Expanding the Dialogue HAVE MINORITIES BENEFITED...? A FORUM Some observers argue that the Copyright Sam Kittner. The answer is clearly no. The There are at least three ways to measure the benefits of the environmental movement to people of color: socially, economically, and environmentally. The social aspects of the environmental movement have, almost without exception, systematically excluded people of color. People of color are underrepresented at managerial and decision-making levels of both governmental and nongovernmental environmental organizations, including my own. Academic "feeder" programs in environmental science and policy fail to recruit and retain people of color, and environmental organizations fail to hire those who do pursue such studies (primarily Chinese- and Japanese-Americans). Finally, the jobs and contracts generated by environmental activity have fallen primarily to white workers and contractors. • The economic effects of environmental policy are almost always regressive (in that they fall more heavily on low-income groups than on people in middle- and high-income brackets). The lack of attention to the distributive consequences of environmental policy also disproportionately impacts people of color. • Finally, the existing evidence points to great disparities in the incidence of environmental quality. People of color have radically less access to this country's natural areas, and, in our urban environments, face greater pollution. Most disturbing is the evidence that government regulation exacerbates rather than reduces these inequities. In both my own research on air pollution and the Commission for Racial Justice's work on toxic waste sites, regulatory activity-in its efforts to control and improve the environment-seemed to shift the remaining burden of pollution more heavily on the backs of communities of color. People of color are a majority on the globe we all want to save. The environmental movement must radically retool its approach to understand, to share, and to address all our needs. Michael Fischer is an incontestible fact that people of color and the poor of America have borne the brunt of suffering from polluting industries and other undesirable development. Whether intended or not (and too often it has been intended), economic growth and land use decisions have been based on environmental racism. Civil rights have been violated; the quality of human life in urban communities has been degraded; adjacent communities and downstream ecosystems have been. egregiously damaged. We at the Sierra Club do know how to make a difference at the local, state, and national levels. For 100 years, the Sierra Club has honed citizen action skills to pressure polluters, elected officials, and government agencies to pass and enforce environmental protection laws. The time, though, for patience, compromise, and "balance" is long gone. Thousands of community-based grass-roots organizations, led by people of color, have been established in (Gelobter is Assistant Commissioner of recent years. They possess a deep and Environmental Quality for the Department of Environmental Protection of New York City.) righteous anger not seen since the beginning of the civil rights movement. It is a just passion which now must drive the Sierra Club and other organizations of the established environmental movement. Our mission has been broadened, and we have been pushed to new heights of commitment and effectiveness in order to meet the challenges of environmental injustice. The environmental movement of the 1990s will be multicultural. It will continue to revere and protect natural and scenic beauties of the Earth. And it will be driven by a quest for environmental justice, or it will become irrelevant. We at the Sierra Club are committed to beginning our second century with increased, not decreased, relevance for all the people of this nation. (Fischer is Executive Director of the Sierra Club.) No o, minorities in East Los Angeles have not benefited from the environmental movement. Although the Mothers of East Los Angeles participated in the 20th anniversary of Earth Day, our own environmental movement is just beginning. The amount of environmental abuse suffered by residents of our barrios is just too great. And the abuse continues. High lead levels and high concentrations of carbon monoxide are directly attributed to those freeways so enthusiastically built for "progress." Virtually every family in Los Angeles can claim a tragedy of one form or another. Asthma, leukemia, lingering coughs, and more serious illnesses are now believed to be a direct result of our environment, even though the government will not admit to it. Closer to home, three young women experienced miscarriages in the last two years-one of them my Expanding the Dialogue daughter, another my daughter-in-law. Only recently have we begun to (Gutiérrez is President of the Santa Isabel Chapter of the Mothers of East Los Angeles.) Gail Small environmental movement should be My home, the Northern Cheyenne surrounded by this country's largest White ranchers who proclaim (Small is the Director of Native Action, several EPA employees wrote a letter to the Editor identifying major inequities in EPA policies. With the advent of a major national summit conference in Washington in October 1991 on environmental equity (which EPA declined to attend) and a House hearing by Henry Waxman, the question is now beyond my