Featured Issue: Eco-Justice and the Role of Churches
A TRANSCRIPT OF DISCUSSION BETWEEN DR. LARRY RASMUSSEN & WHITNEY BAUMAN about the book, Earth Habitat: Eco-Injustice and the Church's Response, Larry Rasmussen and Dieter Hessel, eds. (Fortress 2001).
Dr. Larry Rasmussen is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Whitney Bauman (WB) introduces Dr. Rasmussen (LR)--
WB: Let's start off with a short autobiography [on] how you came to join your religious studies with environmental ethics. Or was it always there? Or did you change your career at a certain point?
LR: No it wasn't a change of career. It had to do with studies at Union Seminary. My doctoral advisor was Dr. Roger Shin and I was doing my Ph.D. here [at Union] in Christian social ethics in the mid 1960. Roger was already involved with the World Council of Churches and a program called "Towards a Just, Sustainable and Participatory Society." I think the World Council of Churches actually gave the world that language of sustainability as applied to a society. It had been applied to yields of forests or fisheries but as a notion for society I think it was an innovation of the World Council of Churches. Roger was deeply involved in the Unit on Church and Society of the WCC and became one of the participants and eventually one of the editors of the WCC and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Conference on Faith and Science in the early 1970s. And I remember in 1972, although I wasn't any longer at Union that Roger was saying how important the new publication "Limits to Growth" was. Although I had no particular course nor was my dissertation involved in ecological issues, I was well aware that my doctoral Advisor was doing this, so when I ended up in Washington DC, in 1972, after a few years of teaching college at the time of the so-called energy crisis under President Carter, I decided to offer a course on energy and ethics. It was probably 1973. From that point onward I paid attention to debates around the limits to growth, to energy policy, and to the movement that came to be called environmentalism with the establishment of the first Earth Day. That's when I began, at least as a scholar and teacher. The roots in my case go deeper, however. I grew up outdoors. As a kid in southwest Minnesota in a small farmer village, where doing our homework was important, but books were not. A group of us kids spent every available moment outdoors, whether to build a raft on the river or to catch gophers with strings. I am sure that the imprints of a carefree childhood out of doors have had their effect on my career path, although not in a self-conscious way.
WB: I had similar outdoor experiences that left a mark on my childhood. It is kind of ironic: part of the task of ecotheology and ecojustice is to reawaken the Church and religious communities in general to that sense of interconnectedness with the world; yet, these experiences of being outdoors, of growing up on farms or in rural communities, are becoming less and less of an option for urban dwellers or for a lot of poor people. It makes for a tough challenge. We get more and more distant as the environmental situations gets worse and economic disparity gets larger. We need to address this. It's almost as if we are wanting to re-awaken this sense of interconnectedness, but it seems like there is no opportunity to do so.
LR: It's a very good point. Many people will give their own testimony to how the experience in nature was an experience of God, or at least the experience of the presence of divine powers that surpassed any of the other powers that were bearing down upon their lives. So, how does a largely urban population experience something of the totality of creation, and the God of all creation? Presently just over half of the peoples of the earth live in urban centers. Actually most of those live within 30 miles of the coastline. It's a very concentrated reality and it's something new! It happened in less than one century, which is nothing in terms of time, even for human evolution. We went from the vast majority living in the countryside and small towns to living in metropolitan areas--urban and suburban areas. We haven't figured out what to do with this change yet, at least how to make it sustainable for the whole community of life. But, speaking from the point of view of Christianity, it ought not to make a difference; that is to say, all of this is creation. Creation isn't a synonym for nonhuman nature. Creation is the totality of all things, in, with, and before God. So if one thinks in terms of the wonders, beauties, and terror of creation, they are present no matter where you live. Likewise, the kind of dualisms that have affected us deeply, especially in the West and especially since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, go back long before that. Dualisms of nature and history, nature and society, culture and nature, or humanity and nature, all of these, while they have Christian expressions, are fallacious in view of the fact that creation is a totality made up of all manner of interdependent elements. It doesn't take long to realize how fallacious these dualisms are, and how deeply body and spirit are joined. I don't care if you live in the countryside or at 120th and Broadway, try holding your breath for five minutes and see whether or not you are imbedded in nature, or try going without fluids for a week and see how much you are a part of nature in the city. So, it's a task of being attuned to reality. Everything about the city is nature, it's all transformation of nature. Culture is second nature. Society is another version of nature. What is needed is the recovery of an understanding of the Christian doctrine of creation, and of what is necessary for humanity to live within this creation. It is not as though we were fine-tuned to live in some other creation rather than this particular one. Nature, in infinitely varied forms, is utterly inclusive, from atoms to galaxies.
