A question to atheists: Could the universe just pop into being?

But... what about the dinosaurs?

video- Walking In Your Footsteps by The Police

I am a Christian. I am a blogger. I am someone who grapples with life's larger questions on a moment to moment basis. In cruising around the Internet and monitoring the ongoing debate between Christians of differing theological interpretations and Christians and scientists and/or Christians and atheists there is one persistent question that just keeps popping up. How old is the earth? some Christian literalists seem to believe that if they don't do the math just a certain way and give in to the notion that the earth is only about 4-6 thousand years old that they are somehow being heretical... disrespecting God and rejecting his Holy Word, the Bible.

Well, I tell you right now that I am a Christian who believes the Bible and I find the notion that the earth is less than ten thousand years old... well... not very believable. To be fair, I don't necessarily believe that the earth as we know it is hundreds of millions of years old either.

As for the Christian "literalists", the literalism seems to be one of convenience... after all the Bible also says to love your enemies and those whom may not agree with you. I know very few Christians who pay much attention to that passage- let alone do intellectual gymnastics to realize and/or internalize it in their everyday lives. "Conservative" and liberal Christians do not even speak civilly to one another for the most part let alone to unbelievers and the lost. I digress.

I don't think that the account of origins as it is given in Genesis is meant to be an encyclopedia like telling of exactly what, when and how things began. Neither is it a totally figurative allegory. The plain fact of the matter is that it only tells us about God as Creator and the original purposes and intentions for mankind. It also tells about the entry of evil into the world and sets the stage for the battle of evermore between the Spirit of Truth and the Father of Lies.
You can take those items to the bank. As far as the exact chronology or timeline... who knows?
Anyone that claims they do know is mightily conceited. The bible does NOT give us that information.

Science gives us a spotty, incomplete and often biased opinion on these matters as well. The academic system works a lot like the media, organized religion or any other institution... anomalous evidence and/or dissenting opinion is squelched as much as possible in the interests of the corporate survival of the institution. Objectivity and truth often take a back seat to the god of money and agenda.

Let me just say this by way of offering my own thoughts on how old the earth might be. I have been to a place where on a raggedy, rocky knoll in Utah, near the Dinosaur National Monument there is a giant fossilized squid. My rational mind tells me that this as well as the rest of the fossil record and all the fossil fuels under the ground did not form in 6,000 years or less. In fact, I find such an idea absurd. I could be wrong of course. Yet, I find this idea almost as absurd as the idea that all the harmony, complexity, order, life and intelligence in the cosmos just happened by sheer mathematical chance and accident... but not quite. If one then insists that life and such came from God- this of course leads to the question of where God came from if there be such a thing. Once again, no man can really answer questions like that. I suppose theorizing on it is a worthy enough enterprise.

But, a lot of people... indigenous people Like Native Americans and/or Christians un-indoctrinated or unaffected by the western mindset and the desire to categorize, master and explain everything surrender questions and desires concerning exactly when, where and why. Instead they worry themselves with another question... perhaps the only one that really matters after all...HOW or WHAT is the right way to live... or what is one's proper relationship to all things? I stand with those who grapple mostly with that question. Now, as a Christian let me say this... those answers can be found in Christ and I believe nowhere else. That is the only reason I am still a Christian. Believe me I know what a monumental task it is to try and convince someone of this if they do not first accept the Bible as a reliable source of information. The truth is no person can ever talk somebody into something they do not want to be true. Real understanding of these matters comes by spiritual means... in fact they are considered as a gift.
Again... if one does not allow for spiritual reality, then there is no sense trying to speak spiritual language to one who does not or will not hear it.

Well... I started writing this with but one question to pose and then got into the stream of consciousness. Anyway.... how old do you think the earth is? Maybe the better question is... does it really matter to how you will live your life?

A Biblical View of the Environment

A Biblical View of the Environment

D. Massimiliano Lorenzini

All Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Bible unless otherwise indicated.

There are many views and opinions concerning the environment representing a wide range of world views. With this essay I intend to present a biblical view of the environment including its origin, present state, and future destiny.

Origin

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Gen. 1:1). The Bible tells us that God existed before the universe and that He created it. For more details on the creation account read chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. Scientific Creationism also reveals intelligent design in the creation, thus testifying of an intelligent Creator.1

The purpose of creation is to worship and bring glory to God. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork" (Ps. 19:1). See also Ps. 148 and Is. 40:25,26. It also testifies of God's qualities. "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse" (Rom. 1:20).

Man is made in God's image. "And God said, Let us make man in our image" (Gen. 1:26). (Note: The plural pronoun testifies of the Trinity.) While every created thing has value in itself, man alone is created in the image of God. This contradicts the Eastern monism philosophy which says all is one.2 William B. Badke, author of Project Earth,3 says that the earliest responsibility of man and the only mandate given him concerning interaction with the earth is found in Gen. 2:15 which says, "The LORD God placed the man in the Garden of Eden as its gardener, to tend and care for it" (The Living Bible). The Hebrew word for tend can also mean "to serve" and the word for care may be translated "to keep safe, preserve, protect." This mandate has never been rescinded.

God gave Adam and Eve dominion in the earth (Gen. 1:28). This means that the human race is to be in charge of the stewardship of the earth and to nurture it, not dominate and exploit it for selfish motives.

