Earth Day 2018: East Madison Community Center kids, Gambian Youths, and MEJO removed trash from large city storm drain discharging to a Starkweather Creek tributary across from the Truax apartments–a few thousand feet southeast of the Dane County Airport and Air National Guard base. Sadly, in Earth Week 2021, this storm drain is full of trash again. (Photo, Jim Powell)
Environmental justice and law enforcement disparities
This “Earth Week,” along with many others, I breathed a huge sigh of relief about Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdicts–while also sadly aware that they don’t bring George Floyd back to life, nor do they change the systemic racism deeply embedded in our law enforcement organizations and policies, all of our institutions, our culture, and the entire society. The Chauvin verdicts are a tiny step forward, but deep systemic racism and racial disparities remain.
I also thought about a post I wrote during the George Floyd protests on how police brutality and environmental justice are connected and re-read some of the articles I cited about these connections.[1]
I wondered what kinds of environments George Floyd grew up in. Was the water he drank contaminated with society’s poisons? Was the air he breathed polluted by industrial emissions? Particulates from large roads and highways? Was his heart condition associated with exposures to toxic air particulates before birth, as a child, or throughout his whole life? I don’t know. But I do know that numerous studies show that given that he was Black, he was much more likely to be exposed to toxic pollution than a white person.
Today I saw this Earth Day piece by Alexandra Kelley in The Hill: Shocking new study finds 4 out of every 10 Americans live in areas with unhealthy air pollution. She wrote: “The report authors highlight that Americans of color are about three times more likely to consistently breathe polluted air than their white counterparts. They were up to 61 percent more likely than white Americans to live in a county with failing air quality grades.”
These racial disparities in toxic pollution exposures are no accident. Kelley’s article links to a June article by Bart Orr, Veronica Olivotto, and Timon McPhearson: Injustice by design: Confronting the embedded racism of America’s cities; How urban planning and policy decisions created the current racial segregation and injustice in America’s cities.
Some excerpts:
“We think of racism as a social ill, but the urban nature of the current uprisings across all 50 states underscores the need to understand the spatial aspects of racism. We can’t afford to ignore the role of place — of geography and physical environments — in creating and preserving systemic racism in cities.”
“It’s imperative that we recognize that this inequitable spatial distribution of risk and resources largely along racial lines is not by accident, but by design. It is by design because of how we embed racial biases into policies — on housing, education, infrastructure, health, climate change — and how these then resonate across urban space and perpetuate themselves across time.”
“City and county planning decisions disproportionately site hazardous and toxic facilities in minority residential neighborhoods where too often the quality of water, air and soil is seriously compromised, and in turn compromises the health of people of color. Placing polluting facilities in areas where cycles of disinvestment have led to pockets of poverty increases the disproportionate vulnerability that people of color already experience.”
Madison’s environmental injustices are also by design–and its counterpart, denial
What about here in privileged Madison, Wisconsin? This city’s significant race and class disparities, and related disparities in environmental pollution exposures, are also no accident. As I described in Madison’s Long History of Racist Planning and Development, many disparities still existing today were created “by design” by early city planning and zoning decisions discouraging (or banning) industry on the west side and encouraging privileged white collar professionals to live there–while encouraging industries and blue-collar workers to locate on the east side. This explicit separation of the city by class also created racial disparities over time, due to systemic race-based socioeconomic disparities and racism.
The story of one of the city’s biggest industrial, blue-collar employers, Oscar Mayer & Co. on Madison’s northeast side– and the development of the blue-collar worker neighborhood next to it–is a sad tale on how people living near the factory and its workers (including many immigrants) were exposed to horrific odors, animal wastes and sewage, and toxic pollution from its operations for decades.
Now, over a hundred years later, these patterns remain, for the most part. Various exceptions all over the city notwithstanding, the east side has more industries (and abandoned industrial sites), the airport and military base. Its home values and median incomes are significantly lower than those on the west side. The east side has significantly more toxic air and noise pollution than the west side–and more people of color. Much of Oscar Mayer’s pollution is still there, lurking in a large groundwater plume under the old factory site and surrounding neighborhoods. City-wide, racial socioeconomic and educational disparities are large. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “giant triplets”–racism, materialism, and militarism–are alive and well.
Many current Madison environmental justice issues are also rooted in denialism, the flip side of purposeful design–choosing to deny or ignore them. In over two decades of environmental justice work here, we have worked with diverse people in affected communities on exposures to fish contaminants, industrial chemicals, air pollution from highway expansion, military pollution, and more (see here, here, here, here and here ). MEJO described our years of work with local minority subsistence anglers to address race and class disparities in exposures to contaminated Madison fish in an MIT book chapter, “Invisible People, Invisible Risks.”
In all of these cases, people of color and poor are more affected by toxic pollution than white privileged people. On all of these issues, our concerns and requests were often met with outright denial or dismissal. Most commonly, they are met with silence and inaction on the parts of city, county, and state government agencies.
Now, in 2021, despite its stated commitment to racial equity and social justice, the city continues to be largely in denial about obvious environmental injustices–the consumption of contaminated fish by shoreline anglers of color, exposures to harmful airport and military noise and hazardous pollution in the Truax and Darbo neighborhoods, and many more. Our requests that Starkweather Creek sediments be tested for toxic PFAS (before Truax teens did ecological projects involving the creek) were dismissed by city, county, and state agencies. MEJO and the teens finally went out with teens from the Truax neighborhood and tested sediments ourselves, finding high levels. City, county, and state government agencies dismissed or ignored the results, as usual.
City housing projects recently built (see here and here)–or currently in the works–will result in people of color and low income people living next to (or on top of) toxic industrial emissions, un-remediated pollution, large roads and highways, and/or horrific airport and military jet noise.
If Madison is really serious about its racial equity and social justice commitments, it needs to take its head out of the sand and consider meaningful reparations to start to heal its past racist and classist planning decisions. This will mean re-evaluating its comprehensive planning processes to include more diverse people, and revising zoning codes to prohibit any housing–especially housing for low-income, elderly and other vulnerable people–next to or on top of toxic pollution, airport and military operations, noise, and other environmental hazards. It will also mean implementing policies and taking meaningful actions to stop exposures to people already living in neighborhoods with toxic pollution–including fully remediating and/or stopping the pollution.
[1]
Police Brutality is a Part of the Environmental Justice Fight
New Orleans Activists Call out Environmental Racism Alonside Police Brutality in Week of Protests
Considering the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalization
Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues
Defunding the police is good climate policy
Racial Justice is climate justice; Why the Climate Movement Needs to be Anti-Racist
Below, June 2020 Madison George Floyd/racial justice protests; photos taken by Maria Powell
