The Intersection of Environmental Justice with Race, Class, and Gender

In the documentary A Fierce Green Fire: The Battle for a Living Planet, civil rights activist James Farmer says, “If we do not save the environment, whatever we do in civil rights or the war on poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.”  He makes a good point, but I think that environmental justice takes different forms depending on race, class, and gender, and that different categories of people are affected differently by environmental harm.

Around the middle of the film, we are told about a plan in 1982 to locate a hazardous landfill in Warren County, North Carolina.  At the time, the county was 75% black, yet had no black people on the County Commission.  This, to me, raises suspicion; was Warren County chosen as a location because the white people making the decision consciously or subconsciously valued black people less?  I think it is likely, though of course there is no way to prove it.  In any case, this was not an isolated occurrence.  Black people, and poor people, are often disproportionally affected by environmental hazards.

The US is not the only place where people of color are unfairly adversely affected by things like this.  It seems to be easier for companies to exploit or endanger people in developing countries (which are often non-white) than in developed ones (which are often white); those countries don’t have structures in place to resist that colonialism, and often have less strict regulations and labor laws.  However, companies certainly manage exploit and endanger people in developed countries, as well, and I am not sure of the extent of the disparity.  This was evidenced, to some extent, in the film Big Men; Kosmos was initially able to come in and profit from Ghanaian oil.  And would Dupont have been able to get away with what they did in Bhopal, India if they had done it in America instead?  I’m inclined to think not, although perhaps they would have, given how badly the Love Canal incident was handled.

Speaking of which, one thing I noticed while watching the Love Canal segment in A Fierce Green Fire was the phrasing used in the health department’s response to the health study the residents had done.  They dismissed it on the grounds of it having been “done by housewives with a vested interest.”  This derogatory use of the term "housewife" implies that they valued the study less because it had been done by women.

So, it seems clear that environmental justice issues intersect with issues of race, class, and gender.  One of the people featured in A Fierce Green Fire mentioned that Civil Rights and Environmental groups didn’t get together for a while, but hopefully now the intersections will be taken into account and the movements will join forces.  They will both be more powerful that way.