I've been experiencing a case of Environmental Injustice in Philadelphia. This contaminated site that surrounds my house is so politically connected that I can't get any help at all and the city has tried to cover it up and has continually violated my civil right to many municipal services including police protection. I've been in hospital 3x and displaced from my home for 3 years. I didn't know what else to do so put much of the story on this blog. www.greenuptoxicphiladelphia.com
You can see the violations. Also I put a lot of links to info about brownfields. The city has tried to call me crazy and discredit me, but I think the violations speak for themselves. They thought that because I was a woman and on my own, they could get away with this. I don't think so. I guess I went rogue. I think the violations speak for themselves. I have info on the original polluters. These problems have to be dealt with even when it affects only a small neighborhood. In this case, the watershed is also affected because the oil waste was dumped near the spring. Changing policy on the local level only happens by citizen action. The politics in Philadelphia around zoning and development are in the dark ages.
And Justice For All
An environmental expert talks about the challenges of helping disadvantaged communities deal with pollution and climate change at a local level.
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The way people are affected by the environment is often presented on a global scale—tides rising or forests dying as a result of climate change. But the way human beings have a direct impact on the planet is often more visible on a local level. Communities closer to industrial areas may be affected by higher than average asthma rates, for instance, and towns with poor water treatment or slow clean-up from disasters may show a disproportionate number of children with developmental problems.
A report released today by two environmental organizations, the Blacksmith Institute and Green Cross Switzerland, found that localized pollution is the leading contributing factor to disability and disease in communities across the world. Even in the United States, air pollution and contaminated water sources result in death, persistent illness and neurological impairment for millions of people. And children, researchers found, are usually disproportionately affected.
Activists for environmental justice claim that the people most affected usually lack the time or resources to fight against factors that will affect their health. But the problem, says Julie Sze, director of the Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Davis, is rarely politically motivated, at least not explicitly. It's more an issue of business-focused zoning and lax regulatory control. It can also be a symptom of the larger inequality in America, which often falls along race and class lines. Sze spoke to NEWSWEEK's Daniel Stone about the extent of environmental injustice and what can be done. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: What's the scope of this type of environmental injustice? How large is the problem?
Julie Sze: Globalization has really allowed injustice to really go global. The term really describes all different types of problems. Some people use it to describe climate change and how that affects people disproportionately in the third world. It's not [a single] issue but more an analytic frame that describes environmental injustice, so you can apply it to lots of different topics.
Problems like ground-water contamination and lack of clean air are found more in developing countries and more disadvantaged communities. How big is the problem in the U.S.?
You see it more and more in the U.S. There's a huge body of research that looks at the kind of global contaminants that you're talking about—groundwater contamination, toxic expulsion from refineries, whatever—in the U.S. It's definitely [happening] in the U.S., because there's inequality in the U.S.
What causes that? Is it local governments that are corrupt? Or officials who are out of touch with the people their decisions affect?
It's hard to generalize. A lot of it is different in different regions. For example, in the Southeast, you have large communities of African-Americans who live around the oil refineries down there. It can also be a factor of employment discrimination. If you look at [the effect of] nuclear mining on uranium[-rich] communities, that's very different, it's an entirely different problem. It's very hard to say what causes it. It's often historical and plays in with different factors, things like race, class, both class and race, zoning laws and, of course, [who has] interests in political decisions.
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