Intro to Environmental Justice
Documentary Credit: Pierre Kattar
Washington Post Story Author: Lynne Duke
Here in Tennessee, just three hours away from Knoxville, is a county that has struggled with environmental racism: Dickson County. For more than four decades, Dickson’s mostly African American community on Eno Road housed the only cluster of solid waste facilities in the entire county (313,600 acres). Sheila Holt-Orsted and her family lived just 54 feet away from the facility and started experiencing major health problems beginning in 2002. Sheila battled breast cancer, her mother was diagnosed with cervical polyps, and she lost her father to colon cancer in 2007. She quickly noticed that her neighbors on Eno Road were succumbing to cancer as well.
The common factor? Drinking water.
Sheila Holt at contaminated family well, LDF Archives
The Holt-Orsted family descendants lived on Eno Road for over 150 years, acquiring their land being after emancipation. Then, beginning in the 1960s, manufacturing companies near Nashville began dumping industrial waste in an unlined landfill next to their property and continued to do so for decades. Over these decades, the Holt-Orsted family and the rest of the community on Eno Road drank water contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE). TCE is a toxic industrial chemical that seeped out of the Dickson landfill and into the community’s drinking water. In 1991, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reassured the Holt family that the water was safe and would not cause any adverse health effects, even though in 1990 government tests found TCE levels five times higher than the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL). In 1991, the Tennessee Department of Conservation expressed concern about the level of TCE in the Holts’ drinking water. The Tennessee Department of Health and Environment officials agreed that Mr. Holt’s water should continue to be sampled. However, this was never done, and the water was even deemed safe to drink, despite known contamination and lack of follow-up testing.
Meanwhile, their white counterparts in Dickson County received favorable treatment. In other parts of the county, there are records of testing, notification, remediation, and provision of alternative water supply. This also included temporary solutions of provided bottled water and then permanent solutions of connecting to the city water system.
Intersectionality of Environmental and Social Issues
It is important to understand the intersectionality of environmental and social issues. These issues are not mutually exclusive; they are directly linked. This means they operate in the presence of one another, and therefore must be viewed and addressed with an intersectional approach.
The overlaps of environmental and social issues are clear in the lives of Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC), where there are much higher rates of environmental degradation in historically marginalized communities. Marginalized communities grapple with the negative consequences of systematic racism that continues to harm people’s health, safety, and socioeconomic status. Black and Indigenous communities specifically were exploited for the foundation of American capitalism, which is born from colonization and the exploitation of natural resources and human beings. Both human and environmental exploitation are foundational to this country’s wealth, beginning with the stolen lands of Indigenous People and slavery which have never been fully reconciled and continue to bear consequences in the present day through forces like environmental racism.
Entire groups of people that have been deemed undesirable by those who benefit from exploitative capitalism have been pushed to the margins and into the same areas as harmful environmental practices. This forces people of color to live amongst harmful environmental practices while also suffering from fewer resources.
These two forces of poverty and environmental degradation then heighten the effects of one another. This makes these populations increasingly vulnerable to direct sources of pollution such as factories and landfills which are more likely to be built in places where low-income households and people of color live due to fewer resources, representation, and advocacy to protect them.
Polluting industries follow the path of least resistance, meaning that they will target areas where land, labor, and lives are the cheapest. Leading to the most profit and exploiting the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, the people in control of resources and industry retain the privilege of ignorance, with the suffering of the people and planet alike out of sight and out of mind.
What is Environmental Justice?
The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.”
This means all people should be treated with equity when decisions are made that have an environmental impact (factories, highways, landfills), and also means addressing the injustice of the past, which includes the environmental impact of racism and classism that persist.
Environmental degradation in communities of color is caused by negative environmental consequences in the presence of industrial, governmental, and commercial operations or policies. These implications include but are not limited to the physical presence of:
Factories
Landfills, Incinerators, and Hazardous Waste
Smelters
Sewage treatment plants
Pipelines
Fracking sites
Industrial Farming
Pesticides
Food deserts
Higher heat index
Vulnerable communities and individuals currently suffer, and will suffer most from the overarching climate and environmental crises.
How to Proceed: As Individuals and as a Whole
All of our resources, from the air, food, and water to energy, money, and materials, come from somewhere. Many of our resources create waste in the process of their production. These resources are not equitably distributed or cared for, and the waste from our resources can cause additional damage to resource equity. It is on us to inform ourselves, and most importantly act with intention inside of the broken systems we participate in that control our resources.
Additionally, the voices of BIPOC must always be heard and addressed as guides to achieve real justice and environmental progress. Their lived experiences make them the expert in this movement and their leadership is necessary to understand the full scope of environmental racism. Although the topic of environmental racism is becoming more mainstream, promises of restructuring and reconciliation will continue to be empty if there is no accountability or action.
“We urge you not only to plant trees or clean up our parks but also join the people of devastated communities across the country in their fight to stamp out environmental racism and economic injustice”
-Dr Robert Bullard, Author of Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty
Organizations In Knoxville
For More Organizations visit the Tennessee Environmental Council website