What’s Happened in the Media
It has been nearly three months since we posted our piece on ‘Black Lives Matter x Environmental Injustice’ where we explored the linkages between environmental and racial injustice. To carry on the discussion, we felt it was necessary to address what has happened broadly since the beginning of May, who has written what and attempt to answer various questions. Are we in a better place now in terms of momentum? Is the direction we are taking increasing environmental and racial justice?
Perhaps one of the most jarring events to occur since George Floyd’s murder has been the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin a little over a month ago. The disturbing familiarity sparked similar outrage, with marches emerging in cities across the US. However, the response was not nearly as profound in stark contrast. There has been critique that the widespread support for Black Lives Matter following the George Floyd Protests was retrospectively short-lived hopefulness and little more than a bandwagoning of support in light of peer pressure.
Within the media, there was a clear upward-facing trend that could be seen during the first weeks of June — coinciding with mainstream media’s reporting. These include The New York Times Racism and Environment reading list (5th June), Los Angeles Times article on ‘Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice’ (4th June), and the Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s powerful article on how ‘Racism derails efforts to save the planet’ (3rd June).
Google trends for search ‘Black Lives Matter’ — worldwide 01/05/2020–01/10/2020
Google trends for search ‘Racism’ — worldwide 01/05/2020–01/10/2020
Google trends for search ‘Environmental Racism’ — worldwide 01/05/2020–01/10/2020
Google trends for search ‘Environmental Justice’ — worldwide 01/05/2020–01/10/2020
While these are little more than general search trends, they are not indicative of any true loss of momentum. Rather it is clear that in today’s globalised world and the volatile year of 2020, we are facing a myriad of issues that leaves the media salivating with clickbait content.
Climate Gentrification and Extreme Weather
In our previous post on the subject matter, we touched upon how Miami has showcased an emerging phenomenon known as ‘climate gentrification’. Based on findings from Miami-Dade County, Keenan et. al 2018 hypothesize that climate change may work as a primary or at least partial driver in urban development trends that match traditional interpretations of gentrification. This is to say that high demand geographies that are advantageous from the lens of climate risk (e.g. sea-level rise and tropical storms) are more than likely to witness elevated real estate prices. In turn, displacement emerges as communities are driven to the brink of financial catastrophe as a result of decreasing affordability. Furthermore, areas with higher climate risk were also shown to have depreciation in property value, deepening income inequality.
The concept of climate gentrification can be summarized as comprising of three key components; the lure of higher ground, evacuation from extreme weather, and (inequitable) green investments. Just as wealthy people around the world move into lower-income neighbourhoods, bringing up real estate prices and driving out the former tenants, climate gentrification follows the same mechanisms.
By no accident can a correlation be found between race and income; the aforementioned study of Miami highlights how predominantly Black communities are the losing end in this transaction. It comes as no surprise that this trend is consistent in other coastal cities regularly affected by extreme weather patterns. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey, thousands lost their homes in New Orleans and Houston, respectively. Gentrification has risen from the ruins of displaced communities in both cities.
To frame just how dire the situation is, a stunning finding from the 2019 Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID) found that the US alone constituted 10 percent of all global disaster-related displacement. In 2018, 1.2 million people lost their homes as a result of hurricanes and wildfires. In the past 40 years, climate disasters have amounted to over 1.7 trillion dollars in costs, with a near steady increase in the frequency of events year after year.
Pertinent to the conversation are locations involved in another regular news piece of the past few months: Atlantic hurricanes. If you’ve ever wondered how and why hurricanes get their names by the way, allow us to explain. The World Meteorological Organization uses a naming system for North Atlantic tropical storms that involves a rotating list of alternating male and female names, which are pronounceable in English, French and Spanish (most spoken languages in areas affected). Starting from A for every new season, each subsequent storm takes its name from the next letter of the alphabet (excluding the letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z) for a total of 21 names per year.
