Introduction

Across the globe, vibrant social movements are emerging that link together issues of resource access, social security, environmental risks and disaster vulnerability. Although all people suffer the effects of pollution, global warming and resource exploitation, poor people are especially vulnerable since they live closer to the margin of survival and are less able to afford cushions from environmental ills. Moreover, as in the case of the United States described by Manuel Pastor in this volume, poor communities often face disproportionately heavy burdens from environmental degradation. Increasingly, low-income urban and rural communities around the world are organizing to fight for environmental justice — that is, for more equitable access to natural resources and environmental quality, including clean air and water. These new environmental movements connect sources and sinks; North and South; ecology and equity; and asset building and hazard vulnerability. They have begun to articulate new ideas about the quality of life, and the meaning of development and modernization.

There is mounting recognition that environmental pollution and natural resource degradation are not simply ‘quality of life’ issues primarily of concern to middle-class people of the global North. In cities of both the North and the South, residents of poor neighbourhoods often are most exposed to air fouled by car exhaust, diesel fumes, and deliberate and accidental industrial emissions. As urban growth accelerates worldwide, neighbourhoods struggle for access to green space, public transportation, sanitation, and clean water and air.

‘Daylight on the wreck’: The Family in decline

Yonge's investigation of the potential of Familial altruism as the basis for social good is incomplete because of the sheltered social milieu within which it is conducted. In The Mill on the Floss, a novel thematically permeated by economic and social friction, George Eliot undertakes a more rigorous exploration of the same theme. She examines the tension between individual will and communal bonds – between the notion of the human subject as rational agent of self-regarding choice on the one hand, and as constituted by given material and emotional relationships on the other – with particular regard to an identifiable debate about what the family really is or should be.

The clannishness of the Dodsons is the besieged and etiolated remnant of the spirit of the traditional Family. Judith Lowder Newton has noted that the ‘Dodson creed’ ‘confers status upon the production and the producers of domestic goods …a vestige from another time, when the comfortable middle-class family was an economic unit and when women of the middle ranks had greater status as persons making visible contributions to the subsistence and income of the family’. The Dodsons put great store by their own ‘particular ways of bleaching the linen, of making the cowslip wine, curing the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries; so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson’ (MF, I:vi:38).

Introduction

Brazil occupies four-fifths of the Amazon Basin and is home to the world's largest remaining area of tropical rainforest, 3.5 million square kilometres (km2). Despite three decades of settlement and intensive development, the forest is still relatively intact compared with similar areas elsewhere. The region is an increasingly important source of natural assets for both regional and national economic growth, and provides livelihood support to a population of several million. In addition, the Amazon supplies key environmental services in terms of the conservation of biological diversity, climate regulation and watershed management, as well as sequestering an estimated 10 per cent of global carbon emissions.

Traditional forest-dwelling populations such as rubber tappers and indigenous groups have been stewards of the natural resource base in Amazonia through their use of non-destructive technologies at low demographic densities. As the frontier has advanced, however, they have come under growing peril from rent-seeking interests that threaten to destroy the forest and people's livelihoods with it. Official policies have tended to reward such predatory forms of occupation through generous subsidies, while ignoring the ecological services provided by local populations. Brazil's rubber tappers were the first social group to pose a major challenge to this ‘development’ model. Making a pre-emptive strike against cattle ranchers and land speculators, they have appropriated for themselves large areas of forest at risk of becoming ‘open access’ to all comers seeking profits.

Introduction

The degradation of the world's ecosystems is undermining their capacity to provide environmental services that are vital to humankind. This has fuelled experimentation with compensation schemes that reward people for managing ecosystems to provide environmental services, based on the premise that positive incentives can lead to changes in land-use practices. In the Americas, such experiments have concentrated on watershed management for hydrological services and on conservation of biodiversity and scenic beauty. If and when international negotiations yield a suitable framework for climate change mitigation, carbon dioxide sequestration could be added to the mix.

The prevailing approach to compensation has focused on payments, rather than other possible rewards such as greater provision of local public goods or enhanced social status. In many cases, payment for environmental services (PES) schemes have been characterized by designs that seek the lowest cost possible for achieving environmental goals; concentrate on single environmental services (such as carbon sequestration), sometimes at the expense of other ecosystem services; and accord priority to simplified, largescale ecosystems, preferably controlled by a few people, so as to reduce transaction costs.

