Volume CXXXIII, Number 18 March 1, 2002 f

Race, justice and the environment symposium
JULIANA GRINVALSKY
STAFF WRITER

Wangari Maathai, the keynote speaker at the Symposium on Race, Justice and the Environment held from February 22nd to 23rd, grew up in Kenya when the government was transitioning from a colonial regime to self-governed democracy. She watched the government sell off public lands and cut down the forests to drive the production of cash crops such as coffee and tea. She noticed how drinking water became scarce and how her peoples' traditions and cultures disappeared with the forests. "God spent from Monday to Friday creating all of nature, the birds, the animals, the land," Maathai noted, "He spent only Saturday creating Man. If Man was created on Monday, he would have been dead by Tuesday". Maathai showed the symposium attendees how it was foolish to not realize how humanity's pressing social issues and the environment are interconnected. However, racial issues and environmental issues are rarely addressed on the same page. Is it purely a coincidence that pollution ends up affecting poor and minority communities the most? Is it coincidence that environmental issues are usually the concern of Caucasian upper class society? Do minorities just not care as much about environmental problems?

Panelists addressed the convergence of race, justice, and the environment this past week at Bowdoin. (Karsten Moran, Bowdoin Orient)

These and many other difficult questions concerning the connection between environmental and social justice issues were addressed at the symposium on campus this weekend. The conference began with the Common Hour lecture by Barry Dana, Chief of the Penobscot Nation. Friday night, the movies "Drumbeat for Mother Earth" and "Laid to Waste" were shown, and there were small group discussions held with those who later took part in panel discussions all day Saturday. Panelists from around the world and from the fields of economics, political science, law, medicine, biology, and history spoke on these issues concerning environmental justice.

What is environmental justice? Each speaker brought a unique perception of the environmental problems our world is facing under the increasing pressure of population and human consumption. Wangari Maathai, the keynote speaker for the conference, founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya which teaches women and community members how the governmental process works through lessons on how to plant indigenous tree species on their land. As a result of her activism, Maathai has been prosecuted by the corrupt Kenyan government, and been imprisoned.

Rebecca Sockbeson and Barry Dana of the Penebscot Nation explained how the federal and state government regulate the water quality of Maine rivers without taking into consideration how Penobscots rely on the fish as a source of food. As a result of eating fish poisoned with dioxin discharged from paper, babies are born with birth defects and cancer rates on the reservation are abnormally high. In the Rio Grande River Valley, Gilberto Reyes, Jr. explained how the local culture is being removed from the environment by the economic freedom introduced by NAFTA.

Panel member Eduardo Lao Rhodes from the University of Indiana discussed how environmental problems could be assessed economically, and Bowdoin professor Lance Guo discussed how economic development had changed the nature of East Asian culture. Annette Dula of the Tuskegee Institute spoke of how the Monsanto Corporation dumped tons of PCPs into a creek near a predominantly minority community in Alabama, poisoning thousands of people. She also how a 50 mile stretch of the Mississipi river from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, Lousiana is now called "Cancer Alley" because of the number of chemical processing plants and the resulting high cancer rates. In Harlem, children suffer from asthma as a result of poor air quality, diesel fumes from buses, poor housing, as George Khaldun, Bowdoin gratuate and Chief Operating Officer of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, informed the panel. Even though environmental concern is written into the Brazillian constitution, Vera Karam de Chueiri explained how the regional government allowed a French car factory to be built in a fragile watershed area, compromising the water supply of the city of Curitiba. The list goes on.

Reducing these issues to simply environmental problems allows the public to ignore the awkward issues of social injustice. We hope that we left racism solved back in the 1960's and that since then great measures have been taken to eliminate social stratification so that everyone has equal access to wealth, happiness, and well-being. We don't like to think that 500 years of western exploitation of the New World's people and resources made the Renaissance and society as we know it today possible, as panel speaker Tony Affigne from Providence College reminded the attendees of the symposium. When action is taken against individual environmental pollution issues, difficult problems of racial equality arise and injustices are incurred in the jumble. It is easy to throw up your hands at the immensity of the problems and "become a guilt-ridden atheist" as Affigne warned. The speakers stories themselves however were indirectly one way of addressing the problem. Each speaker had chosen a small part of the problem, had become involved and did what they could to turn environmental racism around. However, Wangari Maathai provided the sage advice that everyone has to care about these issues if change is to occur. The panelists urged students to educate themselves about environmental injustice issues and to make a difference.