by Lucy Diavolo
December 27, 2018
We frequently hear that “climate change is everyone’s problem” Unfortunately, though, it’s a bigger problem for some groups than others in the United States: those most likely to be affected by environmental pollutants are people of color. This phenomenon— wherein environmental risks “are allocated disproportionately along the lines of race, often without the input of the affected communities of color,” as the Atlantic put it—is called environmental racism.
Environmental racism means that people of color face increased risk of exposure to biohazards, water contamination, and poisons, and they are more likely to be in closer proximity to hazardous waste sites and landfills. These issues arise in communities across the country, in large and small towns, and through a host of mechanisms like polluted water, chemical dumping, and hazardous waste. But even though people of color and low-income Americans are more likely to face these exposures, they are underrepresented in important organizations and mainstream conversations about climate change and environmental protection. This disappointing reality persists at the highest levels of environmental organizational leadership, even in groups that often claim to be inclusive.
The overwhelmingly white, well-to-do caricature of the environmental movement doesn’t actually map onto reality. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found major disparities in how much the public believes minorities and low-income Americans care about the environment. Contrary to what most people polled thought, nonwhite groups reported more concern about the environment than whites who were polled. In other data from the Pew Research Center, Hispanic and Black Americans were found to be more likely than white Americans to blame humans for global warming (an ongoing debate within political and climate change circles alike). When studying differences in environmental concerns between Black and white Americans, researchers from the University of Michigan found that the disproportionate burden of environmental pollutants and catastrophes that Black Americans experienced in their personal lives and communities shaped their responses to environmental issues, making them more likely to express concern than whites. So while public perception might suggest that minorities and low-income Americans aren’t thinking about the environment, data certainly proves otherwise.
There are many working on the front lines to change the common misconception that people of color aren’t environmentally aware. Jamie Margolin is a teen climate change activist and the founder of Zero Hour, a movement that seeks to “center the voices of diverse youth in the conversation around climate and environmental justice.” In an interview with Teen Vogue, she explains that the gap between people’s perception of marginalized groups’ knowledge about the environment and the reality is about “Eurocentric” colonial history.
“People often assume that marginalized communities don’t know what we’re talking about, but it’s actually not true at all,” Jamie says. “[They are] implying that people of marginalized identities can’t think of anything beyond their marginalized identities.”
Beyond the motivation to avoid health risks, people of color and low-income Americans are driven by social and political issues to be attentive to environmental concerns. Environmental justice has become an even greater concern since the election of President Donald Trump, whose policies and agendas on climate change and environmental protection unduly affect Black Americans and other minorities.
At present, the Bayou Bridge Pipeline threatens the lives and livelihoods of residents of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, a water source that provides drinking water, food, and a location for local tourism activities. Young people of color, Native women especially, are defending this space through organized actions, putting themselves directly in harm’s way to ensure the safety of the community there. In North Dakota, the Standing Rock Sioux water protectors have been struggling against the U.S. Department of Transportation and other governmental agencies since 2016, trying to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which Trump “resurrected” after he took office in 2017. For more than a year now, the pipeline has been active on sacred land that the Sioux contend “they never agreed to give up.” The water protectors have spent years advocating not only for themselves and their land, but for all humans and all land, reminding us that ending these man-made environmental disruptors and crises is crucial to our survival, because “water is life.” These are the voices and experiences that should be central in the environmental movement.
When it comes to plastics and the pollution caused by its creation and waste, the conversation gets complicated. An estimated nineteen billion pounds of plastics end up in the ocean each year— but plastic never fully goes away. Instead, it fragments into smaller pieces called microplastics, which can end up in the bellies of animals and throughout oceanic ecosystems. When consuming fish and salt, humans eat these microplastics, and the full impact on our health is still unknown.
The United States, like other wealthy countries, ships a lot of its plastic waste to other, often poorer, countries. Until January 1, 2018, more than half of the waste that was designated for recycling from the U.S. ended up in China. But now, tighter regulations and restrictions on foreign garbage limit the amounts and types of waste China will accept from its wealthy peers.
This global crisis does not discriminate in its reach, though people of color are still not visible at the forefront of the movement to combat plastics—but that’s not for lack of advocacy or care. A 2016 study of California residents found that even though communities of color are more likely to use plastics in their daily lives, they were supportive of taking personal action to reduce the growth of single-use plastics in their communities. After providing participants with more information about how to manage plastics, support for plastic bans increased. These findings suggest that communities of color and low-income Americans, whose recognition within the environmental movement has been almost nonexistent historically, might exhibit more pro-environmental behaviors—behaviors that seek to prevent and reduce the negative impacts of one’s own actions on the environment, if provided with greater information and context.