WB: The question then becomes how to make our cultures so that they are in tune with the natural world. Though this is a dualistic statement, I have heard some strange claims come out of the conflation of nature and culture. For instance, I have heard people say that we are natural, everything we do is natural, creating an atom bomb or burning fossil fuels that's just natural. Then it becomes a question, maybe, of aesthetics? Or a matter of wading through cultural narratives to see which parts add to or alleviate the destruction of the planet?
LR: Well, you can say that it's all natural. Empirically that's the case. Nature is comprehensive in the sense that anything we do belongs to nature. But, one also has to ask what it is that makes it possible for nature to able to regenerate itself on its own terms and be fecund-be fruitful and multiply on its own terms. What does earth's economy require of the human economy? Once you start raising those questions then you are required to look at the requirements of the earth for its own regeneration. Having done this, you cannot say that the unlimited burning of fossil fuels is just "natural". In an empirical sense you can say its natural, but not in a normative one. Fossil fuels have permitted us to live in a way that runs against the grain of nature rather than living in ways that are in keeping with the way nature depends ultimately on solar energy. In other words, your line of questioning points out the reality that just because it is all nature, does not mean we are paying attention to the dynamics and boundaries of nature. A good question is, how do you take a population that is more urbanized than anything else and make it aware of the deep interconnections and dependencies at the heart of nature? One of the efforts of bioregionalism is precisely to make urban people conscious of interconnections, so: if you are reliant upon your region for the food you eat rather than a region that is halfway around the world; or if you subscribe to community supported agriculture and the farmer you know is bringing the food from an hour and one half away in the city and there has been a flood in the Spring that jeopardizes your food supply, you become aware of networks of dependence that free-wheeling, free trade systems tend to obliterate. What you wear on your back comes from half-way around the planet and is produced by people that you will never meet, on soils that you will never visit, much less have any sense for. One of the things that bioregionalism fosters is an awareness of the interdependence of life that is real, in your own backyard or apartment building. It is real no matter, that is clear. But our awareness of it changes a great deal when we are part of relationships that are face-to-face or in close proximity, the kind of connection fostered by bioregionalism.
WB: I think it also gives you a better understanding of the depth of biodiversity because when you go to a supermarket that has produce from all over the world, you might think, "I will just get this thing tonight," regardless of the climate, conditions, and region which made this particular type of produce possible, it is easy to think, "this is always available to me." Getting anything we want regardless of who grows it or where and when it is grown, the produce objects becomes familiar. However, if you do stick to locally grown things, you realize how much the season and region affect things. Then, when you do see something that is not grown in the region you have more respect for it.
LR: I don't really know what we will do about the obliteration of both time and space. It seems to be what happens with the triumph of a free-trade, free-market system that operates across borders at electronic speed. We don't have a very keen sense of our own location in the midst of things when both time and space are collapsed, exploded, or "virtually" done away with.
WB: Are you familiar with Zygmunt Baumann's work on globalization? He writes about this destruction of time and space. He calls those of us who benefit from the time-space crunch, you and I, the "global mobiles." The global mobiles are not dependent on locality at all, they are almost the Cartesian "thinking thing." With the click of a button on a computer, the global mobiles can order products from all over the world, not knowing how, when, and by whom the product was made. What is actually happening, is that the global mobiles are oppressing and even destroying the "immobile locals," those for whom time and space are very important-the "2/3" world. To make it even worse, Baumann suggests, once you become a part of the global mobiles, it becomes easier and easier to live into the lifestyle, perhaps to the point where you will actively work to maintain the global mobile lifestyle (thereby further oppressing the immobile locals).
LR: That's a fine, if disturbing, insight. At some point you have to ask the question of what makes us more or less human and/or more or less humane in terms of the consequences of these relationships. Alfred Borgmann's notion of the "device paradigm" is also useful here. Basically, all that really matters in the modern world-according to modernity-is that we get articles that are "commodius"-that are real commodities that are user-friendly. How they are produced, where they are produced, and all the relationships that go into the making of these products and services are out of site; they fall from view. All that's left is the question of whether or not the result is commodious for us. Nothing else matters. It doesn't matter if it's sweatshop conditions; it doesn't matter if it was a decent wage; it doesn't matter where or what it did to the environment or the character of the local community. Nothing is even visible any longer by the time you pick up the end product at the hardware store or supermarket.