"Historian Lynn White was correct in placing some blame for environmental decay on Christianity. But it is a misunderstanding of the Bible, not God's word itself, that is at fault here,"4 says Tom Sider, professor of theology and culture, Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and president of Evangelicals for Social Action. British author Catherine von Ruhland says, "Christianity is often criticised as being the reason for much of the damage that has occurred on the planet. But we should make clear to the critics that it is not our faith, but a combination of scientific theory and industrial progress among unbelievers and our own wrong understanding of God's Word that has brought about destruction."5

Present State

The event that kicked off our present state, both physically and spiritually, is the fall of man. Along with the mandate of stewardship of the Garden, God told Adam and Eve that they had free access to anything in the Garden except the fruit of one tree which would bring physical and spiritual death (Gen. 2:16,17). This was simply a test of man's love and obedience to his Creator. God wanted a relationship based on choice and without the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil man would not have had any choice to please or displease God. Needless to say man ate the forbidden fruit and here we are today.

Sin is the breaking of God's commandment and it is sin that is the major environmental threat. Physical death and the ground being cursed are just two results of the fall (Gen. 3:17-19). By choosing to disobey our Creator and live in sin the Bible says that the land and animals mourn (Hos. 4:1-3). Sin has such a violent effect on the environment that the Bible says the land will vomit out the sinning inhabitants (Lev. 18:25). Sin is what motivates the destruction of the environment for financial gain (1 Tim. 6:10).

But God promises to heal the land if we will turn from our wicked ways (2 Chr. 7:14). (Understand that there will not be complete restoration until God recreates the earth, 1 Pet. 3:13 and Rev. 21:1). By turning to God and being filled with His Spirit we can have the sensitivity to people and the environment that is necessary (Rom. 8). Indeed, sensitivity to others will affect our treatment of the environment. For example, if we know that there are people who live downstream from us and depend on a river we use, we should be careful to not dump pollution into the river so they can have water that they can use. By our sensitivity to the people who live downstream from us, we will change our treatment of the river we use to do what we can to provide safe and clean water for others who depend upon the same river. Matthew 25 shows that insensitivity to people is also insensitivity to God and will bring His judgement.

Tony Campolo also says that since nature worships God, (Ps. 148) ecological destruction interferes with and silences the worship of God.6 He calls this blasphemy.

Ron Sider says, "The first purpose of the nonhuman creation is to glorify God not to serve us."4 The Bible says, "The earth is the Lord's" (Ps. 24:1). We must realize our role in creation is to worship God and to be stewards of the earth. A steward is a caretaker, not an owner.

Unlike monism, which says all is one, a biblical view, while agreeing that in ecology all things are interconnected, says in the spiritual realm there are two orders -- the regenerated and the fallen. The fall that Adam and Eve experienced has carried on over to every human since (Rom. 3:10, 23). But there is hope of regeneration. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor. 15:22).

God is deeply concerned with His creation and this is shown in many passages of Scripture. In Gen. 9:9,10 God made a covenant with all of creation not to destroy it with a flood ever again and He set the rainbow in the cloud to be a token of that covenant. In Job 39:1,2 God shows that He is with the wild animals when they give birth. Matt. 6:25-30 shows that God feeds the birds and clothes the fields. It is by His power that creation holds together or consists as Col. 1:16, 17 points out. Because God is so intimately concerned with His creation He promises to restore it.

Future Destiny

"Everything that Christianity hopes for is wrapped up with the ultimate fate of the earth," says Glenn Paauw, author of The Garden of God.7 The Bible teaches that salvation is for all of creation, not just humans (Is. 11, Ez. 47). This world will be burned up with fire (2 Pet. 3) and God will create a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1, Is. 65:17). True physical peace will reign (Hos. 2:18) and God will live with His people on the Earth (Rev. 21:3). Until that day Christians continue to pray, "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:10).

Some may say, "If the world will be destroyed by fire and recreated why should we be concerned about the environment?" Well let me sum up some reasons given thus far and introduce some new ones: 1) Destruction of the environment is blasphemy against God; 2) Stewardship is a responsibility; 3) Other people suffer because of the destruction of the environment; 4) Animals suffer; 5) Creation itself suffers (Rom. 8:19-21); 6) The danger is massive and urgent; 7) Common sense tells us to properly manage our resources to maintain a sustainable yield; 8) and I would like to leave you with an idea from Tony Campolo which may be the most practical reason of all. He says the sooner or later we will all get involved in the environmental movement because sooner or later we will all get hurt because of what we're doing to the environment.6

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1. For information on Scientific Creationism see Institute for Creation Research at http://www.icr.org.

2. For more information on monism see James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic World View Catalog, 3d ed. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997.

3. Badke, William B. (1991). Project Earth: Preserving the World God Created. Portland, Multnomah Press.

4. Sider, Ron J. (1993, June 21). Redeeming the Environmentalists. Christianity Today.

5. von Ruhland, Catharine (1991). Going Green: A Christian Guide. Great Britain, Marshall Pickering.

6. Campolo, Tony (1992). How to Rescue the Earth Without Worshiping Nature. Nashville, Thomas Nelson, Inc.

7. Paauw, Glenn (1992). The Garden of God. Colorado Springs, International Bible Society.

What we should learn in school (by G.Kawasaki)

What we should learn in school (by G.Kawasaki)

Compare your answers to what you learned after a few years in the workforce. It seems to me that schools often teach the opposite of what's necessary for the real world. Perhaps in school people have plenty of time and no money, so long papers, emails, and presentations are not a problem. However, people in the real world have plenty of money (or at least more money) and no time. This is a list of what I wished I learned in school before I graduated.

1. How to talk to your boss. In college, you’re supposed to bring problems to your teachers during office hours, and you share the experience of coming up with a solution. In the real world, you’re supposed to bring solutions to your boss in an email, in the hall, or in a five-minute conversation. Typically, your boss either already knows about the problem or doesn’t want to know about it. Your role is to provide answers, not questions. Believe it or not, but in the real world, those who can do, do. Those who can’t do, share with others who can’t do.

