A Role for Migrants in the Environmental Movement

A Conversation with Voices for Power Leader, Asha Ramzan

By Penny Cummins, Contributor

I became involved in environmental activism in the months following the Black Summer bushfires. I spent between November and January divided between Gadigal land in Sydney, where I live, and Ngunnawal land in Canberra where I was visiting my family over the Christmas period.  Most mornings, I awoke to see the street outside my window blanketed in a yellow haze; the thick, acrid smell of ash was inescapable, seeping through the cracks between doors so even whilst staying inside, there was no relief from the eye-watering smoke. I downloaded an app on my phone that measured the level of air pollution every day.

Resolved to do something about climate change during the new year, I became involved with an environmental group. I had just graduated from my arts degree and was eager to translate all my theoretical knowledge about social justice into meaningful action. However, shortly after becoming involved, I found myself frequently in the position of being one of the few non-white activists in the room. Educating myself about the environmental movement, I learned more about its racist history and the exclusion of people of colour from environmental organising and policy.   

Curious about how I could contribute to meaningful action on climate change as a Chinese-Australian and wanting to understand more about racism in the environmental movement, I spoke to Asha, a leader of the Voices for Power Campaign, long-time feminist, and proud member of the Indian-Fijian community here in Sydney. 

‘I have been involved in green politics for many years and it has no place for people like me,’ Asha said. ‘It’s just a lot of people talking in echo chambers.’ 

Listing the myriad ways in which racism manifests within the environmental movement, Asha described ‘the lack of acknowledgement from the white environmentalists I know about their privilege. They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. I’ve met environmentalists who are deeply xenophobic, who want to talk about limiting migration to Australia. Older environmentalists I’ve spoken to have complained that migrants don’t care about the environment. They say that migrants are not politicised and are only interested in consumption and money. 

‘But they fail to understand what migrants are giving up in coming here. They are giving up being rooted to places, to people. As a migrant, you must justify to yourself why you would put yourself through so much racism and exclusion. Migrants buy flashy cars and build McMansions so that they can say “I’m a success, my sacrifices were worth it, at least I gave my children an easier, better life”.

‘Nevertheless, in their private lives, you will notice that migrants are incredibly environmentally conscious. They wash their plastic bags and save them for reuse, they’ve been recycling since before they migrated here. They grow their own vegetables, they are forever telling their children not to waste water, electricity. In fact, we have this in-joke with other Indians about our people building massive houses but living in just one or two rooms and refusing to turn the heating or cooling on unless they have visitors…’ 

Asha’s comments resonated with my own experiences. My mother migrated to Australia from Shanghai in 1989, and shortly after I was born my grandparents followed to assist with caring for me whilst my mother worked shifts at a nursing home. As a kid, I felt confused by the way my grandmother saved every McDonalds serviette and plastic utensil from our outings together; and her insistence on reusing the elastic bands that enclosed bunches of vegetables to tie my hair into plaits rather than purchasing new scrunchies from the pharmacy. These small rituals of recycling various objects – which continued even as we achieved upward mobility – marked my family as different from those of other kids in the predominantly white primary school I attended.

Growing older, I came to understand my grandparents’ behaviour as a product of their experiences in China during the Cultural Revolution. After everything they’d been through in China, they then gave up being close to friends and community to move to Australia, a foreign country where they didn’t speak the language, to help raise me and my sister. It made sense that they were focused on material survival. 

I wanted there to be space to acknowledge this history as valuable in my environmental activism. 

‘It is the next generation that has the luxury of developing the social and environmental conscience, because our parents have freed us up to do that,’ Asha told me.

Of course, part of developing an environmental conscience involves recognising that this the destruction of the environment is deeply entwined with Australia’s colonisation of Aboriginal land. 

‘My whole life has been about deconstructing myth of what it means to be Australian, and challenging this idea that whiteness is superior – that this is white land. It’s not. It’s Aboriginal land, it’s stolen land.’ 

‘The conversation about migration is a discussion that involves the desirable and undesirable migrant. People of colour, Africans and Muslims – they are considered undesirable. White people are disqualified from speaking about migration unless they talk about their own migration histories. 

‘White Australians rarely ask migrants about their life and how they came here, all the amazing stories they bring. There is a prevailing belief that migrants are not only coming here with a clean slate, but that their life before they came here must have been completely dismal. It’s a one-way street: We must have come from poverty, so therefore we should be grateful to be here. We bring nothing of value and everything we are is because of Australia.

‘But we have so much to gain if we listen to people of colour, because people of colour express their relationship to the land and planet in deep ways. For example, traditionally, Indians didn’t have surnames; we were identified by the village we came from. Indians’ names are our village names, our relationship to the land is that profound. 

‘What I say to my grandchildren, and people of migrant background, is our ancestors may have not colonised this land, but we benefit from the colonisation of this land, so we have a responsibility to shape our relationship to this land and country so that it is more just. We will not be silenced and marginal. We have a right to understand the history of this country and we have a part to play here.’