Today I asked the guys
who collect our garbage (We have little of it, by the way.), if they
were concerned about any environmental problems in their neighborhoods.
The answer: "Our environment is fine. We just have problems
with the government. We can't afford to live here anymore. Everything
is being done for the tourist, not for us who have lived here all our
lives."
This answer is representative of many similar answers, I
assume, if I were to ask this man's neighbors or even those in his
income status in other cities elsewhere.
And meanwhile, we white
environmentalists, many of us middle to upper income, ask ourselves why
we can't attract those who are low income into our campaigns.
As
a matter of fact, I recently called scores of environmental
groups in the region. I asked them what they were doing to reach out to
low income people, or to involve them in their work, and I got too
frequently an answer of "nothing."
We traditional
environmentalists seem to be more interested sometimes in protecting
land from development, trees from being cut down, and species from
becoming extinct, than we are in bonding with a sizable population of
low-income folks.
Without this 25 percent of so of our
population not with us, how can we expect to succeed in building a
sustainable environmental movement?
Bringing the low income
population into the movement seems to have selfish motives. I admit
that this is indeed true. However, the social justice person in me sees
other motives.
Those who are most affected by environmental
hazards are most frequently low income people. They live along the
fence line beside polluting factories. They are most likely to drink
unfiltered water. Their children are more likely to have breathing
difficulties because of where they live. They most frequently eat only
food that they can afford, which is often loaded with preservatives,
pesticides and unhealthy fats and sugars.
All the while we
environmentalists drive our hybrid cars, eat our organic locally grown
food, work at our one job and go home to our Energy Star home every
night.
There sometimes seems to be a bigger gap between us
environmentalists and low income neighbors than there is between the
haves and have nots. How disappointing!
But there are hopeful
signs out there. Here are some examples of low income folks seeing the
connection of the environment injustice in their lives with the bad
health and poor quality of life they live with everyday.
They are:
The Center on Race, Poverty and Environment in San Francisco;
Green for All and the West County Toxics Coalition in Oakland, CA;
Clean Air Community Trust in Asheville;
the California Environmental Rights Alliance;
Clean Water for North Carolina (Asheville and Durham, NC);
Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League (Glendale Springs, NC)
Latino Environmental Advance Project in the San Joaquin Valley; and
the Association of Irritated Residents (Delano, CA).
I'm
sure there are many more, but they are often far fewer and poorer than
the major well-known environmental groups like the Sierra Club,
Audubon, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense
Fund and others.
The Sierra Club, to its credit, does have a few
environmental justice organizers placed in some areas of the country,
and they work hard to involve low income populations in local
environmental issues.
Over all, unless we environmentalists get
out of the woods and the rivers, and onto the front porches and
storefront churches in low income neighborhoods, our environmental
movement will be doomed.
But we need to expand our movement not
just because we need more inclusive membership, but most of all,
because it is the right thing to do. We all are environmentalists,
whether we know it or now. We all breathe the same air, drink basically
the same water, often eat the same food grown on our country's farms.
But
if we are to get the low income people inside our doors, we must listen
to them. We must trust them to lead. As I noted above, they are the
people most frequently affected by environmental threats. And, like the
rest of us, they also care about endangered species and forests. But
they may have new methods of working on these problems, and we
professional environmentalists need to listen, and yes, even follow at
times.
We must also be willing to take the time to nurture, to
listen, to learn. We won't entrust low income people to our causes over
night. It will only be when we are open to losing our methods, to
admitting that there may be better ways of solving problems, and to
seeing problems through others' eyes, that we will be able to truly
make the environmental movement come under the ownership of all people.
We
need to make the environment a populist campaign. We need to make our
pie bigger. We need to be able to empower those most affected by
corporate ruination of our surroundings.
And we need to be able to bring the environment onto the football field, the bowling alley and to the next NASCAR race.
Someday,
some way this will happen. Let's begin opening our doors and opening our
minds today. Join me for the benefit of all our grandchildren and the
world, including billions of poor people throughout the world!
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