2. How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run. Unfortunately, it could be a while before you run meetings. Until then, you’ll be a hapless victim of them, so adopt these three practices to survive. First, assume that most of what you’ll hear is pure, petty, ass-covering bull shiitake, and it’s part of the game. This will prevent you from going crazy. Second, focus on what you want to accomplish in the meeting and ignore everything else. Once you get what you want, take yourself “out of your body,” sit back, and enjoy the show. Third, vow to yourself that someday you’ll start a company, and your meetings won’t work like this.

3. How to run a meeting. Hopefully, you’ll be running meetings soon. Then you need to understand that the primary purpose of a business meeting is to make a decision. It is not to share experiences or feel warm and fuzzy. With that in mind, here are five key points to learn about running a meeting: (1) Start on time even if everyone isn’t there because they will be next time; (2) Invite the fewest people possible to the meeting; (3) Set an agenda for exactly what’s going to happen at the meeting; (4) End on time so that everyone focuses on the pertinent issues; (5) Send an email to all participants that confirms decisions reviews action items. There are more power tips for running good meetings, but if you do these five, you’re ahead of 90% of the world.

4. How to figure out anything on your own. Armed with Google, PDFs of manuals, and self-reliance, force yourself to learn how to figure out just about anything on your own. There are no office hours, no teaching assistants, and study groups in the real world. Actually, the real world is one long, often lonely independent study, so get with it. Here’s a question to test your research prowess. How do you update the calendar in a Motorola Q phone with appointments stored in Now-Up-To-Date?

5. How to negotiate. Don’t believe what you see in reality television shows about negotiation and teamwork. They’re all bull shiitake. The only method that works in the real world involves five steps: (1) Prepare for the negotiation by knowing your facts; (2) Figure out what you really want; (3) Figure out what you don’t care about; (4) Figure out what the other party really wants (per Kai); and (5) Create a win-win outcome to ensure that everyone is happy. You’ll be a negotiating maven if you do this.

6. How to have a conversation. Generally, “Whassup?” doesn’t work in the real world. Generally, “What do you do?” unleashes a response that leads to a good conversation (hence the recommendation below). Generally, if you listen more than you talk, you will (ironically) be considered not only a good conversationalist but also smart. Yes, life is mysterious sometimes.

7. How to explain something in thirty seconds. Unfortunately, many schools don’t have elevators or else students would know how to explain things in a thirty-second elevator pitch. Think mantra (three words), not mission statements (sixty words). Think time, not money, is the most important commodity. Think ahead, not on your feet. At the end of your thirty-second spiel, there should be an obvious answer to the question, “ So what?” If you can’t explain enough in thirty seconds to incite interest, you’re going to have a long, boring career.

8. How to write a one-page report. I remember struggling to meet the minimum page requirements of reports in college. Double spacing and 14 point Selectric typewriter balls saved me. Then I went out into the real world, and encountered bosses who wanted a one-page report. What the heck??? The best reports in the real world are one page or less. (The same thing is true of resumes, but that’s another, more controversial topic for unemployed people who want to list all the .Net classes that they took.)

9. How to write a five-sentence email. Young people have an advantage over older people in this area because older people (like me) were taught to write letters that were printed on paper, signed, stuck in an envelope, and mailed. Writing a short email was a new experience for them. Young people, by contrast are used to IMing and chatting. If anything, they’re too skilled on brevity, but it’s easier to teach someone how to write a long message than a short one. Whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

10. How to get along with co-workers. Success in school is mostly determined by individual accomplishments: grades, test scores, projects, whatever. Few activities are group efforts. Then you go out in the real world the higher you rise in an organization, the less important your individual accomplishments are. What becomes more and more important is the ability to work with/through/besides and sometimes around others. The most important lesson to learn: Share the credit with others because a rising tide floats all boats.
What about freeloaders? (Those scum of the earth that don’t do anything for the group.) In school you can let them know how you truly feel. You can’t in the real world because bozos have a way of rising to the top of many organizations, and bozos seek revenge. The best solution is to bite your tongue, tolerate them, and try to never have them on the team again, but there’s little upside in criticizing them.

11. How to use PowerPoint. I’ve seen the PowerPoint slides of professors—it’s no wonder that most people can’t use PowerPoint to sell hybrid cars when gas is $10/gallon. Maybe professors are thinking: “This is a one-hour class, I can cover one slide per minute, so I need sixty slides. Oh, and I’ve written all this text already in my textbook, so I’ll just copy and paste my twelve-point manuscript into the presentation.” Perhaps the tenure system causes this kind of problem. In the real world, this is no tenure so you need to limit yourself to ten slides, twenty minutes, and a thirty-point font—assuming that you want to get what you want.

12. How to leave a voicemail. Very few people of any age leave good voicemails. The purpose of a voicemail is to make progress towards along a continuum whose end is getting what you want. A long voicemail isn’t going to zip you along to the end point of this decision. A good model is to think of a voicemail as an oral version of a compelling five-sentence email; the optimal length of a voicemail is fifteen seconds. Two power tips: First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people playback your message to get your phone number, and if either of you are using Cingular, you may not hear all the digits. Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an email that says, “Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.” Just say, “Tuesday, 10:00 am, at your office.”

One last thing: the purpose of going to school is not to prepare for working but to prepare for living. Working is a part of living, and it requires these kinds of skills no matter what career you pursue. However, there is much more to life than work, so study what you love.

INXS - The Stairs

I have flashbacks of lost loves when I hear this one.

