Care of the Environment, �Environmental Racism, �and Climate Justice�Part 1

Barbara Love,

International Liberation Reference Person for

African-Heritage People

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Diane Shisk,

Alternate International Reference Person

Care �of �the Environment�(COE)

Let us stop looking for a "magic bullet” and have sessions on what each of us can do that can sustain all life.�

That will automatically have a�large effect and lead us to the next steps in restoring the environment.�

Let’s do it for ourselves and our children and our children’s, children’s, children’s, children.

Wytske

Visser

International Liberation Reference Person,

COE

What you can do

• Lead an “awareness campaign” for environmental racism and climate justice.
• Educate yourself—start with this presentation.
• Find your personal environmental care issue: discharge-decide-act�decide-act-discharge
• Find out about the issues in your local community and participate in decision-making about them.
• Join others who are working locally, nationally, globally

Outline

• What is Environmental Racism? …………………………………………………………..6
• Climate Justice ………………………………………….……………………………..…..12
• Three Forms of Environmental Racism …………………………………..………….….17
• ONE: Disproportionate Impact of Environmental Hazards ……………………..……18
• Hazardous waste ……………...……………………………………………………….…..20
• Geographic examples of Disproportionate Impact ………………………….………..30
• Clean water, Clean Energy, Agricultural Waste ………………………………………..39
• Disproportionate Impact of Climate Change ………………………………..…………44
• Present Day Impact of Climate Change …………………………………...……………54
• Climate Change, Health, and Migration .…………………………………...…….….....71
• TWO: Disproportionate Share of the Burden …...………………………………..……77
• The Paris Accord: Developed Nations Avoid Commitment to Finance …..…..…….80
• Adaptation and Mitigation Costs ………………………………………………….…….86
• THREE: Racism in the Environmental Movement ………………………………...……89
• Brief History of Environmental Justice …………………………………….……………95
• Ensuring Climate Justice …………………………………………...……………………106
• RC and Climate Justice ………………………………………...………………………..111
• Glossary …...............................................................................................................115

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What Is Environmental Racism?

• Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of the global majority (PGM) and Indigenous people and their communities.
• Environmental racism, in combination with public policies and industry practices, primarily benefits corporations. The cost of industry (including huge health costs) are shifted to disadvantaged communities.
• Environmental racism influences local land use, the enforcement of environmental regulations, the location of industry, and the areas where PGM live, work, and play.

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Environmental Racism is Caused By:

• intentional neglect,
• the discarding of pollutants in urban areas,
• dumping and failing to clean up toxins in communities/nations populated by PGM and Indigenous peoples,
• a lack of institutional power and low land values of PGM and Indigenous peoples,
• uncontrolled capitalism/greed.

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RC, Racism, and the Environment

“The environmental crisis cannot be resolved without ending racism, genocide toward Indigenous peoples, classism, and sexism. The impact of environmental destruction and climate change falls most heavily on people targeted by these particular oppressions. Oppression also divides people from others who have the same interests and sets everyone against one another. It interferes with a united response to the environmental crisis.”

Sustaining All Life

Principles of Climate Justice

• Awareness of racism must be at the center of climate change policies;
• Policies must be informed by and responsive to racial, environmental, and economic analysis;
• Communities most impacted by climate change must be fully engaged in the design and implementation of policy to ensure fair outcomes.
• PGM, Indigenous, and poor people must receive significant environmental and economic benefits.

Adopted 2014

Environmental Benefits Required

• Policies should ensure the reduction of carbon emissions.
• Outcomes must prioritize improved health; e.g. fair distribution of air quality; cleaning up of areas with high exposure to pollution.
• Information should be public and accessible. It should inform climate change efforts and address existing disparities.

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Economic Benefits Required

• Revenue raised should be used to address climate change.
• Funds should be invested in lower income communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of PGM (hereinafter called “Frontline Communities).

Environmental Racism or �Climate Justice?

• We start our presentation with a discussion of environmental racism.
• Environmental racism has been historically ignored by the mainstream white-dominated environmental movement.
• Climate change and environmental racism harm the majority of the world’s people—people who have been disempowered, oppressed, and displaced by colonialism, racism, genocide, and imperialism. Climate change affecting these groups first and hardest.

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Three Forms of �Environmental Racism

One: Disproportionate Impact

�Two: Disproportionate Share of � the Burden

�Three: Racism in the � Environmental Movement

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Form One: Disproportionate Impact of Environmental Hazards

• The policies and actions of corporations and other organizations target frontline communities for locally undesirable land uses (e.g hazardous industry, waste disposal).
• Due to lax and race-based enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, frontline communities are disproportionately exposed hazardous waste. Their residents suffer the consequent damage to their health.

Examples of Disproportionate Impact �of Environmental Hazards

• Hazardous waste facilities and other dangerous enterprises are located in or near frontline communities, degrading their food, water, and air.
• Environmental hazards in frontline communities are ignored by governments and corporations. Homes, schools, and workplaces are unsafe. People live in dilapidated, outdated buildings and homes.
• Clean water and clean energy are not available.
• Cleanup of environmental damage is underfunded and a lower priority

Hazardous Waste�

• Technologically advanced disposal is needed to render hazardous waste harmless or less dangerous. This technology is often not available to frontline communities.
• Hazardous waste can severely impact the health of people in frontline communities. Long-term exposure to mercury, lead, and cadmium can damage the brain, kidneys, and nervous system, as well as fetal development. It can cause cancer, congenital abnormalities, and chronic health conditions.

