Throughout history, human beings have been interacting with, as well permanently altering their environment. Throughout more recent history, however, human beings have also made several attempts to regulate these alterations. Some these were successful, many were not. Currently, the Trump administration has a quite contentious relationship with and attitude towards environmental regulation. However, many states and non-governmental organizations have made great strides in improving global environmental quality. Unfortunately, that environmental quality has often come at the expense of social justice. Due to this inverse relationship, Benson’s claim is correct. When environmental reform is pursued, the reform is nearly never distributed equitably among racial groups.
The environmental protection paradigm adopted in the United States tends to worsen existing inequalities by intensifying them and broadening their impact to the point of impacting the field of environmental protection itself, thus generating a new type of inequality: environmental inequality. The term refers to the unequal distribution of environmental costs: the movement denounces the unequal distribution of industry-related pollution in the U.S. and shows how minority communities bear a disproportionate share of the burden of this pollution with respect to the wider population. An example of environmental inequality is environmental racism.
Environmental racism is an environmental policy or practice that differentially affects or disadvantages individuals, groups or communities because of their race and/or class. It has been well-documented around the world that environmental hazards often impact poor communities and communities of color disproportionately. Three out of every five African-Americans living well below the poverty line are also living in areas situated close to toxic waste sites, according to the federal government’s General Accounting Office. Living near these dangerous facilities has significant impacts on their their air, water and food. Noise pollution and vibrations become a problem; the awful stench permeates everything; schools, workplaces and homes become unsafe places; and a multitude of different health effects can result.
One of the biggest environmental challenges the United States faced during the industrial revolution (a challenge which continues to today) was how to handle the troubling amounts of waste in the growing cities. In 1920, the majority of Americans were living on top of one another in cities. Due to this uptick in population, there were a host of new hazards faced by city dwellers, like infectious diseases and the neighborhoods were overrun with horses and livestock. This process of industrialization undermined the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian paradise and drove economic growth during this period. Following this period of urbanization, the process of residential segregation began.
There were several commonplace practices to keep certain city areas as white as possible, the chief among them was red lining. Several real estate organizations around the country “sold its spacious homes and yards only to buyers who accepted racially restrictive covenants and joined the homeowner’s association,” the sole purpose was to maintain the cleanliness of the neighborhood and collect garbage. Usually, this cleaning and collecting was done by black citizens barred from living in these neighborhoods. This led to racialized people becoming associated with dirt and pollution, and white people with purity. These practices and beliefs are one of the early sources of environmental racism.
In Clean and White, Zimring convincingly locates the sources of contemporary environmental racism in the seemingly progressive public health and sanitation movements in early American history. The intersections of race, racism, and environment are, perhaps increasingly, evident to anyone who cares to look. In a contemporary world that has seen growing tensions at the intersections of race, ecology, and environmental harm—e.g. the opposition from indigenous groups and others to the construction of new gas pipelines in North Dakota, or the apparent willingness of civic managers in Flint, Michigan to allow devastating levels of lead pollution in a municipal water system that serves a predominately black and poor population—there is, it seems, a substantial need for sustained scholarly attention to the historical roots of these intersections
The intersection of the environment and race is present and applicable to many areas of US history. One lesser known example is the origin of the American icon Smokey the Bear. The concept of forest fire prevention through advertisements began during the onset of WWII. The Forest Service started in the Forest Fire Prevention Program in 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Many of their advertisements were violently racist depictions of Japanese people—the ominous foreigner coming to set our beloved forests on fire. In 1944, in need of a kid-friendly rebrand, the prevention program introduced Smokey, an andromorphic bear who was much more masculine the original candidate, Bambi. Smokey was a symbol that evoked an image of a masculine soldier protecting the nation’s forest.
In addition, Smokey was a target of much ire from the Chicano community in New Mexico. To them, he was a reminder that the woods were no longer theirs and that Smokey’s primary ambition was to keep Chicanos out. He was a “vicious and despotic land thief” who represented white colonial paternalism, unjust land dispossession, and state authority. For many in Northern New Mexico, Smokey wasn’t just a lovable bear, he was an agent of a white authoritarian government. In his book, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico, Jake Kosek argues that it is impossible to understand environmental politics without addressing their embeddedness within the politics of difference. Also, that those concerned with the social reproduction of difference must also take seriously the politics of nature.
The intersection of environment and race is essential to the construction of environmental justice. From Flint to Standing Rock, there are countless examples through out U.S history of these two things colliding to calamitous effect. As cities became the lifeblood of the United States’ economy during the industrial, our environmental problems grew exponentially, as did inequality. Benson’s assessment of the pattern of environmental injustice is correct. That pattern showed the rise of residential segregation and the ethnoracial arrangements of waste industries guaranteed that whites would be associated with cleanliness and less exposed to most real environmental dangers, while in the country the conservation movement dispossessed people in the name of environmental protection, as in the case of Smokey the Bear and the Chicanos in New Mexico. The fabric of U.S history is dotted with cases of environmental injustice, as will be the future if nothing changes.
