Crossing interdisciplinary boundaries is a constant within studying the environment, including this week on situated environmental health. We began the discussion of health in the more traditional sense with the dengue fever, a growing mosquito borne infection in the context of environment; then debated health through three positions: natural medicine, modern medicine, and the preemptive need for environmental justice. We crossed the more conventional lines of health in talking about environmental justice, defined by the EPA as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (EPA Environmental Justice).
Robert Bullard, in his 2008 article Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: Why Race Still Matters after all these Years, writes about two reports by the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the creation of the environmental justice movement. Growing up in Seattle, there was often conversation (without much action) about the Duwamish River, a highly industrialized waterway originally populated by the Duwamish tribe. The ongoing pollution is caused by a series of oil and chemical release into the river and is affecting air quality in the surrounding neighborhoods that are primarily populated by people of color and low income families. Bullard gives a country wide statistic discovered in the UCC report stating that “people of color are 47% more likely to live near a hazardous waste facility than white Americans.” The intersection of environmental and human damage is present in the case of the Duwamish River, and as we learn through Bullard’s review of the report, is just one example of the “documented disproportionate environmental burdens facing people of color and low-income communities across the country”. Photo of Duwamish River above, from Hidden Hydrology article.
Bullard writes that in the past twenty years “environmental justice and environmental racism have become household words,” which I don’t see as completely true, but it is important that these words are gaining popularity and becoming “hot topics.” The beginning of the environmental justice movement began largely due to Bullard’s book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Equality in 1990, which combined the previously unconnected social justice and environmental movements and highlighted a case of environmental activism by black activists in the South. Bullard continues to summarize his writings on the “Michigan Coalition”, a group that successfully pushed the EPA to address environmental justice issues, and the equally successful National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991.
We also read an article by Christopher Foreman titled Environmental Justice and Risk Assessment: The Uneasy Relationship, where Foreman challenges ideas similar to Bullard’s and criticizes the movement for being uninterested in formal risk assessment. Forman argues that the environmental justice movement has captured the attention of policy makers and uses popular rhetoric of “risk” and “racism” yet the problems are primarily “quality-of-life problems.” Although his writing ends positively and addresses the commitment and work of the environmental justice movement, I struggle with Foreman’s disagreement with a movement with so many interdisciplinary and varying aspects.
Burgin Utaski 