EJ Forum

The Speak Out is being held in advance of the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) and will feed into both the NGO Forum and the governmental proceedings.

The concepts of environmental racism and environmental justice have their origins in the U.S.A. but respond to a global phenomenon. With these concepts people of colour around the world recognise our common experience and can build links across race, class and gender lines. Many of the pioneers of the movement are here and this meeting, with people from eleven countries, comes out of working these debates over the past two decades. We welcome you to South Africa.

These concepts were introduced to South Africa by Dana Alston, a pioneer of the movement, at a conference hosted by Earthlife Africa in 1992. Reflection and debate on environmental justice in South Africa has resulted in its formal adoption as a principle of law.

Dana Alston told us: “The people who benefit the most from technological and industrial development do not have to bear as much of the burden. That is the centrepiece of the injustice, not only for people of colour in the USA, but throughout the world”

At the heart of the experience of environmental injustice is the abuse of power. Poor people, and particularly people of colour, live in damaged environments which damage their health. So the struggle for environmental justice is a struggle about relations of power. This is the common theme to the range of diverse struggles against various forms of inequitable development, from shrimp farming to uranium dumping, that we will hear about today.

Globalisation: A system for entrenching environmental racism.

Session 1: Panel discussion on the origins, status and future of environmental racism in the period of globalisation. Moderator: Bobby Peek

Reflecting on the present struggles in Nigeria.

Nnimmo Bassey, Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria.

Oil was discovered in Nigeria in 1908 and commercially exploited from 1958. Local people were at first optimistic. They thought they would get jobs, schools, hospitals, electricity and other modern services. They did not get electricity but they did get light. The flares burn 24 hours a day so there is no night. And air, earth and water are polluted destroying people’s livelihoods from farming and fishing. Now fish are imported to the region but people have no money to buy them.

The people wanted to talk to the companies and to the government. We ask for a chance to say that there must be a better way – things could be different – but are met with the dialogue of guns. We use culture – singing, dancing and waving leaves – as a weapon of resistance and are accused of being prejudiced and violent. We are killed but have no right to cry. Our environments are destroyed and we have no right to complain.

On November 10, 1995, Ken Sarowiwa was executed because he said people have rights. And the people of Ogoniland have taken the right to resist and driven Shell from their land. Others are learning from that example of standing together to resist evil. Yet even still there are oil spills in Ogoniland and people are killed on the instruction of Shell in Ogoniland.

The companies involved in Nigeria are the global giants such as Shell and Chevron. They are driven by profit and the growing rate of consumption in Northern countries to take from places where people have no voice. They want crude – by crude methods. They want it cheap. So pipelines with a 20 year design life are not replaced and burst pipes are frequent.

Our struggle is to control our resources so we can look after our environment. But it is the companies that in fact control our resources and they do it under military cover. So we say, “When you buy a litre of petrol, you buy a litre of blood.”

Reflecting on the history of environmental racism in the USA.

Robert Bullard, National Black Environmental Justice Network, USA.

Environmental racism is located in any policy which disadvantages people based on colour, whether intentionally or not. To understand it, we must understand the roots and legacy of racism. The roots lie in an ideology of freedom: Free land – stolen from the indigenous people; Free labour – stolen from slaves; Free men – the white men who could vote; Free enterprise – and there is no such thing. The legacy is about the relation of people to labour, land and services – housing, education, health care.

The elements of environmental racism are:

· Unequal participation: Authorities take longer to act, and act less decisively when people of colour make demands than when white people make demands.

· The rights of companies are given precedence over people’s rights: Companies can go into communities of colour claiming to provide jobs. Risk assessments are done to justify the trading of people’s health and environments for profit. We say they have no right to kill us and are closing the loopholes in environmental protection. In response, companies are moving off shore so we need global action.

· Corporate welfare: Companies are subsidised to kill us. Louisiana is one of the poorer states but still finds enough money to subsidise toxic industries.