opinion, or any other, in the Journal. This issue is now at a juncture where it will become a moral issue for the Agency if EPA declines to acknowledge the problem, change inequitable policies and priorities, and implement appropriate action. If EPA decides merely to pursue attempts to co-opt legitimate civil rights organizations, offer grants to minority academics, and spin-control the issue, we will continue to end up in an ethical struggle on the wrong end of the scales of environmental justice. I believe our Agency has more sense than this. (Varela is in EPA's Office of Since ince 1492, little has changed in terms of the non-Indian's concept of the environment. What they have failed to learn over 500 years is that there is a profound spiritual dimension to the environment. Religion, culture, spirituality, environment are one and the same to Indian people. Existing environmental laws are not being implemented to protect the sacred places of Indian tribes. Indeed, we often find ourselves fighting environmentalists to protect our ancestral lands and treaty rights. In order to protect our sacred places, we are now asking Congress to amend the Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the M y first reaction to the question is to pose another: Have minorities shared equitably in any situation where there is a majority and a minority culture? The answer is an obvious no. However, dwelling on the negative is not where the real answer lies. Rather, we must take action to try to make life better for all of us. From my own story, I decided to contribute my talents to Chinatown, feeling that few outsiders cared about her. In 1976, through a University of California at Berkeley community design course, I interned with the Committee for Better Parks and Recreation in Chinatown. My first contact with Sierra Club was through its support for a new Chinatown park. The Club's participation was not earth-shattering, but it showed a serious commitment to the urban environment in which the minority community lived. Recently, I became involved with Sierra Club because it has political clout, which I intend to use to benefit Chinatown, and because many Sierra Club members care about the urban environment. Further, I wanted to make important changes within the organization. Senator Daniel K. Inouye The long road of change for Sierra Club is not only in its membership, which is mostly white upper-middle class, but in how it handles issues. The environmental movement needs to take into account the needs of the entire population. It must not shirk responsibility for a particular community's environment on the grounds that "they need" the jobs. Although it is true that the movement did not begin with equal concern about "wild" versus urban environments, I am pleased to find that some mainstream environmental groups are now working with communities to eliminate toxins in urban areas. Because the air we breathe is shared equally by all, we must work together to cleanse our Earth for everyone and not waste energy on past inequities. How we respond to this challenge will determine whether we preserve the lifeline of the Earth. (Ow-Wing, an architect, is co-chair of Sierra Club's Ethnic and Cultural Diversity Task Force and on the Committee for Better Parks and Recreation in San Francisco's Chinatown.) T he civil rights movement gave birth to laws intended to grant minorities the same powers, privileges, and protections accorded other Americans. The environmental movement inspired statutes meant to benefit all Americans, regardless of race or income. Despite these progressive laws, inequities remain. A case in point: American Indians lack the power and means to deal with solid waste disposal problems on their own tribal lands. Like state and local governments across the country, tribal governments are confronted with a mounting crisis in solid waste disposal. In Indian territory, there are currently 650 solid waste disposal sites. Of these, 108 are tribally owned landfills that were constructed before Congress established current standards for landfills under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA); as a result, only two of these 108 are presently in compliance with EPA requirements under RCRA. Based on a preliminary estimate made in 1990, at least $68 million would be required to upgrade these tribally owned landfills to meet current requirements. In addition, another $45 million would be required to either upgrade or close, as appropriate, other solid waste disposal sites on Indian lands. A bill is now before Congress to amend RCRA and empower tribal governments to manage solid and hazardous waste on Indian lands. It is important to note that other federal statutes include provisions stipulating that tribal governments should receive the same treatment as states, whereas RCRA currently does not. The proposed amendments to RCRA would not only recognize tribal governments' authority but also make them eligible to receive funds to assist them in developing solid waste management regulations. Such regulations would accomplish several things: provide for the management of waste generated on reservations; authorize the cleanup of open and unauthorized dump sites; and enable the development of regulations governing the operation of commercial solid waste projects on Indian lands. It is my hope that Congress and the nation will act to rectify this and other environmental inequities