Module 5: Environmental Justice and Human Rights

“When you look at the neighborhoods that are where you have a lot of different waste facilities... the people who live closest are oftentimes the most vulnerable people who have the fewest resources to escape neighborhoods because of residential segregation, housing discrimination, and limited incomes," said Bullard, author of The Quest of Environmental Justice (30). Race is the potent factor for predicting where Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) go. A lot of people say its class, but race and class are intertwined. Because the society is so racist and because racism touches every institution--employment, housing, education, facility siting, land use decisions, you can't really extract race out of decisions that are being made by persons who are in power and the power arrangements are unequal (Bullard 13).
Many occurrences in history prove this argument to be true. For example, the Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management case originated in a town in Houston, Texas. The town was predominately black and poor. A sanitary landfill was put in the middle of the community. It was within a 1 mile radius of 7 schools. The landfill leaked and contaminated the under ground water. It took 21 years and 18 million dollars to clean up the mess. It was economic hell and the county still does not have a hospital and cannot attract any industry. The lack of immediate response from the government was due to the fact that the victims were of a vulnerable or lesser community. Therefore, they were not a top on the priority list. Another prime example of this behavior occurred during the 2001 anthrax attack in Washington, D.C. During the attack officials acted quickly to aid people in political power. These people were predominately white. This same efficiency was not implemented in the post offices. These workers were predominately black. Sadly, two African American, post office workers died.
In response to injustices such as these, the environmental justice movement has been put into effect. The environmental justice movement basically redefines what environmentalism is all about. It basically says that the environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world (Bullard 30). And so we can't separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do. What the environmental justice movement is about is trying to address all of the inequities that result from human settlement, industrial facility siting and industrial development. What it has tried to do over the last twenty years is educate and assist groups in organizing and mobilizing, empowering themselves to take charge of their lives, their community and their surroundings. It's more of a concept of trying to address power imbalances, lack of political enfranchisement, and to redirect resources so that we as a society can create some healthy, livable and sustainable types of models.
The organization of the groups within the environmental justice movement is fairly simple. For the most part, a lot of the small grassroots groups operate from a bottom up model. They don't have boards of directors and large budgets and large staff. They do operate with the idea that everyone has a role and they are all equal in this together. The environmental justice groups are more egalitarian. It brings out the idea that power rests in all of us and when we operate as a collective, that's when we are most powerful and we move forward as a unit, as a body and not necessarily with a hierarchy. It is the idea that is something open and encouraged for society as a whole to partake in. I think a lot of it is when you can have an issue that can mobilize, organize and create the catalyst that gets thousands of people at a meeting, saying this is what we want and we're not going to back up till we get it. That's where the environmental justice movement is more of a grassroots movement of ordinary people who may not see themselves as traditional environmentalists, but are just as much concerned about the environment as someone who may be a member of the Sierra Club or the Audubon Society (Ewall).
It is difficult to pose education and reconstructive issues to people when organizing in low income and politically disenfranchised communities, especially communities with very little open space or access to natural areas. The first line is to start early. We have to educate young people that it is their right to have access to open space, green space, parks, outdoors, as opposed to people thinking that their supposed to be living in an area where the only park is a basketball court with no net. We have to give people this idea that it's their right to have access to open space and green space and we have to provide funds to make sure that we get them early on and take them on field trips, take them to a wilderness area, a refuge, a reserve, to a park-a real park and to integrate this information into our curriculum (Bullard 130).
Environmental justice is not a social program, it's not affirmative actions, it’s about justice. Until we get justice in environmental protection, justice in terms of enforcement of regulations, we should not even talk about achieving sustainable development or sustainability issues until we talk about justice. A lot of the groups that are trying to address these issues in the absence of dealing with race may be fooling themselves. We need to start getting a lot of people to think about how we can start to address the disparities and the inequities and the privileged position that some people have only because of the skin color that they were born in. And that's where the justice issues come into account.