COMM 125: INTRO TO MEDIA, TECH AND CULTURE

When you take a step outside of the front door of your house, have you ever paid attention to the area that your home is

surrounded?

What do you see?

Are the trees dark green and the grass are cut and watered? Are the

children and pets running around on the sidewalks and parks, breathing in and out clean oxygen air? Or, is water running from the faucets in sinks as well as in toilets and bathtubs clean,

pure and uncontaminated?

These are some of the things that we take for granted. Not everyone has access to clean water, green

healthy trees, breathing clean air or healthy produce and foods.

Can you imagine your home, a place where you consider safe, located near a factory? Can you imagine drinking water that is

contaminated with harsh chemicals? Do you know what it is like to live in a neighborhood that

does not have access to grow their own fruits and vegetables?

There are those close to us that are living in devastating conditions you’d expect from a developing

country.

The people that live in these conditions are predominately

minority groups, Latinos and African Americans in particular.

How is this possible? There is one word that can describe these kinds of

situations…

Environmental Racism

Environmental RacismBy Tianamarie Smith and Sonia Perez

What is Environmental Racism? In addition to the definition in the “About”

section Environmental racism refers to environmental

policies, practices, or directives that differentially affect or disadvantage (whether intentionally or unintentionally) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or colour.

Also reinforced, by governmental, legal, economic, political, and military institutions.

Environmental racism combines with public policies and industry practices to provide benefits for countries.

Environmental Racism as Institutionalized Racism Environmental racism is a form of

institutionalized discrimination. Wait, what is institutionalized racism? Institutional racism is defined as

“actions or practices carried out by members of dominant (racial or ethnic) groups that have differential and negative impact on members of subordinate (racial and ethnic) groups”.

How a Community Functions

Tiana and I believe that a community functions with systems. Here are some

examples of systems that are core to how a community functions:

foster care system, education system, jail system, food system>food bank, water

system, home system and the street system

Environmental Racism has affected some these systems as our video presents

FACTS 16.7 million children under 18 in the United

States live in households where they are unable to consistently access enough nutritious food necessary for a healthy life.

The U.S. ranks 23rd among industrial nations in infant mortality. African-American infants die at nearly twice the rate of white infants. The infant mortality rate is closely linked to inadequate nutrition among pregnant women.

62% of children rely on school meals for food and 1 in 12 go to bed hungry.

Before we go into some of the systems, we will be focusing on how these systems

and minority groups are affected by environmental racism in the state of

California.

Environmental Racism in California

Central Valley

Joining Forces: Prisons and ER in California The young Latinos had a lot of threats to choose from:

air quality, one of the worst rated in the country; undrinkable local water supplies; regular pesticide poisoning; downwind drift from incinerators and power plants; and mega-dairies with their toxic emissions

In the face of the toxic load across the Valley, it came as a surprise to some of the adult environmental justice activists that the youth reported as the biggest threats in their communities the “three Ps”: police, pollution, and prisons. The environmental justice movement has struggled with mainstream environmentalists over the bounds of the term environment.

Valley residents remain on the front lines of an unprecedented prison-building boom. The state has built twenty-two new prisons since 1983 (including Delano II), after building twelve over more than a century, from 1856 to 1983. Between 1980 and 2005, California’s prison population has grown 556 percent, from 25,000 to 164,000 prisoners.

California’s so-called prison alley has been the site of numerous environmental justice battles. The United Farm Workers fought a long battle against pesticides that were sickening and, in some cases, killing their members. Site fights in Buttonwillow (a toxic waste dump) and Kettleman City (the location of a toxic waste incinerator) gained international attention.4 The proximity of vigorous environmental justice activism to California’s prison alley has helped activists from both movements see the similarities in our fights. Foremost among them has been the statesanctioned imposition of toxic threats on the poor, people of color, and immigrants.

Delano II

June 1, 2005, marked an auspicious day in the history of what one California official labeled “the largest prison building project in the history of the world.”

After the building of twenty-three new prisons in just twenty years, the June 2005 date marked the first time in two decades that California did not have a prison in planning or construction.

This historic moment was, at least partially, the result of a tenacious and multifaceted campaign against the construction of California’s thirty fourth — and purportedly last — state prison: Delano II.

Delano II The Delano II story begins

in 1998, when Californians elected the Democrat Gray Davis as governor over the state’s Republican attorney general Dan Lungren

Somewhat surprisingly, the powerful state prison guards union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), backed Davis. Consistently the number one contributor to state legislative races, the CCPOA donated over $1 million to Davis.

Environmental Impact (for jails) While legal challenges carry the danger that organizers will

lose resources and energy if the issue is defined too narrowly as a legal one for which the remedy is in the hands of lawyers and courts, the Delano campaign successfully undertook an environmental strategy that used litigation, while not relying on it.

