Who Pays the Price?: The Sociocultural Context Of Environmental Crisis

praxis.

PART ONE

HUMAN RIGHTS AND ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Barbara Rose Johnston

Today, as every day, a woman rises hours before dawn, prepares food, wakes the children, and gets everyone up and out into the world. Her actions are repeated by men and women in homes across the planet—mine included. Yet, the majority of the world’s people do not begin their day as I do, with running water, an electrical stove, and refrigerated food. The abundance of my life—the luxury of a roof overhead, pantry shelves lined with an ever-replenished supply of food, children reading away the morning hours at school and growing in healthy leaps and bounds with their bellies full and their thirst quenched with clean water—is a dream for most of the world.

This dream was purchased.

This material affluence has a price.

Turning on the lights, heating my water for coffee, grinding coffee beans, opening the refrigerator and taking out cold milk—these are all actions dependent upon a continual supply of energy. In my case, electricity is generated at an oil-burning power plant fifty miles to the south. That oil has been refined in places like Richmond, California, some sixty miles to the north of my home. The refining process releases toxic chemicals into the air and water, and this pollution affects the health of area residents: respiratory disease, cancer, and other ailments plague this largely African-American community.¹ Richmond’s environmental health experiences are shared by those unfortunates living near oil wells. Forty-three percent of the oil consumed in 1992 by the United States was imported from places like the Middle East and, more recently, the Amazon. In Ecuador, the petroleum industry dumps some 4.3 million gallons of untreated toxic waste directly into the Oriente watershed. Residents living in oil-producing regions, mostly indigenous groups, attempt to survive while drinking contaminated waters and eating contaminated foods. Malnutrition rates in the Ecuadorian Oriente, by some estimates, have risen as high as 98%. Cancer rates, birth defects, and other health problems linked to oil production contaminants are also on the rise.²

Morning sounds in my house are the sounds of running water. The first one up puts the coffee water on the stove. A line forms outside the one bathroom, as each member of my family waits to use the toilet, wash up, and begin the day. Running water for my family is an image of pipes and faucets, toilets and showers. Half the water running into our house is drawn from aquifers deep beneath this valley’s surface. The other half is diverted water stored in dams far to the east and north, periodically released into cement-lined canals and destined to flow hundreds of miles before emptying into the water district ponds of this valley. The price of dams and water diversion systems is heavy, as the dwindling run of salmon testifies.³ And, while a reliable supply of water in an area prone to biannual drought allows the production of otherwise unsuitable crops (half the nation’s rice crop is grown thanks to water-diversion projects), this water-intensive cultivation has a price, as the salt- and selenium-contaminated fields of California’s central valley indicate.⁴

Breakfast for my family is one of coffee, cereal, milk, and fruit. The rice for our cereal is grown in the central valley on large corporate farms, with mechanical harvesters, and chemical inputs to control soil fertility and destroy pests. The price of this capital- , chemical- , and water-intensive production includes the poisoning of farm workers, residents (especially children), and consumers. Getting caught on the road while a crop duster is spraying nearby fields, or being sent into the fields too soon after chemical treatment, can result in immediate health effects such as rashes, chemical burns, nausea, vomiting, and even death. Longer term consequences of chemical exposure can include cancer, sterility, spontaneous abortion, stillbirth, birth defects, and a host of other disorders.⁵

While the use of pesticides is regulated and controlled in the United States where my rice was grown (with arguable success rates in protecting the health of workers, residents, and consumers), the environmental health costs associated with the production of imported agricultural goods such as coffee and bananas is extreme. The bulk of these crops are grown on corporate-owned plantations using chemical-intensive methods (including pesticides banned from use in the United States) with few of the environmental and worker safeguards found in First World settings. Developing countries, while representing some 20% of global pesticide use, experience 50% of the poisonings and 90% of the officially reported pesticide-related deaths.⁶

The simple act of beginning my day is one that is intimately tied to the environmental health of communities across the world. As the day proceeds and I face the mounds of paper on my desk or peer into my computer screen, I again greet again the global communities whose trees are removed and processed into paper, packaging, and the daily pile of junk mail; whose minerals are extracted, refined, and fashioned into the material wealth of my life. With each tap of my keyboard I touch the lives of workers who assembled this computer: workers here in Silicon Valley, in the maquiladoras at the Mexican border, and in the manufacturing free trade zones of Puerto Rico, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Southern Ireland. I touch the lives of families who live near the computer facilities, drink water contaminated by the solvents used to clean my computer’s components, and thus experience the neurological and mutagenic power of trichloroethylene, xylene, chloroform, freons, methyl ethyl ketone, and other organic solvents.⁷ To some degree, I share the burden of paying the price as the environmental health of my community deteriorates and the occurrence of cancer, miscarriage, and birth defects intrudes more and more into the realm of personal experience.

