User:SarahD12345678910/Environmental racism in the United States

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== Access to Public Green Space ==

A study by sociologist Salvatore Saporito and Daniel Casey found that green space is generally distributed unequally across racial and economic groups. Low-income, people of color tend to live in areas with less vegetation than their white, wealthy counterparts. There is also a relationship between “city-level racial and economic segregation and differences in exposure to green space between the members of different racial and income groups.” The more segregated a city is, the more likely it is that neighborhoods with large concentrations of racial minorities will have less green space than white neighborhoods.

The presence of green space in one’s living environment has been found to have an important impact on physical and mental health. Green space can contribute to stress reduction and attention restoration, as well as improved social cohesion and increased physical activity.

== Native Americans ==

History
According to Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte and Lower Brule Sioux historian Nick Estes, the first “environmental apocalypse” is the coming of colonialism. Settlers used industrial military technologies to systematically kill Native Americans and force their removal. Then, they harnessed indigenous land for agriculture and industrial facilities. Settlers dramatically changed ecosystems through deforestation, overharvesting, and pollution. Additionally, academics Zoe Todd and Heather Davis propose that colonialism has played a major role in environmental degradation. The beginning of colonialism marked the beginning of the Anthropocene. When European settlers landed in the Americas in 1492, they set in motion the Columbian Exchange, drastically reshaping the biology and ecological landscape of the Americas. Simultaneously, there was a drop in carbon dioxide levels in the geologic layer following the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas and the regrowth of plants. Settler colonialism is marked by the process of “terraforming”—damming of rivers, clear-cutting of forests, and importation of plants and animals.

For instance, in colonial New England, settlers cleared forests and woodlands for farms, and sent the cleared forest wood back to England to be used in soap and glass manufacturing. Settlers believed that deforestation would lead to warmer winters like those in England, which would attract more British colonists to the region. According to U.S. Constitution signee Huge Williamson, warming temperatures would create a more pleasurable environment, proving that the continent was better off because of white settlers. Deforestation would also create an environment more hospitable to those with “fair skin” instead of “savages.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, as the United States spread its territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, Native Americans were pushed onto reservations, which were often lands that were deemed undesirable to white settlers because of poor soil quality. Additionally, they tended to be located next to tracts of federally owned land. During World War II, a significant number of military facilities were built or expanded onto these federal lands. The United States sought “remote lands to house bombing ranges and related noxious activities,” and, thus, many facilities contained dangerous unexploded ordnance, putting Native populations at risk of exposure to toxic chemicals.

In the early 1990s, the United States government attempted to blackmail Native populations by offering tribes millions of dollars for hosting nuclear waste facilities. This offer was appealing to many tribes because of extreme poverty on reservations.

Indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and C. Ree argue that environmental degradation is a form of “making killable” indigenous peoples. “Making killable” is a way of “transforming beings into masses that can be produced or destroyed.” Deforestation by settlers also produced long-term effects by releasing carbon dioxide into the air, and contributing to global temperature increases.

=== Hazardous Waste on Reservations ===

Because “Native Americans live at the lowest socioeconomic level in the U.S.”, they are at the highest risk for toxic exposure. The risk is multiplied for indigenous people because they rely on land affected by the accumulation of toxic materials for food supplies. One significant environmental hazard on tribal land is the construction of government and commercial hazardous waste sitings. A survey of 25 Indian reservations revealed that there were 1200 hazardous waste activity sites on or near the selected reservations. According to a study by sociologists Gregory Hooks and Chad L. Smith, indigenous reservations are positively associated with extremely dangerous sites, far above the national average. Examples of hazardous sites include a nuclear power plant built on the edge of the Mdewakanton Sioux of Prairie Island reservation, cyanide heap-leach mining polluting water on the Fort Belknap reservation, and industrial waste dumps surrounding the St. Regis Indian reservation. Furthermore, a disproportionate number of dangerous military facilities are located on or near Native land. Hooks’ and Smith’s study also found that the risk assessment code commonly used to measure the danger levels of a site may underestimate the damage it inflicts on Native American communities. Instead, the hazard probability model accounts for the fact that hazardous chemicals are in close proximity to public spaces, such as schools and hospitals.

