to pay for your overindulgence.
Excerpted from The Problem with Black People © 2023 by Angelo C Louw (available here). Adapted with permission of the author. All rights reserved.