So what happens if there are more than 21 storms in a year you might ask, and what does this have to do with anything? Well, there’s a backup list for that using the Greek alphabet, and meteorologists used it for the second time in history this year.
What makes this more jaw-dropping of an event, 2020 is now tied for the most North Atlantic tropical storms and most landfalling storms in a single season in recorded history. With two months left to go before we can call a close on the season, who knows how many more ‘surprises’ we have around the corner.
History of Environmental Racism
At this stage we would like to visit the origins of the concept of environmental racism. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, numerous studies emerged that clearly documented how minority groups in the US were disproportionately affected by pollution and environmental hazards within their communities. This was made profoundly clear in a groundbreaking report published in 1987 titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States”. The robust study found that race turned out to be the defining variable in establishing whether or not an individual lived near a facility emitting pollutants.
In response to the findings, African American civil rights leader Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who served as the director to the organization behind the report described “environmental racism” as referring to “both the intentional and unintentional disproportionate imposition of environmental hazards on minorities”.
This monumental declaration sparked an entire body of research into the topic in the late 80s and early 90s. For example, sociologist Robert Bullard published a book titled Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. It found that African American communities are deliberately targeted by polluting industries as a result of their economic and political vulnerability.
Fuelled by the growing evidence emerging from similar studies, Bullard alongside other activists founded The National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN) in 1999. This coalition of African American leaders and environmental justice activists was formed to implement a national action plan to combat racially discriminatory environmental decision-making and promote the advancement of sustainable initiatives. While the NBEJN was active in the early 2000s, it fell dormant following the death of its executive director, Damu Smith, in 2006.
The Situation Today
Fast-forward to 2020, the linkage between pre-existing health conditions, often the result of exposure to pollutants, and the rate of death caused by COVID-19 has been abundantly clear among Black communities. As recently as 2018, the EPA released a study that illustrated how non-white Americans are exposed to a substantially higher frequency of air pollution than their white counterparts — regardless of location. Considering the historical research discussed, it is clear as day that the same issues from the 1980s still affect communities of colour today and have only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
There has been somewhat of an unexpected outcome from COVID-19 and the momentum for BLM that the George Floyd protests ignited. Bullard, who still co-chairs the NBEJN, has found that the organisation has seen a revitalisation of its mission as a result of the disproportionate effect the pandemic has had on communities of colour.
The convergence of threats now calls for a new emphasis on the urgency of bringing attention to the underlying conditions that create the economic, health, and environmental disparity that relates to policing and criminal justice”
- Robert Bullard
So are we moving in the right direction to combat environmental and racial injustice? While it may appear that there has been a reduction in discourse when viewing trends in media, the fire has been reignited for organisations at the forefront of combating environmental racism.
Maintaining focus will require all of us to internalise Bullard’s point: for us to truly be in a better place now than three months ago, we need to maintain consolidated efforts that increase both environmental and racial justice.
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For more reading we have a compiled a list of interesting reads related to environmental and racial justice:
- Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich from The New York Times wrote an article on ‘How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighbourhoods Sweltering’. In this article, Plumer and Popovich highlighted the result of poor city planning resulting in communities of colour facing the brunt of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
- Biden’s climate plan aims to create an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the U.S Department of Justice to pursue cases of clear violations of environmental injustice. Biden aims to create a data-driven Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool which would identify communities threatened by the impacts of climate change, economic and racial inequality, and multi-source environmental pollution.
- A summary of Marek Szilvasi’s report finds evidence of environmental racism against Roma found in urban, semi-urban, and rural settings across Central and South-Eastern Europe.
- ‘Denver Wants to Fix a Legacy of Environmental Racism’ according to Veronica Penney from The New York Times. This article highlights how Denver is pushing public policy to green low-income areas and the complexities that follow.
- Sacoby Wilson discusses the connections between environmental and racial injustices’ in this Yale e360 interview ‘Connecting the Dots Between Environmental Injustice and the Coronavirus’.
