An article by Janet Wilson in the Christian Science Monitor highlights the environmental justice work of residents of Maywood:

Across the country, studies have increasingly shown that low-income, minority communities endure a disproportionate share of poor living conditions and contamination. A 2007 study by four universities found that nonwhites are far more likely to live near hazardous waste than whites. Greater Los Angeles led the nation with 1.2 million people living less than two miles from such waste, 91 percent of them minorities.

Maywood, the state’s most densely populated community, is a textbook case. Eight miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, it sits at the crossroads of an American manufacturing and freight-hauling juggernaut with a legacy of industrial pollution. Nearly 50,000 residents – 98 percent Latino – are squeezed into aging apartment blocks and tidy tract houses between diesel-truck-clogged Interstate 710 and “exclusively industrial” Vernon, home to 1,200 factories and sprawling freight rail yards…

“The idea is not to be stuck in those little regulatory boxes,” says Steven John, head of the EPA’s southern California division. Toward that end, the agencies are also wrestling with bringing together bitterly divided factions in Maywood. At the first meeting of the joint agency initiative with the community in August, a water district manager and an activist ended up in a screaming match over a single mercury testing sample as a translator struggled to keep up with hurled insults.

The manager ultimately apologized. At least the two sides were talking, many said.

Mr. John says Maywood’s activism, however fractious, was extraordinary. “[W]hat really for me has been the hallmark of Maywood,” he says, “is the commitment from the citizens.”

In November, EPA dministrator Lisa Jackson named Maywood and its neighbors along the 710 freeway “environmental justice showcase” communities. She awarded $100,000 to the EPA’s regional office to work with the cities, starting with Maywood. In addition, she sent $160,000 to the state DTSC to spearhead joint agency efforts.

Read the full article here.

Today’s Los Angeles Times detailed the fight over a polluting metal plating company in South LA:

Opened in 1941, it’s the type of factory that drew thousands of working-class families to the city during the boom years of World War II. Yet it was wedged onto a narrow street next to homes and across from 28th Street School, which soon became one of the largest elementary campuses in the nation.

According to government officials, Palace Plating generated hazardous waste, including cyanide and chromium, and faced charges of illegal dumping. The waste gave the nearby students nosebleeds, headaches and worse, according to residents and lawsuits.

Scott Gold, Los Angeles Times – Full Article

I was sitting in a cafe in Oxford, UK today when I noticed an article in the Oxford Journal, which encouraged readers to formally speak out against two potential county council-backed incinerators that would both be placed within Sutton Courtenay.

The campaign group called Sutton Courtenay Against the Incinerator has facilitated the formal opposition by gathering over 12,000 signatures for a petition, protesting, and showing people how to register their complaints and where to send letters.

Here are their listed reasons for opposing the incinerators, most of which deal with environmental degredation and a distaste for large polluting industry. Learning from Chester, PA, I’d say there are also several social risks related to health and labor. Like Chester and many cities in LA, Sutton Courtenay already has a high concentration of polluting industries, and these incinerators would aggravate any current environmental injustices.

I’m unsure of whether or not the installment of these incinerators is as blatantly racist or classist as toxic industry placement in Chester and in LA, but I’m still glad to see local community forces, regardless of their race or socioeconomic status, getting the attention they deserve for supporting EJ causes and increasing individual agency!

Adding to the growing evidence of the health harms of freeways and auto-dependency, a recent study highlighted by Infrastructurist found that particulate matter from freeways triggers the fight or flight response in humans:

Scientists at the University of Michigan, led by Dr. Robert Brook, found that [polluted air] can increase your blood pressure, and cause unhealthy changes in your blood vessels that last for hours and perhaps even days. […] [Study] participants were exposed in the lab to the same amount of particulates and ozone that would be found near a local highway. People who breathed in polluted air registered higher blood-pressure readings a short time after exposure and their blood vessels showed impairment as long as 24 hours later.

In a series entitled Toxic Waters, the New York Times has been chronicling hazards to the nation’s drinking water supply:

Almost four decades after Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the rate of water pollution violations is rising steadily. In the past five years, companies and workplaces have violated pollution laws more than 500,000 times. But the vast majority of polluters have escaped punishment.

A map of Clean Water Act violators in California is available here.

Isella Ramirez and Angelo Logan leading a goods movement toxic tour

The LA Times’ Margot Roosevelt featured East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice in a front page article earlier this week:

Here especially, but also across the country, mainstream foundations, which had long supported environmental groups led by white lawyers and policy wonks, have begun to channel grants to community organizations run by Latinos and blacks who see clean air and water as civil rights.

In the Southland, these environmental justice activists, as they are called, wage war in the dense corridor that runs from the massive ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach through neighborhoods that line the 710 Freeway — Wilmington, Carson, Compton, Huntington Park, Commerce– and on through Riverside and San Bernardino counties, with their vast distribution warehouses.

“There are no buffer zones,” said Gilbert Estrada, a teacher who co-founded the East Yard group with Logan. “We are the buffer zones.” [Full article]

EYCEJ is doing excellent work around goods movement and environmental justice.  GreenRELAY participants have attended a number of EYCEJ events (including a public meeting where the reporter who wrote the above article was interviewing people).  Click here to see greenRELAY’s multimedia coverage of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

Take two seconds to fill out this petition organized by Green for All:

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5379/t/6856/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=499

Mother Jones recently published an article entitled How Serial War Become the American Way of Life:

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the “central question” for the defense of the United States was how the military should be “organized, equipped — and funded — in the years ahead, to win the wars we are in while being prepared for threats on or beyond the horizon.”

