FORUM ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION Environmental justice is an area of increasing concern, spawning nu- merous movements and widening global networks which are bringing together peoples as diverse as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, anti- incinerator activists in Los Angeles, California, and the Dineh Alliance at Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Since the 1980s, groups such as these have drawn our attention, not to the pristine natural world cel- ebrated by mainstream American environmentalists and nature writers, but to contested terrains where members of marginalized communities are mobilizing around environmental issues affecting their families, neighbors, and the environments in which their homes are located. One of the defining moments in the history of the environmental justice movement was the publication in 1987 of a report sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ). The report, which compiled the results of a national study, found race to be the leading factor in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities and determined that poor and people of color communities suffer a disproportionate risk to the health of their families and their environments, with 60 percent of African American and Latino com- munities and over 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans living in areas with one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Following publication of the report, the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, then executive director of the UCC-CRJ, coined the term "en- vironmental racism" which he defined as "racial discrimination in en- vironmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and history of exclud- ing people of color from leadership in the environmental movement." 1 Another watershed moment in the history of the movement took place in October 1991, when over three hundred community leaders at Arizona State University Libraries on June 11, 2016 http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from
Transcript
FORUM
E N V I R O N M E N T A L J U S T I C E
A R O U N D T A B L E D I S C U S S I O N
Environmental justice is an area of increasing concern, spawning nu-merous movements and widening global networks which are bringingtogether peoples as diverse as the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, anti-incinerator activists in Los Angeles, California, and the Dineh Allianceat Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation. Since the 1980s, groups such asthese have drawn our attention, not to the pristine natural world cel-ebrated by mainstream American environmentalists and nature writers,but to contested terrains where members of marginalized communitiesare mobilizing around environmental issues affecting their families,neighbors, and the environments in which their homes are located.
One of the defining moments in the history of the environmentaljustice movement was the publication in 1987 of a report sponsored bythe United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ).The report, which compiled the results of a national study, found raceto be the leading factor in the location of commercial hazardous wastefacilities and determined that poor and people of color communitiessuffer a disproportionate risk to the health of their families and theirenvironments, with 60 percent of African American and Latino com-munities and over 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and NativeAmericans living in areas with one or more uncontrolled toxic wastesites. Following publication of the report, the Reverend BenjaminChavis, then executive director of the UCC-CRJ, coined the term "en-vironmental racism" which he defined as "racial discrimination in en-vironmental policy-making and the enforcement of regulations andlaws, the deliberate targeting of people of color communities for toxicwaste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presenceof poisons and pollutants in our communities, and history of exclud-ing people of color from leadership in the environmental movement."1
Another watershed moment in the history of the movement tookplace in October 1991, when over three hundred community leaders
from the United States, Canada, Central and South America, PuertoRico, and the Marshall Islands convened the First National People ofColor Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. Thepurpose of the meeting was to bring together people from African,Asian, Latino, and Native American communities who would shapethe contours of a multiracial movement for environmental changefounded on the political ideology of working from the grassroots.Delegates took a stand against environmental racism and drew up sev-enteen "Principles of Environmental Justice" which profile a broad anddeep political project to pursue environmental justice and secure apolitical, economic, and cultural liberation that "has been denied forover 500 years of colonization and oppression resulting in the poison-ing of our communities and land and the genocide of our peoples."2
A general conception of environmental justice, then, from leadingvoices in the movement such as Robert Bullard and Benjamin Chavis,concerns struggles to achieve equity and fairness in the distribution ofenvironmental burdens and environmental benefits, and the under-standing that environmental issues are intrinsically connected to so-cial justice issues. There is already a vast literature on this subject inthe fields of social science, environmental science, and philosophy, andmore and more expressive writers and artists are representing envi-ronmental justice struggles in their works. However, to date, therehas been little academic work on the literature of environmental jus-tice, which includes such works as Awiakta's Selu: Seeking the CornMother's Wisdom, Raymond Barrio's The Plum Pickers, Jimmy SantiagoBaca's Black Mesa Poems, Ana Castillo's So Far From God, WinonaLaDuke's Last Standing Woman, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, CherrieMoraga's Heros and Saints and Other Plays, Leslie Marmon Silko's Al-manac of the Dead, and Gerald Vizenour's Landfill Meditation, to namejust a few. This lack of attention can be attributed, in part, to the factthat these works often redefine the environment as a place where hu-mans live, work, play, and worship, and approach environmental prob-lems as integrally related to problems of social inequality and oppres-sion, while many of those writing in the field of literature and environ-ment focus their study on canonical texts that describe solitary sojournsin wilderness.
