What do you think of when you hear the words “climate change?”
Chances are, you might think of sad nature, somewhere far away.
But climate change also affects humans, in every corner of the world, including the corner
where you live, and where I live.
It impacts the people and places we see everyday, and it will impact some of us more than others.
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The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most active seasons in history -- with
17 named storms and 10 hurricanes.
Six of those hurricanes had winds more than 110 miles per hour.
And while it’s hard to know if any single weather event is due to climate change, we
do know that it will make conditions more extreme.
We’re seeing what that future could look like in Cape Town, South Africa.
There, a drought has stressed local reservoirs, leading to water rationing as the city prepares
for the day when taps run dry.
And when you take a community that’s already facing these disparities, and add in extreme
weather caused by climate change, it can make it even harder for those communities to recover.
Not every community experiences these climate changes in the same way.
Some communities have more resources, better infrastructure, or more political capital than other countries.
There’s a concept to deal with these inequalities.
It’s called “environmental justice.”
And the idea is pretty simple: Communities shouldn’t be forced to suffer disproportionate
environmental effects or deal with more pollution than others because they belong to a certain
race, national origin or income bracket.
People in wealthy countries often think these concerns are far away.
But even in a place like the U.S., where we tend to think we’re ahead of the curve on
protecting all people, the execution has been spotty.
We can still find lots of environmental disparities right in our backyard.
As Miami cleaned up after Hurricane Maria, officials dumped debris next to a community
with lots of low income residents and people of color...definitely close enough to see
and smell it.
And in Houston, residents who couldn’t afford or weren’t physically able to evacuate before
Hurricane Harvey had no choice but to stay behind as the city flooded.
Puerto Rico has faced budget shortages and a lack of infrastructure for decades.
And after a spate of hurricanes, residents there had trouble finding clean drinking water,
and large portions of the island remained without electricity for months.
It’s more than extreme individual events.
In many places, days that were already hot are getting even hotter, and there are more
of them.
This heat can be especially deadly in homes without air conditioning.
For example, the heat index inside public housing in Harlem stays dangerously elevated
overnight, even when it cools off outside.
And as climate change brings the average temperature up, systemic inequalities like this will become
more obvious.
It’s not that the United States hasn’t tried to fix these problems before.
The fight for environmental justice in the U.S. traces its roots to 1982 in Warren County,
North Carolina, when residents mounted mass demonstrations against a plan to put contaminated
soil in a nearby landfill.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, found that similar landfills in southern
states were all located in black or low-income neighborhoods.
Several years later, a report found this was a pattern around the country: hazardous waste
facilities were more likely to be located in minority communities.
The proof was undeniable, so in 1992, President George H.W. Bush founded the office of Environmental
Justice inside the EPA.
Two years later, Bill Clinton signed an executive order that told federal agencies to consider
environmental justice in all policies, and effectively included environmental protections
under civil rights law.
Sounds like things were going pretty well, right?
Well, environmental justice policies stalled when George W. Bush shifted the focus of the
Office of Environmental Justice from protecting low-income and minority communities to protecting
“all people”.
That sounds good, but in practice, it meant those efforts no longer focused on protecting
the people who needed it most.
At the same time, many environmental civil rights claims were delayed for years, or downright
rejected.
After Barack Obama’s election, his administration re-committed to environmental justice.
Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House for two years.
But guess how many bills they filed to strengthen environmental justice protections?
Zero.
Today, EPA funding itself is under threat, so these vulnerable communities remain at
risk.
It’s easy to assume that climate change will affect us all equally, but the truth
is that communities all around us -- including the one you’re in -- may be forced to bear
an unequal brunt of our changing world.
If we want to change this, we have to recognize those disparities and engage with those communities
That way, as we find solutions, everyone has a seat at the table.