· Residential segregation: Race still talks about where you are allowed to live and toxic industries are sited where people of colour live. This is not just about private companies. The US military is the most toxic of industries and has left a trail of toxic death all the way to the Marshall Islands.

· Unequal economic opportunity: Children of colour grow up with toxic poisons and their schools are often located on closed dumpsites. There is a link between what you learn and what you earn. Lead poisoning, for example, takes away children’s mental capacity and therefore their future earning capacity.

· Unequal enforcement: The US has the best environmental protection laws in the world, but when it comes to people of colour, they are not enforced. Government is now rolling back the basic protections and rights that we have won. The Supreme Court has ruled that it is not enough to show a consistent pattern of abuse but intent to abuse must be shown.

The National Black Environmental Justice Network is a response to an emergency in the US. It is the emergency of a community under attack. Black people have pushed the civil rights movement and the achievements of that movement are under attack by a conservative racist movement.

The US is the richest nation on earth, but people of colour are constituted as the South within the North. The global movement for environmental justice emerges out of struggle and that struggle is also the struggle for economic justice and for social justice. When we visit each other we can see the same enemy. We are still learning but we are moving forward.

The Maquilladora experience

Teresa Leal, Southwest Network on Environmental and Economic Justice, USA and Mexico

I am from an indigenous group whose land straddles the metal border between Mexico and the USA. On either side of the border, I am constantly asked, “Where are you from?”

The Maquilladora industries are assembly plants located in an autonomous industrial zone on the Mexican side. These industries were accused of creating environmental, labour and social problems and so relocated in Mexico – but only just across the fence. The products are now labelled: Made in the USA, assembled in Mexico.

There was 58% sub-employment in the area, so no one questioned it when they arrived. Since then, we have experienced:

· Economic extortion: One week’s wage in Mexico is equivalent to one day’s wage in the US but the price of the goods remains the same.

· Double standards on gender: Women constitute 75% of the labour force because, in a macho society, they can be predicted to make for a docile labour force. Many of them are single parents but no provision is made for child care. Children left without adult care givers for much of the day take to the streets and form gangs.

· Pollution: The original agreement was that assembled goods would be returned to the US together with the wastes. The wastes in fact remain behind, poisoning our soils and water.

· Inadequate infrastructure: The population has grown but the infrastructure and services have not. Housing is unaffordable and people have to squat.

Resistance was difficult because the unions were corrupted and people became fatalistic. But the North America Free Trade Agreement sparked immediate opposition in the border area and in the South with the Zapatistas. This was not coordinated but was an existential response. NAFTA described globalisation as we were already living it. It describes an open door for free trade – but it is a Dutch door with the top half open and the bottom half closed by the militarisation of the border. Now the Maquilladora concept is being expanded with a new fast-track process for a free trade agreement covering the whole of the Americas.

We need to share our experiences to develop a people’s response to globalisation by the transnational companies. We need to be able to defend the quality of our lives and our environments.

Environmental racism in South Africa

Heeten Kalan, South African Exchange Programme on Environmental Justice, U.S.A.

Growing up in South Africa, my thinking on environmental issues was based on a definition given by others. It was about wildlife and wilderness and had no human component. Linking the American and South African experiences has led to a changed definition.

South Africa created a system of Bantustans to justify crowding the African majority of the people onto 13% of the land while not providing any service infrastructure. The system was designed to provide cheap migrant labour for mining capital. In the cities black townships were created downwind and downstream of pollution sources. People lived in the shadow of power plants but did not get electricity. Worker health and safety was neglected and 50,000 people have been killed on the mines so far. South Africa was also a militarised society and people are now claiming back land which has been seriously contaminated by the military.

There are strong US links to this history. The US and South African officials collaborated on the creation of Native American reserves and Bantustans. American companies have been involved in dirty industries – for example, American Cyanamid exported toxic waste to Thor near Durban and American vanadium mining companies poisoned people and land near Brits in North West Province. And the American experience of environmental racism is repeated in the location of toxic wastes near Black communities, for example at Aloes in Port Elizabeth where contaminated water seeps into people’s houses.

