Horn
14th November 2017, 08:10 AM
Penn Students Hold Presentation on Environmental Racism
The student group Fossil Free Penn held a discussion on environmental racism as part of its weeklong engagement project called “Divestfest” Wednesday afternoon.
About a dozen students participated in the event, detailing how the negative impacts of industries disproportionately affect minorities. The speakers at the event, who will remain anonymous, hailed from two student groups on campus: Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Minorities Council.
The message of the presentation was threefold. The first student argued that while “the impacts of climate change and fossil fuels are devastating for all communities, the effects are worse on marginalized communities,” specifically people of color and low-income communities. The second presenter discussed the eco-colonialism that occurred under the British rule of India and the millions of deaths it caused. And the third wanted to “show through the post-colonial theory how we can problematize the idea of forestation in different contexts—how we can use this to show how intersectionality can affect human rights as well as the ecosystem and how it can serve the neocolonialist propaganda.”
In discussing environmental racism, the speakers highlighted the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Jewish National Fund (https://www.jnf.org/), an organization that plants trees in Israel, was a major subject of discussion. After asserting that the organization acted unjustly by purchasing land from Palestinians in the early 1900s in deals from which the Palestinians did not profit, the presenters looked into the symbolism of “making the desert bloom,” a phrase the students argued connected the forest environment to whiteness, evoked the notion of “a vacuum that the European savior can come nourish,” and ultimately incentivized “artificially making these areas look more like Europe.”
The students found a particular problem in the planting of pine trees in Israel and the West Bank, drawing a “connection between pine trees, forestation, and the way they further the colonialist agenda through capitalistic (sic) means of timber production.”
While pine trees are an invasive species and can be bad for certain environments, the solution is not merely to plant native trees like the olive tree.
https://statesmanonline.org/2017/11/03/students-hold-presentation-on-environmental-racism/
The student group Fossil Free Penn held a discussion on environmental racism as part of its weeklong engagement project called “Divestfest” Wednesday afternoon.
About a dozen students participated in the event, detailing how the negative impacts of industries disproportionately affect minorities. The speakers at the event, who will remain anonymous, hailed from two student groups on campus: Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Minorities Council.
The message of the presentation was threefold. The first student argued that while “the impacts of climate change and fossil fuels are devastating for all communities, the effects are worse on marginalized communities,” specifically people of color and low-income communities. The second presenter discussed the eco-colonialism that occurred under the British rule of India and the millions of deaths it caused. And the third wanted to “show through the post-colonial theory how we can problematize the idea of forestation in different contexts—how we can use this to show how intersectionality can affect human rights as well as the ecosystem and how it can serve the neocolonialist propaganda.”
In discussing environmental racism, the speakers highlighted the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The Jewish National Fund (https://www.jnf.org/), an organization that plants trees in Israel, was a major subject of discussion. After asserting that the organization acted unjustly by purchasing land from Palestinians in the early 1900s in deals from which the Palestinians did not profit, the presenters looked into the symbolism of “making the desert bloom,” a phrase the students argued connected the forest environment to whiteness, evoked the notion of “a vacuum that the European savior can come nourish,” and ultimately incentivized “artificially making these areas look more like Europe.”
The students found a particular problem in the planting of pine trees in Israel and the West Bank, drawing a “connection between pine trees, forestation, and the way they further the colonialist agenda through capitalistic (sic) means of timber production.”
While pine trees are an invasive species and can be bad for certain environments, the solution is not merely to plant native trees like the olive tree.
https://statesmanonline.org/2017/11/03/students-hold-presentation-on-environmental-racism/