Building a Better Babel

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Re: Any economists out there?
Friday, Feb. 25, 2005, at 1:51 p.m. PST

Stephen,

You’ve raised a very valuable point about my needing to be able to speak in the language of dollars and cents, and I’ll commit to trying to figure this out more in the context of climate change.

The problem is that the concept of public revenues is, in and of itself, a multiple-language, territorial thing. For example, the dollars that would be saved by the public health-care system (including Medicaid) in reduced visits to emergency rooms for asthma attacks, or the dollars that would be saved by private companies with less work and school time missed due to respiratory illnesses, are not factored in to the New York City Transit Agency’s budget when they’re telling us they can’t afford not to use diesel fuel — or into the board of education when they say they can’t afford to install pollution-control devices on school buses.

Also, as Tom points out, there is a very real (and currently hidden or publicly subsidized) economic cost to climate change that has to be a point of reference for any estimates of financial costs of preserving environmental and public health and well-being. Although I don’t know much about how the whole “public tax revenue base” is related to public benefit programs, I do know that here in Harlem, there seem to be an awful lot of development projects — like the Home Depot that will bring hundreds more cars and trucks into the neighborhood every day, or the General Motors car dealership that will sell more of these cars — that are receiving hefty public subsidies in the form of tax waivers.

Maybe this mega-eco-economics analysis we set out to do could include an estimation of how that both adds to the economic costs of climate change, and subtracts from the public coffers with the disproportionate socioeconomic impacts that you point out.

More to come,
Swati

From: Swati Prakash
To: Torri Estrada, Stephen Moret, Thompson Smith
Subject: Onwards!
Friday, Feb. 25, 2005, at 1:55 p.m. PST

Happy Friday everyone,

Oooh, just as the conversation is getting nice and juicy, we’re at the end of the week already. But, as you point out, Tom, we have to be having these conversations on more of a local level as well as in forums like Grist. And by “conversations,” I don’t mean the self-satisfied academic banter that often characterizes panels of speakers (who often look mighty similar) talking at each other and then going back to their own worlds with an interesting story to tell and no other evidence of having been out of their office for several hours. I mean the more deliberate and thoughtful self-reflections that most of us and our organizations — already overcommitted and under-resourced — find ourselves sacrificing by default. I mean conversations (or better yet, facilitated dialogues) that bring together an unconventional array of groups and individuals with a shared commitment to giving priority to voices that are not often heard in public venues, and to setting aside both defensiveness and overconfidence and being willing to engage in real learning.

I’m wondering how we, the environmental movement, could be engaging in more fundamental political analysis/political education in developing a theory (or theories) of how the world works, of the root causes of social and environmental problems, as a way to reinforce the foundation of our work. My subway reading last night was revisiting a favorite — Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy — in which Rinku Sen writes, “It is virtually impossible for an organization to achieve long-term change without a coherent picture of the world and a theory of how change is effected.”

The same goes for a movement, however diffuse and broadly it is defined. A part of our current movement paralysis is, perhaps, the ever-decreasing numbers of people, organizations, and perspectives engaged in articulating the “environmental movement’s” theory of change. Broadening the base and scope of this kind of political education and analysis helps local struggles from falling prey to NIMBYism. For example, the community leaders WE ACT works with to demand accountability from the New York City Transit Agency for cleaner and healthier fuels have made the connection between diesel fuel and the social and racial justice impacts of the oil industry at every point in the life cycle of oil and diesel, and have made the connection between local oppression and the oppression of other communities of color.