Environmental (In)Justice and the Poor

By Lisa Palmer

Due to my quest for real coffee (with a double shot of espresso), I arrived at the end of the breakfast plenary discussing the environmental justice movement in the south. But I heard Shirley Stewart Burns provide an insider's perspective on the subject. "When I was preparing for this talk, I could not think of one instance of environmental justice in Appalachia," she said. "It is all environmental injustice." Burns is the author of "Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities."

Burns went on to question the effects of coal mining on wealth, or lack thereof. "How could the most minerally rich area be inhabited by the poorest people in America?" she asked. She also provided stories of how local activists are spreading the word globally and taking a stand for their local land. She spoke of people like Judy Bonds, an ex Pizza Hut waitress, now of Coal River Mountain Watch, who travels the world talking about the devastation of mountaintop removal. She talked of Larry Gibson, who walked 400 miles to Washington, D.C., to speak with politicians about the local effects of this kind of coal mining.

Burns also talked about new green energy proposals for coal mountains. A group commissioned an independent study of putting windmills on some of the remaining mountains in coal areas. "Other people in the U.S. are agains windmills. We want them," she said.

Did you attend the breakfast plenary, Environmental Justice and the Poor? Please comment on the presentations of speakers Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, and Marley Shebala, senior reporter at Navajo Times.

Comments

[Christine Heinrichs]

Brenda Box, married to a West Virginian, recommended A&E's production, "Hillbilly," http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=70345&v=All, as the best she had seen. I intend to see it after the conference.

[Christine Heinrichs]

Robert Bullard has written entire books on many of the individual environmental justice issues affecting people of color, such as Growing Smarter, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11185, an anthology of essays on planning.

He noted that the environmental justice movement has spread internationally, to people in similar situations. Assessments now require that environmental justice be addressed.

"People who have the most have to give up the most," he said. "Even people who don't have cars have to breathe polluted air."

[Christine Heinrichs]

Marley Shebala introduced herself in her native Navajo and explained that her name means Where the waters come together, and that she is a member of the Frog clan. That introduction based her presentation in the deep spiritual beliefs of native people, that are ravaged by commercial exploitation of the land and the people whose home it is. She made the point that the boarding schools to which native children were sent were as much an environmental justice issue as destruction of the landscape.

When the mountain to which a native person has brought his sacrifices is removed, his right to pray has been removed with it.

She rejected the stereotypes that reporters rely on in covering native issues. Chris Bowman of the Sacramento Bee raised the issue of the reductions in staff that have eliminated rural reporters who understood their communities better than reporters who 'parachute' in to cover isolated stories.

"We need people to understand what we have been through from the beginning," she said.