Open eyes, open arms - minority environmentalists

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1992 by Mark Mardon

Poor and minority communities throughout the South are in pain, victims not only off social prejudice, but of economic discrimination by multinational corporations with colonialist mindsets. So contends Sierra Club Southeast Staff Director Jim Price, who blames many of the South's environmental woes on corporations seeking cheap, easy places to site their toxics-producing incinerators, landfills, and factories.

As Price vents his outrage at this injustice, his mellifluous drawl takes on an edge of frustration. "Poverty sets people up for this type of exploitation," he says. He rails against local and state political hacks who get cozy with the multinationals, doing favors in exchange For campaign contributions and endangering the health of the people and the environment. Price accuses such "scalawags" of trying to create rifts between oppressed minority communities and the environmentalists who should be their allies. "Powerful economic forces have sought to divide African-Americans and whites in the past," says Price, "and they're attempting to do the same on environmental issues. They're doing everything they can to see to it that some people aren't registered to vote. They make trash industries look like economic development. It's a vast, vicious cycle, and it's killing people." (See "Southern Exposure," page 42.)

Price says it's time for the Sierra Club and similar organizations to help boot out bad politicians, elect good ones, and keep carpetbagging polluters at bay. The best way to do this, he believes, is to link the national groups to the many minority-led grassroots organizations in the South that have long struggled for social, economic, and environmental justice. He intends to make the Club instrumental in helping to build broad, cross-cultural coalitions modeled on the southern labor movement of the 1930s and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s.

A key player in these coalition-building efforts is veteran environmental activist and grassroots community organizer Scott Douglas, who recently joined the Sierra Club's Southeast Office as head of the Gulf Coast Environmental Justice Grassroots Organizing Initiative. Douglas is well known to minority activists in the South; in his new post he'll use the Club's clout to assist them in their battles against the toxic wasting of black, Hispanic, Native American, and poor white communities.

Douglas believes that only a united effort can dissuade powerful politicians and industries from preying on minorities. "A lot of environmental aggression is targeted toward areas where there's little or no effective political resistance," he says.

Much of the struggle for grassroots activists, Douglas continues, is against all forms of intimidation, including economic reprisal by employers who resent those workers who insist on knowing what poisons they're being exposed to and how they can avoid contamination.

"We must buttress the right to vote with the right to know and the right to act in defense oour lives and our children's lives," he says.

Part of Douglas' job is to highlight the issue of environmental justice----the need for equity in solving waste problems-for the Sierra Club's 40,000 members in the Deep South. Like Price, Douglas feels it's essential to get environmentalists of all races to agree on objectives. But bringing everyone to the same table may prove one of his more difficult tasks. Until now, minority environmentalists have felt excluded from or ignored by national environmental organizations. These divisions have begun to heal, but a legacy 0 mistrust and anger persists. Many of Douglas' AfricanAmerican friends may not immediately welcome him as a Sierra Club ambassador. "Where I was previously received with open arms," he says, "I may be greeted with suspicion."

Minorities should be wary, Douglas admits. He recounts how, in the 1970s, a leading white environmentalist negotiated the siting of a giant toxic-waste dump in Alabama, Douglas' home state. The environmentalist held private negotiations with the waste company, but never consulted with the mostly black community near the proposed site.

"It had never crossed his mind to consult with grassroots leaders," says Douglas. "The battle was fought and lost outside the county. Well, if the local people can't even see the fight, how the hell can they win it?"--Mark Mardon