• Hazardous wastes are produced by manufacturing processes, industrial accidents, and extreme weather events. Hazardous waste includes acids, alkalis, solvents, medical waste, resins, sludge, and heavy metals.

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• If disposed of without proper treatment, hazardous wastes can cause serious, long-lasting damage to both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

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Examples of Hazardous Waste

• Chevron's negligence in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been ignored for decades. Residents experience spills and leakages and live in a “terrestrial oil slick.”
• Sixteen Canadian lakes (some Indigenous fishing grounds) are slated to be (officially and quietly) "reclassified" as toxic dump sites for the residues of mining operations. This amounts to a "hidden subsidy" to mining companies, allowing them to illegall destroy fish habitat.
• Hurricane Harvey damaged and flooded SE Texas petrochemical plants and refineries. The extent of toxic damage is extensive.

A group of people washing their clothes beneath a mass of oil pipelines. Some broken. [Ecuador]

Lakes across Canada face being turned into mine dump sites

Electronic waste (e-waste)

• E-waste is hazardous and costly. $52 billion worth of this material has already ended up in landfills. E-waste exposes our environment and our communities to numerous hazards. Meanwhile, natural resources have to be continually mined to keep up with the demand for new products.
• E-waste is often (illegally) exported to developing nations where it is dismantled and disposed of in unsafe ways.

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Exporting Toxic Waste

• Wealthier nations smuggle and illegally dump toxic waste in frontline nations. (e.g. Japan is dumping toxic waste in the Philippines)
• The U.S. ships toxic waste (illegally) to China. This waste becomes a deadly source of income to poor people, who “harvest” toxic elements from it.
• Illegal shipment and disposal of hazardous waste is increasing in central and eastern Europe.

Ban on Export of Toxic Waste?

• A 1989 United Nations agreement, the Basel Convention, would ban the export of hazardous waste. More than 170 countries have signed the agreement, but not the U.S. Seventeen more countries must sign if this ban is to take effect.
• The global ban has been strongly backed by African countries, China, Colombia and the European Union (which already prohibits toxic exports). Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and recently India, have led the opposition to the ban.

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Disproportionate Impact �In the U.S.

• Most people who live within 1.8 miles of the hazardous waste facilities are PGM.
• Half of all Native Americans live in communities with an uncontrolled toxic waste site near them.
• Three out of every five African Americans and Latinos live near toxic waste sites.
• Three of the five largest hazardous waste facilities are located in poor Black communities

U.S Environmental Protection Agency

Failure to Address Environmental Hazards in Frontline Communities

• Poor Global Majority children are more likely to attend schools filled with asbestos, live in homes with peeling lead paint, play in parks that are contaminated.
• Contamination is less likely to be addressed in frontline communities (e.g. lead in water in Flint, Michigan, unsafe drinking water in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria)

Disproportionate Impact �on Native Americans

• Gila River: There is increasing competition for (already overused) river, tributary, and groundwater resources in the Gila River watershed. There is not enough water left to support river ecosystems. Meanwhile, water continues to be diverted from rivers for Water Ski Homes and Communities)
• Zuni: In 1996, without consultation with any tribes, the state of New Mexico issued a permit to Salt River Project, the third-largest public power utility in the nation, to build a coal mine within the sanctuary boundaries of the Zuni Salt Lake, a sacred place for many tribes.

• Acoma Pueblo: a 50-year legacy of uranium mining, with five communities on the Acoma and Laguna reservations heavily affected by cancer and early deaths. The village of Paguate lies within 1,000 feet of the Jackpile Mine, at one time the nation's largest open-pit uranium mine that produced 24 million tons of ore from 1953 to 1982. (Uranium primarily used for nuclear weapons)
• Navajo: "Our people have had to endure radioactivity in their backyard and wind blowing waste tailings onto our land, our crops, and our children. Even today, more than 1,000 abandoned mines on Navajo lands have not been reclaimed.” The Navajo Aquifer is drying us as a result of Peabody Energy Co. using up to 3 billion gallons a day for coal mining.

Disproportionate Impact �in Europe

• Data in Europe is kept by socio-economic status, not race, but results parallel those in the U.S.
• England and Wales: solid waste and other polluting facilities are disproportionally located in the more deprived areas
• France: Eight types of hazardous sites (industrial and nuclear sites, incinerators, waste management facilities) and the socio-economic characteristics of populations were associated at the commune, or town, level for all 36,600 French towns. Towns with high proportions of immigrants host more hazardous sites.

Italy: More than 20 years of waste mismanagement, including uncontrolled waste disposal, release of toxic substances and illegal waste burning, resulted in a positive correlation at the municipality level between waste exposure and a deprivation index.

Hungary: Hazardous sites and illegal waste disposal activities are disproportionally located in the working-class areas and near the Roma populations, whose camps are often settled on (or near) contaminated sites

Migrants in European Countries

Minority groups in European countries are more at risk of environmentally based contamination because they are more likely to be objects of discrimination and be segregated in enclaves or in deprived zones along the borders, or in refugee camps.

Agricultural Waste

• Among the corporations that harm the environment and the health of frontline communities are those that run industrial pig farms. Pig farms are responsible for both air and water pollution, mostly due to the vast manure lagoons they create to hold the enormous amount of waste from the thousands of pigs being raised for food.
• Residents who live near these factory farms complain of irritation to their eyes, noses, and throats, along with a decline in the quality of life and increased incidents of depression, tension, anger, confusion, and fatigue.
• Pig farms are disproportionately located in frontline communities.

End of Part 1 of 3