EnvironmentalJustice-SocietyfortheAnthropologyof.docVIP

Environmental Justice ANTH 334 FALL 2007 Brett Williams Kalfani Ture Battelle-Tompkins T45 Battelle Tomkins cubicles brettnmi@ 885-1836 Office hours: Monday 11-1; Thursday 11-1; 5-7 Office Hours: and by arrangement and by arrangement? Prologue This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. Walt Whitman, Preface to 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass Background to Environmental Justice The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s at the intersection of environmentalist concerns about natural resources and social justice concerns about equality and civil rights. The movement began in Warren County, North Carolina, a poor black community which organized against a landfill laced with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the federal government had decided to place there. In 1987, after the Warren County protests, the United Church of Christ commissioned a study concluding that waste facilities were most often placed in communities of color. In 1991 the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit issued seventeen principles of environmental justice, including just public policy, clean cities, ethical uses of land and natural resources, universal protection from nuclear testing and toxic wastes, the right of all workers to a safe and healthy workplace, and full compen