It’s easy to think of pollution as a problem we all share. Bad air, dirty water, chemical contamination, and other challenges spread themselves out roughly equally. Or so we think. The truth is more complicated: some places are more polluted than others, and the worst conditions tend to be in poor and minority communities.
For too long, this has been environmentalism’s dirty secret. Well-intentioned activists work on environmental issues but many go home to the relative health and safety of clean neighborhoods, which have been kept that way by money and influence that force the sources of pollution — whether it’s a chemical factory or a rail yard or waste incinerator — into areas whose citizens lack the resources and the power to stop them.
This not-in-my-backyard phenomenon is a big problem, and it’s compounded by the fact that many of the environmental burdens it shifts to suffering communities are inadvertently supported by environmentalists everywhere. The factory makes the products we like. The railyard gets them to the store. The incinerator disposes of them when their usefulness ends. And most of us of never see any of this happen because we can afford to live where it doesn’t.
This environmental racism occurs on all scales from local minority neighborhoods to poor third world nations, yet most organized environmental efforts and groups have focused their attention elsewhere. For whatever reason, they’ve failed to recruit meaningful numbers of minority participants and have too often ignored the unique problems these people face.
A recent L.A. Times article reports that this is changing. Fed up with the often horrifying conditions in their communities, poor and minority residents are pushing back. This is good news for all of us. For one thing, environmental racism is an ugly black mark on our efforts to create a truly just and sustainable nation. On a purely moral level, it demands to be addressed. Equally important is the fact that these courageous people are trying to clean up places whose pollution ultimately affects us all.
When they win, we all win. If the environmental justice movement can become pervasive, it can succeed and force one of two things to happen. Either the root causes of much of the country’s environmental blight will be erased at the source or dirty facilities will get pushed into areas whose residents are better equipped to make sure these operations clean up their act. For these and other reasons, we should encourage and help those on the front lines as much as we can. It’s perhaps the best way to get to make sure that many of our environmental challenges aren’t in anyone’s backyard.