As the activist lawyers Luke Cole and Sheila Foster point out, “while legal action brings much needed attention to environmental justice struggles, legal strategies rarely address what is, in essence, a larger political and structural problem.”Recognizing the limits of litigation as a solution to social problems, organizers nonetheless successfully made litigation one strategy in a larger, multifaceted campaign.

WILL TIE INTO GANG ACTIVITY AND ANY RELATIONS TO GANGS

The value of environmental law lies largely in the fact that it requires a full public disclosure of the real costs society will pay for building, in the opportunity litigation can provide for public education and organization, and in the possibility it offers for residents to voice their concerns. Environmental law provides that all who might be affected by a project have a right to demand that the negative effects be made public before project approval, and, if possible, that the developer mitigate those negative effects.

As we continue to investigate and compile studies about the negative effects of prisons, examining the wide range of people harmed by prisons, we have a substantive campaign to unify opposition to mass imprisonment. These opportunities melded with the Delano campaign’s central premise: if the public knows the damage wrought by prisons, people will organize to stop its realization.

Water System-Research in Nitrate Contaminated Water in the San Joaquin Valley

Background: Research on drinking water in the United States has rarely examined disproportionate exposures to contaminants faced by low-income and minority communities. This study analyzes the relationship between nitrate concentrations in community water systems (CWSs) and the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of customers.

Objectives: We hypothesized that CWSs in California’s San Joaquin Valley that serve a higher proportion of minority or residents of lower socioeconomic status have higher nitrate levels and that these disparities are greater among smaller drinking water systems.

Methods: We used water quality monitoring data sets (1999–2001) to estimate nitrate levels in CWSs, and source location and census block group data to estimate customer demographics. Our linear regression model included 327 CWSs and reported robust standard errors clustered at the CWS level. Our adjusted model controlled for demographics and water system characteristics and stratified by CWS size.

Results: Percent Latino was associated with a 0.04-mg nitrate-ion (NO3)/L increase in a CWS’s estimated NO3 concentration [95% confidence interval (CI), –0.08 to 0.16], and rate of home ownership was associated with a 0.16-mg NO3/L decrease (95% CI, –0.32 to 0.002). Among smaller systems, the percentage of Latinos and of homeownership was associated with an estimated increase of 0.44 mg NO3/L (95% CI, 0.03–0.84) and a decrease of 0.15 mg NO3/L (95% CI, –0.64 to 0.33), respectively.

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that in smaller water systems, CWSs serving larger percentages of Latinos and renters receive drinking water with higher nitrate levels. This suggests an environmental inequity in drinking water quality.

Environmental Justice Movt.

The environmental justice movement fights racial and class discrimination in environmental policy making, the selective enforcement of environmental laws, and the targeting of communities of color and poor communities for environmentally disastrous land uses, such as toxic waste disposal sites. Communities of color and poor communities bear an unequal and unfair number of environmentally destructive land uses, land uses that take from the community but do not give back to it. The environmental justice movement seeks to end environmental and economic injustices by eliminating the location of environmentally toxic facilities anywhere.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS Asian Pacific Environmental Network (Oakland)Bayview Hunters Point Health and Environmental Resource Center (San Francisco)Borneo Project, The (Berkeley)Californians for Pesticide Reform (San Francisco)Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (Santa Cruz)Center for Creative Land Recyling (San Francisco)Center for Environmental Health (Oakland)Center for Health, Environment and JusticeCommunities for a Better Environment (Oakland)CorpWatch (San Francisco)Crissy Field Center (San Francisco)DataCenter (Oakland)Energy Justice NetworkEnvironment and Human Health, Inc.Environmental Health NewsEnvironmental Justice Coalition for Water (Oakland)Environmental Justice Resource CenterEnvironmental Law Foundation (Oakland)Environmental Research FoundationFilipino American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity (San Francisco)Friends of Alemany FarmGenerating Renewable Ideas for Development Alternatives (Oakland)Global Community Monitor (El Cerrito)Global Justice Ecology Project (West Coast Desk) (Berkeley)Greenaction (San Francisco)

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ORGANIZATIONS HOMEY (San Francisco)Impact Fund, The (Berkeley)In These TimesIndigenous Environmental NetworkInternational Indian Treaty Council (San Francisco)Literacy for Environmental Justice (San Francisco)National Religious Partnership for the EnvironmentPacific Institute (Oakland)People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (San Francisco)People United for a Better Life in Oakland (Oakland)Pesticide Action Network North America (San Francisco)Prometheus: A Social Justice Law FirmSan Francisco Department of the Environment (San Francisco)Susan Ives CommunicationsSustainable Energy and Economy NetworkUrban Habitat (Oakland)Video Activist Network, The (San Francisco)Western States Legal Foundation (Oakland)Youth United for Community Action (East Palo Alto)

The world is not fair. We, and you, are not that naïve to fail to see that.

Home is next door, next city, next state, and all the states together as

one USA.

We’re only as strong as our weakest link, so we must work together.

“There is some good in this world worth fighting for.” J.R.R. Tolkien