We must consider the marginalized and champion their voices and perspectives on these issues. Take, for example, trendy solutions to combat plastic use, like encouraging paper straws, which recently started to dominate the conversation. Mainstream environmental groups supported the ban, but disability-rights activists quickly highlighted how the focus on banning single-use straws further marginalizes those with mobility and sensory issues. For these populations, the conversation on plastics, and how it factors into larger accessibility issues, hasn’t taken full stock of their daily experiences. So any solution, even a popular ban that reduces plastic use, will be incomplete and may reproduce harms against disabled people.
Each diverse population has specific knowledge and expertise when it comes to how best to address the environmental issues facing its community. Until everyone is included in the conversation about the environment, any solutions we land on will fail to fully account for the ways we all move through the world. Not only that, they will reproduce the exclusions and harms against marginalized groups that are already embedded.
This generation of climate justice activists may be the one to end this cycle, and this buzzy moment, when the world is getting smart to the impact of the plastics we use, could work in favor of those most at risk.
According to Jamie, young people in her community are starting to think more dynamically about this issue. “At my school … people are constantly worried about plastics,” she says. “There’s been a lot of focus on plastics lately. That is a conversation starter. That is the tip of the iceberg.” She’s intent on making sure those conversations don’t just include but embrace those who’ve been left out so far.
But it isn’t just about straws, she says. It’s about all excess plastic. It’s the little bags we use to carry our bananas, a fruit, she points out, that has a “natu
ral wrapper.” Even the plastic bags in which we carry snacks to school are more harmful than some people realize, and the impact of their widespread daily use has far-reaching implications and outcomes over time, especially for communities of color. Real solutions to the plastics crisis require we go beyond individual actions, she says.
“There’s also this impression, like, ‘It’s OK if I recycle,’” Jamie says. “Recycling takes fossil fuels. It uses energy.” In addition to individual acts like recycling, corporations should be held accountable for their plastic production, which often takes place in low-income areas at the expense of people living there. We should push corporations to find innovative alternatives to plastic production to avoid worsening an already dire situation.
We owe it to ourselves to do better. If you care about the impact of plastic on our natural world and human health, start paying attention to environmental racism and fight back against it. Join causes led by those most impacted, and give them your support as they lead the charge in this struggle for climate justice. Going green shouldn’t mean going white.
What You Should Know about Environmental Racism
LINCOLN ANTHONY BLADES
December 21, 2016
Amidst the glow of the holiday season, most Americans find themselves engulfed by the familiarity of joyful tradition and routine, whether it’s flying home to see family, or preparing a large feast for ugly-sweater-clad friends. But, in Flint, Michigan, a predominantly Black, predominantly poor city where residents are living with lead-poisoned water, many families are struggling with the tragic reality of newly formed customs such as traveling to water distribution sites just to get clean water, and taking quick showers and praying that the resulting “white blotches” on your skin aren’t an indication of kidney failure.
After surviving these horrific conditions for more than two years, on Tuesday, December 20, Michigan prosecutors charged four former government officials including two of the city’s emergency managers, Gerald Ambrose and Darnell Earley, in a third round of prosecutions. Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette charged the former emergency managers with multiple felonies that could result in each of them facing up to forty-six years in prison. Gov. Rick Snyder has yet to be formally charged. Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver, is hoping that this is the start of an investigation that will identify all guilty parties and address the problem of “profit being put over the health and well-being of the people.”
The poisoning of Flint’s water wasn’t an accident or an honest mistake. It was the result of greed and inexplicable shortcuts. It’s also important to understand that Flint is actually far from being an isolated incident or even being the worst example of lead poisoning in the nation. A Reuters investigation revealed that there are almost three thousand cities with higher poisoning rates than Flint, most of which are impoverished. Other statistical analysis into the specific neighborhoods and demographics of who’ve been poisoned reveals that minorities and the impoverished (and especially those lying at the crux of that intersection) are the ones who disproportionately suffer through these problems. This is the face of environmental inequality, and if our society is serious about addressing these issues and their root causes, we must begin by addressing the need for environmental justice.
What exactly is environmental justice?
Environmental justice is a movement aimed at addressing and abolishing environmental racism and environmental classism.
Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. This occurs when corporations or local, state, and federal governments target and unfairly subject minority communities to unhealthy living conditions. Environmental classism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on low-income people and neighborhoods. This occurs when poor neighborhoods, towns, and cities are unjustly subjected to hazardous surroundings in a manner that wealthier areas aren’t.
The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Some activists take issue with that definition because they see it as a mandate to poison people equally, while their mission is to ensure that people are not poisoned at all.
Where did this term come from?
In 1979, the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG), a group of Black suburban homeowners in a middle-class enclave in Houston, came together to prevent the city from building a landfill near their neighborhood. The group launched a civil rights suit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., under the legal direction of Linda McKeever Bullard. A report produced in 1979 in support of the lawsuit found that for decades, Houston had built over 80 percent of its landfills and incinerators in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Bullard’s husband, Dr. Robert Bullard, began documenting eco-racism cases throughout the city, then throughout the South, and eventually throughout the nation. Their collective actions became a breakthrough moment for fighting environmental decisions as violations of civil rights.
What are different ways environmental discrimination can be carried out?
Besides placing landfills close to neighborhoods, other examples include placing hazardous waste sites (sewage treatment plants, garbage transfer stations, smelters, etc.) too near to residential areas, and placing other locally unwanted land uses in communities without consulting the residents. Other forms include exposing farmworkers to toxic pesticides, using Native reservations for waste disposal, and denying underserved low-income areas health and safety upgrades such as removing harmful toxins from the air they breathe every day by removing the lead paint in poor apartment buildings.
What are some examples of environmental discrimination?
Besides Flint, probably the most famous, recent case of environmental racism is the #NoDAPL protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The oil pipeline, which could be disastrous in the case of a spill, was directed away from the predominantly white, middle-class city of Bismarck, and redirected way too close to a Native community, without any requisition or warning. When a corporation decides to make a unilateral decision that threatens minorities’ lives without presenting them any options (the same ones granted to white, middle-class citizens), the inherent racial discrimination in their plans is laid bare.
As Dr. Bullard points out, inequities sometimes occur as a matter of class, and thus may be directly targeted at white neighborhoods. “Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don’t just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say ‘no,’” he stated in an Earth First! interview.
Why is environmental justice going to be such an important topic in 2017?
Because it appears America’s new president is ushering in an administration likely to inflict environment injustice. Donald Trump’s cabinet appointments include some who favor the wealthy, some who favor white nationalists, and even an EPA head who tried to sue the EPA—twice. If the policy ideas of Trump’s administration are consistent with the cabinet members’ history, many of America’s most vulnerable citizens will be exposed to harmful threats against their health and safety. The more people understand that racism, classism, and environmentalism are not completely separate and unrelated topics, the greater chance we have at identifying decisions meant to intentionally disenfranchise those relegated to that precarious intersection.
Brooklyn’s Frontline Climate Strike Was Led by the Communities Hit Hardest by Climate Crisis
DENISE GARCIA
September 23, 2019
The September 20, 2019, youth-led global climate strike brought millions into the streets. Among those demanding action on the climate crisis were youth of color from around the world, who gathered in the D
UMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn to spearhead their own fight: the Frontline Climate Strike to create an intentional space for the communities of color often hit the hardest by climate disaster as part of the Climate Justice Youth Summit.
With chants such as “What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” live music, and lit sage, intergenerational strikers marched to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where youth of color from places like Michigan, Indiana, California, and more shared stories of what they are fighting for.
Each climate striker built on the story of the last, articulating experiences using terms like “just transition” and “environmental racism” and expressing their desire to move from an “extractive economy” to a “regenerative” one. Overall, the young people denounced “false” uniform solutions in favor of a community-tailored approach. They powerfully drew on their experiences at the intersections of race, class, and climate vulnerability to advocate for a future where those factors will be considered in any crisis response.
What Are Frontline Youth Fighting For?
Nyiesha Mallet, at the time an eighteen-year-old artist and activist from the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, boils down the frontline youth fight to this axiom: climate justice entails an economic shift that swaps an economy focused on the individual for one focused on people. Beyond clean energy, that involves a just transition, which means helping phase out environmentally harmful industrial practices for better pathways, while also making sure workers from those industries aren’t left out in the cold. And she believes people of color know just how to do it.
“We need people to start listening to frontline community members because we are the ones with the solutions, not the people higher up, who’re looking out on the map and judging us based on [our experiences, saying,] ‘There’s a heat wave here, and there’s water melting here,’“ she tells Teen Vogue.