To call more attention to the interrelated social, economic, and envi-ronmental issues surrounding the environmental justice movement,the leadership of the Association for the Study of Literature and Envi-ronment asked Joni Adamson and Rachel Stein, whose own researchand course offerings focus upon environmental justice writings, to or-ganize a roundtable session addressing the topic for the Environmentand Community conference held recently in Reno, Nevada. The panel
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 157
brought together Simon Ortiz, Teresa Leal, Devon Pefia, and TerrellDixon, who sat down together to discuss their contributions to envi-ronmental justice politics, poetics and pedagogy, and the potential forfuture collaborations between artists, activists, scholars and teacherswithin the movement.
To briefly introduce panel members, Simon Ortiz is the author ofmany collections of poems and essays including Woven Stone, Speakingfor the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, and After and Before theLightning. His work focuses on the issues, concerns, and responsibili-ties of Native Americans towards their lands, cultures, and communi-ties. He writes about his experiences working in the early 1960s in theuranium processing industry in Grants, New Mexico, and the some ofthe social and environmental impacts of the mine on the Acoma com-munity in Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land.
Teresa Leal is cochair of the Southwest Network for Economic andEnvironmental Justice (SNEEJ) and is a grassroots representative tothe National Environmental Council (NEC) which advises the directorof the Environmental Protection Agency. For over thirty years, thissingle mother of eight and resident of Nogales, Arizona, has been atireless activist, working first with Ceasar Chavez for farm worker rightsand, more recently, to ameliorate the problems that result when toxinsleak out from factories into the aquifer from which the poor draw theirwater. She is also working to gain basic sanitation services for the resi-dents of the colonias , or squatter villages surrounding the 98maquiladoras on the Mexican side of the border in Nogales. Her suc-cessful efforts to revitalize the Nogales Historical Association have in-cluded the creation of historical and environmental education programsfor children on both sides of the border.
Devon Pefia is an activist/environmental anthropologist at the Uni-versity of Washington who works with the Rio Grande BioregionsProject, an independent research and advocacy network of social andenvironmental scientists, lawyers, traditional Hispano farmers, andsustainable agriculture activists. He works to promote an understand-ing of agriculture from the perspective of ecosystems theory and ad-vocates for the protection of the ecological wisdom of traditional land-based communities. His books include The Terror of the Machine: Tech-nology, Work, Gender, and Ecology on the U.S.-Mexico Border, and ChicanoCulture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin.
Terrell Dixon has been chair and director of graduate studies in hisdepartment at the University of Houston and is well-known to mem-bers of ASLE for his tireless service to the organization. He has pub-lished a collection of essays on the grizzly bear, contributed numerousessays and reviews on nature writing to such publications as The CEA
Critic and The American Nature Writing Newsletter, and with Scott Slovic,edited Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers. He haspresented many papers on environmental justice writings and is cur-rently putting together a volume of essays on toxic literature and an-other on urban nature.
We hope the transcript of the panel's discussion serves as a fruitfulintroduction to the complex of issues surrounding the environmentaljustice movement and offers teachers and students who wish to pur-sue the conjunctions between environmental justice politics, poetics,and pedagogies a place to begin.
Joni AdamsonRachel Stein
Joni Adamson: We've brought together Simon Ortiz, Teresa Leal,Devon Pefia, and Terrell Dixon, and will begin by asking each panelistto speak about his/her own work and its connection to the environ-mental justice movement.
Simon Ortiz: Good morning. I'm a poet and writer and storytellerwhich means that what I write comes from a community and cultureof people who are Native American or the indigenous population ofthis homeland that we call America or the United States of America. Iwrite about the experience of native people. I'm from Acoma, NewMexico, and as you may know, most of my writing has to do with theAcoma people, and other Native American people, and the experiencesof their cultures and communities. That means that my poems andstories have to do with the environmental setting of Acoma, and all ofthe Americas, where indigenous native people live.
The world that we live in is dependent upon what has taken place inthe past. Certainly my writing and my views have to do with the past,but they are concerned also with what is taking place in the present.Native people don't necessarily see themselves as "Indians"—we arewho we are according to where we live geographically, and to the lan-guages that we speak, and the concepts that we have as native people.When I write, I write as an Indian, or native person, concerned withhis environmental circumstances and what we have to do to fight for agood kind of life.
