A friend and I used to lead a bird club for teens. Our students came from immigrant and Black families and lived in underserved communities. Presented with a menu of choices for an after-school activity, they lost the school’s lottery for the oversubscribed robotics, personal finance, and “Project Runway” sessions and had to settle for us — a couple of obsessed birders who insisted that they go outside, even in the winter.
I remember talking to one student for whom we were not the last choice. He liked birds, but only watched them from his bedroom window. When I (a white person from Cambridge, MA privileged enough to walk around outside whenever I want) asked why he didn’t go out to a park or the woods, he told me that going outside meant getting asthma, or stepping on broken glass and dog poop.
For decades, some communities have been deprived of nature, living in neighborhoods degraded by neglect or worse. Historically, when a city or state looked for a location to put a high-impact project such as a landfill, substation, industrial facility, or high traffic exit ramp, more often than not they selected locations close to communities that are disproportionately Black, indigenous, or people of color or low-income neighborhoods. It still happens today.
As a result, even today, these neighborhoods are more likely to experience poor air quality, increased noise, polluted waterways, trash, rats, urban heat islands, and toxic waste than whiter and richer communities are. To add insult to injury, many municipalities have also tended not to invest in green space in such neighborhoods because in some places there was an assumption that green infrastructure would die or spaces go unused. Without community support from elected officials, and a lack of influence and power, BIPOC neighborhoods tend to remain underserved while more affluent and whiter areas are overserved.
So it is that racism has permeated the very design of the cities we live in. While income creates disparities, income alone does not explain environmental inequity among neighborhoods. Decades of economic, environmental, and land use research have given us a mountain of unambiguous and consistent evidence of “environmental racism.” Even Trump’s own EPA agreed.
Who Pays
Sociologist Robert Bullard, often described as the father of environmental justice, published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality in 1990 sharing vivid stories of the environmental struggles of Black communities in the South and exploring how racism influences who benefits from development and industry and who ultimately pays. Bullard gave this new movement the moral clarity, language, and strategy it needed to catch fire. “Environmental justice is the principle that all people are entitled to equal environmental protection regardless of race, color, or national origin,” Bullard said. “It’s the right to live and work and play in a clean environment … Environmental justice advocates for healthy, sustainable, livable communities that ensure tax dollars are spent on those in need rather than where the power lies. Money follows money and power. Environmental justice challenges that dominant paradigm.”
In the early 1990s, Congressman John Lewis was especially impatient for such a paradigm shift. He understood well how race and the environment were connected. He introduced the first environmental justice bill in Congress in 1992, with support from Vice President Al Gore, and although it failed, President Clinton signed an executive order in 1994, mandating that all federal agencies and federally funded projects consider the impact on poor and minority communities. It was a start.
The Smell of Money
In the 1990s, I used to travel occasionally to Jacksonville, Florida for family reasons. The rancid air from the local paper plant stung my eyes the minute I stepped out of the airport. I could not get used to it. I could barely make it through a long weekend — and yet people lived with this horrible smell all day every day for decades.
Whenever I commented on it, locals chuckled and called it the “smell of money,” a phrase, it turns out, that former Alabama Governor George Wallace coined when people complained about the stink along the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast from industrial facilities and refineries. The smell of money is what people in the South said when you asked about the acrid air.
That bitter stench in old Jacksonville, and so many other cities like it, produced a complex and enduring burden for Black people. It had a negative impact on the value of Black-owned homes, the growth of Black-owned small businesses, and even a sense of community connection and social capital. Who wants to stroll the main street when you can barely breathe? The stench kept kids inside instead of outside. It kept visitors away. And it isolated people from nature so they would know less and ultimately care less, or even fear the natural world. Jacksonville eventually cleaned up. But the damage was done. The smell of money is the smell of racism.
The most unconscionable unacceptable impact of environmental racism is the impact it has on the health of the people who live in polluted and environmentally degraded areas. What kind of society accepts this? Across the nation, asthma rates are considerably higher in communities of color — asthma mortality rates in children and adults are nearly eight and three times higher, respectively, in Black Americans than in white people.
The smell of money, it turns out, includes high levels of the fine and often toxic particulates that cause deadly asthma attacks.
Water is no different. You can taste the smell of money in the ice cubes in your sweet tea. Don’t ask what’s in the water. Degrading infrastructure and outflow from industrial plants poison what comes out of the tap and leaches lead from old pipes. According to the CDC, lead exposure alone causes both serious cognitive and behavioral impairments in children and is a major factor in high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease, gout, early dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, and certain cancers.
Why do we let this go on?
A Nature Gap
If the air, water, plants, and soil are what make you sick, how does that shape your sense of what matters? What does that steal from your experience of life? Environmental racism has helped to create a population disconnected from and fearful of nature and outdoor experiences. No wonder so few nature organizations have learned to welcome people of color. No wonder BIPOC feel excluded from opportunities to experience nature or advocate for conservation and environmental protection.
Urban schoolyards in districts with a higher than average population of BIPOC residents are too often hard-scaped — they don’t include much green space. Urban parks in BIPOC neighborhoods are neglected. Outdoor summer camps are not especially inclusive. Environmental education is rarely inclusive. The images of people we see enjoying the outdoors rarely include people of color.
Many gardening, bird, and other outdoor and natural history clubs have not been welcoming to nonwhite participants and few leadership opportunities are offered to people of color. The Commission on Racial Justice has scolded leading environmental organizations for not including representative numbers of people of color on their staffs or their boards. I cringe when nature clubs and festivals, often headed by an older white demographic, wonder aloud why they are not able to attract younger members and people of color or balk at adopting language or policies that would reassure the more marginalized members of a community. Even though these organizations have mission statements making conservation and environmental appreciation and advocacy promises, they exclude, intentionally or not, a critical part of the electorate.
