Green Daily

This post is part of a series about environmental justice, or EJ for short. For a few in-depth definitions of EJ, visit the EPA, Justice Net, or the Sierra Club.

I listened to a multifaceted presentation about coal at the Chicago Green Fest, and was able to speak afterwards with a representative from a local environmental advocacy organization. Dorian Breuer spoke about his work with PERRO: The Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Coalition.

PERRO asks the community to question the distribution of the costs of industrial production (and pollution). The website explains: "Combined with other sources of industrial emissions in Pilsen, such as the Fisk Generating Station at 1111 W. Cermak, PERRO believes Pilsen suffers from a disproportionately high level of air pollution because of its industrial legacy, its low median income, and its density of first-generation immigrants."
Pilsen is a middle to low income neighborhood in Chicago, and PERRO began in 2004 when local residents wanted to voice their concerns about the Kramer facility, a local brass and bronze smelting plant located in the area. The plant is the second largest lead emitter in all of Illinois.

PERRO created a ballot initiative for an investigation on the Kramer facility, and early in 2005 their resolution passed by 95%. The results of the resolution indicated that there was concern in the neighborhood about industrial pollutants, and those involved with the group wanted to continue advocating for health and safety of residents of Pilsen and surrounding communities. Since that initial issue, PERRO has moved on to investigating the health effects of two coal-fired power plants in the area as well.

Following the coal discussion at Green Fest, I asked Breuer for his definition of environmental justice. Here's what he had to say:

Dorian Breuer:
How environmental justice works from our perspective at least as a community that lives right in amongst two coal plants in the city of Chicago is, one of the questions we raise is if these 2 coal plants, the largest single sources of pollution in all of Chicago, if they were located in a different neighborhood--there are other neighborhoods in Chicago, for example one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Chicago is Lincoln Park, which happens to be predominantly white, or Caucasian American-- if the coal plant was located in the middle of that neighborhood, we end up wondering, would there be as much difficulty in the community having to work to having the coal company itself eventually clean up; or having the local officials clean up, so it gets into all these questions. Questions like why is it that simply because it is located in a lower income community, in a community of color... is it so difficult to get [these polluted areas and plants that continue to pollute] cleaned up? That's what we think of as environmental injustice.

If you've been reading the series on environmental justice, you might notice that when I ask various people to define environmental justice, I often get answers that define injustice. So what is a fair way to deal with the seemingly inevitable pollution that results from the way we live? What is environmental justice?