WB: This brings up the question of faulty anthropology. By that I mean that anthropology that has been handed down from the Cartesian split of things --the thinking thing that's isolated and that sort of thing. I think it has been assumed in a lot of Christian anthropology and concepts of Imageo Dei. In your and Dieter Hessel's book, it seems like an interconnected anthropology is assumed, but its not really flushed out by most of the writers. Where do Imago Dei and Christian Anthropology fit in? How do you see that in the work that you do?
LR: First I would back up a bit and say that the thinking thing, that is the Cartesian human subject as mind where consciousness is over against everything else as object, is still very much alive and has even taken on the language of ecology. So, we talk about "biodiversity" but we do so in ways that view the value of biodiversity in terms of information and resources. Biodiversity then becomes the substance of biotechnology. The human subject then engineers a world in its own design as passive object. So, you can easily take the language of the web of life and make the web of life into an object of the thinking subject. Descartes rises from the dead and bites us in the butt again one more time. That subject-object relationship and "the thinking thing" relates closely to "the using thing". By this I mean the understanding of everything except the subject in completely instrumentalist terms. The divide here is between the non-instrumental-that which has dignity and worth in itself-and the instrumental-that value of which is relative to the human subject. Christianity's relationship to that is deeply ambiguous. All strains of Christianity rightly affirm the preciousness of human life as created in the image of God and ourselves as precious creatures of God. This reinforces the value of the human subject and offers an ethic of good stewardship to all that is subject to humankind. You can see, in a lot of the contemporary Christian language of stewardship, the remains of a modern human subject over and against the rest of the world. The world is an instrument for which we are accountable and for which we are responsible. I think this language is very, very short sighted theologically. If it is fundamental to Christianity to say we are created in the Image of God and are thereby granted inherent dignity, then it is even more fundamental to say creation is sacred and that it has moral standing and moral value before God, in God, and with God, precisely as a creation of God. You can talk about its value as relative to the Creator as ours is. But you can't talk about it in an utterly instrumentalist fashion or consider its value relative to us. I think that Christianity experiences a kind of basic revulsion against the utterly utilitarian way in which all things are potentially commodities, and that that is rooted in the conviction that creation is itself sacred. But this revulsion is held at bay by notions of stewardship that retain the subject-object split of the modern world, and of economic life above all.
WB: So the term stewardship doesn't go far enough. Would you say kinship, or citizenship, or a multitude of more explicitly relational-type models?
LR: When we talk about something so important, so fundamental, so elemental, and so primordial as our place in the world as one species in a vast creation, and the universe as a tale of the cosmic story, it is short sighted to only think in terms of one image, whether the image of steward, or partner, or any other. This is the struggle of human language and the human mind to visualize and conceptualize what it can hardly even imagine. Just as speaking of God requires a universe of images so also to talk about creation and our place in it requires many images.
I am not utterly opposed to using the notion of steward because I think it does, in the present context, underscore the reality of human power in a humanly dominated biosphere. And if stewardship is the vehicle for talking about the moral responsibility of human beings in a humanly dominated biosphere, then we ought to take our stewardship seriously. If stewardship is a way of underscoring the fact that we have cumulative power to really affect all things in a fundamental way-from coral reefs to ozone layers-then keep it! But, stewardship doesn't do some things good enough. In order to overcome the dualisms of industrial and post-industrial, "virtual society," we have to use something other than stewardship. Perhaps it is better to talk in terms of kinship, or partnerships, or Leopold's "plain citizens" of the world-or as a Christian or religious person believing in a theistic God might put in "plain citizens of creation." In any event, we need a variety of images and need to explore the dimensions of each. None of them will get it right but cumulatively they will be more helpful than any selected one.WB: I see sustainability as something that comes out of stewardship. It's an end-vision of good stewardship. It maintains the distinction between humans and the rest of the natural world and the idea that the non-human world is somehow "stuff" that can be sustained by us. Not to mention, what is being sustained for whom? Nature is in flux, some life-styles should not be sustained. It seems to me that, in this interrelated community all created by God, we should be giving something back and going beyond sustainability to gifting or something. I am just wondering if you think the language of sustainability takes us far enough and/or if it is a pragmatic step along one trajectory.