Illegal dumping is another large environmental threat on tribal land. There are two categories of people who illegally dump on Native American reservations. Midnight dumpers are corporations and individuals that dump their waste on reservations without the permission of tribal governments. Native entrepreneurs are tribal members who contaminate Native land without tribal permission. Waste poses a severe health risk, leading to leukemia, organ ailments, asthma, and other conditions. Illegal pollution also results in a loss of tribal sovereignty by creating conditions in which intervention on the part of the federal government becomes necessary. The removal of toxic waste can be used as a “pretext to revert to past patterns of paternalism and control over Native American affairs on the reservation.” For example, in the case of the Kaibab-Paitute tribe, the Waste Tech Corporation used the disposal of waste as an excuse to restrict tribal access to their own land and attempted to give themselves the unilateral right to determine where roads would be built.

== Original Article ==

Environmental racism is the concept that minority and low-income communities experience environmental harms, such as pollution, natural disasters, and extreme heat, at a disproportionately high rate.

Some scholars have coined environmental racism as the “New Jim Crow.” Like Jim Crow laws, environmental racism systematically disenfranchises black people. It causes devastating impacts on the physical and mental health of African Americans, and creates disparities in many different spheres of life, such as transportation, housing, infrastructure, health, and economic opportunity. Epidemiologists Joel Kaufman and Anjum Hajat argue that, “discriminatory policies and practices that constitute environmental racism have disproportionately burdened communities of color, specifically African-Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Hispanic populations.”

Communities of color are more likely to be located next to pollution sources, such as landfills, power plants, and incinerators. Communities with a high concentration of racial minorities are nine times more likely to be exposed to environmentally hazardous facilities than communities with a low concentration of minorities. Non-white populations, especially Black Americans, are exposed to a higher concentration of harmful chemicals than white populations. Exposure to chemicals is linked to increased morbidity and mortality. High-emissions in majority-Black areas may be the explanation for higher prevalence of conditions such as cardiovascular disease mortality and asthma in Black populations.

Natural disasters tend to have unequal impacts on communities of color. The extent of poverty within a region can often have a much stronger effect on the scale of a natural disaster’s impact than the severity of the disaster itself. Affluent, white communities tend to be located on higher ground, so they are less vulnerable to floods than communities of color. Disaster prevention and recovery plans are also biased against minorities in low-income areas.

History
The true origins of the environmental justice movement are unclear. Though there were isolated protests against unwanted land uses throughout the twentieth century, a few events are widely recognized as spurring the modern and widely-publicized environmental justice movement. In 1982, North Carolina state officials decided to place a landfill with highly toxic PCB-contaminated soil in the small town of Afton in Warren County, North Carolina. Afton was about 84% African American. This decision sparked the first national protest against the location of a hazardous waste facility. Organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, residents of Warren County, along with local civil rights and political leaders, gathered in opposition to the placement of the landfill site. Over 500 protesters were arrested. In response, two major studies were published: the US General Accounting Office 1983, and the United Church of Christ 1987. Both studies found that there was a strong relationship between race and the location of hazardous waste facilities.

The US General Accounting Office study conducted a survey of the locations of hazardous-waste facilities, and found that these facilities were more likely to be located in minority and low-income communities. The United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) study found that three of the largest hazardous waste facilities were located in primarily Black areas, and accounted for 40% of the hazardous-waste landfill capacity in the United States. The study also found that the strongest predictor of the placement of hazardous waste facilities was race, surpassing both household income and home values. An additional study conducted by the CJR found that three out of five African and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with hazardous waste sites.

Hazardous waste facilities
Recent studies show that hazardous waste facilities are still more likely to be placed in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. For example, a study in Massachusetts by sociologists Daniel R. Faber and Eric J. Krieg found racially-based biases in the placement of 17 industrial waste facilities. Residential segregation is correlated with higher cancer risk; as segregation increases, cancer incidence is higher. A 2018 study by the American Journal of Public Health found that Black people are exposed to 54% more particulate matter than the average American. In Los Angeles, minority children have the highest risk of being exposed to air pollution at school. Environmental health scientists Rachel Morello-Frosch and Manuel Pastor, Jr. found that “at schools ranked in the bottom fifth for air quality, the children were 92% minority.” They also found that air pollution is  associated with decreased achievement in school. The United States Environmental Protection Agency and United States Census Bureau found that, in the mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the US, minorities are exposed to 66% more particulate matter from vehicles than white Americans.

