The debate over the EPA's new math misses the point. The agency hasn't changed its values, it has simply stopped pretending to account for communities it was never built to protect.
“Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness, and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.” - Frantz Fanon
Kali Akuno, founder of Jackson, Mississippi-based Cooperation Jackson, reminds us in his book Jackson Rising Redux, “To deal with the crisis of Black labor redundancy, the US ruling class has responded by creating a multipronged strategy of limited incorporation [see also the Black Misleadership class, the cooniferous Congressional Black Caucus, and other elements of the Black petty bourgeois], counterinsurgency [i.e. crushing, dividing, and severely weakening and elite capturing of Black-led organizations], and mass containment [vis a vis mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex]." I would also add an additional stratagem to Comrade Akuno’s veracious and perpetually germane analysis, concerted and chronic ecocide.
Ecocide, according to the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide, is defined as, “the unlawful or wanton destruction of the natural environment, specifically mass, severe, and long-term damage to ecosystems caused by human activity.” Currently, 11 nations, including Russia and Ukraine, qualify ecocide as criminal activity, with 27 additional countries considering doing the same. Additionally, efforts are increasing to qualify ecocide as an international crime and include it as an amendment to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). At its core, ecocide is the function of denying the inalienable People(s)-Centered Human Rights of a given population through actively disqualifying its humanity and human value. Ecocide can be exercised both acutely and chronically as part of a larger praxis to remove and exterminate unwanted and/or surplus populations - something that we are witnessing in Palestine at the hands of the zionist ethnostate, as it continues to show the world that it views Palestinian lives as having no value whatsoever. The zionist ethnostate utilizes ecocide as a tactic to demonstrate and actualize this view.
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would no longer consider the monetary value of lives saved when establishing emission limits on two criteria air pollutants, particulate matter and ozone, and will instead quantify the costs to corporations for compliance with environmental laws when developing regulations. This essentially means that EPA has placed the value of human life at zero dollars while sending a simple but chilling message to the residents of the United States, that their government values profits over people.
This move by EPA should and must be considered an act of ecocide - in fact, according to the 1991 Principles of Environmental Justice, Principle 10 specifically, it absolutely is:
“10) Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide.”
Reactions to EPA’s ecocidal move have been mixed as expected. Proponents of the move such as the American Petroleum Institute, the governmental lobbying arm of U.S.-based fossil fuel cartels, praised the EPA for its focus on “sound science.” Opponents are decrying the move as lawmakers including Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA) noted, “The EPA’s decision to stop accounting for the lives saved by clean air rules is a dangerous abandonment of its core mission: protecting human health.” He continues, “For decades, well-established science has shown that reducing air pollution prevents asthma attacks, hospitalizations, chronic disease, and premature deaths. Ignoring those benefits while counting only industry costs assigns a value of zero to human life and makes it easier for polluters to do more harm.”
EPA’s mission, according to the agency, is “to protect human health and the environment,” through a series of practices including, but not limited to, ensuring:
- Americans have clean air, land and water;
- National efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information;
- Federal laws protecting human health and the environment are administered and enforced fairly, effectively and as Congress intended;
- All parts of society--communities, individuals, businesses, and state, local and Tribal governments--have access to accurate information sufficient to effectively participate in managing human health and environmental risks; and
- Contaminated lands and toxic sites are cleaned up by potentially responsible parties and revitalized.
To this end, it’s interesting that Congressman Thompson focuses on EPA’s mission as part of his complaint against the agency’s latest decision to devalue human life. I wonder if Mr. Thompson has asked himself when EPA’s mission has ever applied to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities from Flint, Michigan, to Appalachia, to Cancer Alley and the Gulf South of the United States, and throughout Indian country all in between - the most polluted and contaminated areas in the nation. The People of Color Environmental Leadership Conference that produced the Principles of Environmental Justice (“the Principles”) certainly asked a similar question and, I would imagine, came to the conclusion that EPA’s purported mission did not apply to them or the communities they represent and are accountable to - this was the impetus for the Principles in the first place.
