Page 2 The Skanner Portland & Seattle April 17, 2019
®
Challenging People to Shape
a Better Future Now
Environmental Racism is Real, Destructive and Deadly
Bernie Foster
Founder/Publisher
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Executive Editor
F
Jerry Foster
Advertising Manager
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News Editor
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Graphic Designer
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Seattle Office Coordinator
Susan Fried
Photographer
2017
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Stacy M.
Brown
NNPA
Columnist
guished Professor of Urban
Planning and Environmental
Policy at Texas Southern Uni-
versity.
“Our Environmental Justice
movement has been trying to
change this and related envi-
ronmental inequities for the
past four decades,” Bullard
said.
“
he said, noting a term coined
by NNPA President and CEO
Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.
Chavis, whose also known
as the “Godfather of the En-
vironmental Justice Move-
ment,” first coined and de-
fined the term environmental
racism in his 1983 work,
“Toxic Wastes and Race in the
United States.”
Chavis said environmental
racism is racial discrimina-
tion in the deliberate target-
ing of communities of color
for toxic waste facilities, the
official sanctioning of the
presence of life threatening
poisons and pollutants near
In order to do that much damage
to a community, one must so thor-
oughly objectify and dehumanize
the people in it that they become
things that can be discarded and
forgotten about,
While the study takes a
somewhat different approach
in examining disparities in
air pollution exposure by
examining consumption of
goods and services, “its find-
ings once again reveal blacks
and Hispanics bear a dispro-
portionate ‘pollution burden’
or costs, while whites experi-
ence ‘pollution advantage’ or
benefits,” Dr. Bullard said.
“There is a clear disparity
between the pollution white
people cause and the pollu-
tion to which they are ex-
posed,” he said.
The study concludes that
“pollution inequity is driv-
en by differences among ra-
cial-ethnic groups in both ex-
posure and the consumption
that leads to the exposure.”
There’s a name for this in-
equity, Dr. Bullard said. “It’s
called environmental racism,”
I
Updated daily online.
•
nts
or many, Earth Day
stands as a reminder of
everyone’s role as stew-
ards of the planet.
It’s a time to reflect and to
plan ahead for a cleaner and
healthier environment.
Still, for many others, it’s
also a stark reminder about
how African Americans and
other minorities are often
forgotten when it comes to
the protection of their com-
munities.
A March 2019 study pub-
lished in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of
Sciences (PNAS) found that
whites experience 17 percent
less pollution caused by their
consumption of goods and
services.
On the other hand, Blacks
and Hispanics experience
56 percent and 63 percent,
respectively, more pollu-
tion than their consumption
would generate.
Whites experience a “pollu-
tion advantage” while Blacks
and Hispanics experience a
“pollution burden.”
On his global issues blog,
Dr. Robert Bullard said the
study builds on a growing
body of environmental jus-
tice literature showing racial
and ethnic disparities in air
pollution exposure.
It shows that particulate
matter exposure in the U.S.
is disproportionately caused
by consumption patterns of
whites and inhaled by people
of color minority, said Bull-
ard, the former dean of the
Barbara Jordan-Mickey Le-
land School of Public Affairs
at Texas Southern University
and the founding director of
the Environmental Justice Re-
source Center at Clark Atlan-
ta University.
Known as the father of Envi-
ronmental Justice, Dr. Bullard
currently serves as a Distin-
communities of color and the
history of excluding people of
color from leadership of the
environmental movement.
The civil rights leader also
noted that there are different
forms of racism, “yet environ-
mental racism is a particular-
ly insidious and intentional
form of racism that negative-
ly affects millions of Black,
Native Americans, Hispanics
and Asian Americans, as well
as people of color around the
world.”
“Environmental justice is
the corrective antidote to the
reality and prevalence of en-
vironmental racism,” Chavis
said.
While studies like the one
performed by PNAS con-
tinue to reveal that race is a
major predictor of exposure
to goods and services to air
pollution, conditions aren’t
helped when politics come
into play.
A recent press release
from the nonprofit Earth Jus-
tice said President Donald
Trump’s policies continue
to “chip away at the shield
against environmental rac-
ism.”
Particularly, the NEPA Act
has come into the cross hairs
of the president.
The NEPA ACT requires
review of federal projects be-
fore they proceed — among
other things to assess envi-
ronmental, human health and
socioeconomic impacts on
communities.
Properly implemented, it
gives every person a voice in
decisions affecting the well-
being of their local communi-
ty, from providing comments
on project design to pointing
out how a project could harm
clean air and water, according
to Earth Justice.
It’s far more than an ob-
scure environmental statute:
The Standing Rock Sioux
Tribe made use of the law to
fight back against the Dako-
ta Access Pipeline project
in 2017.
And today, advocates are
charging that the Trump ad-
ministration is violating core
NEPA protections in its quest
to build its border wall.
Simply put, NEPA is one of
the most effective tools in the
fight against environmental
racism.
It is essential to ensuring
that communities of color,
who so often bear a dispro-
portionate pollution burden,
get a say in the decision-mak-
ing processes that are most
likely to affect their health,
resiliency, and vitality, envi-
ronmental experts said.
Read the rest of this commentary at
TheSkanner.com
Why Are Humans Killing Whales Again?
LOCAL NEWS BRIEFS
LOCAL EVENTS
to
y •
Opinion
t was announced this past
weekend that Japan will
resume the killing and har-
vesting of whales. The only
qualification, which, appar-
ently, is supposed to make the
world feel better, is that this
will take place in Japanese
territorial waters.
One can, perhaps, argue
that at a point in human histo-
ry prior to the awareness that
whales are the second most
intelligent animals on Planet
Earth, the killing of whales
for oil and blubber was un-
derstandable. I am not saying
that someone need agree that
it was a good idea, but one
could at least understand a
decision made based upon
profound ignorance.
There is no excuse today.
We know that humans hunted
whales nearly to extinction.
We know that whales remain
Bill
Fletcher Jr.
The Global
African
in a fragile environment both
due to their numbers and due
“
ing? What could they possibly
be thinking that would justify
moving against another spe-
cies? We have seen the impact
of the conscious human de-
struction of various species —
the buffalo being a profound
example — and we know that
once a species is gone, there is
no bringing it back. There is
no “…oops…sorry…” moment.
…what is the Japanese whaling in-
dustry thinking? What could they
possibly be thinking that would
justify moving against another
species?
to the impact of the current
and growing environmental
catastrophe.
Therefore, what is the Japa-
nese whaling industry think-
The people of the world
cannot sit back and view this
as a matter of Japanese sov-
ereignty. The stakes are too
high to allow any country to
fly its flag while plunging a
spear into the side of a mighty
whale. There need to be con-
sequences and those conse-
quences need to be substan-
tial in punishing Japanese
capitalism for embarking —o
nce again, and after repeated
violations of international
agreements — in this direc-
tion.
The arguments have been
made. The issues are clear.
If Japan pursues this course,
then a strategic response
needs to be offered, if not by
cowardly governments, then
by courageous global citizens.
Bill Fletcher, Jr. is the former
president of TransAfrica Fo-
rum. Follow him on Twitter,
Facebook and at www.billf-
letcherjr.com. See his recently
published murder mystery The
Man Who Fell From the Sky,
from Hardball Press.
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