Indigenous populations often suffer from environmental racism. In the US, Native Americans communities continue to be subjected to large amounts of nuclear and other hazardous waste, as corporations take advantage of weaker land laws, whereby the federal government holds land in “trust” on behalf of the tribes. Decades of uranium mining on the land of the Navajo of New Mexico have caused longstanding problems in the community. From 1951 until 1971, the US Public Health Service performed a massive human medical experiment on 4,000 Navajo uranium miners, allowing them to work without informing them of the effects of radiation. The effects were predictable: elevated levels of lung cancer and other diseases from breathing in radon.
The 2016-17 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline were another example where the tribes came up against the power of policy and lost. The 1,172-mile oil pipeline was considered a threat to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation’s water supply, as well as sites of historic importance and culturally sensitive burial grounds. Though unsuccessful, the protests caught the public imagination, drawing solidarity marches and support from Bernie Sanders. All too often however, environmental racism occurs because communities lack the resources to raise awareness or fight a costly legal battle – resources which are available to wealthier white communities, who are better able to divert airport expansions, power stations or landfills elsewhere in a process known as NIMBYism – standing for “not in my backyard”.
A planet-wide problem
Globalization has increased the opportunity for environmental racism on an international scale. It refers to the dumping of pollutants such as e-waste on the global south, where safety laws and environmental practices are more lax. More than 44 million tonnes of e-waste was generated globally in 2017 – 6kg for every person on the planet – and of that, each year around 80% is exported to Asia. One e-waste hub is the town of Guiyu in China, where heaps of discarded computer parts piled by the river contaminate the water supply with cadmium, copper and lead. Water samples showed lead levels 190 times higher than WHO limits. Even a slight increase in lead levels, meanwhile, can affect IQ and academic performance in children. Other examples include the mass shipment of spent American batteries to Mexico, where illegal waste dumps from plants operated by American, European and Japanese companies have resulted in soaring rates of anencephaly (when babies are born without brains).
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Monitors for recycling at a government-sponsored recycling park in Guiyu, China, in 2018.
Image: Reuters/Aly Song
So what is being done? The environmental justice movement works to raise awareness of the plights of vulnerable populations through academic studies, media pressure campaigns and public activism. Grassroots movements make use of social media, along with civil disobedience and marches, to make their views heard. The European Union, where most documented cases of environmental racism affect the Romani people, has funded initiatives including the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project, which ran from 2011-2015 and brought together scientists and policy-makers from 20 countries across the world to advance the case of environmental justice. As environmental laws tighten in developed countries however, many fear that dumping activities will shift towards the global south.
Combating environmental racism may risk falling down the policy in the age of COVID-19 – and yet with non-white people more likely to die from the virus, the higher instances of complicating factors such as asthma and heart disease brought about by exposure to pollution are likely to play a part. Environmental racism is part of the broader picture of systemic racism, which must be fought to bring about a fairer society.
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