The next economy: Both green and just?
One doesn't have to live next to a smokestack or mountain top removal coal mining site to understand and sympathize with the plight of people living on the underbelly of industrialization.
All one needs is a sense of decency and compassion. But as this country lurches from one economic crisis to another, the question becomes will decency and compassion or fear and competition undergird the next wave of jobs? And can the transition being pushed by many to a "green economy" happen without repeating the social sins of America's past?
About 200 activists, community organizers, educators, students and business owners struggled with this and other questions at a green jobs conference that took place on Saturday at N.C. Central University.
This movement, pioneered in New York and California, has taken hold in the Tar Heel state and folks wanted to know how North Carolinians could enable and benefit from new industries that pay adequate wages while reducing the state's dependency on fossil fuels and better managing its natural resources.
For many, the heart of the green jobs movement is the desire to rectify the disregard for the poor and minorities that resulted in their disproportionate burden of living near polluting industries.
"Environmental justice is civil rights in the 21st century," said Majora Carter, keynote speaker and founder of Sustainable South Bronx in New York. "People have been aching for this kind of leadership I know is going to come from North Carolina."
Carter grew up in the South Bronx, an urban, predominantly Hispanic and black area, that in the mid-20th century had to endure citizen displacement caused by highway construction, financial red-lining (which resulted in landlords letting their buildings burn for insurance money because they couldn't get loans for repairs) and the concentration of waste facilities and power plants there.
Carter has worked to transform an illegal waste dumping site into a riverside park, build a greenway, install green roofs on buildings and build an eco-industrial park that creates goods out of recycled sheet rock, plastic, lumber, etc.
"When we lose jobs we gain unemployment and poverty," Carter said. "And we lose hope. We can't afford to do that anymore."
This issue is not limited to metropolitan areas. North Carolina residents have experienced their share of what some call environmental injustice as well. Examples often sited are the ill-managed hog wastes in eastern North Carolina, the creation of a toxic soil landfill site near an economically-depressed community in Warren County, and an energy plant burning chicken waste proposed for Sampson County.
The Rev. William Barber, who heads the state level NAACP, said the state needs to prohibit the building of hazardous waste sites in minority or poor communities and that appropriation bills should describe the negative and positive environmental and economic impacts on a community.
"The question is whether this new green economy will be the same, unjust, unequal generator of wealth for a few as the old economy," he said. "Build it just from the beginning. Don't build it and then try to make it just."
That's a tall order and difficult to accomplish in a world being challenged by shrinking wealth, and peaking energy sources and minerals. How do these new jobs get fully funded in terms of the necessary investment? How does one make a sustained profit and pay a living wage and limit or eliminate the exploitation of natural resources?
Said Marc Dreyfors of Carolina Biofuels: "There's nothing about trade that's free or fair. How do we turn the capalist system around? This is a challenge."
Next post: Sizing up the state's green job opportunities.
Comments (3)
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Morgan:
What do you and others mean by "environmental justice", "adequate wages", "exploitation" of natural resources. I think that if we are going to discuss these issues we need objective meanings. (I doubt that there is any objective meaning; rather, this is more leftist gobledegook whereby advocates use words that can mean anything they want them to, and at the same time make them seem smart while they apply Marxist theory).
On a related issue, what is the basis for your believe that wealth in the world is "shrinking?" Do you mean just now with the stock market on the decline, or that there is a dynamic model that shows that the world actually has less wealth than it did, say ten years ago? And what is sustained profit, and how do we measure it?
Finally, tell us how, in your mind, wealth or income should be distributed? If you work harder than me, or save more money to invest, shouldn't you have more income and weath than I. If not, why not.
I look forward to your response.
Posted on September 24, 2008 9:09 AM
Paul,
Your brought up some good questions, which I will seek to answer below and I encourage others to chip in as well.
Environmental justice has been defined in different ways but the one given at the conference last week was this: The siting of polluting industries that have a potential or history of causing air, water and soil contamination and therefore negative health effects are not disproportionately located within or near certain income or ethnic groups. Instead, all types of communities bear a proportionate burden of living next to them whether they be landfills, nuclear power plants or coal mines.
The case of polluting industries being built in poor and minority communities is well-documented, however I am not aware of a study or report that shows the proportion of polluting industries that were sited this way when they were first built (i.e. XX percentage of hazardous waste are located within five miles of communities with high federal poverty rates).
Regarding adequate wages, that is quite up for debate but many people talk in terms of living wages. That has been defined as the wage needed for a family to meet basic needs, including food and housing in a particular area. The living wage given for the Greensboro area is $12.40 (which Guilford County Schools is phasing in for classified workers).
On exploitation of natural resouces: People are not arguing that the extraction of natural resources, such as minerals or fossil fuels, are bad in and of itself. All living things consume resources. Exploitation occurs under different circumstances, such as the extraction of a renewable resource in a way that the environment cannot naturally replenish it in a timeframe suitable for a living community. An example of this would be the clear-cutting of forests without replanting the trees. Another example would be mountain-top removal which decimates mountain areas and generates a huge amount of waste for a relatively small amount of coal.
I'm not sure what you mean by "leftist" gobeldegook. You are right in the sense that there aren't really any objective meanings here; like most concepts they are human defined and depend on the context. And a lot of what is called injustice depends on the intent. Did a business propose siting a plant in a poor community because it expected little pushback? Did it hide or manipulate information about possible environmental effects? Or was it upfront from the beginning and welcomed by the community?
Posted on September 24, 2008 11:48 AM
To Paul, continued...
To your question of shrinking wealth, there is no question that there are more dollars flowing through the economy than any other time in history. And a minority percentage of the population is very very wealthy.
But when you take into account inflation (higher than the manipulated numbers the fed puts out) and debt, the picture changes. The dollar buys a lot less than it did 100 years ago. According to the CIA factbook, the U.S. has a GDP of about $13 trillion (with some of this just representing the movement of dollars and not the production of goods). The U.S. federal debt is $9.7 trillion, not including the various funds pledged to help ease the mortgage crisis. This also does not include entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security, which brings the total deficit to about $60 trillion, according to some estimates.
And yes, with the credit/mortgage crisis, much dollar wealth is evaporating as I write this. At any rate, national savings are down and much of what we purchase is on credit, not with wealth on hand. What happens to the value of our assets when the Baby Boomers retire followed by a smaller population of workers?
I don't have time to go through it, but a good explainer can be found at www.chrismartenson.com, particularly this presentation on assets and demographics: http://www.chrismartenson.com/assets-and-demographics and the one on "fuzzy numbers": http://www.chrismartenson.com/fuzzy_numbers
I do not have an answer for how wealth and income should be redistributed.
Posted on September 24, 2008 12:27 PM