‘Ōlelo No‘eau

Kānāwai Māmalahoe :

E nā kānaka,

E mālama ‘oukou i ke akua

A e mālama ho‘i ke kanaka nui a me kanaka iki;

E hele ka ‘elemakule, ka luahine, a me ke kama

A moe i ke ala

‘A‘ohe mea nāna e ho‘opilikia.

Hewa nō, make.

— Kamehameha I

Law of the Splintered Paddle:

Oh people,

Honor thy god;

respect alike [the rights of] people both great and humble;

May everyone, from the old men and women to the children

Be free to go forth and lie in the road (i.e. by the roadside or pathway)

Without fear of harm.

Break this law, and die.

Learning Outcomes

1. Students will be able to identify the ways in the environmental movements intersects with social justice movements against racism, sexism, and class discrimination.
2. Students will explore the unequal impacts of global climate change on developing countries and marginalized communities within the developed world.
3. Students will be able to understand the colonial histories and ongoing presence of environmental racism in Hawaii.

Environmental Justice Defined

Environmental justice is defined as a “field of study and a social movement that seeks to address the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and harms and asks whether procedures and impacts of environmental decision making are fair to the people they affect.” ^[1] These social movements have developed in response to environmental racism and other discriminatory practices by which poor and marginalized communities have to live with the impacts of polluting industries while the benefits flow to others outside of the community. In addition, many potential solutions to environmental problems benefit upper and middle class without addressing these disparities.

Social and racial inequalities often manifest themselves in exposure to pollutants.  Those that live next to coal mines, oil wells and refineries, and chemical factories bear the brunt of the environmental pollution caused by these industries. Unsurprisingly, these polluting industries are often located next to neighborhoods who lack the political and economic resources to oppose them, almost always poor and often people of  color. This usually happens because these communities lack the political and economic resources to fight against these industries. This is called environmental racism. In rural areas, these polluting industries can provide much needed employment but also damage people’s health as they are exposed to toxic chemicals. Those that own the mines, refineries, or factories often live in cleaner, safer communities, far from these polluting industries.

Cancer Alley, a section of the Mississippi River in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in Lousiana is an example of this. Lousiana is home to 320 factories that release enough toxic air pollution to have to report to the Environmental Protection Agency. ProPublica reported that St Gabriel’s a small town of 7,300 located in the middle of Cancer Alley is 2/3 black with an per-capital income of 15,000 and 29% of its residents below the poverty line.^[2] As a state, Lousiana has some of the most lax air pollution standards. Their benzene standard, which can cause leukemia, is 60 times higher than Massachusetts. Many of the small towns are unincorporated and don’t have the political power to stop new plants from being built.

Some of the worst environmental racism can be seen in Native American Reservations. Because these reservations are sovereign entities, they are not subject to the same environmental regulations as the rest of the United States.  Thus they are an important site for uranium mining, nuclear testing, and the storage of nuclear waste material across the western United States. Native American communities get millions of dollars for their willingness to host these sites but are also exposed to higher levels of toxic radiation, especially because they are more likely to live off of hunting and gathering food from the areas around these sites.^[3]

As highways were built across the United States, they were often built in black neighborhoods, dividing and destroying neighborhoods in order to support  the growth of cars. This automobile infrastructure also encouraged white flight–middle class white families moving out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. Another problem was redlining.  Redlining was the process from the 1930s to the 1960s in which governments drew red lines around non-white neighborhoods to warn banks, real estate companies, and government agencies from investing in those areas. This restricted the movement of non-white people into certain neighborhoods and worked to racially segregating American neighborhoods at the same time as the civil right movement and other laws were beginning to make many more overt forms of American apartheid illegal. The Unites States, despite being a racially and culturally diverse country, is still segregated at the community level as people tend to live close to people that are racially, socioeconomically, and culturally similar to themselves. This segregation is part of what allows environmental racism to flourish.

A 2022 study found that 50 years after redlining was declared illegal, it still means that 45 million Americans are breathing more polluted air. This is because they are often located near highways and major transportation corridors as well as polluting industries. In addition to air pollution, redlined communities have fewer green spaces, less trees on the streets, and other amenities. ^[4] This is an example of how systemic racism hurts black families economically and also makes them sicker and more vulnerable.

