Welcome

Welcome

January 14, 2010, 6:50 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

This blog is an experiment. An experiment in trying out new ideas, language and visions for our world, of how we walk and live on this immensely beautiful planet. It’s an experiment in asserting myself as a woman of color–I’m a second-generation Filipina-American, born, raised and living in the Bay Area–and putting forward my definitions of ‘environmentalism’, ‘green’ living, ‘eco-activism’ and so on. And while I’m not that interested in labels themselves, I am interested in who gets to decide what those labels mean, who gets left out of those definitions, and why.

Too abstract? Okay, here are some examples of what I’m talking about, so that you can figure out whether you want to keep reading or not:

1. My mother, an immigrant Filipina who came to the United States more than forty years ago, has for as long as I can remember, recycled plastic containers, bags and other ‘disposable’ items–strictly out of necessity and frugality, not out of a deep-seated love for ‘the environment’. She also has never driven a car (because she is terrified by the thought of it), takes public transit and walks or carpools everywhere, and grows food and flowers in her garden. Is she an environmentalist, even if she doesn’t necessarily even know what the word means?

2. There are at two Chinese immigrant folks and an African-American man in my neighborhood in Oakland who make the rounds through all the recycling bins in a five-block radius and collect all the bottles and cans they can carry. The Chinese folks heft them around in two giant bags balanced on the ends of a bamboo pole, the Black man carts them around in a convoy of shopping carts. Their motivation is, I’m guessing, primarily financial: they bring the cans and bottles to the local recycling center and get a good chunk of change out of their work. Are they environmentalists?

3. There are innumerable white people who drive down the streets of Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville, Alameda and San Francisco (the cities I tend to spend most of my time in) in Priuses or other hybrid vehicles. They may even be of that pioneering crowd  who has one of those highly prized, yellow key-shaped stickers on their cars that allow them to zip through the toll plaza of the Bay Bridge free of charge–a real financial boon if there ever was one, given that bridge toll is now $4.00. Most people who use the word would label these folks environmentalists, but in reality, are they any more environmentalist than my mother? Than the Chinese or Black guerilla recyclers?

I’m not going to answer those questions fully in this blog, but I will explore them. I’ll do that mostly by sharing with you, dear reader, my own process as a browngirl going ‘green’–which in many ways means trying to go back to the way my people used to live (and the way some of them still live) before European (yes, that means white) colonization and subsequent industrialization. I’ll be reporting on my adventures in gardening and composting and recycling and all those good enviro things (big thumps-up and cheesy grin here), but I’ll also be buying whole slaughtered animals from local meat farms, talking to ethnic grocers and restaurateurs about where their meat comes from, profiling environmental justice groups based in communities of color that are doing important work, and probably calling out some racism in the environmental movement along the way.

So sit back and enjoy, and jump into the conversation if you feel like it. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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