Landrum is a cancer survivor. As are her sister and her aunt.
So she became an advocate for environmental justice in her community. It’s been slow-going and it’s been tedious. It’s involved knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, and advocating when she goes to get her hair done at the beauty parlor. It’s involved attending meetings even through her own bout with cancer. And it’s meant reading through hundreds of pages of corporate and legal documents containing budgets, projections, data – all written in what she calls “tech-ese.”
“Trying to hide something? Put it in print,” she noted wryly.
We’ll return to Landrum’s story later, but it should be noted that her experience as a person of color who is challenging corporate interests and government apathy in order to restore her community’s health is not singular. It’s being repeated all around this country in places from which middle and upper classes habitually avert their gaze.
It’s worth taking a step back for a moment to consider the history of “EJ” – the environmental justice movement. This has been a slow green wave that has been building power since the 1980s.
As far back as 1987, an eye-opening study conducted by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice demonstrated the disproportionate impact of polluting industries on communities of color. The concluding report correlated the locations of hazardous waste sites with the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of communities. On average, it found that in a locality that hosted a single operating hazardous waste facility, the minority percentage of the local population typically was twice that of communities without a waste site. And when an area had two or more facilities producing hazardous waste, the percentage of minorities living in the surrounding community was nearly triple that of communities that had no waste sites.
It was becoming clear that in America – “land of the free” – the geography of racism included not only the practice of redlining, but also an even more ominous environmental component.
Given the oil and gas fracking boom that’s occurred since that UCC study, there’s been a glut of new chemical manufacturing facilities coming online – well over 300 plants in the last decade alone, most of these sited along the Gulf Coast, in the heavily industrialized areas around Houston, for example, and along the stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that has become known as “Cancer Alley.” You might be able to guess who’s living in those surrounding communities.
Theresa Landrum advocate for environmental justice in zip code 48217 in Michigan.