I have always believed that statistics can be bent to say anything you want them too provided you don’t know the whole story. Its a common advertising tactic “9 out of 10 doctors agree our product is best!”. Do you really think they asked 10 separate doctors? probably not. More than likely they are just using statistics to support their claim. Likewise the authors in our readings tend to use statistics from 1985-92 what if they didn’t like the numbers from 92 so instead they used them from 88 because they fit their argument better. I’m not saying that the Environmental Justice movement is trying to trick people into supporting them. “Such manipulations need not be malicious or devious; they can arise from unintentional biases of the researcher.”(wikipedia.org) or that their arguments are inherently flawed. But they build their arguments almost completely out of numbers and statistics most of which are almost 20 years old.
Now i know what most of you are thinking. I just dressed up the feeble argument that this book is old and out of date so it has to be wrong but I had the opposite reaction. It left me wondering: that’s how it was, how is it today? better or worse?
One of the major events I found concerning the environmental Justice movement was a supreme court ruling in 2001. In the past lawyers for the Environmental Justice movement used a clause in the 1964 Civil Rights act to argue that if something caused a “disparate impact’ on low-income neighborhoods and persons of color.”(vjel.org 2002) then it violated the Civil Rights Act and could be stopped. But the supreme court ruled that this was an inaccurate interpretation. Basically it boils down to if a toxic land fill was going to be built in a minority community then it automatically violated the Civil Rights act. Now to use the same legal strategy you have to prove “intentional discrimination”.
<What do you think about this. was the supreme court trying to fill a gaping loophole or were they trying to deal a serious blow to the Environmental Justice movement?>
what alternatives does this leave us with?Do we now have to rely on underfunded, understaffed government agencies to keep our best interests at heart?
“Without a private right of action, citizens disproportionately affected by agency decisions will have to rely on the EPA to enforce its own regulations; although, that is unlikely to happen. As of November 30, 2000, the United States EPA Office of Civil Rights had received 108 Title VI complaints. To date, only one complaint had been decided on the merits”.(vjel.org 2002)
That was back in 2001. Seven years later the EPA is still ineffective. Recently the EPA changed its regulations so that chemical waste facilities can produce almost 10 times more waste and not have to file detailed reports containing what exactly they are producing. “The EPA’s rollback particularly impacts low-income communities and communities of color, many of which are burdened with the siting of industrial facilities,”(triplepundit.com 2008) Fortunately this change was not met without resistance. “On November 28 last year[2007], New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that a coalition of 12 states was suing the EPA “over new regulations denying public access to information abut toxic chemicals in their communities”(triplepundit.com 2008)
Now why would a government agency try to hide the truth? After all “Information is the fuel of grassroots activism.”(carrborocitizen.com 2007) Whose interests is the EPA serving? Its kind of eerie how governments and big corporations try to hide the truth behind large documents and cryptic language as if they don’t expect anybody to look any deeper than the surface. As Di Chiro writes “These city officials could not have suspected that this ordinary woman … would actually read the entire three-inch-thick EIR that documented the projects scientifically based standards of safety.” (Di Chiro 298) Of Course even if a community had all the information about the environmental impact of a new facility whats from stopping them from choosing jobs and food on the table over chronic health problems?
Is this simply a case of “hey theres a minority community lets build a landfill” or is it just low income communities that happen to be mostly minority’s through other factors(racism, poor education, generational poverty)? A recent study from the University of Colorado had this to say:
“Taken as a whole, this study shows that environmental racial inequality exists in most large metropolitan areas,” Downey said, “but it’s not universal and the explanation for it is more complex than many people think.”(sciencedaily.com 2007)
I also discovered that our habits of dumping toxic wast on poor communities is not only limited to our own country but many other third world countries. In the US its common for old cell phones to be sold for about $30 each to china. where they burn them and use harsh chemicals like cyanides and sulfuric acid to remove the precious metals. In the US this isn’t considered toxic waste but Internationally there is a treaty which deals with it and of course “the US is the only major country that’s refused to sign it. [the treaty] prohibits shipping hazardous waste from rich countries to poor countries.”(Toxic Outsourcing)
what has changed…
There are more Environmental Justice groups with better tools and means of communications. But Environmental Justice battles are still being fought in short, not much
I believe the environmental justice movement works as a grassroots movement but only on a per community basis. For example if a Cooperation tries to build a factory in your community and fails that doesn’t stop them from trying with some other community or even moving to third world countries where environmental regulations are even more relaxed if not non existent. To truly stop such things from happening we need to cut off the problem at its source. We need the government agencies that are responsible for our safety to work. We need the laws to be rewritten to make it easier to repel such attacks. And we need to join the rest of the world and rewrite our foreign policy concerning environmental toxins and wastes.