This approach can have adverse — even devastating — impacts on poor and marginalized rural communities. At the same time, it misses opportunities for tapping into the crucial roles that these communities often play in ecosystem stewardship and the provision of environmental services. When poor communities hold secure rights over lands that provide environmental services, they are most likely to benefit from compensation schemes, and the goals of environmental protection and poverty reduction are mutually supporting. More often, however, community rights to natural resources are limited and insecure.

Introduction

‘Certification systems’ are relatively new tools that have evolved globally to encourage and reward higher levels of social and environmental responsibility— and accountability— among producers of all sorts. They have been designed primarily to alter the performance of otherwise unreachable transnational corporations in the fields of natural-resourcebased production, such as forestry, agriculture, mining and tourism. This chapter explores the question of whether these systems, which have not generally been designed explicitly as poverty alleviation tools, can, in fact, assist poor people, either individually or in community-based and small-tomedium production units, to build their natural assets as a basis for sustainable livelihoods and poverty alleviation. From the point of view of the purposes of this volume, the question is whether these systems, developed largely in the global North, have become— or could become— important new international tools for alleviating poverty in diverse international contexts.

The two leading certification systems of this time, the Forest Stewardship Council™ and the Fair Trade Certified™ system, are analyzed extensively here from the point of view of their impacts upon the poor and their ability to contribute, directly and indirectly, to the alleviation of poverty through building natural assets. Emerging certification systems in tourism and mining are also examined, but to a lesser extent, because their standards have not yet been codified, although considerable movement toward that end has occurred in both cases.

The Centre for Natural Resources Studies (CNRS), since 1992, has implemented community-based environmental restoration projects in Bangladesh that seek to protect and renew floodplain ecosystems. These efforts grew out of a situation where the country's aquatic resources were under assault by massive flood control projects. The CNRS strategy was inspired by research showing that the rural poor in Bangladesh rely on a rich diversity of fish species for their diets and livelihoods. Most of these fish species depend on the annual inundation of flood waters for their reproduction and growth. Yet these crucial social and biological realities were either unseen or ignored by the leading development agencies concerned with water management, flood control and fisheries in Bangladesh. The CNRS projects have shown that an alternative strategy, based on investment in ecological restoration, can benefit both the fish and people.

Inland Fisheries in Bangladesh

In his classic book, Fish, Water and People: Reflections on Inland Openwater Fisheries Resources of Bangladesh, the late Dr. M. Youssouf Ali described the link between fisheries and rural livelihoods in the Bengal delta:

Victorian and postmodern collisions

For the central currents of post-colonial and new-historicist criticism, ‘history’, as it is usually thought of, is in every sense the History of the West. As Robert Young puts it, ‘History, with a capital H …cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalising system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism’. Young argues that History's linear narrative of logical cause and effect, teleologically tending towards totality, rhetorically occludes other ‘histories’, and rhetorically legitimates the subjugation of other peoples in the cause of ascendant western man's supposedly preordained mission to unite the globe under his rule of enlightenment.

The family and political theory: Rehearsing old dilemmas

In this chapter and the two that follow, I move away from questions to do with the representational modes of Victorian fiction, and the metaphysical stance implicit in or propagated by those modes. For alongside the imposing battery of arguments against the novel on these fronts, politicized criticism has marshalled forceful objections against its subject matter.

Foremost among these is the objection to the ‘personal’ focus of Victorian fiction. Various allegations have been made against this focus. It is said to divert readers' attention away from political problems and political solutions towards a preoccupation with ‘human nature’ – a trans-historical notion that, far from reflecting anything outside the structures of language and power, serves to curtail political critique. It is also said to perpetuate the arch-ideological illusion that it is people, rather than political structures, that make history; in other words, that human subjects are ontologically prior to, rather than mere effects of discourse. And, finally, it is said to reinforce the deep division in Victorian ideology and practice between the private and the social, and by doing so to facilitate the strategic displacement of criticism away from the latter.

Introduction

Following the influential article by Garrett Hardin titled ‘Tragedy of the commons’, it is part of both popular and scholarly belief that unless natural resources are strictly in the domain of private or state property, their fate is an inevitable ruin (Hardin 1968). Closer examination of the actions of lowincome communities who depend on natural resources for their daily livelihoods has recently brought to the fore a more positive view about human proclivity for caring and nurturing common resources found in nature.

A good example is found in the state of Kerala, in India, where small-scale, community-based fisherfolk initiated collective action to invest in rejuvenating the natural assets of the sea that had been destroyed by the incessant fishing operations of large-scale bottom trawlers in the region. They went about erecting artificial reefs at the sea bottom in coastal waters to create anthropogenic marine environments. Reefs act as fish refugia and become sources of food for them as the structures are soon covered with bottom-dwelling biomass. Artificial reefs placed in strategic positions in the coastal waters can in time increase the overall biomass and the fish stock in the local ecosystem. An unintended side-effect of sufficiently large artificial reefs is that they act as barriers to the operation of bottom trawl nets, effectively performing the role of a sea-bottom fence against incursions of trawlers into coastal waters. Such reefs have not yet healed the wounds inflicted on the coastal ecosystem of the area, nor can the fishing communities depend exclusively on them as a major source of livelihood.

Introduction

In the 1980s, a photograph of scavengers, some of them children, picking through garbage at Manila's ‘Smoky Mountain’ dumpsite came to represent poverty in the Philippines. In 1995, the government closed the over-filled dumpsite, announcing plans to convert it into a low-cost housing development and an industrial zone. But the 1997 Asian financial crisis caught up with the project, and the promise of a better life for the scavengers remained unfulfilled.

The closure of Smokey Mountain threatened to deprive scavengers and their families of their only source of livelihood. A year before the closure, they were already following the re-routed garbage trucks more than 20 kilometres away to what is now the largest dumpsite in the country — Payatas in Quezon City (Rivera 1994, 53). If the garbage mountain represented poverty, why did the poor follow it? The reason is that to the 4,000–8,000 families who depend on the Payatas dumpsite, garbage is not a symbol of poverty: it is an asset (Tuason 2002, 1).

This chapter describes how poor families living in the Payatas dumpsite earn an income and create jobs for their neighbours by recovering and recycling wastes. A few, who have become traders and small producers, have managed to penetrate the country's biggest supermarkets and even the export market with their recycled products. The scavengers of Payatas have shown that waste recovery and recycling can simultaneously help to reduce poverty and protect the environment.

Nancy Armstrong, in Desire and Domestic Fiction (OUP, 1987), and Catherine Gallagher, in The Industrial Reformation of Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1985), examine the modes in which the ideology of domesticity functions in the nineteenth century. Both assume that portrayals of domesticity have nothing to do with any persistent facts of human nature, but rather constitute an attempt to invent the very idea of such facts as a tool for the naturalization of attitudes that are really shaped by ‘political history’ and the class struggle. Their studies share one particular angle on the more general argument that, in nineteenth-century fiction, the focus on the domestic serves as a rhetorical evasion of social problems.

Significant though their project is, it requires no consideration of fiction's reflection of and influence on the shape of real families, or of the political impetus of the shape of family, considered not only as a discursive figure in relation to public and class politics but as a real determinant of the course of people's lives. Because, in other words, they assume that even to engage with the idea of ‘domesticity’ or ‘human nature’ already implies a displacement of the political, they overlook the political struggles that go on over the very terms of that engagement. As I have argued, however, given that that engagement is not one that any political discourse can evade, the negotiation of its terms is really the focus of the political action.

Introduction

Across the United States, a vibrant social movement for ‘environmental justice’ has emerged. Based initially on the recognition that US minority groups have borne a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards, environmental justice (EJ) advocates have long since shifted from simply resisting ‘environmental racism’ to embracing a positive concept of equal access to environmental and social goods.

The connection between this movement and the asset-building framework has been limited, however, in part because of the nascent nature of the latter, in part because of the immediate preoccupations of the former. Resisting hazards would seem to land one squarely in the usual deficit model: the community is characterized by its lack of clean water, or by the higher risks induced by toxic pollutants in the air. Moving from resistance to the challenge of defining a wealth-building strategy is a useful next step for both the EJ movement and the asset-building framework alike.

In this chapter, I sketch a bridge between the United States environmental justice movement and the asset-building framework. I begin by reviewing the broad political development of the movement and the research on which it has been based. As we will see, there has been some debate over the extent of environmental inequity and this is an issue that even those who are sympathetic to the movement's aims and basic assertions must address in a straightforward fashion.