The environmental movement is alive and well, fueled in part by many low-income communities.
Illness was common in the area, but it wasn't until her husband died of lung cancer and other family and friends became ill that Hazel wondered if the death and illnesses were linked to the environment. She surveyed 1,000 of her neighbors and was astounded at the number of cancers, birth deformities, premature deaths, skin rashes, eye irritations and respiratory illnesses that they reported. Hazel and the group she founded, People for Community Recovery (PCR), contacted the City of Chicago about the findings and urged them to investigate the illnesses. The City conducted a controversial study that found high rates of cancer among African Americans on Chicago's South Side but did not investigate whether the rate was higher than that for African Americans elsewhere, or whether the health effects were related to the toxins in the area.
Dissatisfied with the findings, PCR commissioned its own study and persuaded the federal Agency for Toxic Disease Registry to do a health study. Meanwhile, because the neighborhood was not connected to Chicago' s water supply system, residents suspected that some of the health problems were caused by contamination of their well water. PCR lobbied for and obtained a hookup to municipal water pipes. Then, after discovering that Waste Management wanted to expand its landfill, PCR staged a series of protests (with the help of Greenpeace) that blocked the expansion.
The Toxic Doughnut is but one of many environmentally hazardous areas where poor and working-class people make their homes. Community activists in the burgeoning "environmental justice" movement have given names like "Street of Death," "Cancer Alley," and "Death Valley" to similar areas.
Organizations such as the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, Wilderness Society, and Nature Conservancy focus much of their attention on wildlife and wilderness preservation, and attract a mostly white, upper-middle-class following. In contrast, environmental justice groups recruit a broad coalition of working- and middle-class activists from various racial backgrounds.
Such organizations focus on toxic contamination, occupational safety, and the siting of noxious and hazardous facilities.
Groups whose members are people of color, on which this article focuses, are a vital component of the environmental justice movement. They have brought national attention to environmental racism (when people of color suffer disproportionately from health hazards) and environmental blackmail (when communities are forced to choose between protecting their health or losing their jobs). Until people of color made these terms commonplace in environmental circles, more traditional environmental activists paid little attention to policies that led to grave impacts on minority communities.
Environmental Racism
There is ample evidence that the operations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal and state agencies have had discriminatory impacts on communities of color. A 1992 National Law Journal study, for example, found that fines for hazardous waste violations under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act varied greatly between white and minority areas. On average, companies were charged $336,000 for violations in white neighborhoods but only $55,000 in minority neighborhoods. Similar imbalances held for violations of other environmental laws.
The study also showed that the EPA waited longer to evaluate whether dangers in minority areas should be placed on the National Priorities List of "Superfund" sites, and, following evaluation, the agency was less likely to place such sites on the list. One reason is that EPA's "Hazard Ranking System" scores sites individually, so that it fails to take into account the cumulative effects of having several hazardous sites near a poor community. And even for those designated, it took less than 10 years to clean up sites in white neighborhoods, but between 12 and 14 years for sites in minority areas.
Examples abound. In Houston, six out of eight municipal incinerators were placed in predominantly African American communities. During a 20-year period in King and Queen County, Virginia, all the landfills were placed within one mile of communities that were at least 95 percent African American. But in both cases, the courts ruled against the communities that brought lawsuits over these issues.
A Viable Movement
This failure of government to protect people of color in the face of increasing environmental threats, along with the dismissive attitude of corporate decision-makers, led to the growth of the environmental justice movement. Also important has been dissatisfaction by grassroots activists with the agenda of mainstream environmental organizations. Some of these are direct-action-oriented groups like Greenpeace and Earth First! that focused their attention primarily on whales, nuclear disarmament and forest preservation. Others are legal, technocratic, and lobbyist-oriented associations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund.
Although many organizations formed during the 1960s and 1970s began as grassroots groups critical of the reform agenda of the pre-1960s environmental organizations, most eventually adopted similar agendas and lost their close ties to the grassroots.
Like their predecessors, these associations lacked racial and social class diversity and failed to adopt an environmental justice agenda.
Filling the vacuum, people of color environmental justice organizations have grown rapidly in recent years -- despite the failure of the mainstream to recognize them. As late as 1994 only five people of color groups were listed in the Conservation Directory, and none were listed in the Gale Environmental Sourcebook. Yet in the same year, the People of Color Environmental Groups Directory contained over 300 such organizations.
Organizations devoted to combatting environmental racism emerged out of struggles for social, political and economic justice. Native American groups, for example, contending with the erosion of cultural values and treaty rights, have used these issues to call attention to the environmental hazards on their reservations. In one case, the Navajos living near Rio Puerco, New Mexico, face increased health risks from the numerous uranium mines around them, which contaminate their drinking water and animals. As a result, the Navajos have developed a strong environmental justice agenda.
Many African American associations and leaders have their roots in the Civil Rights Movement. Some, like the Gulf Coast Tenants Association (GCTA), which was founded to improve housing conditions for Blacks, have taken on environmental justice agendas. Working in and around "Cancer Alley," the 90-mile stretch running along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, and home to about one-fourth of the chemical manufacturing plants in the United States, the GCTA constantly communicates with communities in which chemical spills and "accidental" releases of toxins are routine. These communities have high rates of cancers, birth defects, spontaneous abortions, infant mortality and respiratory illnesses.
Latinos in the farmworker movement have made the link between labor and environmental justice struggles into a key organizing tool. Farmworkers in California and other parts of the South and West, through their participation in the United Farm Workers union, have launched successful grape boycotts and focused the nation's attention on the harmful effects of pesticides. They have documented illnesses from pesticide poisoning, including death, infertility, birth defects and miscarriages, and respiratory infections.
Similarly, Asian Americans concerned about immigrant rights and hazardous working conditions in the computer and garment industries have formed environmental justice groups. These include the Asian Women's Advocates and the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, both in California.
Throughout the United States, environmental justice groups are now able to mobilize many people and to raise questions about environmental racism in corporate decisionmaking, government policies, and within the environmental movement itself. They are increasingly effective at disrupting the status quo on the siting of dangerous facilities. As a result, many are taking notice of these organizations and are either incorporating them into the environmental dialogue, or attempting to discredit their claims and destroy their credibility. We can expect continued struggle in the years ahead.
COPYRIGHT ©1996 Dollars & Sense. Reprinted by permission.
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