Lyrics:

In a room above a busy street
The echoes of a life
The fragments and the accidents
Separated by incidents

We Listen to the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

Story to story
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other

Story to story
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other

We listen to the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

The nature of your tragedy is chained around your neck
Do you lead or are you led
Are you sure that you don't care
There are reasons here to give your life
And follow in your way
The passion lives to keep the faith
Though all are different all are great
Climbing as we fall
We dare to hold on to our faith
And steal away our destiny
To catch ourselves with quiet grace

Story to story
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

Listened to by the walls
We share the same spaces
Repeated in the corridors
Performing the same movements

Story to story
Building to building
Street to street
We pass each other on the stairs

My Cherokee / Christian Heritage And The Keetoowah

My forefathers were memebers of this society. Well known former spiritual leader Redbird Smith was my Great Great Grandfather. He had eight Sons and two daughters. One of the daughters was my great Grandmother.

REDBIRD SMITH’S FAMILY

(1) Chief Redbird Smith. (2) Lucy Smith, his wife. (3) Mrs. Ella McLain, daugh­ter.

(4) John Redbird Smith. (5) Sam Smith. (6) Mrs. Susie Starr, daughter.

(8) Thomas Smith. (9) George Smith. (10) Mose Smith. (11) Kiah Smith.

(12) Stoke Smith.

This link is about the Keetoowah Nighthawk Society:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keetoowah_Nighthawk_Society#Redbird_Smith

Excerpt:

Redbird Smith was an influential Nighthawk member and revitalized traditional spirituality among Cherokees, beginning in the mid 19th century. Today there are seven ceremonial dance grounds in Oklahoma and these either belong to the Keetoowah tradition or the Four Mothers Society. In Redbird Smith's time, there with well over twenty Cherokee Stomp Grounds.

Redbird Smith (Great Grandfather to Chadwick "Corntassel" Smith, current Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) stated in the early 1900s:

"I have always believed that the Great Creator had a great design for my people, the Cherokees. I have been taught that from my childhood up and now in my mature manhood I recognize it as a great truth. Our forces have been dissipated by the external forces, perhaps it has been just a training, but we must now get together as a race and render our contribution to mankind. We are endowed with intelligence, we are industrious, we are loyal and we are spiritual but we are overlooking the Cherokee mission on earth, for no man nor race is endowed with these qualifications without a designed purpose... Our pride in our ancestral heritage is our great incentive for handing something worth while to our posterity. It is this pride in ancestry that makes men strong and loyal for their principal in life. It is this same pride that makes men give up their all for their Government."

Redbird Smith Story
"Chief of the Nighthawk Keetowah"

Provided by the Cherokee Nation
Cultural Resource Center
E-mail: cultural@cherokee.org

[**Note: Cultural information may vary from clan
to clan, location to location, family to family,
and from differing opinions and experiences.
Information provided is not 'etched in stone'.]

---

*Redbird Smith

Redbird Smith believed the greatest danger to the survival of the Cherokee as a culture was 'acculturation'. He feared the people would be absorbed into the ways of the white people around them and forget their own ways. Many of the ceremonials were already forgotten during Redbird’s childhood. He was born July 19, 1850; his father was Pig Smith, a fullblood Cherokee of a very conservative family which always had a sense of mission regarding the preservation of the ancient Cherokee religion. Pig also served in the Cherokee government as a Senator. The name 'Smith' was acquired because he was a blacksmith by trade.

Pig Smith settled in an area of the Cherokee Nation that was mingled with traditional Muscogee (Creek) Indians as well as remnants of the Natchez tribe. The latter were well known for their knowledge of the old religious practices of the Southeastern Indians before contact as well as Removal (Trail of Tears). These religious beliefs and practices brought these groups together, particularly during the dangerous and conflicting times of the Civil War. The conditions for the Cherokee after the Civil War were far worse than when they first arrived after Removal. Approximately eight thousand were refugees in camps and the Nation was flattened with buildings burned, and crops and pastures destroyed. Reconstruction was started when the Treaty of 1866 was signed.

About the same time as the Treaty was signed, there was an important meeting of the Keetowahs in the Saline District near present-day Salina, Oklahoma. John Smith, one of Redbird's sons, relayed this story as it had been told to him.

". . . All the people camped up there. All the old men were seers. They kept themselves clean with medicine. They could see a long ways ahead. The medicine men investigated the future of the Keetowahs. They saw that Pig Smith’s seed would be the leader of the Keetowahs in the time of their greatest trouble. Pig Smith saw that his life was short and his son was just a boy. He looked for a man to teach his son the ways of the Keetowah and to guide him spiritually. He decided on Creek Sam, a Notchee Indian. He told him he could leave his son in his care and teaching and that he would be his advisor even to the time of his (Pig Smith's) grandchildren."

Redbird married Lucie Fields, who originated from present-day Braggs, Oklahoma. Lucie's father was Richard Fields who died in Washington, D.C. while serving the Cherokee Nation as Attorney General. The family is of Cherokee / Natchez ancestry. They had ten children named John, Sam, Richard, Thomas, George, Mose, Kiah, Stoke, Ella and Susie.

Since the Keetowah Society had been organized before the Civil War, it had largely been a political organization. Many of the spiritual Keetowahs never became interested or involved with this group. They decided to change the direction of the Society. Because of the two developing factions, the similarities of the old Cherokee White Chief (peace) and Red Chief (war) system began to resurface. The White faction had a meeting at Long Valley, located in the Goingsnake District of the Cherokee Nation in 1859. They drew up an amendment to the Keetowah Society constitution which stated that the Keetowah Society would be religious, as well as political. A church was built at Long Valley so that services could be held during future conventions which were planned for Long Valley.

