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.
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And Justice For All
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New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina comes to mind as affected by environmental factors and lack of appropriate policy. Are there other communities with similar issues?
I've looked at New York. A lot of it there is industrial pollution. Black and Latino child-asthma rates are almost eight times the national average. That plays into the zoning history that concentrated all these industrial developers in the same place. Asthma is just one case. I've looked at the San Diego and Tijuana area, where people are affected by trade between [the two cities] because zoning around the border can often be more lax.
Is it possible to chart who's to blame in each instance?
A lot of it has to do with very general things. In New York, again, it's an issue of zoning. It's not targeted. Decision-makers made decisions to make Manhattan less industrialized and that pushed a lot of industrialization—which usually pollutes the most—into the outer parts of the city. So how do you implicate that? It's just the law and regulations, but it's never politically calculated [to target people].
Is the problem compounded by the fact that these communities lack the resources and time to assemble?
Absolutely. It's all about resources and access to decision making. One of the slogans behind environmental justice is giving people "a place at the table." There are lots of elements to environmental justice: access to decision makers, access to legal resources and many others. It's not surprising that middle- and lower-class communities mobilize differently.
Is there a solution?
On some levels, people are very aggressive in trying to deal with this, both with regulatory framework and through legislation. California, for example, has over 20 laws that deal with environmental justice. So I wouldn't say it's a lost cause. I wouldn't want anyone to think that there's no way we can deal with any of this.
The term "environmental injustice" implies morality
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that those who aren't affected have a responsibility to act and speak up for those who are. Is there a national, even global responsibility here?
Yes, I think part of the responsibility is understanding that different groups experience their world according to circumstances that are different. Even if you're not affected, you're still connected to that person.
So how can unaffected communities play a more vocal role in protecting affected communities?
In Europe, and I think this is really interesting, they have a very different fundamental approach to dealing with this. It's called the precautionary principle, which California is now also using. It basically says that instead of proving that something causes harm, you have to prove that it doesn't cause harm. That affects how things get produced and how people think about development. That's a really concrete example of how we can do better, and where we'll end up, in comparison to the Europe, if we don't.
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