**This post is replacing a comment.
Frankly, when I hear “environmentalism” and “green,” I automatically think of the (white, middle-class/upper-class) elite. Mainstream environmental justice has never been geared towards minority, low-income communities. Both Miriam Greenberg and Melissa Checker seem to agree and attempt at explaining as to why that it is.
Firstly, Mother Nature may not discriminate against anyone when she strikes, but New York City’s government certainly does. Both Greenberg and Checker discuss how city policies and processes prevent local, low-income communities from being able to participate in a form of environmental justice that addresses their needs. As Greenberg points out, a city’s recovery and redevelopment can determine how much a disaster (like Hurricane Sandy) sets back our city, even if it cannot truly prevent the natural disaster from happening. Due to the heft of funds (from previous disasters) dedicated to repairing more affluent areas, areas (such as Lower Manhattan) were able to come away from the next disaster less damaged and repair much quicker than other areas. This illuminates the discriminatory nature of the city (and free-market capitalism). Greenberg reveals that it was a bigger priority for the wealthier sectors with private firms and high-end residential buildings to get back to business as soon as possible, whereas less affluent areas that contain high concentrations of public housing, had to wait weeks and/or months for their basic needs to be met (like electricity, heat, water, building repairs).
However, when non-profit organizations–which consist its local low-income, minority community members–try to take back control the fate of the area they live in, the city creates institutional ways to silence them. For instance, when the Port Richmond community tried to pose its own solutions and plans regarding BOA (Brownfield Opportunity Areas) to the Department of City Planning, DCP simply brushed off the community’s plans and regurgitate their own. These plans included taking vacant lots, vacant businesses, and dilapidated homes and building flood protections and cleaning up local contamination because “What was the point of creating green space, waterfront access, and bike paths while ignoring flood problems and toxic sites?” (Checker 16). In contrast, the city government presents environmental issues as something that can be solved through private investment rather than something like sustainability programs. The city (yet again) wants to continue pursuing environmental reform only if it means the area can be gentrified afterward so that the city can continue to pursue its market-based approaches. This includes developing high-end lofts, condos, and more on natural flood barriers while simultaneously proposing open green spaces that end up displacing low-income residents of said spaces. Jedediah Purdy also highlights that:
While more prosperous people tend to take clean and safe living spaces for granted and [are] able to escape to wild places that feel “ecological” or “natural,” poor people often have very little choice but to spend their lives in compromised artificial environments.
Basically, low-income residents must deal with the city shifting environmental burdens from gentrifying areas to low-income areas and thereby be exposed to more concentrated levels of to toxic chemicals, waste, and pollution. In contrast, the elites have the privilege of creating extra (residential) green space to escape to when looking for more clean spaces.
Furthermore, while for-profit groups and businesses are able to get a streamlined application process that circumvents city council, community boards, and the public on “cleaning up” and redeveloping brownfields, local communities like in Port Richmond do not. Instead, they must deal with a prolonged-faux-democratic process and busy work meant to give the illusion of citizen participation. As the activist, Beryl Thurman points out:
No disrespect to anyone but there is plenty of work to be done here on Staten Island that is legitimate without being given busy work to do in order to make the government look like it’s doing its job. All the while the real issues regarding these communities continue to plod along as if we have all the time in the world for these problems to be resolved and come to a reasonable conclusion. And to be honest we don’t have a lot of time, we are on the same clock as the developers, businesses and mother nature, it’s whoever gets here first. (Checker 20)
This brings to me my final question: What do you do when the free-market economy undermines the democracy in your city? The city prioritizes economic goals over public health and local needs. It would rather build the largest Ferris wheel on the North Shore to further its agenda of bringing in (global) capital, tourists, and this agenda of being the ever-developing, best city than work towards a managed retreat (discussed in my previous post.) Mainstream environmentalism over-values “elite forms of advocacy, like litigation and high-level lobbying, and doesn’t make enough room for popular engagement” (Purdy). It creates a movement of elites who have limited interaction with, and do relatively little to empower, the people who live with the most severe environmental problems. Are there ways communities can support each other and pursue their own solutions without governmental approval? Ways that, even if the government disapproved and did not assist in providing funds, that communities can pursue their solutions anyway and take back control of their land? How would we get access to the tools, knowledge, and resources that allow us to make this a reality on our own? I just do not see the point in trying to be democratic in a faux-democratic system. It only matters that we are democratic within our impacted communities.
Additional Sources
Purdy, Jedediah. “Environmentalism Was Once a Social-Justice Movement.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 7 Dec. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/how-the-environmental-movement-can-recover-its-soul/509831/.