Redbird was a "Little Captain" of the Keetowah Society prior to 1889, but after these changes were made and factionalism became more evident, he became more active. Within several years time, he was made ‘Head Captain’ for the Illinois District. The following year, he was elected a member of the Cherokee National Council. He came to develop his spiritual beliefs, which followed the White philosophy. This later became known as the "White Path." During the years that many political changes were happening in the Cherokee Nation, the Keetowahs were still meeting and observing the old ways. Redbird’s sympathetic nature and extensive knowledge of the old ways made him a very influential man among the fullbloods and traditional Cherokees. At Sulphur Springs, in the Illinois District, the Four Mothers Society was formed. Much like the Keetowahs, the society was based on the ancient Southeastern religion. Largely made up of Natchez people, the group also consisted of members of the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) nations. These people banded together to fight assimilation into the non-Indian world as well as the breaking up of tribal lands. They turned to the Sacred Fire.

Redbird Smith was one of the Keetowah Cherokee who became involved with the Four Mothers. Redbird continued to develop his philosophy and coupled with the Natchez-Creek traditions with the Keetowah. He was active in the Four Mothers for some time, and agreed with their politics but later broke with them because of a disagreement over procedures. The Four Mothers are still active as a religious organization, with their main ceremonial grounds in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. By this time, Stomp Dancing had basically ceased. The ceremonies of the ancient religion, such as the Green Corn Ceremony, the Friends Made Ceremony, and all the New Moon ceremonies had become extinct. By the middle of the 1890's, a Stomp Dance was held in the Illinois District with a group of Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek) and Natchez traditionalists. Redbird had often attended ceremonies at the Notchee Town fire on Greenleaf Mountain, near Sulphur Springs. The knowledgeable elders today maintain that the original fire used by Redbird had come from the East during Removal and never died. It was tended by the people of Notchee Town.

To the Cherokee, the Sacred Fire is much more than a fire. It is a physical, living manifestation of the Creator. The smoke of the Fire carries prayers to heaven and it is the smoke that carries spiritual messages from place to place around the world. The fire and its smoke can do good or evil, based on how the fire is built and how it is used. The Keetowah have always used the force for good and peace. Redbird taught, "If you are following the White Path, God will give you protection. If you are following the White Path and a man strikes you in the back, do not turn around. If you do, you will be off in the black."

Redbird made a pledge to return to the old ways, and decided that the first step was to locate the Sacred Wampum Belts, which were woven of wampum shells to record the history, tradition and laws of the Keetowah and Cherokees in general. The Wampums are believed to have a special power within themselves, and are guarded very carefully to this day by the Keetowah Society.

Between 1891 and 1901, factionalism once again surfaced amongst the Keetowah Society. The Curtis Act, and the impending allotment of Cherokee land by the Dawes Commission were feverishly spoke against by traditionalists and Keetowahs. These government acts threatened to cease tribal governments for both the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek). The Keetowahs held another meeting, this one at Moody's Spring, near present-day Tahlequah. They decided that allotment was the only option they had. Redbird would not give in, so he and his followers withdrew from the Keetowah Society and formed the Nighthawk Keetowah. The Nighthawk Keetowah were determined to not only hold onto what culture and religion remained, but now what land and government, as well. In 1905, the split was even more defined, as the Keetowah Society officially incorporated without the Nighthawks. By 1902, some 5,000 Cherokee had succeeded in resisting enrollment with the U.S. government, and the Indian agents began making arrests of the leaders. Redbird Smith was arrested and taken to Federal jail in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Although he finally enrolled, many others did not. The Dawes Commission took the names of those Cherokee who appeared on the Census of 1896 and enroll them without their knowledge or permission.

Later in 1902, the Nighthawk Keetowah broke from ceremonial affiliation with the Four Mothers. Redbird wanted the Nighthawks to be more Cherokee in tradition, and less Natchez. The main fire of the Nighthawk was first established at Long Valley. Because Long Valley had been the convention ground of the Keetowah before the political schisms started, it was maintained for some time. It was the main fire of the Nighthawk Keetowah until 1906. However, because Long Valley Ceremonial Ground was also affiliated with the Long Valley Baptist Church at that time, Redbird desired to slowly move. He was convinced that it was important for the Cherokee to worship in their traditional way and not the way of the white man. A ceremonial ground on Blackgum Mountain, near Redbird’s home, was slowly designed and laid out in 1902. The fire mound was built, a stickball pole erected, and four arbors placed around the dance ground. Later, Redbird changed the number to seven, one for each Cherokee clan. The council became based on advisors from each of the seven clans, as well.

By 1905, there were 22 fires established within the Cherokee Nation. The fire keepers and spiritual leaders of each ground assembled at a meeting at Sulphur Springs to learn more about the customs and rules pertaining to the fire. They were instructed by Charley Sam, son of Creek Sam.

The following year, a convention was held at Long Valley, and Redbird Smith was named Chief of the Nighthawk Keetowah. Shortly after this, the fire on Blackgum Mountain became the main fire of the Nighthawk. Redbird began traveling back and forth between all 22 grounds in the Cherokee Nation to give teachings of the old ways from the Wampum Belts.

By 1910, Redbird delivered the following speech to the Council of the Nighthawk Keetowahs.

"After my selection as chief, I awakened to the grave and great responsibilities of the leader of men. I looked about and saw that I had led my people down a long and steep mountainside, now it was my duty to turn and lead them back upward to save them. The unfortunate thing in the mistakes and errors of leaders or of governments is the penalty the innocent and loyal followers have to pay. My greatest ambition has always been to think right and do right. It is my belief that this is the law of the Great Creator. In the upbuilding of my people, it is my purpose that we shall be spiritually right and industriously strong.