LR: Sustainability is probably a bad idea whose time has come! It is with us because it is imbedded in so many important discussions going on-The United Nations, the scientific community, the NGO networks all use this language. It has captured something very important. Unfortunately there are a couple major defects. One is that the word doesn't connote the character of the radical changes that are necessary. If you ask someone what is necessary to sustain a given condition, immediately the assumption is to keep it going the way it is, indefinitely. When you are looking at sustainability in the context of ecosystems and the world, sustainability actually means changing the way many, many things are so that they don't keep going on the way they are. Thus, sustainability fails to capture, for example, the radical character of shifting from a world dependent upon fossil fuels to one dependent on fuels that move to the rhythms of solar power and other sustainable forms. That is a problem in the language itself. The second problem is that we don't know what sustainability means. We have to find out, but it's not a matter of creating all of the conditions in a major lab experiment to see what sustains and what doesn't. The costs are too high and the conditions far too complex. But how do you find out what sustainability for the world is, short of a controlled experiment? Yet, there are ways of talking meaningfully about sustainability. Earlier mentioned were the requirements of the economy of earth or of nature and how they relate primarily to the human economy: the economy of earth is fundamental, the human economy is derivative. We have a lot of science that is helpful on this point. Yet if you ask scientists to come up with the norms of sustainability, they could tell you some of them but not all of them. We simply don't know. Much of the science itself, describing how nature works, says that nature is in a state of flux. In only one or two decades of ecology, science moved from the concept of "the balance of nature" to the "flux of nature". How do you operate with notions of sustainability when you say that what is most characteristic about nature is its indeterminacy or its flux? And how do you react to a nature-in-flux when the human way of knowing is always in response to something that precedes it? Knowing is always a second step. So, for nature-in-flux, the language of sustainability doesn't tell you a whole lot by itself. Under conditions of flux, values themselves become as important as good science when the subject is sustainability. Good science is vital and is needed, but the valuing of what humans take from the rest of nature and what humans give to the rest of nature is as critical. So I think any efforts to discuss what sustainability means are religious and moral as much as they are scientific and common sensical. How do we live so that others, humans and more-than-human, can also live and flourish from generation to generation?
WB: It's almost as if some of the earth scientists are-as you said-bringing the earth under a microscope to observe what is happening, and then telling you about it. If that's the case, then we can just keep on observing while the climate changes and never have a program that says "Wait a second! Look at what is happening!" Do you think then that actually what they are doing-for example sustainability sciences as a new field of science where people are focused on new technologies, and the science of biomimickery- is claiming that science will eventually save us? Do you think that here is where Christianity and other religions can offer something to science? Is it up to the world religions to say to science, "Science can't do it alone, religion alone can't do it, economics alone can't do it, what we need is a vision that is healing for the whole earth community towards which to work." It seems to me that theological and philosophical reflections are good about examining different aspects of and connotations of certain visions. Maybe that's what we have to offer at the conceptual level, not to mention what religions have to offer the personal level, including critiquing the ways in which we live our everyday lives.
LR: The contributions of various sectors are obviously important. If you are talking about something as enormous as major changes in creation as we experience it primarily at the hands of human beings, then again, just as there aren't any single images in nature so there aren't any single domains of knowledge that will address problems that show up in various ways. One is one that you intimated-a vision. I would say, more important than the vision itself is a sense of belonging to a community that far surpasses our own lives individually, a community of the same powers that threw the planets and stars into orbit. We want to be at home in the cosmos and be part of a story that started long before we showed up and that will continue after we leave and maybe after our species leaves. There is something profoundly human about this cosmic story and probably has been since the first baby was lifted toward the stars by ancestors in Africa. I suspect that this is a very important role of religion, namely finding the means to tell the story by which we are truly at home in the cosmos. How important it is, is rightly sensed by people who worry about the other-worldliness of many religious traditions. Other-worldly religion that allows you to focus your sense of responsibility somewhere else because this particular world no longer carries ultimate significance.