South Africa’s new Constitution gives people the right to a clean and healthy environment but government is dragging its feet on these rights. They are also creating Industrial Development Zones where, in the name of creating jobs, the Maquilladora experience will be repeated. They have ignored the words of Albie Sachs, a noted fighter for liberation, who said, “When we breath the air of freedom let us hope that we do not choke on hidden fumes.”

Telling our stories: Experiences from the Ground

Session 2: Participants related stories from around the world under four thematic headings. Moderators: Nnimmo Bassey and Heeten Kalan.

Industry and Urban Planning

Desmond D'Sa, South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, South Africa

The South Durban basin is home to 285,000 people and numerous industries, located in five ‘industrial belts’. It is repeatedly claimed that people followed industry into the area, but this is false. Industries were located next to people in the ’50s on land taken from local market gardeners. The industries include two large oil refineries, major chemicals manufacturers and chemicals storage facilities. A toxic landfill servicing these industries has been closed down but not rehabilitated. Local people suffer from high levels of respiratory illnesses and cancers. Apartheid planning forced racial segregation of South Durban’s communities. Recent planning exercises have concluded with proposals that would result in the removal of people. The SDCEA is organising across these divisions to speak out on environmental justice at local, national and international levels.

Ike Ramatesela, Local Councillor, Sasolburg, South Africa

Apartheid planning located the Black township in an area surrounded by chemicals industries. Residents suffer high levels of child mortality and respiratory illnesses. Workers suffering occupational diseases are retrenched and sent home to die. There is high unemployment and people are too poor to afford medicines. In white areas, industry maintains pollution monitoring but claims there is no money for effective monitoring in black areas. Recent action linking wealthy whites living on a polluted water frontage with black residents resulted in industry withdrawing social responsibility funding from a local environmental organisation.

Alex Percent, Secunda, South Africa

Black people used to live in Secunda, which was called Driefontein. When the Sasol refinery industry was developed, black people were relocated downwind at Embalenhle. Secunda became a white town. Embalenhle is now surrounded by mines and adjacent to the local dump. The fence is not maintained and children have access to the dump. The older people do not understand the environmental issues and environmental organising is supported mainly by the youth.

Jose Luis Guevara, Accion Ecologica, Ecuador.

Esmarelda is a poor region suffering from a man-made disaster. A massive infrastructure of pipelines, storage facilities and refineries has been built to service the oil industry. Fires and spillages are frequent and illegal waste dumping common. A new pipeline and a 3.5 million barrel oil storage are being planned. The people are left in poverty and suffer a range of ailments with cancer affecting between 35 and 40% of the population. The state has done nothing to defend people and believes that, because we are poor and black, we have no right to protest or organise. So we are demonstrating that we do have these rights. We are organising against the new developments. We are organising in defence of our rights to life, to respect and to a healthy environment.

Pamela Chang, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, USA.

APEN is located in the Bay area of Richmond, California, where 350 polluting industries including such giants as Chevron are located next to communities of colour including Asians, Native Americans and African Americans. APEN’s strategy is to build a multi-racial movement linking with the poor of the Pacific Islands. Asian people in the US are constructed as homogenous ‘Chinese’ and there is a myth that they have ‘made it’ through hard work in the land of opportunity. Many are in fact refugees from US aggression in South East Asia and the Pacific Islands. There are seven distinct tribal groups from Laos alone, forced out as a result of the Vietnam war. As one Laotian woman told me, “The bombs were less frightening than what we have here. The bombs killed you instantly. Here death stalks you through your life.”

Lyn Pinder, Youth Warriors Express, USA.

Environmental issues facing the people of colour in urban Baltimore include lead poisoning, asbestosis and the impact of drugs. The poor live in areas defined as having no value. This is now changing with gentrification crowding out the poor from housing. The Warriors have linked with the North East Environmental Justice Network to connect with the resources and solidarity of the movement.

Susana Almanza, People Organised in Defence of the Earth and its Resources, USA.

We were once all brothers and sisters under the sky and we were led by our parents, mother earth and father sun.