So the question becomes, what are opponents of EPA’s recent decision actually upset about? By valuing human life at zero dollars, the EPA is simply saying the loud part out louder, that is, there have and will always be disposable people and sacrificial communities under a capitalist economic system. It further exposes the fact that EPA was never designed to protect everyone equally, as it is an agency that upholds racial capitalism, which requires perpetual extraction and disposable people and communities as part of a larger core and periphery scenario that applies both globally and domestically.
The EPA mission statement is a grander demonstration of mendacity than the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And the myriad lies contained in those documents are axiomatically baked into federal agencies like EPA that uphold and enforce a racial capitalist system of dehumanization and white “supremacy” ideology. Congressman Thompson and many other opponents of EPA’s recent move fail to understand that we should actually be thankful for the agency’s veracity, for finally telling the masses exactly what it thinks their lives are worth rather than misdirecting the people with a mission statement that’s nothing more than empty and insouciant rhetoric. This is where the idea of dialectical paradox is instructive and why it must be utilized as a tool to further expose agencies like EPA and the entire apparatus of U.S. empire.
A dialectical paradox, “involves holding two seemingly contradictory, opposing, or mutually exclusive elements in tension to reach a higher, more complex truth or synthesis.” It is further rooted in Hegelian philosophy in that it focuses on the ongoing, dynamic, and often interdependent relationship between opposing forces. In the context of EPA’s zero sum game as it pertains to the value of human life, the masses have an exceptional opportunity to reach a higher truth that reveals the contradictions of both racial capitalism and the U.S. systems that sustain it. EPA has simply lifted the veil and its devaluing of human life is actually quite banal in the context of racial capitalism. What is extraordinary is EPA’s admission, albeit and likely inadvertently, that the U.S. system is in a period of massive decline and is, therefore, prepared to sacrifice more people and communities to continue operating and expanding. How the masses respond to this moment is nothing short of a matter of survival for both the planet and every species that calls it home.
As Akuno reminds us, “When systems decline, their victims usually feel and then see it before their beneficiaries do,” and further notes, “Opposition to capitalism as a system is slowly but steadily displacing the Cold War fetish of thinking only piecemeal reforms were needed or possible (itself and ideological concession to capitalism).” Thompson, as a U.S. lawmaker, is not a victim but both a beneficiary and a sentry of this system, which is in massive decline. Further, his “yea” vote on Joe Biden and the Democrat Party’s Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that I have described as a “poison pill” for Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities, vindicates Akuno’s assertion of ideological concessions to capitalism through reforms in lieu of transforming the system. This may, in part, explain Congressman Thompson’s inability to see EPA’s zero sum game as a dialectical paradox that is actually beneficial - the masses must not make the same mistake.
The primary victims of racial capitalism have known for decades that EPA has never held an intention of protecting the public health of their communities. This much is demonstrated in the fact that there is a majority Black community in the U.S. periphery known as Cancer Alley as well as other Gulf South communities like the United Houma Nation of Louisiana who are watching their lands disappear at a rate of one football field per hour due in large part to rampant oil and gas drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. It should be noted that the Inflation Reduction Act opened 600 million more acres of the Gulf to oil and gas drilling. Through seeing EPA’s latest move as a dialectical paradox, communities like these are better positioned to understand why it’s imperative and essential to embrace the tenets of People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) as part of a larger set of collective actions to continue exposing the EPA for what it is and what it has always been - an agent of racial capitalism that will never call for moving from such a system and instead pursuing an ecosocialist initiative.
Racial capitalism is cornered like a wild animal with few choices left but to double and triple down as part of its survival. This will result in even more collateral damage, loss of life, and further sacrifice of people and communities deemed disposable by the U.S. ruling class as well as elements of the petty bourgeois. Valuing human life at zero dollars is a prime example of what the beneficiaries of racial capitalism are willing to do to continue to benefit from it. It’s a good thing to see this for exactly what it is rather than decrying the EPA for telling the truth. The mission statement of the masses must now include using this dialectical paradox to advance PCHRs as part of a larger and collective program of climate and environmental liberation that places the value of human lives over arbitrary and selective corporate profits.
No Compromise
No Retreat
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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