Assignment #4: Part I (Environmental Justice)

Web link to the newspaper article dealing with environmental justice:
Climate change: A civil rights issue for blacks
http://www.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2010-01-08-column08_ST2_U.htm

I selected a USA Today article published in January 2010 and written by Julianne Malveaux. This newspaper article basically deals with a climate change issue discussed in the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen in January 2010, which focuses on conflicts between the rich (the United States and European countries) and the poor countries regarding environmental issues and how they deal with creating better global environmental performance. In this article, the author consistently argues that “climate change is more than an environmental issue” and “it is a human rights and economic justice issue” because climate change influences different countries, different communities, and people of different colors in various ways. Focusing on the different impact of climate change issues on black people, the author argues that environmental issues should be considered with various racial or gender perspectives.

The author’s viewpoint on different impacts of environmental issues like climate change is consistent with that of many environmental justice-related policy actors. For example, Mirey Navarro’s article in the New York Times in March 2009 (“In Environmental Push, Looking to Add Diversity”) shows that national environmental organizations in the United States have traditionally drawn their membership from among the white and affluent, and have faced criticism for focusing more on protecting resources than protecting people. The need for racial diversity has been a persistent issue in the environmental movement in the 1990s, according to Navarro, and under-representation of minorities in American environmental policy-making brings about some bias in the view of environmental problems such as urban sprawl or working smart programs, as Rast (2006) and Paehlke (2010) mentioned.

Several existing data show the possibility of biased environmental perspectives among policy actors. According to a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation study, referred to in Navarro’s article, African-Americans produce less greenhouse gas (about 20%) than other Americans, but they bear a greater burden in terms of pollution and climate change. National polls also show high environmental concern among minorities. A post-election poll for the National Wildlife Federation in November, for example, found increasing support among blacks and Latinos for candidates keen on addressing global warming. And surveys by the Public Policy Institute of California have found that minorities are sometimes even more concerned than white respondents about environmental issues like air pollution. In spite of this circumstance, under-representation of minorities in environmental governance gives rise to environmental racism and undesirable environmental performance for all. It is a basic logic that Navarro consistently argues in the article. Under the current environmental injustice racism trend, minorities, especially African-Americans, have been seriously excluded, although the Obama administration has taken more action orienting toward racial diversity on environmental governance.

As Rast mentioned, there are several efforts to realize environmental justice in the United States. Under “new regionalism,” representing developing voluntary forms of cooperation, coalition-building efforts, economic competitiveness, quality of life, and new urbanism (p. 251), current growth patterns bring about several malfunctions in urban and community development: the absence of people of color from smart growth coalition (p. 250), urban sprawl, traffic congestion, pollution, or loss of green space (p. 251). To overcome these problems, there are several community groups for environmental justice and they try to form coalitions for environmental justice and health, conduct research for doing so, and develop models for relevant and desirable environmental-movement building. The movement for environmental justice is still under construction. Racial or gender diversity, building models for desirable environmental health and sustainable development, and voluntary or participatory community-based urban planning and development, like smart growth that Paehlke mentioned, will be needed for developing better environmental discourse among policy actors in the future.