Even when BIPOC and other marginalized people do overcome obstacles to getting outdoors and find their way into green space, they are often confronted by people who question their reasons for being there and are made to feel unsafe — as Central Park birder, Christian Cooper discovered last year. Worse, in some communities, Black people literally risk their lives to be outside, as did Ahmaud Arbery who was killed while jogging down a tree-lined street in Georgia.
A tree-lined street, a pocket playground, a city park — green space is more than respite and should belong to everyone. Such spaces are especially precious when they preserve some wildness within. Green spaces provide air and water purification, climate mitigation, biodiversity protection, disease control, and opportunities for learning and recreation. Increasingly, they act as climate regulators — tempering urban heat islands and cooling the surrounding areas, reducing the need for energy.
The Hispanic Access Foundation (HAF) and the Center for American Progress reported that 74 percent of communities of color in the contiguous United States live in nature-deprived areas, compared with just 23 percent of white communities. That is not acceptable. Nature deprivation has consequences. In fact, researchers estimate that every dollar spent on creating and maintaining park trails can save almost three dollars in health care alone — a benefit that is being denied to these communities.
“Environmental racism steals people’s wealth and health.“ Bullard has argued. “Everyone deserves to eat safe food, drink safe water, have their kids play outside safely.”
Nature is necessary to our lives, to our brains, to our immune systems, to our health. Nature engages and improves our ability to even be engaged, to get out of ourselves, and ask questions. Increasingly the questions I find myself asking are why are we poisoning and excluding people of color?
No Escape
After a soaking rain, New England forests come alive with mushrooms — the fruits of an underground network that connects trees to earth to nutrients to waste. This network is made up of mycelium — a part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony woven throughout the underground world. Mycelium plays a vital role in the decomposition of plant material. Some increase the efficiency of water and nutrient absorption of plants and some protect plants from pathogens. The mycelium is an important food source for many soil invertebrates and is essential to the breakdown of organic (and in some cases, inorganic) material.
Most of the earth’s terrestrial ecosystems are largely dependent on this weird, living, globally connected underground fungal network — a network we rarely notice until we turn over a damp log and take a peek. What we don’t see is the vastness of this extraordinary interconnectivity and the incredible power it has over life itself. We are at the mercy of the mycelium, though most of us don’t realize it.
Essential networks also exist above ground — our increasingly depleted waterways are an example. Humans have spent thousands of years seeking to manage watersheds, obscuring the lacework of watersheds. We don’t usually see what happens to water underground. But once again, that network rules our lives.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Mycelium. Air. Water. Ground. People. We are all part of the networks. Invisible as it can be to us, the network of mutuality can’t be ignored. As Bullard has said, “When you don’t protect the least in your society, you place everybody at risk.”
Bullard also believed that change was not out of reach. “Communities should realize they have collective power when they vote. Our elected officials need to understand our laws and need to apply them equally across the board. No community should be seen as compatible with pollution and poison.” That is the paradigm shift we need to make.
There is no escape. The threat of irreversible climate change demands our immediate attention. Drought demands our attention. Air and water and ground refuse to be bounded, no matter how much we pave it over, no matter how many dams and walls and leaky toxic wastewater holding ponds we create. Climate change will not recognize the destructive ways in which humans seek to divide themselves.
We need to immediately give up the idea that we can carve out space for human activity that is fundamentally racist and environmentally dangerous. “It has to go somewhere,” is not, and should never have been, a solution. We need to be more ambitious and more creative in our problem-solving. Prioritizing convenience or cost over equality must never be the answer.
Moving too slowly will only increase the harm we are doing. The network of mutuality means that to fix climate change we have to eliminate racist systems quickly. We have to change the paradigm that Bullard and Lewis started to change.
Bullard again. “If we strive to eliminate racism and classism, as well as pollution and environmental degradation, then we are doing what we can to make sure communities are sustainable and livable. It takes a lot of work; it’s not a sprint. But it’s achievable if we view it as important.” For a little while longer at least, the network of mutuality contains pockets of hope — if we want it enough.
Further Reading
Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation With Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities, A Report of the Government Accounting Office, Publicly Released: Jun 14, 1983
Toxic Wastes and Race In The United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, published by the Commission for Racial Justice and the United Church of Christ, 1987
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, by Robert Bullard. Boulder, CO: Westview. 1990. Available online.
The Nature Gap: Confronting Racial and Economic Disparities in the Destruction and Protection of Nature in America, by Jenny Rowland-Shea, Sahir Doshi, Shanna Edberg, and Robert Fanger July 21, 2020. Center for American Progress
Trump’s EPA Concludes Environmental Racism Is Real: A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency finds that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air — even as the agency seeks to roll back regulations on pollution, by Vann R. Newkirk II, February 28, 2018. The Atlantic
Has the Moment for Environmental Justice Been Lost?: Facing Trump’s proposals for cutting programs that help minorities and the poor, Democrats scramble to make up for missed opportunities to protect them, by Talia Buford July 24, 2017. Pro Publica
How ‘nature deprived’ neighborhoods impact the health of people of color: Green spaces make people healthier and happier, but decades of systemic racism have left many people of color living in areas without access to nature, by Alejandra Borunda, July 29, 2020. National Geographic
As in the ’60s, Protesters Rally, by Dale Russakoff, October 11, 1982. The Washington Post
Health Problems Caused by Lead, from the Centers for Disease Control and The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
An Avid Birder Talks About His Conflict In Central Park That Went Viral,May 26, 2020, NPR, All Things Considered
Robert Bullard: ‘Environmental justice isn’t just slang, it’s real,’ by Oliver Milman December 20, 2018. The Guardian