Teresa Leal: Buenos dias. I am Teresa Leal, from Nogales, Arizona,on the Mexican border. I come from a grassroots organization calledComadres, an organization of women, mostly squatter women thatwas created from the maquiladora experience where families had tofend for themselves in order to get land and public services. So that ishow we began, supporting each other, and then we became a formal
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 159
organization. Comadres is a strategy that women use in our culture toinvite other women to be a co-mother. The degree that a co-mother isprepared is the degree that she can help her co-sisters. In a broaderpicture, I am co-chair of the Southwest Center for Economic and Envi-ronmental Justice. We are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year.We are 85 grassroots organizations on both sides of the Mexican bor-der. Some of us are from the Black Beret, Brown Beret indigenous move-ment, trade unions. We are focused on creating a network that willcommunicate among all of these small locally-focused organizationsin order to develop the indicators that we need to be observant of theimpact of industrialization in our lands. This is something that at thistime is a world-wide movement. We were at the World Trade Organi-zation meeting and we met with other groups world-wide who hadthe same issues. We need to enhance our capacity to communicatewith them in the future, because there aren't that many differences inwhat is happening to communities, to the natural environment, thelandscape, to all of us. We can work on these issues together.
I started working with Cesar Chavez during the '60s. When the spray-ers were spraying pesticides on the pickers, close to Tucson, it waseasy for us to get the sprayers out of there and close down the fieldsand get a boycott on what they were producing. Now the economicissues are so dramatic that we cannot afford to shut down jobs for ouraffiliates or the people that we are trying to defend. So now our chal-lenge is to find new ways to create a just transition movement withjobs and communities involved. A lot of our organizations are tradi-tionalists and we need to use all the tools that are part of globalization,and to use them ourselves. Part of the principle guidelines of our net-work is to look for funding and knowledge and training for our affili-ates so that they can confront these issues, and not just be confronta-tional, but be able to propose environmentally-friendly substitutes, beable to not have to close jobs for our people, but instead creating a newway of development. At the WTO meetings, I was very pleased to seethat we came together from different areas and groups, the enviros,the trade people, all sorts of people. It created a catalyst so that werealized that we all have to work together. We all got gassed, we all gotbullets. That was a novelty for a lot of us from both sides of the fence,the environmentalists and the native peoples, it made us realize thatwe all have to work together, which will enhance the work that we doin the next ten years.
Devon Pefia: When I think of myself as a mestizo or Chicano, I thinkof myself in terms of being rooted for twleve generations in NativeAmerica; one of my immediate ancestors was a full-blooded Cherokeewoman by the name of Missouri Anne Berryhill. But I also have roots
in the culture that came here from Spain; my family first came to thedesert Southwest, to the land grant community of Laredo in 1775. Span-ish culture was greatly influenced and shaped by North Africa, by Af-rican peoples and Arabic peoples, and perhaps that is why the Hispano-Mexicano has always been treated a little badly in the Southwest, be-cause of the black legend. So the European people who came to theAmericas were already a mixed people, a mestizo people, and they goteven more mixed by the time they settled into and worked their wayup the Rio Grande.
