The World Has Always Been Burning, Well, for Some People

By Alexia Leclercq

Cities underwater, massive droughts, increased storms, wars over water and food: these are the images that come to mind when discussing climate change. Yet for many people, climate change is not a future problem, it’s a reality of everyday life. For low-income communities, the climate crisis is not a potential disaster waiting to happen. Already, these neighborhoods, disproportionately populated by people of color, are suffering from a polluted water supply rife with disease and dangerous chemicals. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, commodities including coal and cotton were extracted from third-world countries using cheap indigenous labor.

Scientists pinpoint this moment as the beginning of our current geological age, characterized by the powerful influence of human activity on the health of the environment. Largely sponsored by the exploitation of underdeveloped nations by white wealthy elites, the history of environmental destruction parallels the history of settler-colonialism, slavery, and the proliferation of commercial agriculture. The consequences of this are dipodal. While some enjoy pristine suburban landscapes and relatively clean living situations, others aren’t so lucky. Primarily low-income people of color are being forced to bear the environmental costs of maintaining clean, wealthy environments elsewhere, living in proximity to polluted waters, petrochemical refineries, and air-polluting waste incinerators. In the words of professor Richard Bullard, “In the United States, based on the color of your skin and the money in your bank account, you’re literally breathing different air.”

Although climate change is often portrayed as an abstract concept, affecting future generations or those far off in the global south, it’s actually happening in our very own backyard, New York City. To understand how this came about, a history of white colonialism is due. After settlers pushed the Lenape tribe off their land, the Dutch West India Company brought African slaves to Manhattan. Today, the legacy of this conflict still reverberates in different facets of society, including in the disparity of those who have access to hygienic and safe living and those who do not.

Today, the life expectancy of a man living in the Bronx is ten to fifteen years lower than the same demographic living in more affluent areas of the city, primarily because of environmental degradation in the area. In a 2013 report titled “Keeping Track of New York City’s Children,” the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York found that the South Bronx, north and central Brooklyn, Jamaica and the Rockaways have the strongest concentrations of asthma hospitalizations. Additionally, more than 30% of the city’s waste and 70% of its sewage sludge are managed in communities of color, particularly Harlem and the South Bronx. Harlem, a neighborhood of just one square mile, houses one sewage treatment plant, three power plants, and 60,000 diesel garbage trucks. And this data corroborates findings on the national distribution of harmful equipment disproportionately situated among communities of color and low-income. The Commission for Racial Justice examined 415 federally approved hazardous waste sites and 300 abandoned toxic sites, finding that three out of every five African Americans and Hispanic Americans lived in communities next to uncontrolled or abandoned toxic waste sites.

For more information about environmental justice issues and activism in New York City, check out the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, WE ACT, New York Environmental Justice Alliance, and New York Lawyers for Public Interest.

Works Cited

“Environmental Racism Case Study: New York City - NYC Environmental Racism.” Google Sites, sites.google.com/a/owu.edu/nyc-environmental-racism/environmental-racism-case-study-new-york-city.

Greenberg, Dolores. “Reconstructing Race and Protest: Environmental Justice in New York City.” Environmental History, vol. 5, no. 2, 2000, pp. 223–250. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3985636.