Happy Earth Day
Happy Earth Day! Well, by the time you read this Earth Day will have been yesterday. The first Earth Day acknowledgement was 54 years ago in 1970 in order to bring worldwide attention to the environmental challenges our planet was and is facing.
You know how I’m prone to saying that America’s Thing With Race affects everything? It’s like a wet, wool blanket that lies over every part of the country. It kinda smells. It’s moldy and unpleasant. It’s heavy and restricts our movement. But as damaging as it is, it’s been there for so long, we seldom notice it.
So it’s appropriate on this 54th Earth Day to point out that the Southwest Organizing Project - SWOP - sure noticed the wet blanket way back in 1990. SWOP, formed in 1980, is an organization whose mission it is to “empower disenfranchised communities in the Southwest United States to realize racial and gender equality and social and economic justice.” True or not, the environmental movement, especially 44 years ago, has long been viewed as a White movement concerned with pretty viewscapes and preserving wilderness playgrounds. Frustrated that the environmental movement seemed focused on White people, White Communities, and White issues while ignoring the environmental injustices of people in Black and Brown communities being killed by the environments they lived in, over a hundred community, political, organizational, and religious leaders wrote to the ten leading environmental organizations of the day, who referred to themselves as The Group Of Ten, including the vaunted Sierra Club, outlining their thoughts and concerns. The letter - which quickly and famously became known simply as, “The SWOP letter”, was a direct hit that landed like a small nuke. I can vividly recall the brouhaha it raised. I’ve lightly edited the original letter for brevity.
“We are writing this letter in the belief that through dialogue and mutual strategizing we can create a global environmental movement that protects us all. We are artists, writers, academics, students, activists, representatives of churches, unions, and community organizations writing you to express our concerns about the role of your organization and other national environmental groups in communities of people of color in the Southwest.
For centuries, people of color in our region have been subjected to racist and genocidal practices including the theft of lands and water, the murder of innocent people, and the degradation of our environment. Mining companies extract minerals leaving economically depressed communities and poisoned soil and water. The U.S. military takes lands for weapons production, testing and storage, contaminating surrounding communities and placing minority workers in the most highly radioactive and toxic worksites. Industrial and municipal dumps are intentionally placed in communities of color, disrupting our cultural lifestyle and threatening our communities' futures. Workers in the fields are dying and babies are born disfigured as a result of pesticide spraying.
Although environmental organizations calling themselves the "Group of Ten" often claim to represent our interests, in observing your activities it has become clear to us that your organizations play an equal role in the disruption of our communities. There is a clear lack of accountability by the Group of Ten environmental organizations towards Third World communities in the Southwest, in the United States as a whole, and internationally.
Your organizations continue to support and promote policies which emphasize the clean-up and preservation of the environment on the backs of working people in general and people of color in particular. In the name of eliminating environmental hazards at any cost, across the country industrial and other economic activities which employ us are being shut down, curtailed or prevented while our survival needs and cultures are ignored. We suffer from the end results of these actions, but are never full participants in the decision-making which leads to them.
Comments have been made by representatives of major national environmental organizations to the effect that only in the recent past have people of color begun to realize the impacts of environmental contamination. We have been involved in environmental struggles for many years and we have not needed the Group of Ten environmental organizations to tell us that these problems have existed.
It is our sincere hope that we be able to have a frank and open dialogue with your organization and other national environmental organizations. It is our opinion that people of color in the United States and throughout the world are clearly endangered species. Issues of environmental destruction are issues of our immediate and long term survival. We hope that we can soon work with your organization in helping to assure the safety and well-being of all peoples.”
I honestly do not know if environmental justice has become more just. But I know that hog farms with their stench and effluent, affecting air and water quality, property values, and quality of life are still largely located in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Ditto for chemical plants, munitions dumps, and repositories for deadly coal ash - a powdery substance that is left after coal has been burned that contains known carcinogens such as boron, lead, arsenic, and mercury.
I know that animal processing plants are still largely staffed by Brown-skinned immigrants. I know that Black children contract asthma - a life threatening condition - at many times the rate of White children. I know that 10 years after it made headlines, water in majority Black Flint MI still flows thru lead pipes.
I know that an all-White group of city leaders and state transportation officials designed the freeways of Oakland to prioritize the safety of White neighborhoods. I know that these planners allowed diesel trucks to freely use Interstate 880 — which runs through majority Black West Oakland — but banned diesel trucks from a stretch of Interstate 580 that runs past the East Hills and the city of San Leandro, which were nearly 99 percent White at the time.
I know that Emergency Room visits for asthma in West Oakland are 76 percent higher than the county average, according to the Alameda County Health Department. And I know that hospitalizations in West Oakland vs in the rest of the county are more than 85 percent higher, and that death from heart disease is nearly 35 percent higher. Black lives matter, just not all that much.
I know that when the National Parks and Conservation Association, the advocacy group for National Parks, runs a story about Black Americans in their newsletter that they lose membership.
I know that a couple years ago when I asked a close friend who leads an organization that partners with the Department of the Interior to guide and protect a prominent National Monument what his biggest headache has been, he promptly named Trump to which I promptly mentioned that Trump’s racist campaign had brought this National Monument it’s biggest problem.
But I also know from my own experience that Black and Brown membership and leadership in environmental organizations is way up. Two of the country’s leading environmental organizations, the Sierra Club and Wild Earth Guardians are lead by two Black men, Ben Jealous and Hop Hopkins.
So I’m not sure what I do and don’t know except that I know this for sure: America’s wet blanket still lies over everything and most of America hasn’t connected the dots.