I teach at the University of Washington, in a Ph.D. program in Envi-ronmental Anthropology, which is an extraordinary effort to bring to-gether natural and social sciences at the doctoral level. EnvironmentalAnthropology is not just interdisciplinary research, it is collaborative.You have to collaborate with local cultures to produce the knowledgecalled Environmental Anthropology. You can't do it top down, youcan't do it by means of remote social science. My particular area ofresearch is agroecology. I look at farms and ranches as ecosystems,agroecosysterns. To presume that we could develop agroecology with-out the knowledge of the farmer is preposterous, yet that is exactly thepolitics of knowledge production in the Western trajectory, the cult ofexpertise, of the expert in lab white who experiments with reduction-ist scientific methods and never ever gets on the ground to observehow people over multiple generations have lived in place. The farm-ers that I work with, in the communities of the upper Rio Grande wa-tershed of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, are all fam-ily farms that have been in the same family for back to twelve genera-tions. When people stay on the ground, in place, they are bound tohave learned a little bit about living in place. This knowledge that hasbeen accumulated over generations of people living in place, Hispanoand Pueblo farmers in the region, has been typically disqualified, treatedas being based on superstition, as being primitive, inefficient, back-ward and so on. The work that I do focuses on bringing together inter-disciplinary collaborative research teams to study farms in bothbioregional and political ecological contexts. We just completed a fiveyear study funded by Ford Foundation, National Endowment for theHumanities, and the Colorado Historical Society, of historic acequiafarms in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Our team in-cluded 43 people, including a hydrologist, a plant ecologist, a geolo-gist, botanist, an ethnobotanist, an agricultural historian, a historian,three sociologists, a folklorist,. . . . We looked at everything on eighthistoric sites. These are living farms. The oldest one was founded be-fore the Onate Entrada [the first Spanish explorer's entry]; it is partIndian and they have probably been there for a thousand years, but
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 161
now there is intermarriage between the San Juan Pueblo family andthe Chicano family, so that land has been worked for over a thousandyears and yet they have a six-foot soil horizon, and no plough pan:you have to wonder how people could occupy a place for so long andnot destroy it. In fact, the hydrologist on our research staff says that thegravity driven earthen work irrigation system or acequias that thesefarms use, actually create soil, rather than destroy soil, especially whenit is a multi-generational art form. When you have multigenerational,place-based knowledge you convert your cultural landscapes into veri-table mosaics of habitable spaces for humans and for wildlife.
I don't think of nature either as wilderness or as natural resource.And I don't believe that we have really succeeded in our intellectualdiscourse and in our policy in overcoming culture/nature dualism inthis country, and that we are deeply divided with the idea of naturehere and civilization there, and that they should be separated, asThoreau would have preferred. Instead of thinking of nature as wil-derness, or a commodity, I think of nature as home. And we have asaying in the environmental justice movement that the environment iswhere we live, work, and play.
Teresa Leal: And worship.Devon Pena: The work I do with the Colorado Acequia Association
is working to establish a community land and water trust. Becausethese very old historic farms are being blacktopped for condos, secondhomes and the amenities industry, eco- and cultural tourism. So, thework that I'm currently doing is on land and water trust acquisitionsand conservation easements to insure that these historic cultural land-scapes are not converted or dried out. Therefore this is as much aboutecological democracy as it is about social equity. This is part of what ishappening with the environmental justice movement, which is bring-ing together the struggles for ecological diversity, ecological democ-racy, and social equity, and seeking to invent new sustainable ways ofinhabitation of our planet earth.
Terrell Dixon: Like the other panelists, I'm shaped by my environ-ment. I grew up in a small town in rural, eastern Oklahoma, the capi-tal of the Creek Indian Nation, reading Thoreau. More recently my en-vironment has been Houston, Texas, and much of what I will talk abouttoday stems from my efforts to come to terms environmentally with thecity. Houston (this may come as a surprise to you), has a Texas-size senseof itself; we want to be number one. So far, our development effortshave led us to number one status in one dubious category: air pollution.We've surpassed all the California cities, even Los Angeles. Houston isthus a challenging environment in which to teach environmental litera-ture, but it is a also a tremendously interesting cultural locale. As Hous-
ton has become one of the major in-points for immigration into the UnitedStates, classes at the University of Houston have become wonderfullydiverse. When I go into a literature and environment class, I want towork with as many traditions of nature as I can.
What I want for my students comes in two parts. One is an aware-ness of the natural world, and our individual and cultural connectionsto nature, even in the city, and the second part (and these two oftenblend together) is some growth into activism. There are several waysto go about this. I focus when I can on urban nature. This is not anoxymoron. It is a solid, interesting field of inquiry about a subject thatmy students confront, whether they realize it or not, every day. Thisintroduction to urban nature is rarely easy, so that one thing I do is tohave students write a history of their family's engagement with na-ture. Since many of my students are first generation Americans andfirst generation college students, those histories are often very inter-esting. They cross borders, they chronicle family changes from rural tourban life, and I always ask that they conclude in Houston with atten-tion to our campus and their lives. Many students see connections tothe larger cultural history or urbanization embodied in these familyhistories. Another way, one that fits well with our discussion today, isto work with what I call the literature of toxicity. I believe that over thelast three or four decades, the years since Silent Spring, a major themeof American life and literature is our growing concern with toxicityand that this concern appears in many of the diverse literatures thatmake up contemporary American literature. Toxicity is also a topic thatengages my students living in Houston, breathing Houston air. A thirdway for me has been to work with graduate students in the develop-ment of service learning ecocomposition classes. Students who choosethese classes do the usual reading and write the usual number of es-says, but they also agree to do a number of hours of service for variousorganizations—the Museum of Natural Science, the Sierra Club, etc.—in the city. Such service becomes part of the course work; it figures intheir writing assignments, and it is correlated to their reading. At firststudents love working this way because it promises practical helpthrough real world experience and vita building, but they also come tolove it for the work they do. Once they are in the Houston Arboretum(last year at this time there were forty of us at work clearing a field inthe arboretum for planting with native grasses) or writing a draft for aSierra Club position paper, they begin to change, to become engagedwith environmental issues in ways that deepen and extend their class-room awareness.
