FIELD OF DREAMS: Environmental Injustice in East Houston
In late June, I was down in Houston for a meeting of environmental justice organizations from around the country. The convening included a toxic tour, which is an advocacy tool used by many of these organizations to illustrate the environmental injustices in their communities.
For a little more than a year now, I have been working as the Director of Communications at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, helping to raise awareness of the fact that low-income communities and communities of color are disproportionally impacted by environmental issues such as climate change, air pollution, and toxic chemicals. And we have our own toxic tour, which we call a toxics & treasures tour because not only do we show the environmental challenges faced by the residents of Northern Manhattan but also some of the victories we’ve helped achieve on their behalf.
But the tour in Houston, run by our host T.E.J.A.S., blew me away. It was a three-hour bus tour through an industrial landscape, where miles and miles of sprawling petrochemical plants have swallowed up economically disadvantaged communities, most of which are home to people of color.
These petroleum businesses run Houston, so they can do as they please. And there is no zoning, so they can do it where they please. The local residents can’t afford to move, and they can’t afford to match the political donations that keep their elected officials looking the other way.
Which is why organizations like mine are fighting for environmental justice, to put an end to the decades of environmental abuse these communities — and similar ones across the country — have been forced to endure thanks to a society plagued by greed, corruption, racism, and general dickery.
It goes back to redlining, where racist politicians and businesses intentionally denied services to communities of color. Residents could not get a loan from the bank to purchase or improve their homes — and insurance companies would also refuse to ensure them. Supermarkets and healthcare services were discouraged from opening and operating in these neighborhoods. Schools were deliberately underfunded, and the police took a brutal approach. The only business development encouraged by this system were liquor stores and the most offensive industrial sites, such as bus depots, coal-fired power plants, garbage incinerators, homeless shelters, jails, and sewage treatment facilities— all of the stuff that wealthy neighborhoods, with the money necessary to persuade the politicians, would never tolerate.
We call these environmental justice communities. Or frontline communities, especially when they are on the frontline of the impacts of climate change (which they often are). And in East Houston, the neighborhood known as Manchester is called a fenceline community, because a chain-link fence is all that separates people’s homes from petrochemical plants.
These communities have become designated dumping grounds for the poisonous byproducts of our consumerist society. Simply because they are too poor to effectively fight back. And the cumulative effects of these toxic pollutants are literally killing them.
In Houston’s Manchester community, the cancer rates are as high as the smokestacks that line the outfield of Hartman Park, the neighborhood's only green space. No one is running these bases. Home has never felt so lonely, even in the Lone Star state.