The opposite of industrial pollution redlining, in which the worst industries crowd into the poorest neighborhoods, is the NIMBY (not in my back yard) effect in which more affluent communities are able to pressure corporate and government officials to not build roads, landfills, and other industrial facilities next to their neighborhoods. To some extent, we need to have these industries as we all generate waste and use plastic products, but no one wants to live next to the industries that produce these products we all use. The fairest solution is to figure out ways to reduce our dependence on these products and find better ways of getting rid of our waste rather than sacrificing some communities for the benefits of others.

Within Hawaii, we can see similar kinds of issues. Why is the largest oil burning power plant, the coal burning power plant, the trash incinerator, and the landfill  all located on the west side of Oahu where there is the largest percentage of Native Hawaiians? A new landfill will have to be built and new potential locations include Waimanalo and Kahuku, other areas with lower incomes. Why are  these new proposals never proposed for Kahala or Kailua? Wind turbines and solar farms are similarly placed next to communities with the least political and economic clout.

Other islands have handled this disparity in more equitable ways.  On Kauai, the landfill is located on Hawaiian Homestead lands in Kekaha, on the west side of Kauai. However, in 2008, after consultation with the community the company that manages the landfill also established the Kekaha Host Community Benefits fund, which provides money to local residents for scholarships, solar panels, and to support youth sports. The fund has paid out about 2.5 million from 2012 to 2020 to projects decided on by local residents. The fund is replenished with a percentage of the tipping fees at the landfill.^[5] By providing material benefits to residents who must live near the landfill site, this approach begins to address some of the equity concerns about the location of these sites. It is not a perfect solution and does not deal with the environmental and health issues associated with landfills but it does provide material benefits to communities who lose property value and experience other negative impacts from the landfill, providing a more equitable and less exploitative relationship between the waste management company and the community.

Global Environmental Justice

These same processes we see at work in the US are also at work on a global scale. Many of the worst polluting activities have shifted from wealthier countries to poorer countries with fewer (or unenforced) environmental regulations and poorer, marginalized communities that have even less political and economic power than the most marginalized communities in the US.  For example, the most polluting mining and industrial activities now happen in South America, Africa, and Asia. The result is that while air and water pollution have been improving in the developed world for decade but have been getting worse in developing countries. These global supply chains are increasingly complex and make it difficult to quantify the impact caused by the production of our smart phones, shoes, or latest toys.

Social scientific theories like Wallerstein’s world systems theory and development theory can help us make sense of these global supply chains. World Systems theory divides the world into the core, the semi-periphery, and periphery. The economy of the core is dependent on information and its main industries are  banking , cultural production (the internet, entertainment, and advertising), education, and other knowledge industries. The semi-periphery involves industrial manufacturing, while the periphery is involved in mining raw materials and other extractive industries. Rather than being separated, each one is maintained in place by its relationship with the others. Poor underdeveloped countries are not underdeveloped because they are somehow further back along the development highway.They are underdeveloped because they are exploited and marginalized by global systems of power.

Africa, one of the poorest regions of the world, has an abundance of oil, gold, diamonds, minerals, and other natural resources. These resources are extracted and exported, making millions of dollars for a tiny African elite and extractive industries based in Europe and North America. The pollution from these industries impact local health and livelihoods while the benefits are largely exported. Many of our consumer electronics and old clothing, once broken, are shipped to Africa. The electronics are dismantled and recycled, often resulting in unsafe working conditions and health impacts. The used clothing from the developed world is often sold in Africa at very low prices, destroying local clothing manufacturers who cannot compete with the cheap bales of used clothing coming in from abroad. Although most of us have not traveled  to Africa, our economic consumption and waste impacts their lives through global supply chains. In 2020, three of Hawaii’s top ten importers were Libya, Angola, and Congo, all of which supplied oil which is our largest import at over a billions dollars a year.^[6]  The next largest import is cars, which we need to use the oil.

Climate Change and Environmental Justice

In addition to the impacts of toxic pollution, climate change disasters like flooding, sea level rise, droughts, and hurricanes will impact many areas in the global south worse than areas in the global north. Some of this is due to geographic factors but is also due to political, economic, and social factors. For example, low lying island nations in the Pacific like Kiribati or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean will lose much of their territory or even disappear as sea level rises. Farmers in Africa dependent on rainfall will become increasingly impacted by droughts. Within these countries, the poorest and most marginalized communities will be the most vulnerable because they don’t have the resources to move to avoid these impacts or to mitigate by reinforcing their homes, building up shorelines, or buying food shipped in from other parts of the world.

