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Welcome back!
Let's Talk About Environmental Justice: Why It Matters
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, poor and marginalized populations have borne the brunt of the toxic byproducts of industry. Low income neighborhoods are generally cheaper to build facilities in, and the people who live there have little power to object to the degradation of their environment. Often they are even unaware of the dangers to which they are being exposed, due to language and educational differences, as well as regulatory policies that don’t require clear and timely notification to the local populace of pending infrastructure buildout and the potential health issues caused by air and water pollution.
Environmental justice is a concept that promotes regulation that ensures that all people - regardless of race, color, national origin, or income - should receive fair treatment and have meaningful involvement with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their impact on projects in their neighborhoods.
The great civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer noted that “nobody's free until everybody's free.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. The same can be said about the necessity of ensuring that all people have equal protection from environmental hazards.
Here in Massachusetts, the state determines criteria for what constitutes an environmental population entitled to special consideration under the law, including statistics on average income, percentage of minorities in the neighborhood, and percentage of the population without English language proficiency.
Environmental burdens are defined as any destruction, damage or impairment of natural resources resulting from causes such as climate change, air pollution, water pollution, improper sewage disposal, dumping of solid wastes and other noxious substances, excessive noise, impairment of water quality, or other damage caused by private industrial, commercial or government operations or other activity that contaminates or alters the quality of the environment and poses a risk to public health.
The process of achieving regulations to mitigate these issues is ongoing. The Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs has added an Environmental Justice Task Force, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities is currently working on ways to improve outreach to environmental justice populations to ensure the meaningful involvement of people with respect to developments in their neighborhoods, and the implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. These policies must involve public meetings in the affected communities that are scheduled well in advance of any planned projects, and must not only inform the populace about the likely effects to their environment, but also educate about the process itself and the ways in which the community can affect decisions that affect their lives.
Environmental justice, in order to be applied equitably, should not only plan for mitigation of the future effects on a given community; it must also take into account the historical burden that a community has undergone. For instance, communities that have a high rate of asthma, such as Springfield, should not be assessed solely on the future effects that particulates in the air might have on their health, but also on how those effects would be exacerbated in a community which is already vulnerable to lung disease.
BEAT and No Fracked Gas in Mass have been involved in some of the frontline fights to protect environmental justice neighborhoods, including our Put Peakers in the Past campaign, which has already resulted in the shutdown of two major peaking power plants that were polluting environmental justice neighborhoods here in Berkshire County, and one in Hampden County impacting Springfield, West Springfield and surrounding towns.. Negotiations are ongoing with a third Berkshire County plant to either close it or convert it to solar power with battery storage.
We also collaborate in coalitions of environmental groups around the state in a multi pronged effort to ensure that climate justice and environmental justice are provided to every community in Massachusetts.
No Fracked Gas in Mass continually monitors government and corporate activity in this area. Opportunities for the community to take action and file comments are regularly updated on our Act Now, Events, and Comment Period pages. Please check back often as we sometimes get notifications of events and hearings on very short notice (we are working to press state agencies to give the public more lead time).
For more information on Environmental Justice (EJ) in Massachusetts, check out the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Conservation Law Foundation, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Environmental Justice Tracking Tool.
For even more environmental news, info, and events, check out the latest newsletter from our colleagues at Berkshire Environmental Action Team (BEAT)!
— The NFGiM Team
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