In Austin, Texas, our community of Native and African Americans took on 6 of the 7 oil giants and shut them down. They had taken land and contaminated it. Emissions exceeded the allowable limits – by 750 times in the case of benzene. The community suffered high rates of cancer and miscarriages. We organised using our bodies and minds against their dollars. We realised that our vote is not our voice, but that our voice is our vote. We showed that it is possible to defend the lives our children, our ancestors and our parents. Through organisation we become brothers and sisters again.

Margaret Williams, Citizens Against Toxic Exposure, USA

In Pensacola there are few places where people of colour can live. When I grew up my parents earned 25 cents an hour and we lived first next to a fertiliser plant and then next to a creosote plant. We did not associate our common ailments with the pollution until government ordered an emergency clean up. They dug out 260 tons of contaminated soil, dumped it in a heap and covered it with plastic – and left the hole. We wasted long years writing to authorities. We tried finding lawyers but they refused to take our case. We tried finding doctors to treat us but there are no specialists in environmental diseases. Finally we had the ground in our yards tested and a number of chemicals were found over allowable limits. Now we have negotiated relocation.

Mining

Troy Prince, Concerned People Against Asbestos, South Africa

In Kuruman there are more than 80 old asbestos dumps located next to the homes of thousands of people. But it is not only in the dumps. It is in our houses, our schools, our playgrounds, our water, our air. Since ’87, 10,000 South Africans have been diagnosed with asbestosis. There is no medicine for it. We must just wait for death.

The biggest mining company was UK based Cape Plc. British asbestosis sufferers took Cape to court in ’97 and were compensated with R 300m. Our case will now be heard in 2002. Bringing the case has been a slow process and 150 claimants have since died including my parents.

Thuli Makama, Yonge Nawe, Swaziland

In Swaziland we have only recently become aware of the human dimension of the environment. We thought it was just about trees and animals and did not relate our illnesses to pollution. Companies have taken advantage of our lack of awareness. Recently there was an explosion at a coal mine where toxic wastes were being stored. The mine is 75% owned by Koch, a giant US company. In the US, similar claims are settled for millions of dollars. In Swaziland there has been no compensation and the company had not renewed its mandatory insurances. Three days after claims were made, the company filed for provisional liquidation.

Yaluritja Isaacs, The Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Peoples of Australia

In the name of creating jobs, Australia has supported mining companies, led by Rio Tinto Zinc, in bulldozing sacred sites, changing river courses and exterminating species. The mining companies developed a ‘native policy’ which has been declared racist by the United Nations but which the Australian government still wants to work with. The Australian industry is now moving into Indonesia, claiming it will clean up the mines there. But there is no reason to think they will treat black people in Indonesia different from the way they treat black people at home.

Peace Dlamini, South African Reparations Movement, South Africa

The people of Soweto are no better off now than they were before the ’94 elections. We are told development is coming, but it does not come. In the meantime, the mines are polluting the water of the Klip River and government does not want to take on the big mining companies. We are passionate about this country. We destroyed apartheid and our next fight is to remove the mining waste land dams.

Jenice View, Just Transition Alliance, USA

Just Transition is an organisation that brings together workers and communities on the front line. There is a history of racism in US unions just as there is in US companies. But workers and communities are both affected by companies that disregard their rights. At the Arizona Portland Cement Company, workers were without basic contracts for four years and the local community has suffered pollution for 40 years. The municipality ran an environmental education campaign resulting in joint action against abuse. At San Antonio, Texas, the Kelly Air Force Base closed. Workers and the local Mexican American community formed an alliance to clean up the base and provide sustainable jobs.

Toxic Dumps

Bheki Thusi, Yonge Nawe, Swaziland

The dumping and incineration of medical wastes is creating severe consequences for people living downwind and downstream and for waste pickers. The hospitals and clinics have been irresponsible in having no proper controls or systems in place. The Swazi authorities have failed to develop waste management systems and cannot provide coherent information.

Kenneth Bradshaw, Concerned Citizens Against Defence Depot, USA.

