Why does environmental racism happen

However, similar to all things on Earth, the environment is subject to human influences. Unfortunately, these influences often tend to lower their hands to the worsts of our society including racism and classism.

This can ultimately create environmental racism. When introducing the topic, she notes that Dr. Environmental racism refers to how minority group neighborhoods—populated primarily by people of color and members of low-socioeconomic backgrounds—are burdened with disproportionate numbers of hazards including toxic waste facilitates, garbage dumps, and other sources of environmental pollutions and foul odors that lower the quality of life.

This can lead to different diseases and cancers. Because of this, as the fight with climate change worsens, minority communities will be disproportionally affected. These disparities are entirely due to power dynamics. In a study done by Nicholas Carnes in his book The Cash Ceiling , he broke down how in , millionaires make up only three percent of the public, yet they control all three branches of the federal government. While more than fifty percent of U. In addition, no member from the working class has gone on to become a United States President or Supreme Court Justice.

Most were millionaires before getting elected or appointed to the position. This disparity also relays over racially. Governors are white. In addition, the top richest Americans are also white. This tends to be perpetuated into policies which is one way that environmental racism is perpetuated. This situation is simple.

When government officials or other individuals or groups in power are faced with the decision of where to place the newest hazardous waste facility or dump site, they typically do not want it to be placed in their backyard, and instead, they decide to place these hazardous waste facilities and dumpsites in communities filled with people who do not look like them or fall under the same tax bracket. Environmental Justice and People Acting Against It The fight for environmental justice took off in when protests erupted in Warren County—a predominately Black community in North Carolina—over the plan to place a hazardous waste landfill in their community.

This means accounting for the way that race and income intersect in the UK, but also broader issues that may not seem immediately related. For example, the fact that just 9. We can also consider how environmental racism relates to the greater health risks often faced by BAME communities. COVID, for example, has been found to kill black men at twice the rates of white men. The most important thing I took from my conversation with Professor Agyeman though, was the need for social movements to be mass movements, operated from the ground up; including the movement for environmental justice.

The idea that environmental justice must be approached from the perspective of grassroots organization and engagement is extremely prevalent in modern literature, but it also has a history in environmentalism. Ecologist and political activist Murray Bookchin emphasized this idea, particularly in his essay Ecology and Revolutionary Thought.

He argues that centralized and top-down governance harms not just individuals and their communities, but also inflicts massive damage to our environment. Bookchin focused on classic ecological concerns, like agriculture and energy production, making the case that sustainable practices require an intimate understanding of the local landscape and its ecological limits.

Professor Agyeman coined the term just sustainability to refer to environmental justice. In the same way that classical sustainability requires an intimate understanding of the local environment, just sustainability requires an intimate understanding of the local community. It is a well-documented fact that communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted by polluting industries and very specifically, hazardous waste facilities and lax regulation of these industries.

Since then, The Principles have served as a defining document for the growing grassroots movement for environmental justice. PREAMBLE WE, THE PEOPLE OF COLOR , gathered together at this multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities, do hereby re-establish our spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure environmental justice; to promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and, to secure our political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over years of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples, do affirm and adopt these Principles of Environmental Justice:.

Some minority communities lack piped water completely and have to rely on wells or shared water systems that may supply them with contaminated water. According to a study published by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies , the white participants in the study generally had the lowest exposure to airborne particulate matter.

Hispanic participants suffered from the highest rates of pollution, followed by African Americans participants. High air pollution contributes to many diseases, as well as deaths from lung cancer, respiratory infections, stroke, pulmonary disease, and others, according to the World Health Organization WHO. Children of color are more likely to suffer from lead poisoning. The blood levels of lead in non-Hispanic black children are almost double than those found in white children, according to the Public Health Post.

Lead poisoning can cause many health conditions and medical problems, including anemia, weakness, kidney damage, and brain damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC. Extremely high lead exposure can cause death. According to the Center for Effective Government , more blacks, Latinos, and people in poverty live close to industrial facilities with toxic chemicals. Communities close to hazardous facilities are likely to suffer the greatest impact when an explosion or leak of toxic substances occurs.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of how inequality impacts the exposure of a community to environmental hazards. There can be many other instances.