With present concerns over the ongoing strike at York University, it’s easy for the environment to take a back seat on our list of priorities. However, rather than making us forget the importance of environmental protection, the labour disruption should remind us of that issue.
The labour movement started about a century before the modern environmental movement, but the two phenomena have followed similar paths and stand for similar principles. Both are premised on the idea that people should be treated fairly, and that the rights of less powerful members of society should not be trodden on by the social elite. The labour movement seeks to guarantee workers’rights by securing fair wages and reasonable working hours. The environmental movement seeks to protect another right that each and every one of us deserves: access to a healthy environment.
While it is certainly true that no one can flourish under poor working conditions or on a wage that places them below the poverty line, it is equally true that a clean environment is an essential component to a healthy lifestyle. The struggle that people all over the world are waging to ensure that local environments stay as healthy as possible is aimed at protecting that essential component for all of us and for future generations.
While environmentalism is often seen as a pastime for the wealthy, we must remember who suffers most because of environmental degradation. Members of poor communities in developing countries often work in close contact with hazardous waste to earn a living. Coastal communities without the resources to mitigate the effects of climate change will likely be wiped out due to rising sea levels if nothing is done to stop global warming. These types of disadvantaged communities are positioned to feel most keenly the negative impacts of a lack of environmental protection.
As new technologies are developed and policy ideas floated to accompany them, there is growing evidence that the social and environmental health of communities are deeply intertwined. Green energy technologies can help disadvantaged communities to access electrical power even when they are not connected to national energy grids. There is money to be made in performing environmental cleanups, thereby preserving sensitive habitats and supporting local economies. The preservation of natural landscapes is beginning to be seen as more valuable in terms of tourism dollars than for resource extraction. All these recent developments point to the fact that social and environmental values can be championed simultaneously.
While it is still widely believed that the exploitation of the environment is required for economic growth, the trends described above (and others) contest that assumption. There are many cases in which the goods of society and of the environment are in fact intertwined, and in which initiatives can be developed to support both. Let the current labour disruption, the result of a movement seeking to protect the right of workers from being exploitated, serve to remind us that the environment deserves protection as well.