Albert Einstein stated that “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war“. I do not believe for one second that war needs to be priority. The United States has spent many of its young years fighting war after war.

• Beginning with the Colonial Wars (1620-1774), War of Independence (1775-1783), from 1783-1815 dozens of undeclared wars, from 1816-1890 wars fought for continental expansion
• American Civil War (1861-1865)
• Manifest Destiny brought about the Indian Wars (1865-1870)
• Spanish-American War (1898), Philippine-American War (1899-1913)
• Banana Wars (1898-1935) which is described by the United States’ Latin America intervention
• World War I (1917-1918)
• World War II (1939-1945)
• Cold War (1945-1991)
• Korean War (1950)
• Vietnam War (1957-1975),
• The Persian Gulf War that lead to the Iraq invasion in 1990
• and the War on Terrorism (2001-Present).

I have provided a brief United States Military Time line. The forces of materialism, imperialism, colonialism, and the military industrial complex have led this country’s leaders to take us into unnecessary and preventable wars. Sometimes it is just best for us to mind our own business. What ever happened to the Good Neighbor Policy coined by then President Herbert Hoover? It seems that we are overly concerned with matters that do not directly affect the everyday lives of United States citizens.

According to the Mother Jones article, we should be surprised to talk so casually about wars. In my opinion, it should not be a culture shock. Given the wars this country has been in and the time lapsing in between them, our people have begun to desensitize themselves from the culture of war. It has become an American norm to be in war. We have suppressed our feelings towards war to allow our leaders to take us into unnecessary wars.

The article states a very true statement “For anyone born during World War II, or in the early years of the Cold War, the hope of international progress toward the reduction of armed conflict remains a palpable memory.” Americans have been overcome with a feeling of hopelessness that there will never be an Era of Good Feeling in their lifetime. Serial War is the American way of life.

Consistently fighting wars surely have its consequences on the environment. As a result of the Gulf War in 1991, the environment has experienced a depletion in Uranium. Uranium is used primarily by the United States in addition to other countries such as Great Britain. The use of Uranium in the military is for  penetration armor  from enemy tanks and other attacks. Scientists are studying the health related problems brought on by Depleted Uranium. Military and civilian persons exposed to Depleted Uranium are at higher risks of kidney damage and lung cancer.

The high costs of war can wreak havoc on the local government and public health. As already noted, war cost money and tons of it. The money is taken from the infrastructure of the local governments to pay for the costly war. In doing so, social welfare programs such as education, health care, public transportation, social security, and all other much needed services are drained to spend this war. At most times, entrance into these costly wars can be prevented. With the participation in a war, the home front struggles financially to provide its citizens with adequate resources. Serial War is an environmental injustice in which every citizen is victim to the injustice.

Public Comment during a meeting about the Westside subway extension

In an August 20, 2009 Los Angeles Times Blog, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated a huge and unrealistic Subway to the Sea Construction Plan:

As the most outspoken advocate for the so-called Subway to the Sea, the mayor has long been frustrated by that timetable and it was evident again when he and other officials gathered for a news conference in a UCLA parking lot. There, final soil samples had been drawn for a line that would follow Wilshire Boulevard from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica.

“I’m 56 now,” the mayor said. “We are here today to make sure that it gets built before I am 66.”

There are many flaws to what the Mayor is asking for; a subway to Santa Monica is not possible in the timespan he wants it to be constructed. Even from public comment meeting where citizen from different communities opposed the subway to the sea plan, Mr. Villaraigosa still wants to continue to build it. What concerns me is he will to actually go through with this project, shoving aside the opposition of those who have concern over the construction of the subway.

In reality the subway to the sea will take much longer to build especially from obstacles that are similar to those that once stopped the hopes of the subway heading to the westside as well, such as soil strength, chemical issues and many other factors. Regardless of these issues Antonio Villaraigosa still wants this subway to be built, no matter at what cost.

The LAPD is increasingly focused on serving as a space police rather than keeping us safe

An article in the Los Angeles Daily News [via LAist] discusses the Los Angeles Police Department’s benchmark of having 10,000 officers.  Some local politicians and city council members are calling for even more police:

Zine said the city will need a bigger force if the state proceeds with the early release of 27,000 prison inmates in a cost-cutting move.

“When these folks come back, there are no jobs and the economy is suffering. They’ll return to what they know, which is crime,” said Zine, a retired police sergeant. “Without these officers, it would be a dangerous and serious situation.”

A larger LAPD will only reinforce an oppressive cycle of poverty, violence, and imprisonment in Los Angeles.  Instead of hiring thousands of police officers, the city of Los Angeles should focus on green jobs.  The State of California is projected to need 10,000 solar workers each year over the next five years.  Funding real rehabilitation, job training, and green jobs, instead of more police officers to further the criminalization of communities, will initiate a cycle of cleaner neighborhoods, lower prices for photovoltaics, and more quality employment.