The US military is one of the largest, richest and most powerful organisations on earth. It is also one of the biggest polluters but conceals its pollution behind security legislation. It has mismanaged a secret chemical weapons dump at Memphis for 40 years and is responsible for losing a number of nuclear warheads.

Displacement: Dams and Agriculture

O'Brein Gcabashe, Earthlife Africa, South Africa.

Construction of the Inanda Dam outside Durban was proposed in ’86. The people to be displaced by the dam were promised other land. When they had to move, there was no other land. They were promised compensation and R 5.6 million was paid out to the chief, but the families who lost land saw none of it. The dam was built to supply water to Durban, but those living next to it have still not got clean water.

Sandile Ndawonde, Greater Edendale Environmental Network, South Africa

The Henley Dam, built 80 years ago to supply water to the white city of Pietermaritzburg, is now decommissioned. Its primary use appears to be to regulate water to an annual canoe marathon from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. The abandoned water works has become a dangerous playground for children. During floods in ’87, for fear of a dam burst, water was released damaging black houses. Down stream 10 km of the river is canalised through the white city. During a flash storm in ’95 the flood water was channelled through to flood the black township of Sobantu downstream of the canalised section. The communities are calling for the demolition of Henley, the water works and other engineering works, and rehabilitation of the catchment.

Modesto Segura, Accion Ecologica, Ecuador

Ecuador has one of the largest wetland systems in the world and this is an eco-system of global importance. Government has sold 99 year leases on wetland areas to shrimp companies for $11.11 a hectare. The people who live in the wetlands and depend on them for their livelihoods were not consulted and were dispossessed by the deals. For them, sustainability is a matter of life. With support from Accion Ecologica, Greenpeace and other environmental organisations they have made a claim against the state and held a march in Quito demanding rights. Government has now made a declaration granting the wetlands to the communities.

Carlos Marentes, Border Agricultural Project, USA

Mexican migrant farm workers feed the most powerful country on earth but their interests are largely ignored. This labour force is about 5 million strong and includes about 100,000 minors. They do not have the right to organise and annual earnings average $6,000, about a third of the lowest paid US wage, and 6 out of 10 do not have a house. They deal with dangerous chemicals in the fields and suffer from a range of ailments, particularly skin diseases. Toxic chemicals cross the border to Mexico freely and rural Mexican communities are also being poisoned. We are fighting for a changed agricultural system that does not use dangerous chemicals so as to protect the lives of farm workers and rural people.

Environmental racism: a system supported by governments

Session 3: Panel discussion on the role of governments in environmental racism.

Moderator: Deborah Robinson, International Possibilities Unlimited.

The Australian Experience

Ellie Gilbert and Yularitja Isaacs, The Sovereign Union of Aboriginal Peoples of Australia

There are 500 Aboriginal nations and 350 distinct languages surviving in Australia despite successive policies of genocide and assimilation. The Australian government now faces two legal problems:

· The Marbo judgement on land rights found that Australia’s claim to sovereign title based on the assumption of ‘terra nulius’ – implying that there were no prior native rights – is without legal basis;

· Australian courts have only been able to dismiss an Aboriginal charge of genocide against the Prime Minister on the basis that there is no domestic law against genocide. This puts Australia in breach of UN human rights conventions to which it is a signatory. Australia should therefore be excluded from the UN system.

As a result, Australia has refused to sign a trade agreement with the European Union which contains a standard human rights clause. In response to this we have called for a boycott of Australian wine and are considering a sports boycott. Government delegations to the UN exclude Aboriginal people and, together with the US and Canada, Australia is attempting to head off a UN declaration on indigenous rights on the basis that it would lead to the fragmentation of the state.

Within the UN system, we are calling for recognition of indigenous peoples as sovereign peoples with the right to determine their own future. The effect would be to give us a majority over the colonising nations that control the UN. For this reason it has been footnoted in the draft UN declaration that the word ‘peoples’ is not a legal term.

