PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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industry (certain segments), big governments (including the World Bank) and
establishment, high tech big science can get to dominate the world even more than
they currently do in the name of “sustainability,” ecological modernization and
appropriate global management of the supposedly fragile health of planet earth.
Against this threat, Harvey is sympathetic to the environmental justice movement
– a key variant of political economy approaches – because it “advances a discourse
radically at odds with the standard view and ecological modernization.
Putting
inequalities at the top of the environmental agenda directly challenges the dominant
discourses” (p.385). Unlike green environmental groups like WWF, NRDC or
Greenpeace, who fight for the protection of wild land and endangered species, the
environmental justice movement, as Harvey points out, “puts the survival of people in
general, and of the poor and marginalized in particular, at the center of its concerns”
(p.386). Harvey is more skeptical, however, of the movement’s so-called “militant
particularist” tendencies that overemphasize doctrines of local cultural autonomy and
place-bound politics to the point where “not-in-my-backyard” politics simply mutate to
generalized “not-in-anyone’s-backyard” principles. 34
Yet as an urban theorist, Harvey is
practically forced to theoretically engage with the environmental justice movement, since
it is one of the few movements that explicitly refocus environmental problem perception
away from emission, pollution and biodiversity issues towards issues that directly affect
local communities, such as health impacts, noise or economic affordability. Political
economy approaches more generally and the environmental justice movement in
particular are thus representative of what is sometimes called the “brown agenda” of
34 To provide a perfect, very self-aware European example of this: On their web-page, the European activist
NGO ASEED advertises their “Map on Activities on Transport in Europe” (MATE) materials with the
following words: “With the p. booklet, you will be able to find out about new transport plans in your part of
the continent, and also who to contact in case you might not like a six lane motorway in your backyard (or
anybody else’s backyard)” (http://www.aseed.net/publications/publications.htm#mate, assessed May 2002).