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Neoliberal Nightmare by sami rosenblatt
Environmentalism is greatly intertwined with economics. How can we continue to exist within Capitalism when it’s crushing our world? Environmentalism meant nothing to me; until I realized it meant everything. I’ve always appreciated nature and its beauty. I was raised in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, so going beyond the paved streets into any type of greenery, coast or patch of clean, white snow struck me in contrast to the urban milieu. I thought trees were nice to look at, the grass was nice to sit in, and the earth-shattering sublime experience of strolling in Muir woods, or standing before the Grand Canyon was my birthright as an American, but none of these things were worth politicking over. I didn’t have the facilities to place environmentalism in the context of the rest of our complicated world. To me, the world was already filled with so many maladieswhy would we worry about endangered trees when there were people starving, an AIDS pandemic, and wars on? I actually thought people focusing on climate change and environmental sciences were ignorant… It seemed to me like the kind of dreadlock-wearing, treehugging white people that would rather give time and money to forests than other causes were probably racist burnouts in disguise. I thought I was wise, and quite the humanitarian, for seeing things this way…It took me until college, where I first began to understand the dark underbelly of neoliberalism, to see that this was my internalized capitalism speaking. How foolish I was to not realize that starvation and wars and nearly every other ill of society has an underlying root in sustainability and environmentalism. 6
One of the first lessons I can ever remember learning in elementary school was a simple equation:
Land = Power
The phrase was used to help explain a watered-down, age-appropriate version of colonialism for the specific context of studying the American Revolutionary war… Never could I have predicted the multitudes that this fragment contained. Truly, in every sense of the word, the land is power. Not in the colonial sense, where size matters or warm-water ports do, but in the sense that with a greater understanding of what the earth gives us, we can broaden our understanding of the interconnectedness (or quite frankly, the clusterfuck) of the maladies of our modern world and find the room in our hearts to care deeply and passionately about climate change, environmentalism and all that they encompass. Neoliberalism, a form of capitalism that prioritizes a free-market gives a new meaning to the word freedom. Just as Neoliberals believe that economic success can penetrate class barriers, (also known as supply-side or trickle-down economics) Neoliberalism itself permeates the American experience, knitting itself deeply into the vast tapestry of our culture. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, author David Harvey argues that despite neoliberalism’s economic origins, its reverberant effects can be felt in all walks of society. He points specifically to how Neoliberalism challenges “divisions of labor, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of the heart.” Neoliberalism serves to create a new standard of society and what we can expect
