How Can the Concept of Environmental Racism Challenged Contemporary Understandings of Sustainability?

All people on the planet, irrespective of their racial or social status, need the basic things such as clean waters supplies, normal air, healthy foods and so on. Unfortunately nowadays the more and more discussed problem is environmental racism. This notion is generally defined as “placement of low-income or minority communities in proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution and urban decay.” (Bunyan 1995). There might be some slight differences in defining of environment racism, however, the key points about it are universally accepted. The debates, however, are related to the fact, whether to consider environmental racism only the situation, when those unfavorable environmental conditions are organized with intention or not. One of the factors, which needs to be considered about the low-income communities, is that in most cases there is no organized strong political power in such communities, which would help people to resist the introduction of dangerous technologies, allowing these societies move towards environmental decline and disasters. “Historically, the term is tied to the environmental justice movement that took place in the 1970s and 80s in the United States. There is much discourse on environmental racism in the U.S., and while many of its cases are documented in great detail, focus on cases from other countries is important to have and should be highlighted as well.” (Bunyan 1995). Environmental racism is also practiced on the international level, for example in the situations, when dirty technologies are moved to other countries, when those chemical and waste materials, which are officially banned in developed counties, are moved to other countries, where environmental legislation is not so well-organized. To put in simple words environmental racism could be defined as ignorance or intentional impact of environmental hazards upon people of different races. In response to environmental racism there appeared the movement of environmental justice, which should not be mixed with environmental equity, which is a policy of the government, which is developed in accordance to the demands of the environmental justice movement. “Government agencies, like the EPA, have been coping the movement by redefining environmental justice as “fair treatment and meaningful involvement,” something they consistently fail to accomplish, but which also falls far short of the environmental justice vision. The environmental justice movement isn’t seeking to simply redistribute environmental harms, but to abolish them.” (Kuehn 2014). Thus racial discrimination could not only be in the form of limiting access of people of color to services, goods and various opportunities, rather to normal environmental conditions as well.

The notion of environmental racism is not new, it started to develop approximately from the year 1971, when the Council of Environmental Quality issues their Annual Report to the President. Eight years later this report was widened by a sociologist from Texas Southern University – Robert D. Bullard. He wrote about the life conditions of the African-American community in Houston, Texas, who had to live close to the waste landfill. The key message of the author was that probably not only the low-income level became the defining factor for placing these people there; rather it was an issue of their skin color in the first line. “In 1977, Sidney Howe, Director of the Human Environment Center, suggested that people positioned in the poor socioeconomic level of their respective communities were exposed to more pollution than others, and that those creating the most pollution live in the least polluted places. He used the term environmental justice to describe the corrective measures needed to address this disparity.” (Bullard 1994).

Starting from the 1980s African Americans became aware of the impact of pesticides upon farm workers, lead poisoning of children, such toxic facilities as landfills, impact of the pollution from industrious complexes and they started to oppose these practices. One of the most important issues was the fact of positioning of a great number of nuclear waste dumps in the reservations of the Native Americans. This was exactly the period, when more and more researchers and scholars started to study the relations between race and environmental hazards. There were two remarkable studies conducted at that period of time. The first one was done by the U.S. General Accounting Office and the second one was done by the United Church of Christ. The results of these studies concluded that not only African Americans, but all people of color are more luckily to live in the conditions, which are sufficiently worse, than those of white people in relation to the state of the environment. The United Church of Christ conducted a more detailed study, revealing the connections between race and hazardous waste exposure.

