ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM: COMPOUNDING POVERTY WITH POISON

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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BERKELEY, May 1 2005 (IPS) - Environmental racism is a global phenomenon that follows closely in the wake of economic globalisation, writes Mark Sommer, director of the U.S.-based Mainstream Media Project and host of the award-winning international radio program, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’ In this article, Sommer writes that for the affluent global minority, \’\’out of sight, out of mind\’\’ leaves the conscience largely untroubled.The media often cooperate by giving only fleeting coverage to distant industrial accidents. The catastrophic leak of lethal chemicals at a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, two decades ago left 3,000 people dead and 500,000 injured in the worst industrial accident in history. But while the victims of the World Trade Centre attack, which killed as many but injured few, attracted enough attention to transform the global agenda, Bhopal was soon forgotten. Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage sites in China, India, and elsewhere not only lowers labour costs but enables manufacturers to avoid environmental regulations that would otherwise make their products non-competitive. In its headlong lunge for industrial supremacy, China is placing the poorest of its own citizens at greatest risk by siting and operating manufacturing plants with scant regard for their lethal effects on the surrounding air, water, and soil.

Environmental racism is a global phenomenon that follows closely in the wake of economic globalisation. When seeking sites for toxic industrial development, multinational firms are well aware of the political power of affluent ”NIMBYs” who benefit from the products these firms produce but insist, ”Not In My Backyard”. Most also prefer to dispose of their discarded products in the global South where poverty and the lack of employment alternatives make handling toxics a tragic necessity.

Outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage sites in China, India, and elsewhere not only lowers labour costs but enables manufacturers to avoid environmental regulations that would otherwise make their products non-competitive. Nor are they alone in their ”race to the bottom”. In its headlong lunge for industrial supremacy, China is placing the poorest of its own citizens at greatest risk by siting and operating manufacturing plants with scant regard for their lethal effects on the surrounding air, water, and soil.

For the affluent global minority, ”out of sight, out of mind” leaves the conscience largely untroubled. The media often cooperate by giving only fleeting coverage to distant industrial accidents. The catastrophic leak of lethal chemicals at a Union Carbide facility in Bhopal, India, two decades ago left 3,000 people dead and 500,000 injured in the worst industrial accident in history. But while the victims of the World Trade Centre attack, which killed as many but injured few, attracted enough attention to transform the global agenda, Bhopal was soon forgotten. Its victims received little of the USD 470 million settlement and continue to suffer from severe respiratory illnesses and congenital defects in their offspring.

Even in a wealthy nation like the United States, pockets of poverty attract toxic industry. Non-whites are 50 percent more likely to live in communities with hazardous waste facilities. Residents of largely poor, non-white ”fenceline communities” bordering on giant petrochemical plants in Louisiana’s ”Cancer Alley” and other sites around the country suffer disproportionately from air, water and soil pollution and lead and pesticide poisoning. These environmental health hazards in turn produce significantly higher rates of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and birth defects.

Tracing cause and effect, however, is a challenging task requiring long-term research and data collection for which there is little funding, especially when those affected are not in a position to demand it.

In Diamond, Louisiana, a mixed-income African American community located beside the Mississippi River along the Chemical Corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, several hundred direct descendants of former slaves live sandwiched between two huge chemical refineries operated by oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell. For half a century they have lived with a toxic bouquet of polluted air, massive gas flares, and periodic industrial accidents. The memory of two huge explosions at the vast Norco complex continues to haunt many long-time residents.

Most important, Diamond’s residents have experienced health effects they are convinced come from close exposure to Shell’s chemical operations — headaches, allergies, asthma, and respiratory illnesses of all kinds, skin disorders and cancers that have taken numerous lives. Curiously, however, the community of Norco (which officially includes Diamond) also contains a 98 percent white neighbourhood that shares a fenceline with Shell. The two are separated by a wooded strip — and by a chasm of culture and experience that leaves the two communities worlds apart.

Unlike Diamond’s residents, few of whom have been able to secure work at Shell, Norco’s white neighbourhood is a company town where Shell has provided jobs, schools, hospitals, and other amenities to generations of residents. While Diamond’s residents reported severe symptoms of chemical contamination, Norco’s residents insisted that their health was better than the national average. The perception gap between the two halves of Norco demonstrates the consequences of institutionalised segregation and the ways in which socio-economic factors contribute to a toxic natural environment in racially divided communities.

In the mid-nineties, Diamond’s black residents embarked on an arduous twenty-year campaign to get Shell to buy them out at prices that would enable them to relocate — an option they couldn’t afford on their own. Resistant at first, Shell eventually succumbed to pressure from bad publicity masterfully orchestrated by environmental activists from across the United States as well as legal and scientific experts who successfully challenged industry and government data.

The campaign was also aided by drawing connections to foreign environmental justice struggles like Shell’s notorious repression of the Ogoni people in the Niger delta. At a major global climate change conference, Diamond’s grassroots leader Margie Richard publicly confronted a top Shell official with a sample of Diamond’s toxic bouquet and asked him to breathe it. Stunned and moved, Shell’s Robert Kleiburg quickly mobilised top Shell management to take decisive action to avoid a repeat of the company’s Nigerian experience.

Over time, Diamond’s seemingly quixotic quest form compensation not only succeeded in securing a buyout from Shell but became a model for environmental justice campaigns worldwide. Among the many lessons learned was that success depends on the coordination of complementary strategies — grassroots activism, legal and scientific expertise, back channel negotiations, foundation grants, appearances by celebrities and politicians, and the mobilisation of diverse constituencies — local, national and international. And it requires both barricading and bridging, a shared understanding among allies that such apparently contradictory tactics are often both essential.

Just as it is crucial to remain faithful to one’s first purposes, it is critical to connect on a human level to those on ”the other side” with different interests but equally worthy motives. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)