Water pollution
Low-income, Black communities are more likely to have polluted water. In 2014, Flint, Michigan, a city with a 57% Black population, switched its drinking water to the Flint River, which led to complaints about the water’s taste and color. Studies found that the water was contaminated with lead from aging pipes.

The Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice reviewed data from 4,600 groundwater monitoring wells. 91 percent of coal plants that are required to monitor groundwater near their coal ash dumps show unsafe levels of coal ash components in nearby groundwater. The report also found that 52 percent of plants had unsafe levels of cancer-causing arsenic and 60 percent showed unsafe levels of lithium in nearby groundwater.

Health effects
Environmental pollution has been found to cause physical and mental disabilities, cancer, and asthma. Car and bus exhaust have been linked to increased rates of asthma. Exposure to industrial chemicals have correlated with increased cancer rates, learning disabilities, and neurobehavioral disorders. Some industrial chemicals have been identified as endocrine disruptors, which means they interfere with the functioning of hormones. Endocrine disrupters have been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, metabolic disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and infertility. There is a strong link between childhood exposure to pesticides and solvents and cancer. Additionally, toxic exposures in childhood have been linked to brain, and central nervous system cancers.

A row of industrial plants in Louisiana has now been dubbed “Cancer Alley” due to the high prevalence of cancer cases in the surrounding communities. This area is about 50% African-American, and has a 20.7% poverty rate. One study found that rates of stomach cancer, diabetes, and heart disease were significantly higher in Cancer Alley, and in Louisiana, than the United States overall.

Since the 1700s, power companies have dumped coal ash into pits and ponds, especially in the Southeast. Coal ash is mostly composed of lead, arsenic, selenium, and mercury. Each of these minerals individually are unsafe for the human body, but scientists are unsure of how harmful the components are combined. Mercury, for example, can damage reproductive health. Lead causes developmental disorders, arsenic can lead to rashes and lesions. Kristina Zierold, an environmental health scientist and epidemiologist, concluded that there are clusters of cancer around coal ash sites where workers are exposed. However, scientists have not been able to prove a direct link between coal ash and cancer. Measuring coal ash’s impact on a control group would be dangerous and unethical, so researchers have had to extrapolate based on their current knowledge of toxins. Researchers have observed that the placement of a coal ash dump near a community causes dramatic increases in cancer rates and neurological issues among children.

Poverty
Low-income households and people of color are often unable to afford adequate healthcare to treat pollution-related health problems. One study found that 34% of adults live without health care coverage in a primarily African-American, low-income neighborhood in Chicago. This results in the compounding of health issues within these communities, and exacerbates a cycle of poverty; sickness eats up money, often forcing families to sell assets to pay off medical debt and/or quit a job to take care of family members. This means less money to pass down to children or share with local organizations, such as schools.

Natural disasters
Natural disasters have historically had a larger impact on poor African-Americans than wealthy whites. For example, Black people were disproportionately affected by Hurricane Katrina. Predominantly black communities were more likely to be located in low-lying areas that were more vulnerable to flooding. Evacuation plans were insufficient for populations without access to a car. At the time, over a third of New Orleans’ African American residents did not have cars. The city also only had one-quarter the number of buses that would have been necessary to evacuate all car-less residents, and many buses were lost during the flooding. The disorganized response to the storm and flooding also disproportionately affected Black victims. Michael D. Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was not aware of starving crowds at the New Orleans Convention Center until he heard about it on the news. Deliveries of supplies to the convention center did not arrive until four days after Katrina hit.

Another example is the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, the first Category 5 hurricane officially recorded in the Atlantic. The storm devastated much of the Southern coast of Florida, but hit low-lying, Black migrant worker communities particularly hard. In fact, over 75% of the 3000 recorded deaths were Black migrant workers. Most Black bodies were burned or buried in mass graves. The towns of Belle Glade, Pahokee, and South Bay were “virtually wiped off the map.”

Natural disasters have also been used as an opportunity to oppress African-Americans. For example, During the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, whites were evacuated, while African-Americans were placed into disaster relief “concentration camps” and forced to work while being held at gunpoint.