Complete Interview: The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 2 of 7)
Mar-.Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
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Are you saying that low income communities, particularly communities of color, don’t bear a larger burden of environmental degradation?
No. We say very clearly that poor communities of color do bear a heavier burden in terms of pollution and environmental impact. The point that we make is that what gets defined by environmental justice advocates as environmental impacts are not the most serious factors determining health outcomes. In other words, smoking, diet, probably even things like stress related to living in an environment that’s high in violence and insecurity. Those are much more powerful factors shaping life and health outcomes and an expansive movement would deal with all of those problems simultaneously, not just with the ones that are defined as “environmental.”
There’s a new breed of environmental activists—Van Jones in Oakland and Majora Carter in the Bronx, for example—who are focusing on more comprehensive approaches, like training low-income people for green jobs, cleaning up waste sites, creating cleaner, safer green spaces. Will they succeed where you think their predecessors failed?
What is exciting about it is that they are taking a more expansive view, in which economic development is at the center of the agenda. The challenge that they and all of us face is creating a politics that is comprehensive enough to deal with the many factors driving concentrated poverty.
In the book we point to the excellent work of Geoffrey Canada, who runs the Harlem Children’s Zone. He’s taken a truly ecological approach in that when he deals with a problem like childhood asthma, he attacks all of the causes: everything from lack of health care to dilapidated housing to cigarette smoking to diesel bus pollution.
The same thing has to be the case in creating prosperity and security for poor communities of color. It’s not enough to, for example, just do job training. There also has to be very significant government investment to make sure that there are actually jobs there for the people who get the training.
Look at what Canada has done. He has drug and alcohol treatment, parenting classes, a whole set of other things that empower community members. Just providing jobs is not sufficient. The challenge of dealing with complex challenges, whether it’s global warming or entrenched poverty, is being able to attack a number of causes at once.
How does that fit into the broader environmental movement?
This is what we mean by the death of environmentalism: A new politics that’s capable of dealing with challenges from concentrated poverty to global warming should not put the environment or nature protection at the center of our work. We need to be putting a vision of economic development, prosperity, and really a kind of belonging and fulfillment at the center. And that requires a different policy agenda; it requires a different discourse; it requires a different way of organizing and really a whole different way of being in the world.
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