Then in 1990 the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources organized the conference, the topic of which was the notion of environmental racism. People from various spheres participated in this conference, there were scholars, policy makers and they had the aim to study the problem of environmental racism. “Forms of environmental racism include but are not limited to greater probability of exposure to environmental hazards; uneven negative impacts of environmental procedures; uneven negative impacts of environmental policies; intentional targeting and zoning of toxic facilities in minority communities; segregation of minority workers in hazardous jobs; minority communities with little access to or insufficient maintenance of environmental amenities, for example, parks; and disproportionate access to environmental services such as garbage removal.” (Bunyan 1995). The initial debates were related to the appropriate definition of the notion, as some researchers supposed that it should be defined only as intentional discrimination in relation to environment, experienced by racial minority groups, other researchers, however, insisted upon any kind of hazardous environmental conditions, either intentional or not intentional. One of the leaders of the African American rights movement, Benjamin Chavis, offered his idea for defining of environmental racism: “environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the presence of life threatening poisons and pollutants for communities of color, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the environmental movement” (Bullard 1994). He was criticized for restrictions, as deliberate racism should be viewed as just one of the racism forms. It is not important whether it was somebody’s intention or not to place some groups of people to worse environmental conditions and make them face hazards because of pollutions or any other poor conditions. So, it is not correct to relate the fact of presence of environmental racism only to intention or lack of it. So, most of the researchers from all over the world agreed that this definition is too limiting.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office studied the issues of environmental racism and concluded that there is an evident connection between hazardous environments and ethnic backgrounds of the individuals. “In predominantly minority areas, voter registration and education are often lower than average, and citizens are less likely to challenge proposals or seek financial compensation for environmental and health damages.” (Bullard 1994). Certainly it is possible to take concrete steps and measures in order to reduce the hazardous impact of those environments, but the problem is that money and political power are needed for doing this. There should be access to all necessary resources, financial and documental, which is certainly not provided for minority group representatives. Thus even to assume that they are aware of the risks and the problems and have the wish to struggle, they would hardly have any possibility for this. In addition in most cases such situations happen in the areas with collective action. In other words most of local citizens are just afraid of losing their work places in case they decide to participate in any kind of revolts or strikes. The situation is absolutely different in non-minority communities, as they are able to confront the application and placement of hazardous waste and insist upon application of the corresponding facilities there. “While some social scientists see the siting of hazardous facilities in minority communities as a demonstration of intentional racism, whereby these communities are targeted for prejudicial reasons, belief in racial inferiority, or a desire to protect racial group privilege,[13] others see the causes of environmental racism as structural and institutional. The traditional perspective views discrimination as more individualistic, sporadic, and episodic than the institutional perspective.” (Kuehn 2014).

The process of suburbanization is one of the wide spread processes in many countries of the world. The principle of it is the fact that people move to live to some safer zones, which are much cleaner, than industrial districts. At the same time racial minorities remain to live there, close to industrial zones, which are highly polluted and dangerous. Taking into consideration that businesses prefer to move further from such areas, the unemployment rates there are rather high and this causes very low incomes and high poverty rates there.

One of the historical examples of environmental racism could be the situation in North Carolina in 1983, when the state officials took the decision to bury soil contaminated with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls in Afton. “Between June 1978 and August 1978, 30,000 gallons of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB)-contaminated waste were illegally deposited along 210 miles of North Carolina roads. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the PCBs a threat to public health and required the state to remove the polluted waste.” (Kuehn 2014). Warren County was considered to be the “black belt” of North Caroline and consisted of the areas, which were much poorer, than the rest part of the state. According to statistical data around 54.5 % of all citizens were African Americans. In 1982 a lawsuit with the demand to stop landfill was sent by the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In the same year there started protests of civil rights groups against this process. A lot of participants of these protests were arrested and sent to jails. Irrespective of all these steps, the Warren County PCB Landfill was created and toxic waste was placed there. Around twenty years later $18 million were needed in order to detoxify the soils of Warren County.

The problem of environmental racism is not purely local or national, there are international examples of it as well. It is most often met in relations between developed and developing nations and groups of different races and ethnicities. “In one alleged instance, the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau was prohibited from entering Alang, an Indian ship-breaking yard, due to a lack of clear documentation about its toxic contents. French President Jacques Chirac ultimately ordered the carrier, which contained tons of hazardous materials including asbestos and PCBs, to return to France.” (Kuehn 2014).

Overall, the problem of environmental racism is one of the national and international problems, which is studied by modern researchers and experts. It is most luckily to have direct and indirect impacts upon sustainability in the modern world and this is the main reason, why this problem needs many-sided and versatile approach along with development of general tendency of waste reduction.

Works cited:

Bullard, R. D. Environmental racism and invisible communities. West Virginia Law Review, 1994

Bullard, R. D. Unequal protection: Environmental justice and communities of color. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1994

Bullard, R. D. The quest for environmental justice: Human rights and the politics of pollution. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2005

Bunyan, B.  “Introduction.” Environmental justice issues, policies, and solutions. Washington, D.C: Island, 1995

Coates, J.  Ecology and social work: Towards a new paradigm. Halifax: Fernwood Publications, 2003

 Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic wastes and race in the United States. New York, NY: United Church of Christ, 1987

Dominelli, L. Green social work: From environmental crises to environmental justice. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012

Hancock, J.  Environmental human rights: Power, ethics, and law. London: Ashgate, 2003

Hawkins, C.  Sustainability, human rights, and environmental justice: Critical connections for contemporary social work. Critical Social Work, 2010, 11(3): 68–81.

Kemp, S. P. Recentring environment in social work practice: Necessity, opportunity, challenge. British Journal of Social Work, 2011

Kuehn, R.  Environmental justice. London: Routledge, 2014

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