The cruel irony in these differential impacts of climate change is that the communities who will be hardest hit by climate change are those who have contributed the least to its causes. In some cases, they do not have electricity, do not own cars, and have never flown on a plane. They do not participate in the consumption of industrial goods or the global food supply chains that have caused the climate crisis. Many of the poorest in the world still operate within local supply chains, growing and raising their own food and purchasing few manufactured goods.

Alternatively, those who live in the global North, which includes Europe and North America, participate in the economies and governments which have been the primary drivers of climate change since the industrial revolution. We also have the resources to move houses back from the ocean, dig wells to access more water, and electrify our houses, and purchase electric cars. Of course, within these societies these resources are not evenly distributed and with Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast as a category 5 hurricane in 2005 displacing over 1 million people and causing 100 billion in damages we could see how communities of color were disproportionately impacted by natural disasters, even within the US.^[7]

From this perspective there are no truly natural disasters. While the hurricane, flood, or wildfire are natural, the distribution of their impacts is always affected by economic, social, and cultural factors. Government aid also moves unevenly, helping some communities quicker and more effectively than others. In September of 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a category 5 hurricane. There was an estimated 90 billion dollars in damages with 95% of residents without power or cell phone services. Even though Puerto Rico is a US territory and its residents are US citizens, the federal response was slow and in January 2019, almost a year and half later, 350,000 people still lacked electricity. Even now, four years later, there is a significant amount of infrastructure work that has not been completed. This lackluster response is due, in part, to ongoing histories of colonialism and racism.^[8] Environmental activists are suggesting that the island adopt more renewable energy, smaller energy grids, and other measures that simultaneously build resilience and provide more equitable access to electricity.

One response to the destruction wrought by climate change will be migration as people in areas hit hard by droughts, fires, and floods seek to move to other areas less impacted. The massive Syrian refugee crisis across Europe resulting from the Syrian civil war was also caused by an ongoing drought to the region that exacerbated tensions and created the conditions for civil unrest. The developed world can respond with compassion and accept refugees or turn them away, allowing huge refugee populations to live in political, socioeconomic, and cultural limbo as they live displaced in refugee camps built along geopolitical borders. Our immigration policies are part of our climate change response. Do these policies reflect a scarcity mentality in which we need to fight to keep what is ours and exclude others, or do they reflect a willingness to open our borders and allow others who are trying to improve their lives to participate in the American dream. These are not theoretical questions as different political parties fight over immigration policies that can have a dramatic impact on migrants’ lives. With climate change, the scale of migration will dramatically change.

There are within the US and Europe, the development of nationalist and eco-fascist movements that recognize the societal threat of climate change but offer nationalism and closing of borders to undeserving outsiders as a solution.^[9] These movements often focus on overpopulation as the cause of environmental destruction and see reducing the number of certain kinds of humans as beneficial. These anti-immigrant sentiments fail to realize that many of the problems in the developing world, even those that seem natural, are often the result of political and economic policies that left these countries vulnerable and underdeveloped in the first place.

The Green New Deal

Within the US, many on the left are calling for a Green New Deal. The Green New Deal calls for a huge investment to combat climate change that also includes a dramatic government expansion of social safety nets to reduce income inequality and support marginalized communities. It imagines a massive social program similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal which helped lift the US out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Green New Deal is not a specific set of policies but it is a call to link the rebuilding of a green economy and decarbonization to socially just policies and rebuilding of communities of color that have been excluded from the American Dream.