in the United States. (Senator Inouye (D-Hawaii) is Chairman of the Select Committee on Indian Affairs.) Expanding the Dialogue may be colorblind, many of the conditions which gave rise to the disparate impact of environmental problems on minority communities are not. Colorblind solutions will not solve these problems. The focus of the civil rights enforcement effort, from about 1970 until recently, was on problems of equal access and nondiscriminatory administration of federally assisted programs. Although the term was not in use, the environmental equity issue was nevertheless there. In the wake of much criticism, certain federal agencies began to address, within their areas of jurisdiction, the issue of disparate impacts of federally funded programs on minority communities-e.g., the Department of Transportation and the location and impact of the interstate highway system; the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the location of low-cost and subsidized housing projects. Until the mid 1980s, EPA's primary concern in terms of civil rights enforcement was the construction grants program and the racial composition of the communities to be served by wastewater treatment systems. The problem of minority communities' exclusion from that program due to geographical or political boundaries was largely eliminated some time ago. However, other problems, affected by a wide range of EPA programs, remain. As people become more sophisticated about environmental issues, they are also becoming more aware and more critical of the disparities in the benefits of environmental programs. As a result, EPA is now looking at the environmental equity issue and the impact of environmental programs from a broad policy perspective. EPA's Office of Civil Rights has a role to play in exploring ways to use the crosscutting civil rights statutes to address the inequitable effects of environmental policies on minority communities and bring about significant change. (Olive is Acting Director of EPA's Office of Civil Rights.) Beverly Wright J ust recently, I was asked by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to testify at an environmental equity hearing conducted by the Louisiana Advisory Committee to the commission. My charge was to present an overview of social justice issues related to the environment in Louisiana. I was asked specifically to respond to the question whether hazardous waste storage, disposal, and treatment practices impacted with greater frequency and intensity on minority communities. The difficulty in answering this question-indeed, the fact that the question was being asked-reflects the relative lack of attention government has given to possible environmental effects on minority communities. A similar dilemma presents itself when I attempt to answer the question posed for this forum: Have minorities shared equitably in the benefits resulting from the environmental movement? If the answer lies in the present state of affairs for minority. communities as to exposure to toxics in the environment, the answer must be a resounding "NO." As most of us are already aware, the 1983 General Accounting Office report and the 1987 study conducted by the United Church of Christ strongly suggest that minorities (blacks and Hispanics) are disproportionately impacted by the siting of hazardous waste landfills. It does not take an extraordinary intellectual effort to surmise that this pattern may be indicative of patterns for other environmental pollutants. For a very long time, minority and poor communities have been the prime targets for undesirable byproducts of industrial society. These neighborhoods are seen as the paths of least resistance for such things as bridge or highway buy-outs, toxic waste and solid waste landfills, incinerator and chemical plant locations, to name a few. Unlike the middle and upper socioeconomic strata, who possess the resources to effectuate their opposition to the placing of pollutants in their neighborhoods, poor communities have been less likely to forge successful battles of resistance against federal, state, and local agencies and industries who target their communities for the siting of undesirable "but necessary" polluting facilities. A review of the history of mainstream environmental organizations and their programs fails to produce any significant involvement by them of minority groups or individuals and almost no attention to pollution problems specific to minority populations. Only recently have we seen minority groups and communities. embraced (with some difficulty) and allowed to have a voice in areas related to the environment. The results have been that minorities have not shared equitably in the benefits resulting from the environmental movement. It is now time to forge an Agenda for Action. A highly innovative approach for dealing with equity issues has emerged from a number of minority researchers and scholars independently investigating equity issues. They have proposed the development of a National Agenda on Environmental Equity and the establishment of Environmental Equity Regional Centers to deal with research. and policy, community assistance, and education. This would represent a positive step toward the development of a "clean" environment for all, with the ultimate goal being Environmental justice. (Dr. Wright is an environmental sociologist with the Sociology Department of Wake Forest University, North Carolina.) |