Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Native Americans, Hispanics, and other black and minority ethnic groups in the US.
In what appears to be a deliberate understatement, Bullard (2005: 22) notes that
'making government respond to the needs of communities composed of the poor,
working class and people of colour has not been easy'. Changes to the environmental
protection paradigm have been due to the lobbying and campaigning activities of a
loose alliance of grass-roots and national environmental and civil rights activists,
but, as many observers have argued, the real problems are deeply rooted in the
institutionalized racism that has characterized the history of land-use policy. Zoning
has enabled dirty industries to infiltrate established communities. Environmental
regulations have been either evaded or weakly enforced. For Wright (2005), slavery
begat environmental racism and injustice, which can be seen in its purest form along
Louisiana's Mississippi River 'cancer alley' or 'chemical corridor', which produces
around 20 per cent of the petrochemicals in the US. Many communities have been
destroyed, poisoned or relocated by this highly profitable and, in Louisiana, subsidized
industry. Wright (2005) and Lerner (2005) tell the story of the residents of Diamond,
a small African American mixed-income community, located within a manufacturing
complex that in 1997 released 2 million pounds of toxic emissions into the atmosphere.
The community subsequently lobbied Shell, whose refinery was a massive emitter of
carcinogens, to buy them out and move them to an area where they would not
experience the devastating health problems associated with the toxic pollution plaguing
their neighbourhoods. In 2002, Shell finally agreed. The environmental justice cam-
paigns in Diamond, and other similar communities, have an uncomfortable historical
resonance, because some relocated communities were originally established by freed
slaves following the Civil War. In another example, activist and academic David
Pellow (2002) analyses the waste recycling industry in Chicago, developing a fourfold
framework for evaluating environmental racism and injustice in the process: first,
the environmental history of racism in a particular place; second, the role of multiple
stakeholders in the environmental conflicts and disputes; third, the effects of social
stratification - race and/or class; and fourth, the ability of the least powerful social
groups to shape their struggles for environmental justice. Pellow (2002: 9) identifies
a number of indicators of environmental inequality and/or racism, including:
•
widespread unequal protection and enforcement against hazardous facility siting
in poor neighbourhoods and communities of colour;
•
disproportionate impact of occupational hazards on the poor and workers of
colour;
•
the abrogation of treaties with native populations, particularly with regard to
mining, waste dumping and military weapons testing;
•
unsafe and segregated housing;
•
discriminatory transportation systems and zoning laws;
•
the exclusion of the poor and people of colour from environmental decision-
making;
•
the neglect of human health and social justice issues by the established environ-
mental movement.
For Pellow, industrial production and consumption is a never-ending 'treadmill'
fired by the ideology of economic growth and real conflict between groups whose
