Week 9: Environmental Racism in New York City

(Julie Sze's Noxious New York, p 1-12 of Introduction, Chapters 2-4 and 6)

Sze's research, as most researches do, attempts to delve into what has been previously "neglected in the acdaemic literature" (7). In this case, the subject is environmental and health inequalities in New York City. As we have studied during the week of Environmental Racism, Pulido covered the environmental inequalities in Los Angeles, but there hasn't been much scholarly attention to New York City. Sze focuses on four communities: Sunset Park and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, West Harlem in Manhattan, and the South Bronx. She also concentrates on a specific time period, the late 1980s and 1990s. Race enters this conversation as the transformation "from a solid manufacturing base to an economy based on finance, industry, and real estate [...] has had particularly disastrous impacts on African Americans and Puerto Ricans, many of whom were previously employed in the manufacturing sector" (8). Sze also studies environmental justice activism "because racial minority communities are at the front lines of resistance to policies and discourses valorizing the market and the private sector at the expensse of the public and community interests" (10).

In chapter 2, Sze lists multiple individual campaigns that are "largely undocumented in the academic literature" or if they are, they are "analyzed primarily in isolation, separate from the other issues unfolding in the same time frame." This makes it difficult or gives scarce chance to realize that these "individuals campaigns were linked through the discourse of environmental racism" (89). Though these individual campaigns lacked links among themselves, these resulted in the creation of "citywide coalitions that emerged in response to changing city and state policies on solid waste and energy" (90). Sze analyzes this more in detail in chapters 4 and 5, in which she brings in the discussion she mentions earlier in the introduction: "changes in garbage and energy systems as a result of privatization, globalization, and deregulation" (1). Among many other colitions, she highlights the Organization of Waterfront Nighborhoods (OWN) that was "founded by the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a citywide organization focused on environmental justice issues" (115). OWN was at the forefront of "reformulating garbage as an environmental health and air pollution issue and in centering race and the lives of children of color into dicussions of garbage policy" and "enabled a much-needed discussiona bout the environmental impacts of the politics of consumption, the perils of corporate privatization, and the effects of globalization in and on local communities and communities of color" (141).

In chapter 6, Sze questions the function or perhaps the competence of community-based environmental justice initiatives. According to her, there are "two related but distinct forms of community-based action: environmental health research and planning in New York City" (177). The two fields of public health and urban planning reforms come together "in the arena of environmental racism and through the environmental justice movement [...] because of its growing recognition of the complexity o the relationship between race, class, health, and the urban environment" (177). Despite some some drawbacks of making broad generalizations, "for communities long disempowered from the political process [...] the act of coming together and envisioning their future is an important and a profoundly political and proactive act" (204).

The conclusion wasn't part of the selection assigned, but I like this paragraph on page 208.
Ultimately this study of environmental justice activism suggests what happens when you center the lives of those usually disenfranchised from the poicy process: the young and thd old, the working class and people of color. The answer, as the New York City experience shows, is better policy and environmental conditions for everyone. Without environmental justice activism, the North River sewage treatment plant would still stink daily (isntead of being reparid and closely monitored), the Navy Yard incinerator and the Sunset Park treatment plants would have been built to line the coffers of corporate investors, and the corrupt Bronx-Lebanon facility would have been still running with its daily violations of toxic releases. Garbage would be moved exclusivley by disel truck isntead of by barge (and perhapss someday by rail) and energy plants built wherever profits could be squeezed. All the while, asthma rates, deaths, and hospitalizations would continue to spiral for outh of color in partciular neighborhoods in the city.
I appreciate Sze asserting the need to empower the marginal population but her absolute stance (ie to say that it is better for 'everyone') is bound to elicit criticism or resistance from the other side of the argument.