How the Other Half Lives
Photo by Mary Wiltenburg/Grist
(Read Part 1 here.)
I really can’t do a better job than Grist of describing the insufferable conditions and ecological devastation the downtrodden have to bear for the sins of industrialization.
Take mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia used for coal extraction, for instance. From the Orion Magazine article that Grist reprinted:
[An] Eastern Kentucky University study children in Letcher County, Ky., where a great deal of strip mining takes place, suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath—symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome—that can all be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites into nearby streams. Long-term effects may include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract.
Erica Urias, who lives on Island Creek in Grapevine, Ky., told me she has to bathe her 2-year-old daughter in contaminated water because of the mining around her home.
That and more, is just part of the price they’re paying for cheap energy, “through contaminated water, flooding, cracked foundations and wells, bronchial problems related to breathing coal dust, and roads that have been torn up and turned deadly by speeding coal trucks.”
Large-scale poultry production is another blight for small-town communities, but this time in the rural South. Besides threats of disease outbreaks from sick animals, residents must live with health and environmental hazards from industrial chemicals, such as the arsenic and ammonia found in feed and manure.
Much like the residents of Lake Charles, La., who live adjacent to polyvinyl chloride plants and are exposed daily to toxic clouds of pollution, many of these communities are not able to voice their protests. Often already battered by poverty and unemployment, these residents see the job openings as heavensent miracles, and don’t even realize the environmental or health implications of these chemical or industrial factories. In fact, the corporations are counting on their ignorance.
We also frequently forget the struggles of low-income families who have waste incinerators, water-treatment plants, and toxic landfills in their backyards. These are the same populations who are largely unemployed and have no access to adequate healthcare when persistent exposure to pollutants makes them sick.
Practically everything we consume—for many of us much too excessively—is at someone else’s cost. Everything we don’t recycle or take steps to dispose of properly … even something as innocuous as a disposable plastic cup … has to end up somewhere downstream. The first law of thermodynamics expresses this best: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
To me, this isn’t just an environmental or human-health issue. This is a moral issue.
And this is something I think even those fighting for environmental causes should never lose sight of.
Additional resources (Don’t get depressed, get organized):
1. Center for Community Action and Evironmental Justice
2. Greenaction
3. NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
4. Sierra Club’s environmental justice index
The Worsted Witch » This Landfill Was Made For You And Me said,
April 6, 2006 at 1:55 pm
[...] I think if it wasn’t for my monthly Country Living fix, I’d have needed to be institutionalized a long time ago. (It was the only thing holding my sanity together when I was waiting in line at the Social Security office this morning, feeling my lifeforce ebb away by the minute, and trying to ignore an older gent who wanted to know if I was from China or Japan.) The flagrant wastefulness absolutely breaks my heart—which, yes, I sometimes admit to having—because you know it’s all going to the landfill, more often than not, in someone’s backyard. [...]
The Worsted Witch » Build it Green said,
April 14, 2006 at 7:31 pm
[...] This is community action at its some of its best. Pure genius! I wish I had known about this ahead of time because we’ve already made plans for tomorrow (including stopping by Earth Day New York), but dude, I TOTALLY signed up for their volunteer mailing list. I strongly feel that green housing should not be a privilege, but a basic human right, and we need to find a way to build healthy communities cost-effectively, especially in low-income neighborhoods. (The use of toxic PVC materials is widespread in the construction industry—including Habitat for Humanity—because of its affordability. But no matter how you spin it, it’s still class discrimination.) For the rest of us, a nonprofit store like this is a great way to build without contributing anything new to the waste stream, so this is one of those rare occasions where I tell you to GO NUTS SHOPPING. [...]