Environmental Justice

Activists for environmental justice seek to stop or minimize ways in which abuse of the Earth adversely affects specific groups of people: the 'concerned communities' whose quality of life, livelihood or very lives are threatened by exploitation of, or damage to, the (local) environment – usually by governments and/or (private) industry or commerce. Key issues outlined here include:

1. who is affected, and how
2. an attempt to charter the principles
3. the exposusure and elimination of corporate abuse
4. safeguarding the rights of indigenous people
5. achieving sustainable population growth

There is also a list of useful sites and sources on environmental justice.

Who is affected, and how

Affected communities may include indigenous peoples displaced from rainforests to allow their destruction for profit to the paper industry. They may include farmers whose ability to survive economically is compromised by transnational agribusinesses. They may include children whose health suffers by the introduction of toxic substances into the air. To resist all such abuse of the environment is to extend effective and enforced protection under the law to all: everyone has an equal right to clean water and clean air regardless of race, ethnicity, sexuality or socioeconomic status. No-one has the right to degrade or destroy the environment regardless of their power, wealth, status or position in a hierarchy or of their ability to obscure, excuse and hide their actions. The cost of one nuclear weapons test alone could finance the installation of 80,000 hand pumps, giving third world villages access to clean water.

One accepted way to categorize what could otherwise be a massive range of issues is into:

• procedural inequity: questions of fair treatment and the extent that governing rules, regulations, and evaluation criteria are applied uniformly. Examples of procedural inequity are packing boards and commissions with pro-business interests, holding hearings in remote locations to minimize public participation, and using English-only material to communicate to non-English speaking communities. BlackRhinoceros has a number of Actions under the heading of Corporate Abuse that draw attention to these
• geographical inequity: some neighborhoods, communities, and regions receive direct benefits, such as jobs and tax revenues, from industrial production while the costs, such as the burdens of waste disposal, are sent elsewhere. Communities hosting waste-disposal facilities, for example, receive fewer economic benefits than communities generating the waste
• social inequity: environmental decisions often mirror the power arrangements of larger society and reflect the still-existing racial bias in the relevant country or countries. Institutional racism has influenced the siting of noxious facilities, for example, in areas where indigenous people will suffer as a direct result. Destruction of living space (eg rainforests) for profit at the expense of those who live there is another example

Principles of Environmental Justice

More specifically, the following list of Principles of Environmental Justice was adopted at the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington DC on October 27, 1991; the proceedings are held by the United Church of Christ in New York:

• environmental justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction
• environmental justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias
• environmental justice mandates the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things
• environmental justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food
• environmental justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples
• environmental justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production
• environmental justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation
• environmental justice affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment, without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. It also affirms the right of those who work at home to be free from environmental hazards
• environmental justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care
• environmental justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide
• environmental justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination
• environmental justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and providing fair access for all to the full range of resources
• environmental justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color
• environmental justice opposes the destructive operations of multi-national corporations
• environmental justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms
• environmental justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives
• environmental justice requires that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible; and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations

Corporate abuses

A useful tool for environmental activists to avail themselves of is the ability to spot – and refute – 'greenwash'. This is the technique by which polluters and destroyers (usually corporate) try to put a positive, sometimes even an actively 'green' construction on their damaging activities. Typically this ranges from naming of a particularly fuel-inefficient car 'Eagle' or 'Panther' to suggest an affinity with the environment which its manufacturers and drivers are helping to destroy through spuriously associating a harmful project with an image of a known endangered species to suggest 'caring' (Mitsubishi's California Gray Whale is a good example) to spending more on a campaign to promote some trivial participation in a conservation project than in the project itself. Chevron often spends more on advertising the projects than managing them. Chevron has produced a 30 second advertisement boasting about its work with the El Segundo butterfly program costing up to US$200,000; the program costs the company only US$5,000 a year!

Indigenous people

Indigenous peoples (those living on their lands at first – before settlers came from elsewhere) live across the world from the Arctic to the South Pacific and number about 300 million. Among many indigenous peoples are the Indians of the Americas (for example, the Mayas of Guatemala or the Aymaras of Bolivia), the Inuit and Aleutians of the circumpolar region, the Saami of northern Europe, the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia, and the Maori of New Zealand. Most indigenous peoples have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics which are clearly distinct from those of the other segments of the national populations.

Despite cultural and ethnic diversity, there are often striking similarities between the challenges, grievances and interests of the various indigenous peoples. Attempts to 'assimilate' such communities at the time of decolonization, for example, after the Second World War have almost universally been accepted as detrimental to them.

Significant survivors of the destruction by the Spanish from the sixteenth century of the Maya civilization are the Lacandones, whose successful stewardship of Central American rainforests is highly instructive.

Population

By most estimates the world population topped 6 billion in 1999. Those same estimators project that it will grow to 10 billion sometime in the next 30 to 50 years. This relentless expansion taxes the entire planet. More people means more habitat lost for endangered species. More people means more water used, more energy generated and fossil fuel consumed, more pollution generated and lower quality of life for everyone.

Much of this population growth is a result of unwanted pregnancies. Humankind has the knowledge to avoid unwanted pregnancies but for a variety of reasons, religious, political and economic, those women who most need birth control and other reproductive health care do not have access to them. Anything that aids in getting reproductive health care information, supplies and services to those areas of the world under served will contribute to voluntary population control. Anything that brings people to choose smaller families in parts of the world where all these things are available pays even more dividends in higher quality of life – people in the developed world use more of everything.

Women with economic power tend to have fewer children. Programs supporting economic justice and literacy for women contribute to this power and will eventually lead to a lowering of the population growth percentage. Easing the strain on individual women will help ease the strain humans put on the planet.

Sources on environmental justice

The Orion Grassroots Network has good information. On Greenwash is CorpWatch, which includes practical suggestions for exposing it. For indigenous peoples go to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights site, which details the 15 organizations of indigenous peoples who have consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). On population try Zero Population Growth.