Environmental Racism

Corporations place hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators and polluting industries in areas mainly inhabited by African-Americans, Hispanics, First Nations peoples, working poor and migrant farm workers because they often lack access to power and a political voice (see the Annotated Bibliography at http://www.mapcruzin.com/EI/ejigc.html, where study after study is cited referencing minority groups and their struggles for environmental justice).

Rees and Westra (2003) comment: “Wealthy individuals can shield themselves from the worst environmental degradation by living in or moving to areas where conditions are better. Special interest groups abound to protect privileged status.” The enclosure of privileged space and the externalizing of the environmental degradation consequent upon that privilege is the basic challenge of environmental justice. Many local grassroots environmental groups are galvanized by a NIMBY ("not in my backyard") perspective. Is community development a matter of foisting toxic wastes on to some other (more) disenfranchised group?

Racism is also reflected in the geography of communities. Racialized people are often physically segregated; privileged neighbourhoods are established as “whites-only” spaces. In an article titled "The haunted place," Terry Glavin (2005) explores the tension between Hul'qumi'num and non-native residents of the Gulf Islands, producing a damning indictment of current land-use trajectories.

"Over the past five years, the Gulf Islands have become precisely the kind of deregulated, deracinated, and dehistoricized communities that Campbell's Liberals set out to make of the entire province when they came to power in June 2001.

The Islands Trust, which was established to "preserve and protect" the unique ecology and landscapes of the Gulf Islands, is a laughingstock. The real-estate industry has been given the run of the place. Working families have been relegated to serve as tenant labour to build houses for millionaires or to wait on tables at swish restaurants. The Hul'qumi'num and Saanich people who have made these islands their home for the past 7,000 years, and whose village sites and graveyards can be found in almost every bay and cove, have been left to retreat further back into their few Native-reserve enclaves, like Kuper Island."

Of Kuper Island Glavin writes, "When Statistics Canada recently completed a "community well-being" index to measure such social and economic indicators as health, income, employment, and so on, all of the Gulf Islands were found within the top 25 percent of B.C. communities. All except Kuper Island, that is. Of 486 communities surveyed in British Columbia, Kuper ranked 12th from last place.

The median annual income among British Columbians is $22,095, but for Kuper Islanders it's $8,112, and it's mostly from welfare. One in four adults on the island is unemployed, more than three times the provincial rate. More than half of the Kuper Island residents between the ages of 19 and 34 never finished high school, more than three times the rate for British Columbians in that age range.

More tourists now visit the Gulf Islands every year than visit Prince Edward Island, but they don't go to Kuper. There is a ferry that stops at the island, but there are no Buddhist retreat centres for wealthy Vancouverites, no faux-rustic bed-and-breakfast getaways, no bustling farmers' markets, no seaside cafés, no inns, no gas stations, and no marinas." See http://www.straight.com/article/this-haunted-place

Examining the connection between race and environment also involves examining the social construction of whiteness. David Roediger (1994) describes whiteness as “the empty and terrifying attempt to build an identity on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.” White racial identity assumes its meaning in power-over and difference-from non-whiteness. Considering race as a social construction rather than a biological (or “natural’) fact, we can see that it is subject to deconstruction and change.

References

Glavin, Terry. (2005). This haunted place. The Straight. http://www.straight.com/article/this-haunted-place

Kloppenburg, T. (1991). "No hunting! Biodiversity, indigenous rights, and scientific poaching." Cultural Survival Quarterly, 15 (3), 10-18.

Rasmussen, D. (2005). "Cease to do evil, then learn to do good... (A pedagogy for the oppressor). In Bowers, C. and F. Apffel-Marglin (Eds.), Re-thinking Freire: Globalization and the Environmental Crisis, pp. 115-129. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Rees, W. and L. Westra. (2003). When Consumption Does Violence: Can there be Sustainability and Environmental Justice in a Resource-limited World? In Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. J Agyeman, RD Bullard and B Evans (eds.) London: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

Roediger, David. (1994). Towards the Abolition of Whiteness. New York: Verso.

Wackernagel, M. (n.d., with The Task Force on Planning Healthy and Sustainable Communities, University of British Columbia). “How big is our ecological footprint?” Retrieved October 12, 2006 at http://www.iisd.ca/consume/mwfoot.html

See also First Nations Environmental Network