News
Posted on
Sat, Sep. 30, 2006
Traveling
group of activists urges groups to fight polluters
CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST
BEREA-- They were black, white and Latino, but they all told stories of how their communities in Louisiana, California and Kentucky have been polluted by industry.
Yesterday, Berea College was the latest stop for the "Environmental Justice for All Tour," a traveling coalition of community activists encouraging grass-roots groups to keep up the fight against polluters.
"The whole goal is to make progress in cleaning up our communities and to make government accountable," said Elizabeth Crowe of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation.
Among the panelists who spoke to about 50 students and Berea residents was Jose Bravo, executive director of the Just Transition Alliance, a group near San Diego that helps unsafe communities become healthy places with sustainable economies.
He and other panelists described how poor and minority neighborhoods have a disproportionate share of incinerators, dumps and other sources of pollution, and the ill-effects from their wastes and toxins.
"Communities of color and working-class neighborhoods are the canaries in the coal mine," Bravo said.
Teri Blanton, a member of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a group that focuses on environmental justice, said activism requires a shift in attitude.
"I think we've heard things like 'You can't fight city hall,' 'You can't fight big business,' 'Your vote doesn't count,' You can't make a difference' I think we've heard this crap so much that people have begun to believe it," Blanton said.
"But with our jobs as activists, there are people out there saying, 'You can fight city hall,' 'You can fight big business,' and 'Your vote does count.'"
The tour traces its roots to Louisville, where environmentalists and health groups met in 2004. They expressed their solidarity with local activists who have struggled for 15 years to force a cleanup of the section of West Louisville known as "Rubbertown," an industrial area near an African-American neighborhood. That 2004 meeting resulted in the tour to raise the profile of community groups and to encourage them to work together.
The tour has three simultaneous bus routes in the Northeast, South and West Coast that kicked off Sunday. The northeastern- and southern-route buses will meet in Washington, D.C., on Monday with calls for environmental justice and health protections for all communities.
Berea College student Nathan Hall, 23, of Floyd County said he could see parallels between the fight that poor blacks and Latinos have with chemical and petroleum companies in Louisiana, Texas and California and the struggle of people in Eastern Kentucky to deal with effects of mountaintop mining.
"Eastern Kentucky is mostly white, but there are a lot of similarities in the environmental destruction that we have with the health degradation that communities of color have. It's mostly a class issue," Hall said.
Hall said his goal is to start a biodiesel/ethanol company in Eastern Kentucky "so I can give people good-paying jobs that won't be environmentally disruptive, and to have a more firm foothold to fight surface mining and various other forms of environmental degradation."
Hearing yesterday's panelists, Hall said, "gave me more wherewithal to continue, to persevere, seeing that people in other areas have similar problems and that they continue to fight. It helps me to not just be exasperated and throw up my hands."
Reach Greg Kocher in the Nicholasville bureau at (859) 885-5775 or gkocher1@herald-leader.com.