Environmental justice 

Essay on a positive approach to environmental justice.  Greg Gerritt 2/28/08

Too much of the work of environmental justice is wrapped up in fighting the hazards that are found in low income and people of color communities.  We know the settlement patterns of urban New England.  The walk to work factories meant that the lowest paid workers lived the closest to the hazards of the factories, in the most run down housing with rats, lead paint, cockroaches, in the most flood prone sites with their water borne hazards, including Cholera and dioxin.  As the economy and technology changed traffic added to the issues our inner city communities had to deal with.  The economy continued to churn and now the jobs have left the inner city, moved to the suburbs, while the toxic legacy remains in the city.  We end up with schools on toxic brownfields because that is the only spaces big enough to site a school in a very dense city, the place where the factory burned down 50 years ago or was abandoned when the jobs moved to China 20 years ago, while the community members face longer and longer commutes to jobs.  We know we have to work long and hard to remediate and eliminate hazards, but there is more to this struggle.

With the complete intertwining of poverty and degraded environments it is going to take more than just efforts to remediate toxic sites and teach the community about hazards in order to reverse the current situation.  It is going to take building a community understanding that societies will never end poverty and discrimination without healing ecosystems.  And that we shall never heal ecosystems without ending poverty and discrimination. We shall have many challenges in remediating the specific hazards strewn across the Providence landscape, but maybe the biggest challenge is to foster the understanding of the relationship between poverty and ecosystem collapse and then fostering the understanding of what it actually takes to heal ecosystems.  Ecosystems, when healthy, clean the water, moderate the climate, feed the community, and provide resources for the economy to transform.

Modern Americans, fostered by the information put out by the rulers of communities, have forgotten the role healthy ecosystems play in healthy communities.  And healthy is not just an absence of hazards, a reduction in toxics. It is a place of abundance, where the natural world and the people are symbiotic. Where building healthy soils creates livelihoods and food, where the waters are both swimmable and fishable, and have fish populations that can provide a component of the diet reliably.  Where production does not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions but is run on clean renewable power.  Where it is safe for children to be outside, and what they can learn there builds stronger communities.

It is therefore critical that an exploration of environmental justice in our community needs not just a focus on reduction of hazards, but also a focus on the healing of ecosystems.  That we focus as much on the assets as on the destruction.  That our education and mapping find what is right, what can be built on, as well as what needs fixing.

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