That kind of grand narrative is one thing, but it's not the only thing that religious communities and religious traditions offer. Something closely related is motivation. What is it that will move people to make changes that they would otherwise find difficult? It takes something with the tenacity and devotion of religion to pull that off. Motivation and sustaining power to make life changes is rightly associated with religion. This doesn't mean that the power of religious motivation is only good-there is a lot of terror and terrorism that has religious motivation too. But it is testimony to the power of religion. So, tenacity, dedication words like sacrifice and devotion, deep motivation, and a kind of piety that puts one's own energies in the service of something that goes beyond oneself, all belong to the world of religion. Nobody ever died for E=MC2. You could "prove" the need for sustainability, and perhaps even express it as a scientific equation-yet, nobody will live or die for that! Such passion and motivation takes on the language and color of religion and poetry, or the language and scope of epic. But, I wouldn't stop there. The deep religious traditions also harbor an enormous amount of human experience that may be newly relevant. There are many cultures and religious traditions that have lived with the awareness of the interdependence of life. Now, when you have the majority of peoples living in urban centers and when you have a human population that is off the charts in historically unprecedented numbers, few cultures live with an acute awareness of interdependence. Yet there were religious cultures that were keenly in tune with living inside a web of life and feeling the dependencies there, and there were religious resources for living in such a way. These express themselves in liturgical practices of communities, including monastic communities and other intentional Christian communities. This wisdom about living may have a new relevance as an aesthetic, as a set of moral sensibilities, as a way of leaning into the world, as a posture toward God and toward others, as a feeling of being a plain citizen of creation. These resources have been largely neglected because we have been totally enamored with conquering human powers-the powers of the modern world. But, this is very concrete religious knowledge in very specific practices that needs to be revived not so much because it is immediately and directly applicable, but because it offers numerous examples of fashioning life within the world. As we try to refashion our lives to live within the web of life, we know it's possible because it's already been done!WB: That's one thing that I really liked about what you said in your introduction to the book. That is, in institutions of higher education and in theology [students] are taught that the core of theology is [found in] theologians like Tillich and Barth and other German and European theologians/philosophers. Only later are you introduced to Ecofeminist theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, and Latin American liberation theology.
LR: The curriculum has actually been changed at Union. It is a rule at Union that the syllabus for a course needs to include historically underrepresented voices. That's the stipulation of doctoral exams in theology and ethics, for example-you must include historically underrepresented voices. In Ethics, in at least one of the doctoral exams the exam question itself must be formulated from a particular marginalized setting. In other words "privilege the non-privelaged" as a way of looking at the world. This happens internally to newly powerful voices, and enriches them. There is an increase of various forms of liberation theologies and critiques of them, for example: Womanist theology is critical of Black theology, Latin American Ecofeminism is critical of Latin American liberation theology, etc.. Beyond theology and ethics as disciplines, there are other things happening. In Biblical Studies and in Church History we are using methods and sources for looking at materials that have not themselves been privileged. Not at Union, but at New York Theological Seminary Dale Irwin assembled a large team of 30 scholars in Church History who are taking another look at World Christianity. It's not going to look like anything you have seen as the presentation of World Christianity before even in a course in ecumenics. Ethiopian and Nubian experiences in North Africa, for example, will have a voice they have never had in presentations of World Christianity, which have been Euro-centric, and not "World" at all. Christianity was born on three continents-Africa, Asia, and Europe-and was multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, multi-racial and diverse from the very outset. And, it wasn't very long before Christianity surpassed the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Yet, when was the last time you studied Persian Christianity in your World Christianity course? Likewise, Biblical Studies is in the midst of revolutions of its own and part of that is happening at Union. Vincent Wimbush has a course entitled"African-Americans and the Bible." He has asked the question of how the Bible is used in these communities and what that means for biblical scholarship. This method doesn't just go to the scholars or to the preachers, but also to the artists, musicians, and rappers. Likewise there are the post colonialists in Biblical Studies and others [who use,] for example, the Hispanic experience or African experience in the use of scripture. I don't want to digress. All I want to say is that it is in a variety of areas of biblical studies and not just in theology where there are major changes going on. One of the courses that I am teaching this semester is called "Deep Christian Traditions as Earth Based" and we look at the traditions of asceticism, sacramentalism, mysticism and the contemplative life, and prophetic-liberative practices. We ask, is there a green asceticism? Is there an asceticism that loves the earth fiercely in a simple, disciplined way of life that says "yes" to some things and "no" to others like consumerism? START Is there a sacramentalist orientation that has been around for millennia, an orientation that would not look at the world in utterly utilitarian terms because all things are sacred? Is there a green mysticism? The answer to that is "yes", there is, and a lot of it has been overlooked. No traditions are pristine, but it's foolish to not look to the mystical, ascetic, sacramental, and liberative traditions and see what has been there as well as what might be there. The wrong way to go about this is to ask how do we create an eco-theology and then recreate the churches according to this ecotheology. It won't happen, even when there ought to be a lot of people working on ecotheologies. The more fruitful way is to graft onto traditions that have a couple millennia behind them in terms of experience, and that keep showing up cross-culturally in different geographical regions and different times and locales. Sacramentalism keeps showing up. Why? Because it answers to something deep in the human spirit. So, we should create theological curricula that are aware of the deep traditions, study them, and read them through the complex of issues that face us, as a planet in jeopardy. This is a way to address eco-issues that has the capacity to put our own efforts and struggles in a far larger framework of meaning and value. It gives us the sense that we belong to something that started not in 1972, nor when George Bush pulled out of the Kyoto treaty, but long ago; it has real depth, in time and space and across cultures and peoples.
