By Anne van Oorschot, AWC The Hague
I am originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US and have spent the past 39 years explaining to people in the Netherlands where that is. Everyone knows where New York, Florida, Texas and California are, but Minnesota is someplace most people had never even heard of. While the fact that not everyone knows exactly where Minneapolis, Minnesota is remains true, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of excessive police force, everyone has now definitely heard of it! Although I never thought of my hometown as an especially racist place when I lived there, the beginnings of the racism presently on display in Minneapolis must have been present while I was growing up. How disorienting to realize that I never really saw it. I sympathize with the baked-in racism that I now realize is in seemingly every community in America and will stand with others to see that situation change, but I don’t see it as my #1 priority. My passion is the environment and climate change. So imagine my surprise in the past weeks of reading articles to realize just how intertwined racism is with the problems of climate change. You are not alone if the connection between racism and the climate crisis is not immediate to you, but I do hope you will read on so I can share with you what I have learned.
“There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives.”‒ Audre Lorde
Environmental racism at home
The concept of environmental racism was coined in the United States in the early 1980s, and refers to any practice which leads to an unequal distribution of environmental (pollution) burdens between different groups of people, with “race” being the strongest determinant. Many studies show that communities of color and poor communities are at a far greater risk of being negatively impacted by environmental risks. Consider the following: airports, power plants and the busiest roads in the West tend to be in the most disadvantaged working class areas, where a disproportional number of black and brown communities live. London City Airport is located in Newham, where 40 percent of the population gets by on £20,000 or less per year. Consider as well that the average salary of a London City airport passenger is £92,000 per year. Environmental justice is the name of a movement that evolved in response to those findings, stressing that specific social groups are hit harder by the environmental and climate policies that other groups benefit from.
Environmental racism not only refers to the unequal dispersion of environmental disadvantages but also to the underlying systemic structures causing those inequalities. Let’s look at an example. Some industry leaders state that they do not carry out “intentional” discrimination; it’s all a result of simple economic reasoning. In an attempt to maximize profits, production costs should be minimized, so a factory location is chosen with the lowest land prices. This leads to industries invading low income communities, where residents cannot afford to live in more expensive areas. The pollution, which always accompanies the industrial process, decreases the quality of living conditions as well as the land value. The former motivates those who are sufficiently affluent to move away, while the latter is a factor leading in the further impoverishment of the area. Since industry and government try to avoid communities which are capable of forming an effective opposition to this sort of industrialized process, communities of color and poor communities are more likely to fall victim to this negative chain of events. Due to political underrepresentation of communities of color and their discrimination in the white dominated public discourse, this negative cycle continues.
Environmental racism on a global scale
Systematic environmental racism does not limit itself to Western counties. Looking at it from a global perspective, due to the rapid economic growth of capitalist economies since World War II, economies are in constant need of natural resources. Economic value is prioritized over the social or biological value of nature in the exploitation of the necessary natural resources. This often results in conflicts with indigenous communities on whose land resources are found. The result is decimated natural resources, altered infrastructures and the compromise of traditional ways of living that respect the environment. Indigenous communities the world over have been fighting against this trend for years, but have made little headway against huge corporations.
While climate change poses a threat to everyone living on this planet, its harmful effects are not distributed evenly among countries and communities. Island nations and low-income countries around the world, from the Maldives and Haiti to Bangladesh and Madagascar, bear the brunt of environmental destruction and man-made and corporate-driven global warming. What do these countries have in common? They are all former colonies or prefectures of major Western powers. If one examines global and transnational patterns of environmental injustice, they clearly show that the export of polluting industries and waste goes more often by far to countries that were former colonies and are mainly populated by people of color.
A call to action?
Politicians, experts, commentators and activists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia are currently arguing in unison that their governments should view the Corona pandemic as a wake-up call to improve their relationship with the environment and take constructive steps to tackle climate change.
While the plans offered for achieving a “green” recovery differ in detail, they appear to share one important feature: a tendency to ignore the global nature of the climate crisis. They ignore the nuanced and lived experiences of the hard hit populations in the southern hemisphere ‒ often communities of color ‒ as well as the role of co
untries in the northern hemisphere in creating an unfair system that marginalizes the environmental groups, peoples and ideas in the South. It seems clear to me that the only way for a better, healthier and more prosperous future for all is through a truly global climate stabilization and resilience plan that includes reparations to former colonies that are struggling to withstand a crisis that they played little role in creating.
Individual action
Even though many individuals are concerned about climate breakdown, they do not see how they can influence something so big, abstract, and threatening. While there is much an individual can and should do, we fall short – not because we don’t change enough in our individual lives, but because we don’t take collective action. It’s up to us to demand and create broad, structural change ‒ not only for the environment, but also for the racial inequities at home and abroad that contribute to it.
Sources:
Climate Activism and Anti-Racism
