When it comes to environmental justice, there is always a two-tiered system that favors the haves over the have-nots. Environmental racism is pervasive and is happening on a global scale.
Numerous studies of environmental pollution show that it is far more likely to occur in poor, non-white areas. One study last year determined that just 5% of industrial chemical polluters in the US were responsible for 90% of the pollution and that virtually all those sites were located in poor, minority areas. A further study showed that polluting industries were almost always located in those poor, minority communities after they became low-income and non-white. As the one study noted, these communities became “sacrifice zones,” in which polluters “can exist without the focus they might receive in other locations.”
Now a new study out of Flint, Michigan shows just how devastating these environmental pollutants can be to the communities they inhabit. In Flint, the water system became contaminated by lead when the city decided to save some money and not treat their lead pipes correctly.
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Fertility rates decreased by 12% among Flint women, and fetal death rates increased by 58%, after April 2014.” April, 2014 is when the city of Flint converted to using the Flint River with drinking water, stopped treating the lead pipes, and, accordingly, the lead content of drinking water in Flint spiked through the roof. These actions were finally revealed by the state nearly 18 months later and only after independent groups noticed increased lead levels in Flint’s citizens.
But environmental racism is not only a local phenomenon, it is also occurring on a global scale. As
Erik Loomis points out, “The reality of climate change is that a global disaster created almost entirely by rich white people in the Global North is going to disproportionately affect the poor of the Global South who had almost nothing to do with it.” We see that so clearly today, where the poorer Caribbean islands are being devastated by hurricanes whose intensity is linked to climate change. The UN is citing climate change as a factor in the drought and the increasing food insecurity in Kenya. In the Pacific,
numerous islands in the Solomon Islands have been lost to rising sea levels.
Meanwhile, the Republican party claims global warming is a hoax and Donald Trump pulls the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Do I have to make a direct connection?
