This diary was prompted by, and builds upon, the outstanding diary by DKos contributor Walter Einenkel from this morning, about the association between pollution and incidence rates of suicide and Alzheimer’s, particularly in urban communities.
Our efforts to destroy our planet, and render our own species (and every other species) extinct, take many forms, well beyond the warming of the atmosphere and the seas.
Environmentalism is not a viewpoint; it is life and death for all of us, and the association between pollution in the cities highlights the connection between environmental justice, social justice and economic justice.
When wealth accumulators and carbon profiteers seize the agencies that are intended to limit pollution, and ensure clean air and water for all, they do so because it is cheaper, and therefore considerably more profitable, to spew filth onto the public, than to limit or eliminate polluting discharges. These costs (in dollars, and illness) are borne disproportionately by people of color, and the impoverished. And even an EPA held captive by Putin’s tool acknowledges this:
Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.”
This is what is meant by environmental racism, and it cannot be understood separately from systemic economic racism:
According to Dr. Robert Bullard, a scholar and prominent environmental justice activist, in an interview for EarthFirst! Journal, “Race is still the potent factor for predicting where Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) go. A lot of people say its class, but race and class are intertwined. Because the society is so racist and because racism touches every institution – employment, housing, education, facility siting, land use decisions – you really can’t extract race out of decisions that are being made by persons who are in power when the power arrangements are unequal.”
The environmental justice (EJ) movement seeks to change that by giving disenfranchised communities – often communities of color – a voice and empowering them to organize and get involved in decision making processes. As defined by Dr. Bullard, “The environmental justice movement has basically redefined what environmentalism is all about. It basically says that the environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. And so we can’t separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do.” (emphasis added)
Not surprisingly , wealth accumulators and carbon profiteers have made a determined (but thankfully failing) effort to prevent the development of renewable energy sources on a commercial scale. (All the while maintaining their cash flow with enormous tax dollar funded direct subsidies, and the indirect subsidies of shifting the ‘externalities’ of pollution, and co-opting military, intelligence and diplomatic agencies to ensure their supply chain; it is possible that oil, coal and gas, or nuclear, would not have been profitable for the past half-century, had they not been propped up by this massive cost shifting).
Why?
Because it doesn’t take much to realize that most sane people would prefer energy production that is cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and reduces, rather than increases, the number and degree of political and military conflicts around the world.
Think of it this way— the cost in illness, and the seizure of land and resources in cities, is a tax on poor people of color, with the proceeds of that tax diverted entirely to wealth accumulators and carbon profiteers. It is poor people of color who bear the burden, and provide the capital, for the military-industrial complex.
If we approach any of these— environmental justice, social justice or economic justice— in an isolated manner, as if they are not inherently intertwined, we are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the socioeconomic framework within which the exploitation of people and the environment exists. If our focus, and our efforts to address environmental justice, social justice and economic justice issues remain fragmented, we will fail to address any of them.
Previous diaries of mine also focused on the essential connections between environmental justice, social justice or economic justice:
Where all progressive lines intersect: A profile of the women of Standing Rock. (Jan. 21, 2018)
Environmental justice and social justice ARE economic justice. The socioeconomics of pollution. (Feb. 9, 2018)