Environmental Justice in the News

Every week, students in ENVS 467/567 (Power, Privilege, and the Environment) discuss news pieces that touch on some aspect of social and environmental justice. Here are some of the articles and podcasts that we’ve been discussing (blurbs written by students in Spring 2021 ENVS 467/567 class):

In Klamath Water Illegally Diverted to Farmers (High Country News), Jessica Fu discusses the drought in Oregon that has pitted local farmers against local Tribal Nations. Due to record-low precipitation, there is not enough water for both groups to satisfy their needs. The tribes demand that no more water be diverted from the Klamath River to prevent a salmon die-off, while the farmers depend on water diversion to irrigate their crops. The federal government has sided with the tribes, instructing local municipalities to cease diverting water for agricultural use. The farmers, however, are willing to go to great lengths to ensure their crops don’t die, and in the past have gone as far as manually diverting water using human chains to pass buckets of water to the irrigation canals, called “bucket brigades”. As the planet continues to warm and summers grow hotter, water crises are expected to be more frequent, and battles like the one in Oregon are going to get more intense.

A recently released study by the Nature Conservancy highlights the correlation of low-income neighborhoods with less tree cover and hotter average temperatures compared to more affluent residential blocks. While this connection is not a new revelation, the study reaffirms how the country’s wealth disparity is directly linked to matters of physical and mental health, and residential segregation. This article aims to uncover how past, often racist, social and economic policies have lasting effects that pervade multiple aspects of daily life. Whether exclusionary zoning or redlining, numerous policies have reinforced trends of residential segregation, which go on to maintain long-lasting issues of generational wealth, exposure to health risks, burdens of climate change and many other disproportionate hazards. Based on their research, the Nature Conservancy suggests that investing in tree-planting initiatives could have beneficial and long-lasting effects that protect BIPOC, minority and low-income people from the disproportionate environmental harms, and physical and mental hazards they face.

This article (High Country News) discusses the processes that lead to poor data collection of Indigenous health data over the past year. The article uses the term “invisibilized” to describe the injustice at play. With the COVID-19 pandemic one can see patterns throughout the media of Indigenous people being invisibilized. One can also see this in the past 2020 elections as voter demographics left out Indigenous communities and labeled individuals as “others”. The article includes a short interview from Abigail Echo-Hawk (Pawnee), the director of the Urban Indigenous Health Institute, and the chief research officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board. Echo-Hawk discussed how racial mis-classifying of Inidgenious people has been exacerbated due to COVID and restriction of family members allowed in hospitals to advocate for patients. Echo-Hawk explored the idea of partnerships between large institutions and tribal communities and urban Indian organizations to be a successful solution.

The environmental justice movement claims to focus on environmental injustices against marginalized communities. Some groups, however, are left behind by the movement’s discourse and research. An article published by Grist focuses on one of these groups: those incarcerated in jails across the US. A range of research exists on the connection between prisons and toxins, but not as much consideration has been given to jails since they are seen as more temporary holding places. In reality, they often do not function this way. The article explores how the experiences of people of color being exposed to environmental hazards become exacerbated when these same pollution-filled neighborhoods are over-policed and community members are forced into jails that are also built in heavily polluted areas.

This article on the Byhalia pipeline highlights a primarily black community in Tennessee that is fighting against allowing the company to use eminent domain to take land from community members. The community is already fighting for clean water and clean air they don’t need more environmental degradation to worry about. The article mentions how Byhalia will pay people $3,500 for 100 square feet of land and if people choose not to sign the land over to Byhalia the company can take the land for $150. The ultimatum makes residents choose to give up their land for more money rather than having their land be taken for way less. It doesn’t give residents the opportunity to keep their land. The community has taken the issue to the supreme court, but with the current administration’s approval of other pipeline construction, there is very little hope that the court will find in favor of the community.

As climate change has started to impact water availability in communities, this article takes a look at Lake County, California, one of the poorest counties in the state currently affected by an impending water crisis. This is due to toxic algal blooms which are growing rapidly because of warmer seasons and making the water unsafe to drink. The county recently received a grant from the state to build a new system to retrieve cleaner water from farther out in Clear Lake, the county’s source of water. On top of that, the county hosts the site of a mercury mine that was operating for almost a decade, and people still go fishing in the lake. Would these issues in Lake County have been addressed earlier if it were wealthier?

This article, written by Brianna Baker, discusses the challenges that arise when the urban habitats of humans overlap with those of other animals in urban environments with Chris Schell, an associate professor of urban ecology at the University of Washington Tacoma. He calls attention to a correlation between the areas preferred by other species and lushy green spaces that tend to be in high income neighborhoods. Schell talks about the benefits of carving out green spaces in low-income communities like air pollution mitigation and decreasing the negative impacts on the bodies and minds of those living there, humans or otherwise.

A Grist article by Zoya Teirstein titled ‘Western tribes already lacked water access. Now there’s a megadrought: Why some tribal advocates and water experts are feeling hopeful’ discusses the state of extreme drought in the Colorado River basin and what it means for indigenous stakeholders. Clean, running water is taken for granted in most of the U.S., but in the Navajo Nation and other tribes there remains a serious scarcity. Fixing the problem would require billions in infrastructure improvements and legal fees to get tribes the water they are allotted, but don’t actually have access to. Drought conditions are predicted to get to critical levels in the near future, which will worsen the problem, but which some believe also will prompt a reform and reinvestment in the system that could result in more efficient water use and more equitable distribution to indigenous stakeholders.

Land back movements are growing throughout North America. Ojibwe journalist, David Treuer, writes in his article, “Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” that the National Park system throughout the United States should be returned to the Tribes that originally inhabited those lands before they were forcibly removed. Treuer presents a convincing argument for returning public lands to the Tribes that lived on them for millennia. Treuer eloquently weaves current experiences of the NPS, and historical events into a can’t put down article.