Environmental Justice For All
(Page 2 of 6)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
by Leyla Kokmen
That green rights, green justice, and green equality should be the environmental movement’s new watchwords.
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“This is the new civil rights of the 21st century,” proclaims environmental justice activist Majora Carter.
A lifelong resident of Hunts Point in the South Bronx, Carter is executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, an eight-year-old nonprofit created to advance the environmental and economic future of the community. Under the stewardship of Carter, who received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, the organization has managed a number of projects, including a successful grassroots campaign to stop a planned solid waste facility in Hunts Point that would have processed 40 percent of New York City’s garbage.
Her neighborhood endures exhaust from some 60,000 truck trips every week and has four power plants and more than a dozen waste facilities. “It’s like a cloud,” Carter says. “You deal with that, you’re making a dent.”
The first hurdle Carter and a dozen staff members had to face was making the environment relevant to poor people and people of color who have long felt disenfranchised from mainstream environmentalism, which tends to focus on important but distinctly nonurban issues, such as preserving Arctic wildlife or Brazilian rainforest. For those who are struggling to make ends meet, who have to cobble together adequate health care, education, and job prospects, who feel unsafe on their own streets, these grand ideas seem removed from reality.
That’s why the green rights argument is so powerful: It spans public health, community development, and economic growth to make sure that the green revolution isn’t just for those who can afford a Prius. It means cleaning up blighted communities like the South Bronx to prevent potential health problems and to provide amenities like parks to play in, clean trails to walk on, and fresh air to breathe. It also means building green industries into the local mix, to provide healthy jobs for residents in desperate need of a livable wage.
Historically, mainstream environmental organizations have been made up mostly of white staffers and have focused more on the ephemeral concept of the environment rather than on the people who are affected (see “Global Warming Is Color-Blind,” p. 47). Today, though, as climate change and gas prices dominate public discourse, the concepts driving the new environmental justice movement are starting to catch on. Just recently, for instance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dubbed the promise of public investment in the green economy the “Green New Deal.”
Van Jones, whom Friedman celebrated in print last October, is president of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California (see “A Leader Is Born,” p. 96). To help put things in context, Jones briefly sketches the history of environmentalism:
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