Essay on Concern for Environmental Justice

There are many organizations that are concerned with environmental justice. Despite identifying themselves as advocates for environmental justice, not all of them address the same thing. The environment is a multidimensional concept and organizations deal with different concepts. For example, some organizations advocate for a pollution-free world while others advocate for conservation of trees or action against certain activities such as deforestation. Sometimes it is hard to learn more about an organization without interacting with members who subscribes to such an organization. Members of an organization can provide more in-depth information such as the motivation of starting an organization, membership, goals, activities, membership, visions, and plans for the future. To learn more about an organization, it is better to interview members of an organization. In this case, three members of an organization were interviewed on various aspects of their organization such as the history of their organization, membership, major activities, their goals, their plans, successes in the past and so forth. The following paragraphs are a summary of what was provided by the interviewed members of the organization.

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The Environmental Justice Movement is one of the most popular organizations that is concerned with caring for environmental justice. Environmental Justice Movement has been associated with the struggle to not only improve but also a clean as well as a healthy environment. In their quest for environmental justice, the organization targets those who have or are still living, working or playing closest to sources of pollution. In the community, the organizations members have found out that there are people who are exposed to health risks due to hazardous conditions existing in where they work, live, or play.

Although it is common knowledge that every community has a landfill or dumpsite, the organizations members have realized that a section of the population in every community that is highly polluted happen to be dominated by a particular group. The organization can be viewed as an advocate for environmental protection and also an advocate for social change in the community. The organization fights for rights of some members of the communities who have been marginalized by the environment. That is, the community members have been systematically denied accessed to a clean environment. According to the response given by one of the members, Environmental Justice Movement was formed by the minority ethnic groups which comprise the African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Asians. One of the central issues that motivated the formation of the organization is a statistical fact. According to the people behind the formation of the organization, statistics suggest that people who play, work or live in some of the most polluted environments in America are mostly the minority group: people of color as well as the poor in the society.

The members have evidence of past historical injustices. For example, there was once an incident that happened in Warren County, NC. Warren County is largely dominated by rural, poor and majority black population. In 1982, the state of North Carolina was looking for an ideal ground for hazardous waste landfill. The state found out that the county was a perfect place to host the landfill. The landfill was constructed for the deposition of soil that were laced with hazardous PCBs equivalent to six thousand truckloads. The hazardous PCBs could leak and contaminate underground drinking water which was going to affect the nearby communities. The community was frustrated by the governments decision to ignore their concerns regarding dumping of hazardous wastes in their vicinity. Angered by the decision, the people from the community protested and barred the trucks delivering loads of contaminated soil to the site by lying on the road and organizing non-violent street protests. Despite their efforts to stop the deposition of the hazardous waste in the landfill, they eventually lost it. Before the Warren County incident, there had been attempts to stop similar environmental threats in the past. In the 1960s, Latinos had expressed concerns regarding exposure to pesticides in California. African-American students protested in Houston in 1967 against a dumpsite in their community that had resulted in the death of two children while in 1968, residents of West Harlem, NY, protested against siting of a sewage treatment facility in their vicinity.

Advocates of environmental justice claim that the statistics are not by accident. The members point out that available evidence suggests communities from the minority groups are often systematically targeted to host many facilities that pose negative environmental impact. Some of the facilities they mention include landfills, truck depots, hazardous industries, and dirty industrial plants. These are facilities which need to be located far from where any community lives or work. However, policy makers and other authorities find areas occupied by the minority groups as soft targets. The organizations members have referred such discrimination as environmental racism. The organization has been therefore used as a tool for battling this injustice for a long time. The history of the organization is full of struggles to liberate a minority against environmental racism. The environment, in this case, is seen as another from where people sought to battle for justice. From the civil rights movement came the environmental justice leaders.

The leaders of environmental justice movement employed the same tactics that were used by the leaders of the civil rights movement. Some of the tactics include coalition building, marches, and community empowerment via education. Other leaders include organizing members and other people in the minority communities who targets of environmental injustice to participate in rallies, non-violent direct action, rallies, and litigation. Nobody like a garbage site, diesel truck garage, or a landfill in their backyard. But the leaders of the environmental justice have always wondered the factors that make areas occupied by the people of color to be ideal sites for siting such facilities. It has been revealed that local planners, corporate decision makers, zoning board, and regulatory agencies often find such facilities in areas inhabited by low-income Latinos or African-American communities than sitting them in areas inhabited by primarily white, middle income and upper-income communities. One major explanation that has been given for this moral and unethical anomaly is that the people of color do not have connections to the key decision-makers who can help protect their interests. Furthermore, the decision makers find it easier to locate the facilities in poor minority communities because such communities are often so poor that they cannot raise fees to hire legal experts to take their battle to courts. The most they can do is to complain a little and continue with their lives working, playing or living near such facilities.In the process, they get exposed to hazardous substances which pose a threat to their health.

Learning about the Environmental Movement is one way of getting a glimpse on how certain people in the society can create social change by forming an organization. Just like the civil rights movement, the environmental movement has battled hard for the minority people who would have suffered the consequences of exposure to the hazardous environment. While the civil rights movement (National Humanities Center) was battling against racism of a different kind, the environmental movement was fighting for environmental racism. The persistence of the groups members eventually led the federal government to the Congress to listen to their voices. The Congress was tasked with the responsibility of determining whether people of color had suffered disproportionately from the impacts of deliberate siting of hazardous facilities. Evidence presented to the Congress in 1983 revealed that 75% of the hazardous waste landfill sites in the southern states were located in poor communities that largely comprise of the Latino or African-Americans. Persistence of the environmental justice actions also led to further evidence that was documented and presented in 1987 by United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ). The report revealed that one of the greatest factors that were used to determine to the site of hazardous waste landfills in the US was a race. The strong statistical correlation between the location of toxic waste facilities and race suggest that the sitting was not purely by chance but a deliberate decision by federal, state, and local land-use policies. It was the groups persistence through years that led President Bill Clinton to sign an executive order in 1994 which directed federal, state, and local authorities to address concerns of disproportionate siting of toxic waste facilities in their policies. Furthermore, the executive order directed federal agencies to identify ways of eliminating discrimination on the grounds of race national origin or color in any environment or program funded by the federal state. The environmental justice seeks to keep vigil of discriminatory practices in siting toxic waste facilities in future. It also aims to spread the message globally to other countries where there is a likelihood of such discrimination. This is a classic case where people create social change through their lifes work.

Works cited

National Humanities Center. The Civil Rights Movement:1919-1960s. www.nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm.htm. Accessed December 3, 2016