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HUMAN RIGHTS
The Struggle for Environmental Justice in New York
by Ludovic Blain (New York Public Research Interest)
Environmental racism: a term used to describe the connection between racism and the environmental degradation that exists in communities of people of colour.
Youth need to organize for the right of people to have a healthy environment and a healthy life. With higher levels of pollution, access to a clean environment has become a commodity. Drinking water, for example, in many communities is limited to those who can afford to purchase it. The struggle for environmental justice encompasses the right of people to protect their communities from environmental degradation by outside industries. Environmental justice is about pointing out the discrimination involved in the placing of polluting industries in communities of people of colour making it a human rights issue.
In New York, Harlem, and its surrounding areas, is a cultural center that encompasses the Apollo Theater, City College, Columbia University, and Striver Row. Within that area also lies a crematorium, a truck to barge garbage transfer station, a six lane highway, most of Manhattan s municipal bus stations, an exposed high speed rail line, and a defective sewage treatment plant through which roughly half of Manhattan's sewage flows. The City of New York has begun expanding a street to a high speed drive by downsizing an adjacent park. To compensate for the sewage treatment plant, New York state offered a plan: the creation of a park. The site chosen, however, was atop the sewage treatment plant, an area where, since the facility was placed on line in 1986, the community residents have been complaining of unbearable odors, headaches, asthma, and other respiratory problems. Just south of Harlem is Manhattan's mostly white, middle to upper class Upper West side, which was the first proposed site for the sewage treatment plant, formally known as the North River Water Pollution Control Plant. The neighborhood was able to use its abundant resources and leverage on its politicians to oppose and reject the facility out of the neighborhood.. This is a clear-cut example of racism, specifically environmental racism, which is exemplified in the concentration of environmentally destructive facilities in communities of color.
Environmental racism has a long, disturbing history in the United States. Take, for example, the following story as reported by Emerge Magazine: in West Virginia in the 1930s, a subsidiary of Union Carbide hired hundreds of black mineworkers. When these workers attempted to leave the mines because they were feeling ill from dust, they were beaten back into the mines by company overseers. Within two years, almost 500 workers died and 1,500 were injured by a disease similar to black lung. In subsequent congressional hearings the contractor admitted: "I knew I was going to kill these niggers, but I did not know it was going to be so soon". Many such incidents have been uncovered by community activists and there are plenty more examples today that indicate the need for an environmental justice movement. An example is a community called Greenpoint-Williamsburg, a Latino and Hasidic community, that has a combined hazardous and nuclear storage facility, a huge underground oil spill, the largest sewage treatment plant on the East Coast, twice as many toxic storage sites as any other community board district, and that now faces the prospect of an incinerator.
A report by the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United Stares found that nationally, three out of five blacks and Latinos, and approximately half of the Pacific/Asian Islanders and Native Americans live in communities with uncontrolled waste sites.
The manifestations of environmental racism in New York State do not stop at sewage treatment plants, incinerators, or toxic dumps. Consider two other environmental health issues that severely impact people of colour: lead exposure and tobacco addiction. For children, lead poisoning is the number one environmental threat. Fully 75 percent of New York State's young people are at risk of lead poisoning -from paint to the house (either eaten or breathed in), nearby incinerators (the largest stationary sources of lead) , and even drinking water contaminated by lead pipes. Children who are exposed to lead on a regular basis may suffer irreparable intellectual and physiological damage. Due to the concentration in communities of colour of dilapidated housing with lead-based paint, an extremely high number of New York State's black and Latino children are at risk of lead poisoning.
Tobacco addiction is another killer in communities of colour. Blacks suffer high rates of tobacco addiction and cancers related to smoking in the United States. Mentholated cigarettes (which pose a greater health risk than others) are smoked by 75 percent of blacks who smoke, but only 23 of whites who smoke.
Across New York, people are fighting back, demanding environmental justice. The traditionally divided communities of Latinos and Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are working together to stop the proposed Brooklyn Navy Yard Incinerator. Continuous, unified work of community voices on the environment also bodes well for future activities that would ameliorate the ethnic and racial tensions prevalent in the community.
In the past, environmental and civil rights organizations rarely formed alliances due to lack of diversity of perspectives and goals within the environmental movement and lack of interest within the civil rights movement. However, the separate movements have been converging. In Albany, New York City, Buffalo, Long Island, Genesee County, and throughout New York State, environmental problems cut across those lines as well. This year, legislation was introduced, not only in New York State and other states, but also in Congress, that would begin to address environmental justice. These bills are a first step to affording protection to all US residents protection that until now has been withheld to all but a few.
Poverty Trends in the United States
1970 1980 1990
Population in Millions 205.1 227.8 252.2
Total Poverty Rate (%) 12.6 13.0 14.2
White Poverty Rate (%) 9.9 10.2 11.3
Black Poverty Rate (%) 33.5 32.5 32.7
Hispanic Poverty Rate (%) -- 25.7 28.7
"HUNGER 1994: Transforming the Politics of Hunger", p. 170.
Reasons for Environmental Movement:
Overall, communities with the most hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethic populations.
Toxic Waste and Race. United Church of Christ, 1987
Cite as: Youth Sourcebook on Sustainable Development. Winnipeg: IISD, 1995. Online. Internet. http://iisd.ca/youth/ysbk047b.htm.