The Green New Deal links climate change solutions and social justice. The work of creating a new carbon free economy–cleaning up polluted industrial sites, retrofitting homes to be more energy efficient, installing solar panels, restoring native ecosystems, building public transportation infrastructures,  and creating sustainable food systems–will generate a lot of economic activity, jobs, and beneficial growth. The government should use these investments as an opportunity to invest in neglected urban and rural areas and reduce social inequality. When deciding infrastructure and funding priorities, we should consider the social as well as economic impacts of these decisions.^[10]

Similarly, building the affordable mass transit systems that we will need to reduce the CO₂ emitted from transportation will greatly benefit working class communities. Taking concrete steps to reduce energy and heating costs by making homes and appliances more efficient or installing solar panels for low income families can also support them. Many of the current forms of subsidies for green technology such as tax rebates for solar or electric vehicle purchasing go mostly to middle and upper class who have the money to buy electric cars or install solar panels. Even worse, many proposals like gas taxes, carbon taxes without dividends, and investments in industrial projects in poor communities can reduce carbon emissions at the expense of those who can least afford it, and generate a lot of money for the energy companies who are largely responsible for creating the current climate crisis. These measures can also generate frustration and protests from working class citizens who feel, rightly so, that they are being asked to pay for problems that they did not cause. The Yellow Vest Protests in France in the fall of 2018 led to countrywide protests for months in response to a proposal to increase a gasoline tax aimed at curbing global warming. The protesters called for taxes that were less regressive and did not target suburban and rural poor who depended on using their cars for economic survival.

As climate change accelerates and more people become educated about our impact on the planet, many corporations have begun to try to make money off of the transition to a carbon free economy. Almost every polluting business out there, and especially the worst of them, is beginning to make pledges to reduce their emissions or advertise their green business practices. We need to be careful to distinguish legitimate commitments from greenwashing, or the practice of pretending to be environmental while simultaneously lobbying against real energy reforms. Similarly, we should be suspicious of government initiatives that are promoted as sustainable but actually do more harm than good. The distrust of government rhetoric we can see in the Yellow Vest protests, the Ku Kiai Kahuku protests, and other similar ones around the world is not unfounded. Many times environmentalist language can be used to expand corporate and state power.

This leads us to the strongest argument for a Green New Deal which is that we cannot rebuild a new green economy using the same dangerous alliance between governments and corporations that have led us to the current crisis. Our governments have largely ignored the climate crisis at the request of the fossil fuel lobby. A recent example of a $60 million dollar bribery scandal in Ohio in which energy companies paid corrupt legislators to pass an energy policy which bailed out the coal and nuclear industries while raising energy costs for Ohio citizens ^[11]. Clean energy is easier with clean politics.

A recent poll shows that a  majority (63%) of Americans think that climate change is impacting their community and 65% thinks that the Federal Government is doing to little to combat climate change. A massive 79% think we should be developing renewable energy and 73% favor a carbon tax.^[12] These polls indicate the extent to which politicians vote for corporate lobbies more than the broad general public.

Without clean politics creating socially just clean energy there will be continued protests and political infighting which will make it more difficult  to achieve real progress in achieving the radical social transformation necessary to arrive at a carbon neutral economy. It can be hard to envision a future in which racial and social justice are created through sustainable food systems, expanded public green spaces, free public transportation, and a carbon free energy system. The changes do not need to necessarily come from top down, but can also be initiated by grassroots and community organizations. However, in order to implement them we need to gain popular support from both sides of the political spectrum that are suspicious of the government and corporate alliances.

Classroom Ideas and Disciplinary Adaptations

Social Sciences

Examine some environmental historical examples of environmental injustice. They can be domestic, such as Robert Moses and the freeways in New York, coal mining in Appalachia,  or the TVA in the south, or international.

Natural Sciences

Explore the movement of pollution through different types of food chains, the hydrological cycle, etc.  How far do they travel?  What are some of the far reaching affects?

Math and Business

Using statistics to explore environmental justice issues and correlation. For example, explore the data on race and public health in Cancer Alley.

Art and Humanities

Explore how artists use art to teach about and raise awareness about environmental justice.

Supplemental Materials

Books

Klein, N. (2020). On fire: the (burning) case for a green new deal. Simon & Schuster.

Articles

Mohai, P., Pellow, D., & Roberts, J. T. (2009). Environmental justice. Annual review of environment and resources, 34, 405-430.

Lim, A. (2021) Through their eyes: How artists are capturing the struggle for environmental justice | Fix Grist.com

Palmer, C. *Why The Fight Against The Kahuku Turbines Matters – Honolulu Civil Beat

The Environmental Justice Movement | NRDC

Films

Environmental justice, explained www.grist.com

Noah, T. Highway Racism – If You Don’t Know, Now You Know | The Daily Show

Page, E. and I. Daniel (2019) There’s Something in the Water.