"Even the Kids at Fat Camp Will Make Fun of You"

That's The Hatemongers Quarterly's take on something called the Student Environmental Action Coalition's Activist Training Camp.

We strongly suggest you forgo Camp Trail of Tears this year in favor of Activist Training Camp. After all, why would a kid want to play tetherball with some noxious suburbanite-in-training when he could be busy "confronting the legacy of racism and other forms of oppression and their manifestations within the environmental movement today"?…So drop your water wings, kids, and get ready for a "two-day anti-racism training, continued with forums for discussing and planning anti-oppression work."

Hatemongering here.

Activist camp here.

Comments

[smacky]

"Even the Kids at Fat Camp Will Make Fun of You"

That's kind of how I feel about being accepted to IHS's Environmental conference in Seattle this July. I mean, do I really want to take a week off of work to discuss the environment ? Even my dad, who to me is one of the most boring people on the planet, thought the conference sounded too boring to attend. I wrote all those essays, and all I got accepted to was the environment conference? I must be a terrible essay writer. On the other hand, I might've considered spending a week of my PTO at the Arts conference in Orange, CA with the notorious Nick Gillespie as guest speaker.....

[Jennifer]

"Confronting the legacy of racism and other forms of oppression and their manifestations within the environmental movement today?" That sounds like an awful lot of stress to put on a kid in the summer.

How DOES racism manifest itself within the environmental movement today, anyway?

[Mark Borok]

Jennifer -

I couldn't find any references to it while looking at the site, so I would guess that either this is made up to make them sound like real wack-o's, or else they are real wack-o's and this refers to the way the environmental movement supposedly ignores the disproportionate impact of pollution on minorities.

[The Wine Commonsewer]

Your tax dollars at work courtesy of Indiana U.

[Jennifer]

Mark-
If anything, wouldn't pollution have a disproportionate impact on NON-minorities? I mean, the paler your skin, the dirtier it looks after you've gone walking through the smog.

[Happy Jack]

How DOES racism manifest itself

Depends on if you sympathize with the maples or the oaks. 🙂

[the regulator]

There is some tie, though I think alot of the time it's a tie in with income level, and in some places that means there's a tie with race. This is particularly true in parts of southern Louisiana along the Mississippi river where the chemical plants (and the mysterious cancer clusters) tend to be right next to mostly black towns. Back in 1999ish there was a lawsuit brought by a town against one of the plant's owners, and Mike Foster, then gov. of LA, threatened to remove Tulane's tax exemption if the university's law outreach continued to represent the plaintiffs.

[dhex]

for some reason the wrench graphic makes me cringe.

[Jim Walsh]

Just last night on Nightline I saw how far the school system in China has moved toward quality education for the children and away from Maoist indoctrination. It would seem we are determined to meet them going the other way.

[Thomas Paine's Goiter]

This is particularly true in parts of southern Louisiana along the Mississippi river where the chemical plants (and the mysterious cancer clusters) tend to be right next to mostly black towns.

Except that the towns were there before the plants, and they became "black" towns via migration AFTER the plants came in.

[jdallen]

Chemical plant locations have nothing to do with any sort of racial anything. They are where they are due to economic considerations, with little or no regard to anything else. You can be relatively sure that sites were not selected by people with humanities degrees.

Most of those plants date from about the WWII era, plus or minus a few years, when nobody considered pollution at all, much less as any sort of problem, and zero chance of being considered by any Chem-E of those days. They chose their plant sites on waterways for availability of shipping and ease of waste disposal. Land transportation (rail and highway) was also a consideration. Another criterion was the price of large amounts of land. Places where the indigent Chambers of Commerce would welcome them as providing employment and a boon to the local economy.

Put all those things together and some I'm sure I missed, and you can spot most all the chemical plants in the USA. If there is a racial component in where the plants are sited, it is probably Morlocks/Eloi rather than black/white/ yellow/brown.

[kevrob]

The Hatemonger's Quarterly page gave me a mild chuckle, but, guys, Bob Tyrrell has had the mock-Mencken market cornered for the last quarter century, don't you think?

Kevin
(Has a box of tabloid American Spectator issues in the basement somewhere.)

[Eric the .5b]

How DOES racism manifest itself within the environmental movement today, anyway?

Well, I doubt they'd bring it up at that camp, but some environmentalist rhetoric is starting to harp on the claim that if the third world is allowed to industrialize, there won't be enough natural resources to go around. (And if you think that has a whiff of the "pull the ladder" prescription for reacting to the die-off that would happen in the third world, and then worldwide, right about, um, 10-20 years ago, in The Population Bomb, you're not alone.)

[feek]

smacky--
Rumor is that Ron Bailey will be at the IHS Seattle thing, so you can always annoy him if you're really bored.

[Rhywun]

dhex,

Yeah, what exactly is that symbolism supposed to mean? Turning the screws?? Well, get used to our "kick-ass" youth activist overlords. *shiver*

[free form]

Did you check out the workshops? I thought sticker-making sounded like fun, but then i came across the "Reusable pads" one. Woo-hoo!

[Mark Borok]

Jennifer:

"If anything, wouldn't pollution have a disproportionate impact on NON-minorities? I mean, the paler your skin, the dirtier it looks after you've gone walking through the smog."

The idea is (and I read this in some article a long time ago, so I'm fuzzy on the details) that minority neighborhoods don't have the same political clout to get things done, environmentally-speaking, at the local level. I would guess that means things like water filtration, making sure that factories are up to code in terms of emissions and so on.

[Jennifer]

Mark-
True enough, but that's a matter of poverty, not racism. Oprah's neighborhood is probably a lot nicer than poor-white neighborhoods iin Appalachia.

[Jim Walsh]

Bob Tyrrell has had the mock-Mencken market cornered...

Now that's the funniest thing I've heard all week...

[Stevo Darkly]

for some reason the wrench graphic makes me cringe.

I originally read that as "wench"; got me all excited about nothin'.

(The weekend comes none too soon.)

[LisaMarie]

"discussing and planning anti-oppression work." So I guess that means they'll be protesting Fidel Castro's policies in Cuba. Right?......Right? Maybe I'll hold my breath for that one.

[D-FENS]

Tampaction? I'm speechless. I didn't look around the site long enough, but I would guess that they support a return to cloth diapers.. They could call it "Crapaction!"

[smacky]

Even with Ron Bailey, I'm not sure that the environment seminar warrants a week of my PTO, especially since I have to pay travel expenses (which I conveniently found out after I wrote the $#*!&@ essays). No offense to Ron, but that's a lot of PTO.
Can't Nick Gillespie or someone else at Reason pull a few strings for an ol' H&R regular and get me into the Cali seminar on the Arts?

Maybe I'll just go to fat camp instead.... at least I could directly benefit from that.

[solyom]

LOL. This is The Onion come to life. I love it.

(http://www.seac.org/atc/)

"Come gain the skills, knowledge, and inspiration necessary to fight for the environment and social justice during this week of education, skills building, action, networking,and fun!"

Where does the 'fun' come in?