MTO: Environmental injustices

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Environmental injustices


		Charles Richardson

E nvironmental justice. I had always thought that it had to do with hugging a tree or making sure the spotted owl was protected from extinction. Well, I knew a little more than that when I walked into Newton Hall on Mercer University's campus Wednesday night.

I was aware that for some reason most waste dumps and chemical factories end up in poor and minority neighborhoods. But the person I came to hear, Dr. Robert Bullard, would open my eyes to a wider, more insidious problem.

Dr. Bullard is one of the foremost authorities in environmental justice. What he could not know was that we have examples of environmental injustice right here in Macon and Middle Georgia.

Dr. Bullard's published works explain that race is the most important predictor of where a dump site could be located. And that fact flies in the face of several of the necessary ingredients for environmental justice, such as: Do all communities have equal protection and is the process equitable?

Dr. Bullard cited Houston, Texas, as an example. All of that city's dump sites are located in black and Latino neighborhoods. He got involved in the fight to stop an additional site from being constructed in a middle-class black Houston neighborhood, but he could have been talking about about Macon or up the road in Hancock County.

Many of you may not remember the fight east Macon citizens, mostly black, had in trying to stop a landfill from locating in their neighborhood in 1991. The area of the landfill is middle class. It isn't full of rundown, dilapidated houses. It is a neighborhood very much the same, except for skin color, as many north Macon areas. I don't think a landfill will end up in the middle of Wesleyan Woods anytime soon.

In Hancock County, three women, Sarah Hunt Pearson, Ella Mae Barnes and Betty Holsey, fought to stop an 887-acre landfill from being located right behind their church. The landfill would have cleared the church cemetery.

There is a thought that landfill operators naturally gravitate toward areas where land is cheap and that the price of land, not racism, is the driving factor. Granted, that could be part of the consideration, but operators also gravitate toward areas that can't mount much opposition.

According to Dr. Bullard, landfill operators get in cahoots with various agencies and individuals, making it very difficult to fight back. Fighting back becomes an expensive and drawn-out proposition, one neighbors generally can't afford. It is much easier to move, or as in most of the cases Dr. Bullard cited, the people couldn't leave - they were just too poor. A decent environmental attorney costs around $50,000.

Environmental justice should be the cornerstone of road building, too, but it rarely is. Look at the Bibb County Road Improvement Program. Would the program administrators have allowed sidewalks to be built with utility poles in the middle on Northside Drive as they did on Maynard Avenue? The situation has been corrected now, but we know that would never have been an option on Northside.

Is it racism? Is it classism? Make up your own mind, but Dr. Bullard says the driving force in building roads is not need - it is money - and the desire to spend it before it's allocated somewhere else. "Who cares about the trees? Cut them suckers down and bring on the bulldozers before we lose state money." No matter the blight created.

Have we experienced some of this in Bibb County? What was one of the first reasons given for widening Forest Hill? State money and state requirements. What requirements? Construction requirements - not air or people requirements.

What about the requirements in the National Environmental Policy Act or the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991? Requirements are starting to be like statistics around here. Remember the phrase, "Figures don't lie, but liars figure."

Charles E. Richardson is the assistant to the editor for The Macon Telegraph. Call him at 744-4342 or e-mail to crichardson@macontel.com. His column appears every Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.