happy earth day!

April 22 is Earth Day, since 1970.

Earth Day is a product of the environmentalist movement, which many see, for good reason, as historically underrepresentative of communities most severely impacted by environmental degradation. Note this excerpt from an interview with environmentalist leader Denis Hayes, the coordinator of the first Earth Day, at dKos:

Now, to answer your question: If I were starting over, I would have tried harder to instill from the very beginning a concern for economic justice as a bedrock value of the movement, and I would have sought a way to organize the tens of thousands of local groups across the nation into a coherent whole that functioned organically -- not just on Earth Day, but around the calendar. Some groups, most notably the Sierra Club, have lots of local chapters, but as a movement we've done too little to have a vibrant presence in all communities.

In the last few decades, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown significantly. The core strength of the environmental movement is college educated, middle class "haves" (or at least "quasi-haves.') But the movement is underrepresented in communities of color and disadvantaged communities in general. This has many unfortunate implications including (1) many current environmental issues, notably global warming, will have huge economic costs, and the poor need to be represented at the table when those costs are allocated; 2) most environmental problems impose their heaviest burdens on the very poor; and, 3) these populations are growing faster than other segments of society, so in a democracy they are becoming increasingly powerful.

Earth Day, here and around the world, is heavily focused on growing and diversifying the environmental movement. If you review the march across the podium at the big Earth Day event at the Mall in Washington, D.C., last Sunday, you will see that a many of the speakers and most of the celebrities were people of color, and the audience was more than half non-white. We are trying!

The Environmental Justice movement is very much part of the relatively recent effort to tie together issues of poverty, racism, and disenfranchisement with issue of livability and stewardship. A great thing about the EJ movement is that it is representative of what so many social justice movements strive for: it is grassroots-centric, rather than than top-down; it relies on political and local people power, rather than lawyers; and it integrates effectively the work of community activists, scholars, and faith-based groups. One of the largest groups involved in the EJ movement is the United Church of Christ, which has taken up the banner on racism involved in toxic waste dump siting. Working closely with the UCC is Dr. Robert Bullard, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and sometimes known as the father of the EJ movement, who very much put the need to address environmental justice issues on the map with his publication of Dumping in Dixie: Racism, Class, and Environmental Quality in 1990. It's a fantastic read, very accessible with very powerful stories, and I highly recommend it.

One of the reasons why An Inconvenient Truth was so powerful was that it spoke not only to the immediacy of the crisis, but to the fact that global warming has severe economic, health, food, and resource implications. But global warming is not the only environmental crisis that impacts people's lives in this way. Toxic waste from our skyrocketing electronics consumption, traffic pollution and the destruction of walkable communities created by exurban sprawl, and the contamination of drinkable water sources due to agricultural policies that in turn contribute to nationwide epidemics of diabetes, obesity, heart disease and more... these are all concerns that are environmental in nature, but also profoundly matters of social justice. While the environmentalist movement can't start over, it is of utmost importance to the movement's continued relevancy to focus their efforts on large-scale issues of environmental injustice, as groups like the Basel Action Network are doing on the issue of toxic electronic waste, and to ignore those affiliated groups that waste their time and energy trying to grow meat in labs.