"Our pride in our ancestral heritage is our great incentive for handing something worthwhile to our posterity. It is this pride in ancestry that makes men strong and loyal for their principle in life. It is this same pride that makes men give up their all for their government."

In July, 1914 Redbird traveled to Washington, D.C. with his son John and a Nighthawk officer, Ocie Hogshooter. They appealed to President Woodrow Wilson. Senator Lane advised Redbird, through his interpreter, that the fullbloods and traditionalists must accept their allotments and learn to be happy in the system. Redbird was understandably disappointed, and returned home where he turned to the Sacred Fire. Medicine men from each of the clans met with him, and they prayed for spiritual information. The enlightenment they received was that the Nighthawk Keetowah should only be a religious organization, and they should leave political matters alone. A Nighthawk Constitution was drawn which was based on the ancient forms of the Keetowah. At a convention in 1915, the rule was adopted that all members must know their clans. This was as important of an event as the reinstatement of the Stomp Dance. Many Cherokees did not know their clans, and had to ask the elders if they could recall the clan of the grandmothers. This became known as "The time we found our clans." The ceremonial fires began to flourish within the Cherokee Nation. Stomp Dances at individual fires were held every two weeks, and the lighting as well as feeding (sacrifice made to) the fire was carefully observed by all grounds. In addition, two general meetings were held during the year. In September, a three- or four-day meeting was held at Long Valley Ceremonial Grounds and the Keetowah business was transacted there. There was a bar-b-cue, hog fry, stickball games, and general fellowship. People came from miles around and each night of the meeting a Stomp Dance was held around the ceremonial Fire.

On Redbird's birthday, July 19, people would come from miles to Redbird's home and bring food and pay their respects. The celebration eventually became so large that it was moved to the ceremonial grounds near his home. This tradition continues today.

Around 1916, membership in the Nighthawks and Keetowah societies began to decline. With the loss of tribal land and attempted loss of tribal government, people became more and more disenchanted and acculturated with non-Indian society. However, those Keetowahs who gained spiritual strength from the Fire remained faithful As World War I progressed, many young Cherokees enlisted. A special ceremony was held each month for the protection of the young soldiers, and all of them came home. In 1917, the Nighthawk Keetowahs made a first of several community investments for their membership. Two hundred head of Aberdeen Angus cattle were bought.

The following year, in November of 1918, Redbird Smith passed away. He was buried with the death ceremony of the Keetowah. About a year earlier, he had wrote the following words, "I have endeavored in my efforts. . . for my people to remember that any religion must be an unselfish one. That even though condemned, falsely accused and misunderstood by both officials and my own people, I must press on and do the work of my convictions. This religion as revealed to me is larger than any man. It is beyond man’s understanding. It shall prevail after I am gone. It is growth like the child, it is growth eternal. This religion does not teach me to concern myself of the life that shall be after this, but it does teach me to be concerned with what my everyday life should be. The Fires kept burning are merely the greater Fire, the greater Light, the Great Spirit. I realize now as never before it is not only for the Cherokees but for all mankind. . ."

The Desiderata- And The End Of The Rainbow (Bonus- the Deteriorata)

Desiderata
-- written by Max Ehrmann

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

________________________________________________________

And now its cynical spoof:

The Deteriorata:

From the CD: National Lampoon Radio Dinner Album
A Parody of the poem Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and waste,
And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof.
Avoid quiet and passive persons unless you are in need of sleep.
Rotate your tires.

Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself,
And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys.
Know what to kiss and when.
Consider that two wrongs never make a right,
But that three lefts do.

Wherever possible put people on "HOLD".
Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment,
And despite the changing fortunes of time,
There is always a big future in computer maintenance.
Remember the Pueblo.

Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate.
Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI.
Exercise caution in your daily affairs,
Especially with those persons closest to you;
That lemon on your left for instance.

Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls,
Would scarcely get your feet wet.
Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your face.

Carefully surrender the things of youth: birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan,
And let not the sands of time get in your lunch.
For a good time, call 606-4311.

Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog
Is finally getting enough cheese;
And reflect that whatever fortunes may be your lot,
It could only be worse in Sioux City.

You are a fluke of the Universe.
You have no right to be here, and whether you can hear it or not,
The Universe is laughing behind your back.

Therefore make peace with your God whatever you conceive him to be,
Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin.

With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal,
The world continues to deteriorate.
Give up.
_________________________________________________________

Well.... the Deteriorata was pretty humorous... good for a hyuk hyuk. But, I reckon I'll take the original Desiderada to heart. If I've got the freewill choice to choose my path trough this world I'd say the best bet is the path of light and hope. If I turn out to be mistaken and there is no heavenly reward at the end of the rainbow then I don't reckon that it will matter much anyhow. I will have lost nothing. On the other hand... the power of light and goodness and God and a life beyond time and space... well now that is probably worth holding out for even if at times it seems hard or even foolish. To die chasing light and rainbows- only "fools" are brave enough to do that.

"Project Earth: Preserving the World God Created"

Read this article and think...no skimming! LOL:

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1998/PSCF3-98Ball.html

Excerpt:

This article explores how the concepts of ecology are presented and utilized in the evangelical Protestant response to the ecological crisis. It finds that there are seven basic themes in the literature: (1) etymological discussions; (2) the concepts of interdependence and balance; (3) cycles and energy flow; (4) food chain/food web/ecological pyramid; (5) carrying capacity; (6) the idea that humans are the disrupters of "nature's" balance; and (7) the contrary idea that humans are a part of the ecosystem. In light of these themes, I make several observations. One is that the summarized findings of ecology becomes the latest version of natural theology: God's will is for each ecosystem to be a climax ecosystem which never declines. If this is the case, then western agriculture, industry, and the use of much technology will have to be severely curtailed--a situation unacceptable to most evangelical Protestants.

