
{"id":1301,"date":"2007-11-15T07:25:26","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T15:25:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/2007\/11\/15\/patterns-emerge-on-race-and-environment\/"},"modified":"2011-12-10T13:33:34","modified_gmt":"2011-12-10T18:33:34","slug":"patterns-emerge-on-race-and-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2007\/11\/15\/patterns-emerge-on-race-and-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Patterns emerge on race and environment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>National studies and federal action cause changes in how environmental justice issues are determined and addressed<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>By Taylor Sisk<br \/>\nStaff Writer<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Editor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s note: This story is the second in a series that will examine issues related to environmental justice and to the fight of the Rogers and Eubanks roads community to be relieved of what they allege to be an undue burden. To read the first story in this series and for other resources, go to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/rogers-road\">www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/rogers-road<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<p>On Nov. 5, the Orange County Board of Commissioners announced they were reopening the site search for a solid-waste transfer station. The commissioners had voted unanimously last March to place the station on Eubanks Road.<\/p>\n<p>While this was but one of the demands made by the Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism, the decision to reopen the search was, for the community, an essential step forward. This community alleges it has suffered the effects of public policy decisions that reflect what Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, calls a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pattern\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of environmental racism in underserved communities.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Undeniably, though, significant strides have been made in 25 years of environmental justice organization and action to turn back this pattern. As a result, the Rogers-Eubanks community proceeds today on firmer ground.<br \/>\n<strong><br \/>\nSignificant disparities revealed<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In October 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington D.C. Seventeen principles of environmental justice were drafted and adopted. Among those were assertions that environmental justice \u00e2\u20ac\u0153demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making\u00e2\u20ac\u009d; and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>In 1992, a landmark study published in the <em>National Law Journal<\/em> titled \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law\u00e2\u20ac\u009d revealed significant disparities in the way the federal Environmental Protection Agency enforced environmental laws. The report read: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153There is a racial divide in the way the U.S. government cleans up toxic waste sites and punishes polluters. White communities see faster action, better results, and stiffer penalties than communities where blacks, Hispanics and other minorities live.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>In 1994, Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The order asserted that, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionally high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States and its territories \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Its intent was to follow on the principles of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discriminatory practices by anyone who receives federal funding.<\/p>\n<p>The EPA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s definition of environmental justice goes on to affirm that environmental justice \u00e2\u20ac\u0153will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>And yet, a dozen years after the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Unequal Protection\u00e2\u20ac\u009d study, 10 years after the signing of Executive Order 12898, the inspector general of the EPA acknowledged that his agency was doing a poor job of achieving the stated goals of federal action against environmental injustice.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153On a grade [scale] of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcA\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcF,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d give the government a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcC-,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Bullard. He says that while progress was made in putting policies and programs in place under the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration, the current administration has worked to roll back those gains.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So if I had to rate this current administration, it would be an \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcF,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Changing a mindset<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Unquestionably, though, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s harder for government to today ignore environmental injustices.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made important strides as relates to changing policy and gaining awareness and getting more scientists and health professionals to look at the risks and impacts of having these [waste] facilities placed so close to communities,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Bullard.<\/p>\n<p>He cites research conducted on the effects on families drinking well water that may have been contaminated by waste facilities and how government has very often ignored them.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153They can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ignore this anymore,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he says.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So what has happened is that the environmental justice movement has raised the awareness, and in some cases changed the laws, in other cases brought communities into the room, to the table, to say, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWe need to have equity to address these issues.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Twenty years ago \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 in many cases, black people were not even allowed in the room.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made strides. But when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re fighting 200 years of these patterns, I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it would be fair to say you can change these horrific conditions in 25 years.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We have a lot of uphill battles to fight, but there are more people fighting them, there are more individuals in government who are more sensitive to these issues today. Not everybody is sensitive to them \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because there are some people who are in elected offices who see nothing wrong with placing every single facility in one community and saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcWell, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing wrong with it because it has to go somewhere.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153That mindset is now being challenged, and, hopefully, at some point in our history, we can really just erase that kind of thinking from the face of the earth.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Robert Cox is a former national president of the Sierra Club and helped establish the club\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s environmental justice organizing program. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s now a professor of rhetorical studies in UNC\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s department of communication studies.<\/p>\n<p>Cox says: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I believe there is an emerging sense in this country that society can no longer expect to profit from the benefits of an industrial-chemical economy and all of its products and services while asking some parts of its citizens to bear the burden of the production and\/or disposal of these same products.