Something in the Air: Racism and the Environment
By Envision Magazine on April 9, 2014
Story By Kelly Kenoyer
Photos by Elle Sullivan
It has been five years since Josefina Cano found out what was causing her family’s health problems and allergies, but she has yet to escape it.
In her quiet cul-de-sac in west Eugene, Cano can consistently smell something odd in the air. A short walk away from her little home places her by a highway with manufacturing buildings and processing plants across the street. The stench is pungent and constant; the smell of paint, diesel, and car exhaust mix in the winter air in a horrific medley that coats the entire neighborhood. “The creosote smells a little like paint,” Cano says. “When we walk sometimes it’s a headache from the smell.”
Cano rests on the arm of a sofa in her small living room, flitting between Spanish and English to express herself fully, “To the east by the university is fine, but here in the middle is where the pollution is, there are a lot of cars that pass by and many factories,” Cano says. She has two children, one born in Mexico and the other in the United States. Her demeanor is motherly and worn; she seems beaten by traumas in her life, but grows more animated in moments of indignation at the state of the environment.
“My son Emanuel says ‘when I grow up, I will make the factories stop polluting people,’” she explains. “He wants to care for the planet because he’s seeing all of this.” The main pollutant in Cano’s neighborhood is creosote from nearby JH Baxter, a wood preserving factory, but the other side of the highway is packed with industrial factories.
Lisa Arkin is the executive director of Beyond Toxics, an environmental justice organization based in Eugene. She considers the west Eugene neighborhood where Cano lives an “Environmental Justice Community.” Such neighborhoods can vary greatly in their make-up, but they all have one thing in common: “Disproportionate burdens of toxic pollution in communities,” Arkin explains. “Usually these communities are disadvantaged by socioeconomic status, low income or greater groups of minority folks, and also characterized by lack of access to decision makers.”
Arkin has worked for Beyond Toxics since 2001. Her organization focuses on helping Environmental Justice Communities throughout Oregon. Near Portland, these communities include mostly ethnic minorities like blacks and latinos, but socio-economically disadvantaged communities in rural areas of Oregon can be white and still face the same types of problems. In Lane County, however, the largest Environmental Justice Community is west Eugene, where young, low-income families often start their lives.
This neighborhood is inside the industrial corridor of Eugene. The area includes ten schools and even more factories. There are several cases where poorly planned zoning placed schools dangerously close to large industrial factories that pump pollutants into the air. These pollutants disproportionately affect Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the population of West Eugene, as compared to a 5–6 percent Latino population in the rest of Eugene. Arkin sometimes speaks with mothers in the area who fear for their children’s health.
“Their child… is continually coughing — just has a chronic cough, and they think it’s due to something outside,” Arkin says. “Mothers don’t like to see their children suffer.”
Families in west Eugene have to pay close attention to air quality before deciding if they can send their kids outside. Arkin says, “They want a summer night where they can open their window and they don’t have to be impacted by these smells.”
Issues with environmental justice go far deeper than pollution alone. Mercedes Lu is a fifth year Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon and a staff scientist for Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW). ELAW is an organization that provides lawyers for disenfranchised groups with environmental problems in countries around the globe. Lu says the problems with environmental justice run rampant worldwide. Racism can be found at the heart of the environmental movement and how we approach environmental issues.
“In my country, [Peru], there are more than 300,000 Amazon indigenous people. They are hunter-gatherers, and…live in areas where there are no roads,” says Lu. “It will cost somebody more than $800 to travel from such an area to the capital, Lima.”
Such indigenous people, when affected by pollution from oil companies and other corporate projects, face tremendous obstacles even after they reach the capital city. “They don’t speak the language; they don’t have documents. They dress in a different way. Therefore, people consider them inferior and will dismiss their claims,” says Lu, whose research at UO is based on pollution of the Amazon Rainforest by oil companies.
Ethnic minorities have less power than others in situations like this, which leads to the incorrect notion that they are just passive victims. This assumption of passivity creates a form of racism within the very organizations that try to help indigenous populations across the globe, Lu argues.
“Racism is not only confined to the polluter and the affected person, it’s also embedded in the relationships between the environmental organizations and the people that they claim they’re saving,” Lu says. “That is something that I see in the ways that funders operate — that environmental organizations operate.”
Victimizing minorities allows primarily European or American organizations to step in as heroes, which may prevent them from seeing the problems from the perspective of those affected. A better approach involves the privileged acknowledging equality with environmental victims and working together to resolve the matter. Such cooperation maintains good relationships between minorities and organizations that try to help them, and it may even prevent disenfranchised people from becoming violent when they feel particularly helpless.
Throughout her work with indigenous people in Peru and around the world, Lu has seen this institutionalized racism in action. She has found that the hierarchy can be broken down with the help of groups like ELAW, which act as interpreters between the two groups and help the indigenous population speak with technical language.
Arkin, on the other hand, feels that the term ‘environmental racism’ is unnecessarily inflammatory and probably does more harm than good.
“I think environmental racism is a bit of a charged term and could turn people off,” Arkin says. “It’s hard enough to get people to want to talk about environmental justice,” Arkin says. “But these concepts about fairness for all and equal access to elected officials, equal access to better policies, fairness in terms of where we put our bad pollution; all of that has to be embedded into laws, regulations, policies, and practices.”
Although she gets resources and assistance from Beyond Toxics, Josefina Cano has yet to see any real change in her environment. “I think that it’s ok that there are factories, but they shouldn’t put out bad chemicals that hurt our health and harm our environment,” she says. “This area is the most persecuted, and the most polluted from the factories.”
She hopes that with test results on the soil provided by Beyond Toxics, her community will be able to better protect themselves from pollution and bad zoning laws that put them near factories. But for now she has to wait, and listen as her daughter struggles to breathe at night.