Many scholars have argued that western culture, infused with a Christian understanding of the world, provided a nurturing environment for the development of science. The belief in a purposeful God, the argument goes, who gave order and coherence to the universe allowed scientists to assume that they could discover such order, such "laws." God made a world which was consistent and real, and therefore predictable. The discipline of ecology has also benefited from Christian assumptions embedded in western culture. By the time ecology began to develop as a scientific discipline, however, these assumptions had become "secularized," or stripped of their God-talk. In other words, early ecologists did not have to believe in a Christian God to assume that the world was orderly, consistent, real, and predictable. These beliefs had become cultural norms taken for granted by everyone in the West; they could be understood by an ecologist as simply similarities between Christianity and science, rather than shared beliefs which have their "genesis" in Christian doctrine.

Not surprisingly, it is these assumptions that evangelical Protestants emphasize when informing their audience about the concept of ecology.¹ Furthermore, probably in part because of these shared assumptions, the languages of ecology and theology are mixed together without any serious discussion about what the potential differences could be--not so much a synthesis as a bricolage. This article is an attempt to describe and analyze the concept of ecology contained in the evangelical Protestant response to the ecological crisis, and to raise questions about its use.
____________________________________________________________________________

I have a book entitled "Project Earth: Preserving the World God Created" ,

which is awesome on this topic. It's by a bloke by the name of Willaim Badke which has also written other interesting books and has a blog here:

http://badkemeaningofeverything.blogspot.com/

another link on his work: http://www.meaningofeverything.com/

Here are some other references (skimming allowed):

http://www.earthcareonline.org/popularbooks.html

For more on these vital topics also visit these posts:

The Misuse of "Radah" (dominion)

A Biblical View of the Environment

A Christian View of the Environment

The Meaning of Genesis

Why Are We Here?

Quantum Freewill, the Breath and Spirit of God...

Doing Lunch With The Almighty

Poverty, Pollution and Environmental Racism

Eleven Inherent rules of Corporate Behavior

Is God Green?

Thank You For This Earth

Indigenous Mind


> From: S. Starr
> To: D.S. Martin
> Subject: Glory
> Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 21:28:23 -0500
>
> If creation is responsive to God, if it praises him, then it bears
> witness to some crucial realities. Creation, in fact, bears witness to at
> least four realities - That God is glorious, that God wants to nurture what
> he has made, that human beings carry a penalty for walking away from God and
> his plan for them, and that we live in a precarious universe. These might
> seem like contradictions, but they're not.
>
> Let's start with God's glory. Ever wonder why so many people on the
> weekends leave the cities to find somewhere in unspoiled nature that they
> can call home for a few hours? What are they looking for? When we view it
> with eyes that see beyond the routine, creation speaks enormous volumes
> about the complexity, greatness, and wondrous power of the Creator. That's
> why, standing in front of an unexpected waterfall or coming upon a deer in
> the woods, we get the urge to worship. Nature constantly points us beyond
> itself to the One who made it, saying, "See! See the One who's responsible
> for all of this."
>
> People who escape to the great outdoors may not tell you that they're doing
> it to find God. But that is who they find.

From: D.S. Martin
Sent :	Thursday, April 27, 2006 1:01 PM
To :	"S. Starr"
Subject :	RE: Glory

I think that Mr. Eldridge (John Eldrige author of Wild At Heart and others) made use of this type of example.

It is the Creator, by His Holy Spirit, unexpectedly reaching into my soul and plucking the "Holy Chord" and as it resonates through my heart, mind and soul I will feel the urge to fall on my knees and just cry, but, not a sad cry.

This happens just as Eldridge describes it, unexpectedly; maybe a sunrise that seems to turn some surreal and unknown color that could not be duplicated on any artist's palate no matter how many times that he tried , or sometimes when we sing a song in church that touches at the love of God and the harmony of the body all combine in a glorious crescendo.

This feeling is one of those things that I try to choke down and suffocate, if I am not alone. I sometimes think that I should just let go; that maybe I'm quenching the Holy Spirit.
DSM

Quantum Contemplations: Dialog Echoing In Eternity #3- The Root Connection

I have decided to post some of the e-mails from the expansive archives of the ongoing conversation between D.S. Martin and other friends and myself. Here is the next installment of: Quantum Contemplations: The Root Connection

>From: "Scott Starr"
>>Subject: New Review, Connecting The Paradigms
>>Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2004 18:19:51 -0600