WB: That's essentially the more reason that we don't just talk about sustaining the tradition, nor the earth; rather, we must and can only add to and change it.
LR: Traditions are living! It's been very interesting to me because I often end up speaking at secular universities and colleges on issues of sustainability. Often I am asked to talk about the role of religious and moral imagination or the role of religious and moral traditions. I find it fascinating to see the positive resonance to the role of the religious. Evidently utterly secular language and utterly secular sources such as modern science cannot contribute factors religion and ethics can. We are incorrigibly religious. Mostly, we to turn to it in circumstances where we can no longer be naively confident about our own capacities. We saw it in New York in response to Sept. 11th. It wasn't very long before the parks became places of ritual: candles were lit, little messages of hope and consolation were made, Yankee Stadium itself was the site of an interfaith response to the horror of September.
WB: It was the first time in a long time that the whole nation's eyes had been focused on the religious communities for some sort of guidance.
LR: But this sort of thing happens on a regular basis when you find out that something precious to you is threatened or jeopardized, whether at your own hands or someone else's. People were glued to John Kennedy's funeral. It became a public ritual event. Likewise an increasing awareness of the planet in jeopardy elicits something like a religious response. Another example happened in New York, while we awaited the decision of the EPA about cleaning the Hudson River of PCB's and whether or not General Electric would foot a good bit of the bill. The night before that decision there were candles along the Hudson River from the Chelsea District in Manhattan to Albany. They were mostly placed by nongovernmental organizations, among them women's religious orders. Actually, a Catholic women's religious orders group named ROAR, Religious Orders Along the River, helped organize this simple little ritual of coming to the banks of the Hudson River and lighting a line of light that went for a couple hundred miles. People felt that they needed to communicate something that went beyond writing letters to Congressional representatives, important as that was. Candlelight and utter silence puts us in a different world from organizing and leafleting.
WB: That's amazing. Every time I think about this I get anxious. It is so hard to create the religious motivation around ecological issues because the effects of degradation are so desperate. Its not like something explodes or an earthquake happens, which gets people's attention. And most often the people in power aren't the ones affected. It is so hard for groups-like the Harlem River group-dealing with ecojustice or environmental racism issues to get people's attention.
LR: It is frustrating. So many of the major environmental issues aren't dramatic. They don't rivet our attention like the collapse of the Trade Towers or some huge explosion of some chemical plant. Many are insidious. It's increased asthma rates in West Harlem and trying to find the connection of pollution to heightened respiratory diseases among kids in elementary schools. Yet, difficult as it is, the most effective action is action that does work from an issue that has a real clear local expression. For instance, West Harlem Environmental Action was formed in response to the location of the North River Sewage Treatment plant in the Hudson River (a decision on which the Harlem community was not even consulted). Things went wrong at the sewage treatment plant. There were terrible odors. This led to falling property values-an item that does get people's attention! The group is still in existence today, and it works to combat the many issues affecting the Harlem community that arise from environmental racism, including public health issues such as asthma.
Today's paper has a story about the purchasing of the little town of Cheshire Ohio by the company that has polluted it. They simply bought the town for 20 million dollars because that is less costly than lawsuits that would run beyond 20 million dollars. These global ills have local expression. They are not invisible, nor vaguely pan-global. You just have to get down to the local level to confront ills being combated by specific communities and do your best to amplify the voices already aware of the dangers we have crated and exported.
Many thanks to Dr. Larry Rasmussen for agreeing to meet with me for this interview, to Eileen Harrington for typing and reviewing the interview, and to Dana Spottswood for putting it up on the web!
--Whitney Bauman
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