The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [70]
This phenomenon is known as environmental racism—that is, the placement of the most toxic facilities in communities of color, zoning and other practices or policies that result in disproportionate burdens being placed on communities of color, and the exclusion of people from these communities from environmental planning and decision making. In the 1980s, the environmental justice (EJ) movement emerged in the United States in response to these fundamentally unfair practices and offered an alternative vision—one of environmental health, economic equity, and rights and justice for all people.148
In 1987, the budding EJ movement was bolstered by the first study to solidly document that the racial composition of a community was the most significant factor in determining whether or not a toxic waste facility was likely to be located nearby: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, published by the United Church of Christ (UCC). This astounding report showed that three out of every five African Americans and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.149
I remember when UCC released the findings, during my first year working at Greenpeace in its Washington, D.C., offices. The report sent shock waves through traditional environmental organizations, most of which didn’t have industrial environments and racial justice on their radar screens. It was impossible to deny that the bulk of the issues that major environmental groups addressed—whales, forests, baby seals—utterly ignored the thousands of people living in the shadows of gigantic polluting industrial facilities and dumpsites. Sadly, some traditional environmental groups chose to downplay the report or to respond defensively. For others, the findings inspired some serious self-reflection. Some groups woke up to the fact that their boards, their staff, and their members were largely white, which meant they’d left a large segment of the U.S. population out of their strategic discussions and efforts. That is a pretty big oversight.
The UCC report helped inspire a powerful, diverse movement that saw environmental sustainability and social justice issues as inseparable. As civil rights and environmental justice activist Cora Tucker said, “People don’t get all the connections [when] they say the environmental is over there, the civil rights group is over there, the women’s group is over there and the other groups are here. Actually, all of them are one group, and the issues we fight become null and void if we have no clean water to drink, no clean air to breathe and nothing to eat.”150
With the movement gaining momentum globally, the first ever National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C., in 1991. Soon after, in 1993 President Clinton signed an executive order that created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the EPA.151 So by then, there was solid evidence of a racial bias in the choice of locations for polluting and hazardous facilities; there was a growing broad-based movement for environmental justice; and there was a presidential executive order and a special advisory council to the national Environmental Protection Agency. But while all that ought to have solved environmental racism, at least in the United States, that’s not what happened.
Twenty years after the release of the first report, the UCC released Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987–2007, which found the problems persisting and, in some areas, growing worse. “Race continues to be an independent predictor of where hazardous wastes are located, and it is a stronger predictor than income, education and other socioeconomic indicators. People of color now comprise a majority in neighborhoods with commercial hazardous waste facilities.”152 As Steve Lerner, an author and research director at the environmental health institute Commonweal, writes, “More remains to be done to keep America from being divided into livable communities, where the environment is relatively clean; and “sacrifice zones,” where