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>In a recent environmental justice-focused issue of <em>The Crisis <\/em>magazine, published by the NAACP, Bailus Walker Jr., a professor of environmental and occupational medicine at Howard University, writes:<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Addressing environmental health disparities calls for more than tinkering at the edges, or more biomedical research and scientific analyses. It requires more active participation and leadership of governments of all levels. Governments must be more sensitive to the importance of having the voice of poor and underserved groups in decisions that affect their health, environment and quality of life.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p><strong>From the community, for the community<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>But the short history of the environmental justice movement indicates that the participation of government will not be forthcoming till the community at risk instigates that participation.<\/p>\n<p>Bob Hall, director of Durham-based Democracy North Carolina and editor of the book <em>Environmental Politics: Lessons from the Grassroots<\/em>, acknowledges that many people attribute the fight to keep a waste facility out of one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s community as welling from a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153not-in-my-backyard\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mindset \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a mindset that serves as the source for the raising of awareness and as the inspiration for grassroots organizing.<\/p>\n<p>Hall says he believes that community-generated environmental justice campaigns have often inspired individuals to explore \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the power of government and the power of their own organizing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153And these are legitimate grievances they have,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Hall continues, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and they should be organizing to protect their backyards.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Some then return to relatively quiet lives, others are compelled to the next encounter.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153While most of those folks would try and get back to their daily lives,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Hall, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153some of them would end up getting involved in other fights. Some of them would get on the county planning board \u00e2\u20ac\u201d because they would see the power of the planning board. Or they might run for county commission or the school board and get more into politics.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>John Cooper of the Chapel Hill-based nonprofit MDC says that the bottom-up nature of an environmental justice initiative \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the fact that the foundation is built by, and immediately for, those who are at risk \u00e2\u20ac\u201d generates and encourages leadership skills.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153[These campaigns] are much more egalitarian than the larger mainstream organizations, in that these small, underfunded organizations don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t operate as corporations with boards of directors and staffs, but basically with volunteers,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Cooper says. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can see how they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re tied to the community because they are the community. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not headquartered in D.C. or New York or San Francisco or LA, but in the community.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>And, as many scholars of environmental justice observe, though women may not always be the most recognizable faces in an environmental justice campaign, they are most commonly the most active organizers \u00e2\u20ac\u201d women who have been drawn to the movement out of a very immediate concern for their families, their homes, their neighbors and their neighborhoods.<\/p>\n<p>Says Bullard: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Grandmothers and retired schoolteachers and postal workers are coming to the front.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Women are very often the true backbone of the local organization, says Hall. He believes women have a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153deeper understanding of the community value\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and of the risks being imposed upon that community \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something they take very seriously and are willing to fight about.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So when it gets to that level, they perceive it quicker and can act on it with more passion, and won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcno\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 for an answer \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which is absolutely essential. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to have a level of tenacity to go through the different stages of being called stupid, then you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a troublemaker, and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re wasting your time \u00e2\u20ac\u201d and you go through all these stages of intimidation that the powers-that-be will put on those who stand up.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153So they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to have some real spunk and some driving spirit. And I think it has something to do with their really strong connection to a sense of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthis is integral to my family and everything that I view about my values as a person on this planet. Who am I if I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t defend my family against personal attack?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00e2\u20ac\u02dcBroken promises\u00e2\u20ac\u2122<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>On Sept. 20, Neloa Jones, a resident of the Rogers-Eubanks community and member of the Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism, was allowed five minutes at the beginning of an Orange County Assembly of Governments meeting to speak on behalf of her neighbors. She said, in part:<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153[I]n spite of the fact that Orange County prides itself on being aggressively opposed to social and environmental injustice, it has refused to honor decades of broken promises made to the Rogers-Eubanks Community. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism supports this community in its demands for environmental justice.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The coalition demanded that local governments do the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>immediately eliminate the community as a site for the proposed solid-waste transfer station;<\/li>\n<li>halt all solid-waste activities in the community no later than November 2009;<\/li>\n<li>honor the promises made to this community over the past 35 years for having endured the negative impacts of the landfill; and<\/li>\n<li>provide the community with municipal water and sewer services and other community enhancements.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With upcoming elections that focused in part on the issue and with officials in Chapel Hill and Carrboro expressing their unease with what was widely being perceived as an insufficient search for potential transfer station sites, the effort was well timed.<\/p>\n<p>On Sept. 25, County Manager Laura Blackmon sent a letter to the City of Chapel Hill stating that the county would like to resubmit its request for a zoning permit for the station.<\/p>\n<p>County Commissioner Mike Nelson went on record on Oct. 23 advocating reconsideration of the station decision.<\/p>\n<p>On Nov. 5, the commissioners announced they were reopening the site search.<\/p>\n<p><em>In the Nov. 29 issue of <em>The Citizen<\/em>: Charges of environmental racism in Orange County.<\/em><\/strong><strong><\/strong><del datetime=\"2011-12-10T18:31:22+00:00\"><\/del><del datetime=\"2011-12-10T18:31:22+00:00\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>National studies and federal action cause changes in how environmental justice issues are determined and addressed By Taylor Sisk Staff Writer Editor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s note: This story is the second in a series that will examine issues related to environmental justice and to the fight of the Rogers and Eubanks roads community to be relieved of what&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1301"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22323,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1301\/revisions\/22323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}