Joni Adamson: As Devon and Teresa mentioned earlier, one of thekey efforts of the Environmental Justice Movement has been to expand
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 163
mainstream American environmentalist definitions of "the environ-ment." We'd like to ask each of you to speak to the reasons why thiswork is so important and explain how you and your groups are rede-fining what we mean when we say "Nature."
Teresa Leal: We view the environment as where we live, work andplay but also where we worship which is something very importantthat we need to take into account as we go through the designation ofprojects and permitting issues that keep us very busy in the network.The Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice hasa whole campaign that is dedicated to EPA accountability. We are con-stantly trying to get the EPA to be more accountable to what is happen-ing. We've got another campaign which is the worker justice campaign.Worker justice campaign is where we work. These workers, if they areinvolved in some risk management in their work area, take it homewith them. That also is something we need to make connections withdirectly. Then, the border justice campaign includes human justice is-sues that are often seen as something not connected to the environ-ment. And violence, the human rights issues are directly connected tohow we fare socially as well as spiritually, so that does affect the envi-ronment. The last one of these campaigns is the youth leadership cam-paign. The youth leadership campaign is a very important part of ourorganization because it is a way to take care of preparing the future,bringing the youth into what is happening, not packing it up and writ-ing it in nice books and leaving it in some bookcase for them to read inthe future, but for them to walk with us, as they mature, and get themto be more efficient as the elders phase out of this. We've got to handthis to different people but the issues go on and on. We continue tohave these problems. So that's the way we envision the environmentand it's something that I don't think that we have been able to bridge,that concept as [Terrell] was saying about the differentiation that isoften done with the environment, as well as with the urban and thepeople connected with the environment. For example, in the border-lands, we deal with a lot of collective farmers as well as Indian tribes.They are very alienated, often, when there is a conservation programgoing, because they are often accused of misusing the natural resources.But they need the water, they need the resources to fend and to sur-vive, and yet they are being denied the use of the land and water rights.So those are the issues to really be pushy about getting on the table.
Simon Ortiz: I am glad that Teresa brought up water. Water is amajor element of the natural environment which means that for thenative people of the Southwest, water is a necessary element for con-tinuing life. A farming way of life and economic self-sufficiency is thebasis of culture and community for the Pueblo Indian people of New
Mexico and Arizona in the Colorado Plateau. That means that, for thesepeople, the struggle for water and the preservation and use and mainte-nance of water is very important. And yet, we know that because of ex-panding population in the American Southwest, that water is becomingscarce. But water defines our culture, water from the skies, andgroundwaters which are really part of each other. In terms of religion, thegods and the kachinas bring the water, of course they bring it in terms ofthe weather forces, the climatic conditions that provide that water.
Today, with the capitalist economy as it is, the native communitiesand cultures are in many cases no longer able to make a sufficient eco-nomic livelihood by farming. So, we find that because of the increas-ing population and water use of the major cities like Phoenix, Tucson,Albuquerque, El Paso, and Denver, our way of life is under threat. Iwould say that if we are to find a way in which native communities,Indian people and non-Indian communities are to protect the environ-ment, there must be a workable solution to the way that water is to bedealt with. I know that as a topic for my writing, water is a major fea-ture because it is a concern of the culture, indigenous as well as non-indigenous.
