America Needs Environmental Justice Now More Than Ever
Environmental issues are inherently issues of social inequality. Unfair and unequal distribution of resources and environmental responsibility has been America’s preferred instrument of marginalization since the arrival of Europeans on the continent. In times like these, we can most clearly see the cracks and scars wrought on our nation by centuries of environmental injustice.
COVID-19 is proving deadliest to America’s most marginalized groups. Black and brown communities, indigenous peoples, the homeless, inmates, low-income laborers, migrant workers, undocumented immigrants, the old and infirm: all the groups our society likes to keep comfortably unheard and out of sight are bearing the brunt of this crisis. Many towns like Flint, Michigan have had to brave a deadly pandemic with severely limited and unpredictable access to clean drinking water; air pollution has antagonized COVID cases in many more communities. Meanwhile, the EPA is stripping away what little regulation we have to ensure some degree of air and water quality. Nonviolent inmates — disproportionately many of whom are people of color — remain captive in facilities ill-equipped to handle outbreaks while federal authorities relocate or release white-collar criminals like Paul Manafort for their own safety. Rather than devoting resources to safely sheltering the homeless and accurately reporting the pandemic’s progress in homeless populations, state and local governments across the country have chosen to let one of the most vulnerable brackets of the American population take their chances on the streets (a historically irresponsible move during a public health crisis). Our leaders have taken the even more predictable step of ignoring indigenous communities altogether. Due to underreporting and limited means of testing and treatment within reservations, we know disconcertingly little about the scale of COVID’s impact on Native Americans. Our system’s disparities all stem from the question of how and to whom those in power are willing to delegate their resources. And any question of resource partitioning invariably boils down to environmental (in)justice.
Environmental justice is intersectional environmentalism. It is a movement that takes on race, sex, class, sexuality, culture, ideology, and more in its quest for a fair and equitable system that fosters harmony with our environment. Underpinning this movement is the issue of how inequities and disparities in who reaps the natural world’s rewards and who deals with its consequences perpetuate inequality and division in our society. The privileged and powerful stifle the underprivileged and marginalized by forcing them to pay the price of unsustainable greed and overuse. A low-income, minority-majority community somewhere over the horizon hosts the smokestacks so we can power our homes and breathe (relatively) clean air. The “bad” neighborhood is downwind of the landfill so I can throw “away” more than my weight in municipal solid waste each month without ever seeing or smelling it again (I’d like to think I’ve since defied that statistic). Even the measures we take to mitigate environmental damage often merely translocate their environmental impact. A Tesla driver trades the exhaust behind them for emissions from mining equipment and a natural gas or coal-burning power plant well out of sight. When we recycle, we trade a pile of trash on U.S. soil for a pile of trash waiting to be burned, buried, dumped, or, by some miracle, recycled in an impoverished Southeast Asian nation. (The pandemic has made domestic recycling more profitable, but that phenomenon is unlikely to last.)
By passing down the burden of environmental responsibility to those least able to handle it, we temporarily preserve our comfortable consumerism while condemning generations of our unfortunate cross-bearers to the cycle of poverty and every disadvantage that comes with it. This relationship protects and preserves a suffocating power structure that teaches non-white immigrants without an education to either leave our country or voluntarily submit to slavery,
that teaches bright black kids that they’ll never be cut out for college,
that teaches underprivileged women that they have to sacrifice everything for their children,
that teaches LGBT+ kids in poverty that they have to hide who they are inside to survive,
that teaches the privileged that they deserve to be where they are while the poor deserve to be poor,
that teaches power-mad cops who get a thrill out of senseless violence that they can get away with acting their rage fantasies out on people who look a certain way,
that teaches us all that all of the above is okay and normal and inevitable and just part of how the world works.
George Floyd’s brutal murder at the hands of Derek Chauvin is yet another spark set to the powder keg of American race relations. Emmett Till. Rodney King. Michael Brown. Each incident was the “last straw” of its day for the black community. Dishearteningly little has changed, but, through civil disobedience and militant tactics alike, protest has been absolutely integral to legislative, judicial, and social victories for the black community. Far from sabotaging a movement, aggressive tactics often prove instrumental in the fight for fair and equal treatment. Given the continued maltreatment of black Americans and our government’s consistent reluctance to meaningfully acknowledge it, drastic measures are hardly unwarranted. What we now see on our streets and on streets across the country is a triumph of modern activism. We are in the midst of a movement of historic proportions. It’s time for environmentalists to embrace environmental justice as a fundamental part of our cause and leap into this movement and those that follow. March. Sign. Donate. Write. Mail. Bail. Communicate. Spread the word. We can accomplish more in front of our screens than activists of the past could have possibly imagined. We are all capable of action. But, above all else, we must keep the fire burning. The path to lasting change is to tackle the fundamental issues that perpetuate inequality in America alongside immediate problems like police brutality. As environmentalists, we have something big to bring to the table. We see how environmental issues become racial issues which become life-or-death issues. Right now, justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and lasting systemic change are our goals. Environmental justice is not about hijacking this or any other movement. It’s about understanding how environmental issues are woven into the fabric of countless other social and political issues in our country and elsewhere. Let every catalyst for feminism or LGBT+ rights or Black Lives Matter be a catalyst for the environmental justice movement. For now, we will remember those whose deaths now call us to action as casualties of a very American breed of racism, casualties of an inherently unjust system, and casualties of an unsustainable environmental condition that prioritizes the comfort of the few over the lives of the many.