Yet, then again, if the price of our consuming culture is environmental degradation and the deterioration of human health, the benefits, as well as the burdens, are not shared equitably. My ability to survive and thrive depends upon the restriction of other peoples’ rights to a healthy life. The purpose of this book is to explore this differential experience of paying the price.

Notes

1

Citizens for a Better Environment, Richmond at Risk: Community Demographics and Toxic Hazards from Industrial Polluters (San Fransisco: CBE) 1989.

2

See, for example, Joe Kane, Letter from the Amazon: With Spirits From All Sides, The New Yorker, September 27, 1993 (pp. 54–79). This essay was written from an environmental insider’s point of view and was highly critical of the activities of several prominent environmental and cultural rights organizations. A subsequent issue of The New Yorker featured several letters in response and subsequent comments by the author (The New Yorker, October 25, 1993, pp. 10, 11).

3

See Marc Reisner, Can Anyone Win this Water War? National Wildlife, June/July 1991. Water diversion projects have had a detrimental effect on salmon spawning parameters (temperature of water, loss of gravel beds, and so forth). In the Sacramento River the chinook salmon declined from some 120,000 in the 1960s to an estimated 400 today. In 1989 the chinook salmon was added to the federal endangered species list.

4

See Kennith Tanji, André Lauchli, and Jewell Meyer, Selenium in the San Joaquin Valley, Environment 28(6): 6–11, 34–39 (1986); and Tim Harris, The Kesterson Syndrome, The Amicus Journal, Fall 1989 (pp.4–9).

5

For health effects of pesticides and the differential exposure of people of color, see Marion Moses, Farmworkers and Pesticides, in Confronting Environmental Racism : Voices from the Grassroots, edited by Robert D. Bullard (Boston: South End Press) 1993. For a general overview of pesticide use and its problems in California, see Ralph Lightstone, Pesticides: In Our Food, Air, Water, Home, and Workplace, in California’s Threatened Environment: Restoring the Dream, edited by Tim Palmer (Washington, DC: Island Press) 1993, pp. 195-211. For an analysis of cancer clusters in pesticide-intensive agricultural areas of California, see Benjamin Goldman, The Truth About Where You Live: An Atlas for Action on Toxins and Mortality (New York: Times Books) 1991, pp. 230–235.

6

See Public Health Impacts of Pesticides Used in Agriculture, World Health Organization, 1992; and, Barbara Dinham, The Pesticide Hazard: A Global Health and Environmental Audit (London: Zed Books) 1993.

7

For an overview of the health consequences of worker and community exposure to solvents used in the electronics industry, see Robin Baker and Sharon Woodrow, The Clean, Light Image of the Electronics Industry: Miracle or Mirage? in Double Exposure: Women’s Health Hazards on the Job and at Home, edited by Wendy Chavkin, M.D. (New York: Monthly Review Press) 1984. For current news on toxics exposures, health consequences, industry regulation, and citizen activism, see Silicon Valley Toxic News, a publication of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, San Jose, California.

CHAPTER 2

ENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE

Barbara Rose Johnston

The right to health, a decent existence, work, and occupational safety and health; the right to an adequate standard of living, freedom from hunger, an adequate and wholesome diet, and decent housing; the right to education, culture, equality and nondiscrimination, dignity, and harmonious development of the personality; the right to security of person and of the family; the right to peace; and the right to development are all rights established by existing United Nations covenants. These rights represent the ideal that governments strive for in providing for their citizens—basic life requirements that all humans are entitled to. All of these rights depend at one level or another on the environment.¹

Environment in this context refers to the biophysical realm supporting humans and other life forms in their efforts to survive and thrive. Much of the anthropological literature explores the ways humans survive: how we as a species adapt and evolve over time; the range and variation in human behavior, society, and culture; and the role of culture in structuring, stimulating, and resolving the environmental problems facing humanity. Humans are seen to have adjusted to environmental constraints via behavioral and physiological strategies. Some of these environmental constraints are natural features of the setting (e.g., climate, temperature, and terrain). Other constraints, such as increased salinity, declining soil fertility in irrigated agricultural lands, and other types of environmental degradation, are anthropogenic (human-induced change) in nature.²

It is clear that environmental degradation, in itself, is not a new facet of human survival. The rise and fall of many past societies can be explained in part by the ability to modify the immediate environment and the subsequent inability to prevent escalating environmental