Devon Pefia: The farmers that I work with have a saying, "Sin agua,no hay vida. Sin tierra, no hay paz." [Without water, there is no life.Without land, there is no peace.] That goes to the heart of what Teresaand Simon, quite right, are saying. The question of water and of indig-enous access, equitable access to water is one of the most pivotal po-litical ecological struggles of contemporary times. Under the capitalistsystem we have a very complex set of struggles that are emergingaround the commodification and privatization of water. You see, forthe Pueblo Indian and the Hispano Mexicano alike, water was not acommodity. It was not the exchange value that was important, it wasthe communal and spritual value that was important. So that waterwas treated not as a private property right, that you could sell andseparate from the land. Rather, water was seen as a communal valueand an ecological value that sustained a way of life in place. Fortu-nately, over the last 10-15 years or so, indigenous communities, in NewMexico and Colorado especially, less so in Arizona, although I believeit's starting there, too, have organized acequia associations which arethese ancient, gravity-driven irrigation networks, that typically, inColorado and New Mexico have the oldest adjudicated water rights.But these acequia associations are having to spend a considerableamount of effort in defensive positions because of the growing popu-lation, not really the growing population itself, as the industrializationand commercialization of water, the growth of the demand for water.
The Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice,
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 165
or SNEEJ, and the Southwest Organizing Project, or SWOP, have bothhad other very important campaigns which deal with the impact ofINTEL Corporation in Albuquerque, on groundwater and surface wa-ter supplies, because of the way in which they are using 2-6 milliongallons a day in their wafer chip operation and so on. They have toaugment their supplies of water with water that is traditionally beingused for agriculture. A lot of people criticize agriculture for using 90%of the water that comes out of the Colorado Basin. I realize that a lot ofthat is monoculture, agri-industrial, very harmful. But a lot of it is usedby indigenous people in more traditional patterns in which they pre-serve not just the farming system, but open space and wildlife habitat,and all the values that others cherish as part of cultural or eco-tourism.So you have to understand those connections between livelihoods andpreservation of landscapes and water. Those are critical public policyissues.
Right now we are facing a situation in the San Luis Valley where onegroup, Gary Boyce, a multimillionaire, wants to mine the confined aqui-fer which is assumed to have about 3 billion acre feet of water, and hewants to pump this out to the tune of about 250 thousand acre feet ayear to sell to Reno and Las Vegas and so on. So whatever you do here,as this population in Reno and Las Vegas grows, people are going allthe way to Colorado to this high altitude alpine desert, at 8000 feetabove sea level for their potential water supplies. And of course, this isnot a sustainable, regenerative type of irrigation, it's the removal ofwater from the ecosystem to another place, to a totally different place.It's a repeat of the Owens Valley, and we all know what that story isabout. So, this is all very interesting and problematic. It's very easy toget lost in the overwhelming nature of these defensive struggles wherewe are trying to defend the environment and water and place-basedcommunities and urban communities and maquiladora workers ex-posed to toxics in the workplace. It's always defending. So it's no sur-prise that there is this amazing literature of toxicity. Capitalism hasunleashed this incredible environmental degradation and our body isan environment. So when I talk about environmental degradation, Iam talking about degradation of our bodies as well, because our bod-ies are in the environment and they are a micro-ecosystem themselves.
But what about the positive side? Is there an upshot to this? What Isee happening within the environmental justice movement, partly as aresult of the leadership of the network, SNEEJ, and other grassrootsorganizations, is that environmental justice wants to get beyond thecritique of environmental racism, it wants to get beyond the critique ofhow globalism is destroying the planet and destroying the cultures tosustainable alternatives. What are the alternatives? Experiments in lo-
cally-controlled, self-managed, community-owned, worker-coopera-tive-type organizations are visible everywhere. There are thousands ofworker-owned cooperatives, and community-owned lands, and emerg-ing land trusts for people of color, and water-rights users' groups thatsupport cooperative farming. Thousands of these alternatives that arealmost entirely unknown to the general population. And that's verytragic because we get caught up in the politics of negativism and thecritique of environmental racism and isn't it horrible and look howbad it is. And never shift away towards developing sustainable alter-natives, as Teresa was saying. We need to find a pathway to ecologicalsustainability and social justice. My answer to that is that those waysare already there. In thousands of local efforts to create democraticworkplaces, to create production processes that aren't based on thedestruction of the environment or the worker. And it's in those les-sons, those local models that we can learn a lot about the nature of thealternatives. So I urge my colleagues at the table to think about howenvironmental justice is, in a way, moving away from the literature oftoxicity to the literature of sustainability. And I want us to be aware ofthat literature of sutainability because it is emerging now and it givesus a whole different perspective of the environmental justice move-ment; it gets beyond the critique of destruction to the actual construc-tion of alternatives. That's critical to our future.
