Elite Carbon Capture, or How the Environmentalists Might Be Gentrifying Your City

Environmentally-minded people, like your dear host and writer of this story, feel it is their responsibility to play a more conscious role in everyday living. This might entail recycling more, being less wasteful, buying GREEN.

But what if despite all these choices you are perpetuating a greater misdeed to your neighbours and neighbourhood? Two Montreal-based authors have published a book on this question, called The Sustainability Class: How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists.

On this episode I, Kalden Dhatsenpa, talk to Vijay Kolinjivadi and Aaron Vansintjan about their book and the ways that this class of people exist in and around Montreal.

The book lays out three kinds of people belonging to the sustainability class; lifestyle environmentalists, green administrators, and the driving force of this class, green modernists.

The idea is that despite good intentions this class of green-minded people are acting and making choices with little attention given to class. Their stature, resources, and power often pay little attention to existing social dilemmas and problems common to working class and/or immigrant populations.

We spoke of ways that often eco-conscious people have ended up reinforcing divides between themselves and poorer south asian communities. Parc-Ex being one of the chief examples of where this struggle continues today. Such as with the instalment of a new campus just on the border of the poor neighbourhood. This new facility boasted sustainable features like being LEED certified, rainwater collection, and having trees all around the campus. Meanwhile it is powering the displacement and gentrification of Parc-Ex as students and professionals in the orbit of the campus look for lodging.

What can we do about this?  Well watch the full interview to learn more.