Write Out of the Margins!

Environmental Justice

Whatever the religious, ethical, and esthetic arguments... I want to be able to breathe five years from now. I want to drink water without paying 20% of my grocery budget to buy the bottled stuff. I don't want to run the risk of death if I go wading at the beach (let alone swimming.) I don't want to get Mad Cow Disease from either beef or some genetically engineered corn that ate a cow.

Wealth and privilege can insulate people from the effects of their decisions. CEOs and stockholders don't have to work in unsafe and toxic factories, or live in towns with four times the average rate of cancer because the air, water, and ground itself have been made poisonous. People with time and money lobby against the freeway, the factory, the nuclear power plant breaking up their park or their neighborhood — so those things go to neighborhoods where the people don't have the time, money and power to fight them. Dubya thinks we can live with global warming because he can always afford to move to a mountaintop and turn up the air conditioner.

My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. We all have the right to live, therfore no one has the right to make the environment unliveable.

Environmental justice means:
  • Everyone has the responsibility for their own effect on the environment.
  • Everyone has a voice in environmental decisions that affect them.
  • The community has the duty to insure the environmental rights of all citiizens and to hold everyone accountable for their effects on the community environment.

It is for our own good to extend the rights to a livable environment to the plants and other animals who share the planet with us. It's not just ethically good, and spiritually healthy for us to keep a sense of perspective that we aren't the only important things in the universe. It's not juust for the sake of a more pleasant world that sttill has oak trees and dolphins in it. It's also in our own self-interest, for our own physical welfare and survival. We're part of a biosphere, an intricately interrelated network of life that we only superficially understand yet. We keep discovering new ways in which we can benefit from obscure plants deep in the Amazon, or lose crops because some odd little bird disappeared who ate a certain kind of insect.

It's not smart to mess with systems you don't understand. It's not even smart to mess with systems you do understand — because you usually just thought you understood.


Sierra Club

© Anitra L. Freeman / Updated December 8, 2002