Terrell Dixon: One way to illustrate my view is to talk about work-ing with concepts of degraded nature—toxicity—and community. Stu-dents come to the classroom with what seems to me a fairly standardissue sense of toxicity. They get the usual sound bites, the iconographicmessages about hazardous wastes. There is a familiar kind of a loopwhere they, like the rest of us, see the news story, read the news story,worry briefly, and forget about it. One classroom task is to break throughthat loop and I would like to mention one book that does this verywell. It's Helen Maria Viramontes' book, Under the Feet of Jesus, a pow-erful, short novel about migrant workers in California, dedicated toCaesar Chavez, and concerned with pesticides and their effect on theworkers. By working with this text, students can move to a strongerunderstanding of what is at stake with toxicity. I emphasize that whatwe can call the toxicity chain is not only physical, that the way wehave degraded our enviromnet, our own bodies and those of othercitizens, also creates a web of mistrust where government and corpo-rations come under suspicion. The result is deep divisions along linesof class, ethnicity, and gender. Once they see how all of this stems fromhow society works, or fails to work with toxicity, students come torecognize how toxicity fractures the potential for community.
Rachel Stein: We intentionally brought together a varied group, a
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 167
poet, an activist working on the ground, two scholars working in theacademy, all working for environmental justice in different ways. Wewondered if you could each speak to what you think you have to offereach other. What might poetry, what might working on the ground,what might the academy offer each other in terms of working towardsenvironmental justice?
Devon Pena: All the teaching I do—which historically during andsince my years at Colorado College—involves me in some kind of fieldwork. I have been a sort of "roads scholar"; I hit the road. The mostvaluable thing that teaching in the field has taught me is to respect andseek to legitimize local knowledge, the knowledge of the people whohave knowledge of the place you happen to be visiting. Therefore ac-tivists from the Southwest Network (SNEEJ) have always lectured andtaught in my classes, farmers, environmental activists, environmentalscientists involved in litigation, Forest Service personal, the list is end-less, folk healers, curanderas, native ethnobotanists, if you will, theseare the folks that have the on-the-ground, place-based knowledge. Andso in my own teaching I try to meld together the experience, the localknowledge of activists, people on the ground. Many of them are poetsand therefore open up a whole other vision of the world that cannot beseen through scientific discourse alone or by the intellectual commu-nity of students and faculty and researchers alone.
But the other thing that we do is that when we ask local people toteach these courses with us, we sit down and together come up with aproblem that is facing the community or a need that exists in the com-munity. And then the students and I work with, say, a local rancher orsomeone on solving that problem. Over the years we have built fouradobe homos, or adobe ovens in the community of San Luis, Colorado.Now you might think, so what, so you built four adobe ovens. Well,those ovens are very important to the local economy because peopleuse them to roast the white corn to produce something known as"chicos." Chicos is an organically certified product that the farmersare marketing both to the high end, Wild Oats-kind of stores, wholefoods, but also keeping the tradition of barter among themselves. Sothat you grow potatoes, I grow chicos, and we exchange. So while theyare commodifying the production of chicos to make a living to stay onthe land, they are also maintaining their traditions of mutual aid andbarter. But the homos were defined as a real problem. People were grow-ing a lot of corn but there weren't enough adobe ovens to roast thecorn inside of them. So the students learned, working with local mas-ters of adobe oven making, how to do this, and then they get to seemany years the results of that, the incredible economic revival associ-ated with those adobe ovens. So there is always research and the ser-
vice of social action in the community and then teaching within that,it's all folded in together. I also work as an expert witness in lawsuits,or on questions of water rights, land rights, so on and I try to make useof my environmental anthropology background to do something thatneeds to be done, and that is to legitimize that local knowledge, be-cause most of the time that local knowledge is disqualified, as Fou-cault might say, it's a disqualified kind of knowledge. It doesn't haveecological legitimacy. Pueblo Indians, Navajos, Chicanos in the South-west have been demonized as eco-ignorant, ecological thugs who over-graze the land with their sheep. You know we have got to break throughthat because that stereotype persists.
My research and my writing aims to open up discourses amongpeople to recognize the divisions that Terrell was talking about, divi-sions of race, class, gender, and culture. So therefore, working withinterdisciplinary teaching is an important tool, but not just interdisci-plinary, it has to be collaborative. What I mean by that is collaborativepartnerships with local people, with people in the community. That'show all teaching ought to be done, not just field studies, not just onebranch of say environmental ethics, but all teaching should be done ina collaborative partnership with people in the community.
