The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights

[Cassinarees]

I live in Detroit. My problem is...if you clean the toxins from the land, toxins will continue to fall from the sky onto the environment again because the polluters have not stopped. Please help! How do we stop the polluters.

[realdad32]

a community is only a melting pot of the people who live there. spend all the money you want you cant make a poor thinking person start thinking like a wealthy person. until people change their own mind any changing of community or environment will have little effect.

[blindjustas]

This man who claims to be for environmental justice stated in a speech in Ventura, CA in August 2010: "I do not practice dead white man sociology, I practice kick butt sociology." He replied to my e-mail as to what that is, that he believes in "free speech," standing behind his racially inflammatory statement. I think he has shown who he really is. It is not only non-white people who are the victims of injustice. He undermined any position he preaches in the name of "justice."

[lpdeer2]

I will pay someone big money to make me a website based on this video with a strong question and thesis.

like 50 bucks

[yammyspeed13]

Copy, paste, search....  "This is John Galt speaking..." PART THIRTEEN"

[BambisMusings]

I also was thinking about the recent Tase Early, Tase Often mentality in this country that was discussed in an article I read recently. The young people who were just using their Citizen's Riight to non-violently demonstrate about the waste facility that was discussed in the video would they likely get tased in today's world?

[strong8action]

In fact, a more truthful term would be Environmental Classism. That is because there are currently no laws that only apply to black people, besides white people have been found to have the same problems. For example, the love canal incident took place in a poor white community. EJ activists always allude that environmental inequity stems from socio economic status, yet they continue to play racial politics by defining the problem as one of race instead of economy.

[altocaos]

Race and socioeconomic status are interrelated. It plays a factor in terms of injustice because Black people are more likely to be exploited for their labor than whites, as well as be of lower income. The majority of people who are poorer in America are Black and Latino, not white. So although class plays a part in this, discounting race, instead of seeing it as cohesive with class, is an incorrect analysis.

[altocaos]

Also, because Black and Latinos are the ones who are more likely to be of lower income, they are more likely to live in environments where there is more environmental degradation than whites.

[strong8action]

I don't disagree with you. I wrote that comment five months ago because I was trying to elicit different points of view for a paper was working on in my university. I agree that class and race intersect at different points for myriad reasons, one being the proverbial IQ disparity, but I also think that the socio economic class of a given neighborhood has more to do with whether a chemical plant owner will move in next door than the racial makeup. Its hard to sum this issue up in a soundbite.

[strong8action]

The typical EJ activist tends see things in such narrow terms as the white race conspiring to exploit black communities. They fail to realize key economic forces, for example, the long history of environmentally questionable economic activities opening up in white communities, and people of color migrating to these communities in search of jobs. Over the years, white flight occurred and the racial makeup of these communities changed naturally due to market forces. Its no a conspiracy.

[42vince]

44:37 "..man made disasters often times exacerbate natural disasters."