We are now focusing on the perpetrators and have established an Aboriginal Diplomatic Camp outside Australia’s parliament. We burn fires there continuously to focus the spiritual energy to attack the negative spirituality of the colonisers. We believe that indigenous people have the recipe for living with and healing the Earth, our Mother.

Struggles of indigenous peoples in the USA

Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network, USA

Indigenous people resisted the centenary celebrations of Columbus because we saw no reason to celebrate the invasion and occupation of our land. The US is a colonial government of occupation and its instruments are the church, the military and the lawyers. We believe that there is no difference between the state and the corporations. Each feeds and nurtures the other.

When governments are not held accountable by the people they serve, the door to oppression is opened. In the US, corporate control of Congress makes it harder for the people to hold government to account. International trade agreements signed at the expense of national sovereignty also make it harder for people to hold governments to account. The possibility of protection is threatened by the World Trade Organisation. We believe that civil society must regain control of governments if we are to have progress.

There are 550 indigenous nations recognised by federal law. Despite this, we still struggle for effective recognition of our rights. We face common problems with toxic dumping, clear cutting of our forests and military contamination of our lands. The people themselves have been contaminated and PCBs and dioxins are showing up in breast milk. We face the same problems as other people of colour and are now linking with African, Asian and Mexican Americans around the concept of environmental justice.

The present laws do not protect us and are discriminatory. The standards developed in the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are not about clean air or clean water. They are about acceptable levels of contamination and are adjudicated in risk assessments designed to calculate the trade of their profit against our health. These laws and these assessments do not consider our spiritual values or our values of identification with the land. We are now calling for a Seven Generation Precautionary Approach to put development into the perspective of that time scale.

South Africa: A practical experience

Thabo Madihlaba, Environmental Justice Networking Forum, South Africa

South Africa presents a peculiar situation. We now have democratic rule and a government led by black people, so how can it be possible to talk of entrenching racism in that context? People in South Africa were dispossessed of land by force. With democratic elections in ’94 we were promised ‘a better life for all’. A land reform process was announced and 70,000 claims for restitution have been made. Seven years later, only 12,000 claims have been settled.

Our Constitution gives people the right to a clean and healthy environment but this right is made subject to economic development. Economic development is now interpreted in terms of government’s neo-liberal macro-economic policy which was applauded by the World Bank. We have developed good policies in a number of areas, but they do not deliver because their intent is undermined in the context created by economic policy.

So the democratic government still seems to be promoting an imperialist agenda. We now need a 180 degree turn around. We need to unite to fight globalisation.

Turning the Tide on Environmental Racism: The way forward

Session 4: Panel discussion on the work of reversing environmental racism.

Moderator: Chris Albertyn

Mechanisms and strategies to halt and reverse environmental racism

Bobby Peek, groundWork, South Africa

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) takes place in Johannesburg next year. Should we be thinking ‘Rio+10’ or ‘Johannesburg-30’? 30 years ago the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the relationship between environment and development on the agenda. Since then the poor have got poorer, women are more vulnerable, industrial pollution has got worse and, in places like Burma, corporations are profiting from slave labour.

Africa thought Agenda 21 (A21), agreed at Rio in ’92, would prove the panacea for their problems. But A21 has put in place a process for industrial self-regulation, to coincide with globalisation advanced through the international economic governance regime, and has led to more deaths from industrial accidents. In South Durban, proposals for relocating people came directly from an A21 process. Globally, the process has led to the UN sponsored ‘Global Compact’ which has 9 principles including one on human rights and one on sustainable development. Shell, responsible for human rights violations in Nigeria, was invited to join the process. South African utility Eskom, a proponent of nuclear energy, was invited to join the process. So the perpetrators are invited to make decisions in the chambers of world democracy. Here in South Africa, the President has convened a Business Council to advise him but there is no comparable Community Council.

The Business Council for Sustainable Development recently took out advertisements to the affect that we should trust them and they will develop the world for us. But the resistance of the Ogoni and the Zapatista did not coincide because of any globalised internet links. The link between these struggles is the abuse of corporate power in th