Simon Ortiz: I know that to make use of our collective knowledgeor individual or personal knowledge or put it into community use iswhat we are looking for to make positive change. I'd like to offer upsome names to everyone, to the universities and colleges and organi-zations that you work with, people who may be helpful. These arenative people. For example from here, there is an elder man in theNevada and eastern California community, Corbin Harney. He's a com-munity leader, a religious elder, with long experience in communityorganizing. He's part of an intellectual and activist movement, on be-half of native people, but he knows and has experience working withnon-native people as well. Another elder is Grace Thorpe. She's Sacand Fox. Originally from Oklahoma, Grace Thorpe is an anti-nuclearactivist. I think her work as an anti-nuke began because her people,the Sac and Fox people in Kansas had been considering a nuclear stor-age facility which has affected native communities like the Mescaleropeople, Apaches in New Mexico, and I think presently the Skull Valleycommunity in Utah. Also her daughter, Dagmar Thorpe, is a very ar-ticulate woman, an environmentalist spokesperson, and writer. WinonaLaDuke is fairly well-known as an environmentalist and feministspokeswoman, a person who is very concerned about the indigenous,Anishinaabeg communities and culture in Minnesota, her homeland.Another person is Manny Peno. Manny is from Acoma Pueblo. Mannyteaches in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he lives. Manny is a younger
Environmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion 169
person who is very knowledgeable about environmental concerns. Ithink that indigenous peoples and their spokespersons, speaking onbehalf of their communities, are obviously necessary to the social andenvironmental justice movement.
Teresa Leal: Yesterday I was impressed by the circle of people whomet to dwell on what writers are doing in order to bring more atten-tion to these issues. This is really very necessary. It is very important tobring more popular education styles into your writings. I think that aseconomic and environmental circumstances and issues become morenecessary for people to read about, and again I am taking the populistposition for very obvious reasons, it is very hard for common peopleto read scholarly journals, or to buy expensive magazines, or specialtymagazines, but if they can read it in USA Today, or some trashy periodi-cal (laughs), if the issue is introduced in a way that is simple, yet highly,highly informative, it often triggers people's concerns and activism.That has been a concern for me, that writing about the natural envi-ronment and on contamination and globalism continues to be very,very elitist and inaccessible. I represent grassroots participation inNAC, which is the National Advisory Council for the North AmericanCommission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which advises theAdministrator of the EPA. I find that it is the same thing there: Spacesare provided on the NAC for citizen participation, for people to haveaccess to this information, and yet the information is kept highly elitistand secretive and the meetings are scheduled in places where com-mon people wouldn't dream of going or can't afford to go or can'tafford to buy. So there should be an effort to disseminate this informa-tion in ways that can be understood by all people. The World TradeOrganization meetings and protests were another illustration of eventsthat could have been enhanced had there been more writers writingabout the environmental concerns that were being raised by the pro-testors there. Instead, the media focused on the violence and the chaosand the bombings and everything. There should be more effort on thepart of the media and scholars to write in ways that compel us to cometogether to solve environmental and social problems; there should bemore writing that is accessible to more people on a broader scale. Makethe writing simple, so it will make a mark on people. Don't make thewriting so sophisticated that it just goes over people's heads.
Terrell Dixon: Very quickly. I would like to take the very interestingthings that have emerged here back to the city. Eighty percent of Ameri-cans live in cities, and it is in our cities that our diverse nature tradi-tions intersect. However, when we look at cities, we often tend to seethe built overlay, that is the highway loops, the skyscrapers and all theother kinds of construction on top of the landscape. If we are going to
have long-term success in legitimizing local knowledge, and commu-nity-based partnerships, a first step is to move away from our easydismissal of cities as merely replicating collections of McDonalds,Starbucks, and suburban sprawl and to recognize instead the differ-ent, local nature of individual cities. Cities are potentially our best sitesfor truly multicultural interaction with the natural world. Acknowl-edging that will help us move ahead with many of the things we havetalked about today.
N O T E S
1. Chavis is quoted in Giovanna Di Chiro's "Nature as Community," Un-common Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronon.(New York: Norton, 1996) 298-320, 304.
2. Qtd. from the "Preamble" of the Principles of Environmental Justice which isreprinted in its entirety in Di Chiro, 307-309.
