SOCIAL SACRIFICE AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

In the East Ward of Newark, New Jersey, the Ironbound neighborhood, a multiethnic community of 50,000 people, lives surrounded by industrial plants, warehouses and the polluted Passaic River.
Like many in New Jersey, this neighborhood has supported the state’s economic foundation for decades.

There, abandoned industrial plants are located next to mega warehouses where trucks pass thousands of times a day emitting diesel pollution through exhaust gases.

INDUSTRIAL PAST, POOR PRESENT

Although the remains of New Jersey’s industrial past have fossilized, postindustrialism did not lead to a post-growth society; Instead, growth has mutated into new forms.

Across the state, warehouse development has skyrocketed; As of 2023, there are an estimated 1,900 warehouses, with more than 26.5 million square feet of warehouses planned between 2021 and 2024, according to the state planning commission with skyrocketing levels of diesel pollution.

This development has drawn criticism from local environmental advocates and nonprofit organizations, who express concerns about poor working conditions and air pollution from trucks, which increase the risk of cancer and respiratory illnesses for residents.

Ironbound residents refer to this area as a “sacrifice zone” where human health is sacrificed in areas of profit.

SOCIAL INJUSTICE

Criticisms of environmental injustice coincide with those of environmental racism.
In New Jersey, the likelihood of being black or Latino nearly doubles when you live within 0.25 miles of a warehouse.
Despite this, developers and smart growth advocates tout warehouses as a force for good, arguing that they help drive local economic development through job creation and tax revenue.

More than unique, this story is commonplace, emblematic of a society that defines well-being through markers of abstract growth and material consumption.

THE SACRIFICE AREAS OF CHILE

In Quintero-Puchuncaví, Chile, a coastal region two hours from the country’s capital, economic growth has also taken root and its effects have spread for generations.
Copper smelters, coal-fired power plants, petrochemical facilities and natural gas facilities dot the landscape, contributing to Chile’s economic development and its “very high” status on the United Nations Human Development Index.
But despite the presence of numerous industrial plants, the region is among the poorest in Valparaíso.

It is part of a collection of communities in Chile that also refer to themselves as “Zones of Sacrifice” or “Zones of Sacrifice.”

STUDIES REVEAL THE CLIMATE CRISIS

A 2023 report from the United Nations Office of Human Rights and Environment describes a community fighting the industrial complex that has been located there since the 1960s.
In Quintero-Puchuncaví, accidents related to air pollution have sickened hundreds of schoolchildren, and the region’s soil contains levels of lead and copper that far exceed international health standards.

In the report, the main researcher recounts a moment in which some young women gave him drawings that say:

“I’m afraid of dying from poisoning” and “We’re breathing poison and no one cares.”

“We are breathing poison and no one cares”

SCARING DATA

Codelco, the Chilean state company that oversees the country’s copper smelters, accounts for 27% of the world’s copper.
A report indicates that 60% of copper demand “comes from the construction of electrical infrastructure, meaning Codelco’s prospects are getting brighter as the world electrifies in response to climate change.”

In communities like Quintero, it has quickly become evident that the arrival of “green growth” will not result in a change in their material condition; rather, it is indicative of a “green future” that has already been divided and parceled out.

A group in Resistencia Quintero-Puchuncaví (Muzosare), has been fighting these conditions for more than a decade, organizing education and advocacy workshops, as well as using legal measures to seek environmental justice.

Their efforts have not gone unrewarded; In 2022, Codelco announced the closure of one of its copper smelting plants, but still, many of the industrial plants remain open with no plans to close.
One member recounts a time, back in the 1980s, when the skin of male workers at the local copper plant began to turn green, referring to them as “green men.”

CONSUMER SOCIETY

In “The Consumer Society”, Jean Baudrillard argues that today, the individual has been reduced to a consumer, forced to consume as the only means to ‘find oneself’, presupposing that without participating in capitalist society, one is lost, or worse yet, meaningless.
Although this system of logic has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse, it should come as no surprise that in the global North there is still a refusal to consider degrowth as an alternative way of existence.

The degrowth movement calls for prioritizing “social and ecological well-being rather than corporate profits, overproduction, and overconsumption.”

WELL-BEING AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY ARE DEFINED BY CONSUMPTION MARKERS

Wellbeing and consumption become much more difficult to disentangle than previously imagined.
Degrowth is a call to reduce the size of our material economy and, by extension, consumption, but in the Global North this has become akin to “downsizing oneself.”

Our refusal to imagine a social structure without consumption and growth leads us to incorrectly conclude that degrowth requires that we “sacrifice.”

SACRIFICE AND DEGROWMENT

The emergence and maintenance of “sacrifice zones” in both the Global North and the Global South reflect the dependence of growth on the subjugation of communities based on race, socioeconomic class, and power.
Whether driven by trade, industrial production, or climate change technologies, case studies of diesel pollution in Newark, New Jersey, and Quintero, Chile, reveal the dependence of growth on a violent form of “sacrifice” of man or nature, or both.

DIESEL POLLUTION SYNTHESIS:
Thus, sacrifice and rituals of extraction are woven into the capitalist system, despite neocolonial claims that modernity has left them behind as practices of a “primitive” past.

CONCLUSION:
“The sacrifice of millions of useless people in the fight against what is simply the visible spectrum of poverty is not too high a price to pay if it means that the myth of growth is preserved.”

In the pursuit of environmental and redistributive justice, degrowth is a call to find a way out of the growth machine and challenge a society that has replaced the term “sacrifice” with “cost” to maintain the appearance of rationality.

In the global North, degrowth should not be seen as a movement that demands unfair sacrifices, but as an instrumental tool to help end it.

WE SEEK GLOBAL CLIMATE JUSTICE!

AUTHOR:
DIEGO BALVERDE
ECONOMIST
EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK