The environmental justice movement in the United States was led by the civil rights churches which poured much of its resources and efforts into the environmental movement. This was as a result of the realization by the Church that environmental protection and justice were just but expressions of some of their social engagement. This movement was known as the religious environmental movement since the church was a central figure in the whole movement. Indeed, in recent times, theologians have developed the term” eco-justice” to mean or reflect a universal aspiration for the right relationship between man and earth. This has been so articulate and with a greater emphasis being laid upon the vulnerable people and creatures of the earth who are at risk of destructive human activities. This paper shall argue that race played a major role in the religious environmental movement more so in the United States as the people of color were discriminated against in terms of environmental justice.
As argued by Bullard in his work on environmental racism, the people of color namely, the Blacks in the United States bore the brunt of negative environmental impacts. Indeed, civil rights leader and church minister Rev Martin Luther King Jnr took the first steps towards environmental justice in the year 1968 when he went to Memphis so as to assist the Black sanitation workers in the fight for equity on work and pay conditions. Indeed, in the ensuing years following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr, advocates in both the rural as well as the urban poor communities started noticing a pattern. As a result, they joined together with other academic researchers to demonstrate the effect of environmental degradation and how this affected the low income earners and the people of color, mainly the Blacks in a discriminatory manner. We begin from an understanding of the term environmental justice. This term was first articulated by a report of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race. It sought to build upon the work of other social movements in the United States such as the civil rights, the labor rights and the community organizing efforts. It must be set out that African-American churches that were active civil rights advocates were the important contributors to this new environmentalism. In conjunction with community groups and academicians, they described and documented the patterns of environmental harm that was continually suffered by the inner city African Americans, and the Native Americans on reservations. More so, this discriminatory practice was also perpetrated against the rural Mexican Americans most of whom were working as farm workers in the rural communities. The groups saw the dangerous industries and the toxic waste as another symbol of discrimination and racism. This problem among the people of color was exacerbated by the fact that these environmental problems added to the economic, crime and marginalization misery of the people in these neighborhoods. Without doubt, the environmental problems visited upon these races were just but one dimension of the various forms of racial injustice towards the low income communities of color.
Essentially, the religious environmental justice movement emerged so as to counter what they perceived to be unjust and encumbering public policies. In this move, the movement also criticized the environmental organizations that only employed persons of color thus casting the environmental protection initiatives as never being a concern for the middle and upper class but rather for the low income people of color. As a consequence, the leaders saw the need for another approach to environmental leadership and thereby took the problem of toxic racism and reframed it as environmental justice. Robert Figueroa and Claudia Mills cite evidence of environmental racism in the United States. For instance they state that Native Americans suffer from negative environmental effects caused by the mining of uranium that is used to feed the nuclear arsenal. Further, downstream states that are along the Mississippi River are also overburdened with waste from industries. In fact, the lower Mississippi which is mainly inhabited by African-Americans is popularly known as the “Cancer Alley” owing to its high levels of industrial waste. It need be set out that this is not unique to the United States. Inequities in terms of environmental burdens abound in virtually every nation in the world coupled with a glaring failure on the part of environmental groups in addressing these inequities. This is what has prompted the emergence of the environmental justice movement in a bid to address the inequitable representation and distribution. Figueroa and Mills further proffer that there are two dimensions of environmental justice namely distributive justice and participatory justice. Distributive justice concerns itself with the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens while participatory justice is concerned with the decision making and the participants in this process.
I begin from the first dimension of distributive justice, namely how environmental benefits and burdens are shared. This is in a bid to mask what Bullard defines as environmental racism and further argue that race has played a key role in the religious environmental movement. Looking at the distribution of these benefits, it is axiomatic that the people of color, the poor and the underrepresented groups such as the indigenous tribes have a disproportionate share of the environmental burden. The environmental burdens express themselves in the form of pollution, health and workplace hazards, toxic wastes and exposure to dangerous materials. I then turn to the second dimension of environmental justice namely that of participatory justice. Here, I examine the representation in decision making in matters environment. Again, it occurs that the poor and the people of color especially from the South in the United States and other people of the non-industrialized South have little or no environmental representation in the environmental movement. This is also the case in other arenas where the sharing of environmental burdens and benefits are done. The absence of participation in this crucial initiatives robs the people of color and the poor the opportunity of addressing environmental policy-making thus contributing to their continued subjugation.
The first major initiative that demonstrates the preeminence of race in the environmental movement was the Warren County protest, in North Carolina in the community of Afton. In the Afton community, Warren County consisted of the highest percentage of the African-American people in North Carolina. This County also suffered from the second highest level of poverty in the whole of North Carolina with a 13.3 percent rate of unemployment. In the year 1982, a director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice named Dr. Charles E. Cobb criticized the Warren County landfill for its heavy environmental burden that it placed on the African-Americans. This criticism sparked a protest of non-violent civil disobedience characterized by the blocking of trucks that were hauling the PCB-laced soil leading to arrest of over 500 people and in turn capturing the attention of the media. This protest marked a criticism against environmental racism and though it did not have the effect of stopping the dumping of this contaminated soil, it moved the United States General Accounting Office to conduct a study of the hazardous waste landfill siting, which noted a strong correlation between the siting of the hazardous waste and race and the economic condition of the people. Indeed, the report found race to be the most significant among the studied variables which were tested, with the location of the hazardous waste facilities. Most of these hazardous waste facilities were situated at the location of the people of color.
Further, it is general agreed that the term “environmental racism” itself was coined by a member of the religious environmental movement, Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis Jnr in the year 1987 following the presentation of the findings of the report cited above in Washington DC. He defines environmental racism to be the intentional or unintentional exercise of power to isolate, exploit or separate others. Chavis explained environmental racism to be racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the deliberate targeting of people of color to dump hazardous waste facilities, the unequal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations and the exclusion of people of color from the leadership of the environmental movements. A leading authority on the subject of environmental racism named Robert Bullard offers his definition of environmental racism as a policy, practice or directive that differentially affects, intentionally or unintentionally, a group or community based on their race.
In conclusion, it may well be stated that on the whole examination of the religious movement that fought for environmental justice and the environment and the inequity tilted against the people of color, race played a key role in the environmental movement.
Works Cited
Bullard, Robert. "Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the Environmental Justice Movement." Bullard, Robert. Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press, 2006. 15-23.
Figueroa, Robert and Claudia Mills. "Environmental Justice." Dale, Jamieson. A Companion to Environmental Philosophy. New York: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2007. 333-338.
Gandy, Jnr, Oscar H. Wedging Equity and Environmental Justice into the Discourse on Sustainability. Philadelphia, 11 8 2013.
UNESCO. "The Earth Charter." 14 8 2007. Unesco. 7 11 2013. <http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/mods/theme_a/img/02_earthcharter.pdf, www.earthcharter.org>.