>>Ok, I don't have the focus to write a thesis at the moment but here's
>>something I offer you to think about in the vein of "new topic".
>> I have been carrying this one in the sidepocket of my mind for a good
>>while. First, please forgive me for often referring to my ethnos when I
>>converse with you. All I can say is that it is in the warp and woof of
>>me. To surrender my place of who I am would be a terrifying loss of
>>identity. I think that is what is wrong with most of the world right
>>now.... Correct me if this is not a conservative view... If its not then
>>I really am lost. People don't know who they are and where they came from
>>and just what it is they are suppose to be doing with themselves anymore.
>>They try to get it from tv and other media I suppose. People have lost
>>their context...their identity. The root connection for me is that when I
>>was lost too...I found the answer to who I was, where I came from and what
>>I am suppose to be doing not in a church pew (although that is where it
>>all starts), not in my family home in suburbia...but in my familiy's
>>traditional culture and worldview....the one that stood for thousands of
>>years but has almost been erased from the face of God's earth, and the
>>same one that men Like Newt Gingrich suggest be surrendered and
>>homogenized into pop culture once and for all now. I agree that America
>>must pull together as one nation if we wish to survive, however, this does
>>not mean surrenderring our individuality or diversity completely - but
>>creating a network of diverse, autonomous communities working towards a
>>common goal and common unity. If we remember this concept then we will
>>not always be dividing and sub dividing ourselves into seperated-
>>hyphenated false categories. Then, we can express our diversity and
>>cultural perspective without detracting from the goal of the whole. I
>>will always be a Native- American, A citizen of the United States and a
>>member of the human family and God's Kingdom. Try to take away or harm
>>any of these parts of me and you will have a fight on your hands. I
>>imagine we all feel the same about this from our own perspective if we
>>have in fact devoted any thought to it. Getting in touch with this root
>>connection of who I am was a potent experience with real spiritual
>>occurances and huge realizations and paradigm shifts. All humanity points
>>toward this same set of truths regardless of the distractions and
>>tragedies of the dark side of human nature. I have something relevant to
>>say on my mind that many of my ancestors died trying to say
>>unsuccessfully.
>> At the moment I am not thinking of theology and metaphysics although I
>>do have a good deal to say about how Jesus reveals himself to my people
>>and the truth Jesus stands for. I am still thinking politics!!!
>> I know, as you do too...no question in my mind about that...that our
>>world is at a huge nexus right now...and in every phase of existence
>>too...especially spiritually. Politics!! Its well known that our
>>nation's democracy was modeled after the Roman senate, Greek thought and
>>also after models of government exhibited by the Iroquois League of
>>Nations and other tribal governments. The model of government exhibited
>>in much of Native America was designed well enough to last eons. It was
>>more streamlined...more decentralized...more conservative...more
>>balanced...more in line with God's Law- Natural Law...better suited to
>>humanity and the family structure as well as the food chain. It was also
>>more like what the founding fathers of the United States had in mind.
>>Forget about the fact that it was a long time ago (not really so long) and
>>dealt with fewer people (although in the tens of millions instead of the
>>hundreds of millions) and a different world stage. I'm just tallking about
>>the flow chart like exquisitely simple design of it. Never mind all that
>>other stuff right now. Think about the formula...the model. Its about
>>individual and community rights and responsibilities.
>> Thomas Paine I believe it was (Common Sense?), kind of touched on
>>where I am going with this on the States' Rights tip. He was also talking
>>about a network of more autonomous communities like I am. Now before you
>>start thinking I'm talking about socialism or liberalism and dismiss it-
>>start thinking about how a system like this would have to be and could be
>>done. I am not such an idealist that I can honestly say that I think my
>>vision OR...the world as it is set up right now is salvagable. I beleive
>>that niether is salvagable without cataclysm to motivate some real
>>paradigm shifts. I also believe we are going to live to see that
>>cataclysm if we are not in fact watching it hatch right now. I am a BIG
>>picture thinker. I am so beyond all this crap we have been bantering
>>about. I am starting to worry less about how much damage Dubya can do
>>(most of his worse gaffes are either failing or are at least exposed) and
>>worry more about what comes about 5 years down the road. We can pull
>>America out of her decaying orbit if more people will get serious and
>>focus. To hell with all this right-left stuff...lets get back to the
>>center...the source. This is what I have been talking about the whole
>>time in a way. Can you see that model in your head? Think about that for
>>a new topic. Our generation's turn to hold the reigns is coming right up.
>>

Einstein and the Mind of God

check out Einstein and the Mind of God HERE.

POVERTY, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM:

LINK

Since that link has been acting up-I am going to post the text it contains here. If the author or someone else from the provider has a problem with that just let me know and I will remove it.

POVERTY, POLLUTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM:
STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING HEALTHY AND SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES
Robert D. Bullard, Ph.D.
Environmental Justice Resource Center
Clark Atlanta University
223 James P. Brawley Drive Atlanta, Georgia 30314 USA
(404) 880-69-11 (ph) (404) 880-6909 (fx)
ejrc@cau.edu
Website: www.ejrc.cau.edu

A Discussion Paper prepared for the National Black Environmental Justice Network (NBEJN) Environmental Racism Forum World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) Global Forum Johannesburg, South Africa July 2, 2002
Introduction
Despite significant improvements in environmental protection over the past several decades, over 1.3 billion individuals worldwide live in unsafe and unhealthy physical environments. Hazardous waste generation and international movement of hazardous waste and toxic products pose some important health, environmental, legal, political, and ethical dilemmas.
The systematic destruction of indigenous peoples' land and sacred sites, the poisoning of Native Americans on reservations, Africans in the Niger Delta, African-Americans in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," Mexicans in the border towns, and Puerto Ricans on the Island of Vieques all have their roots in economic exploitation, racial oppression, devaluation of human life and the natural environment, and corporate greed. [1]
Unequal interests and unequal power arrangements have allowed poisons of the rich to be offered as short-term remedies for poverty of the poor. The last decade has seen numerous developing nations challenge the "unwritten policy" of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries shipping hazardous wastes into their borders. Most people of color communities in the United States and poor nations around the world want jobs and economic development-but not at the expense of public health and the environment.
Why do some communities get dumped on while others escape? Why are environmental regulations vigorously enforced in some communities and not in other communities? Why are some workers protected from environmental and health threats while other workers (such as migrant farm workers) are allowed to be poisoned? How can environmental justice be incorporated into environmental protection? What institutional changes are needed in order to achieve a just and sustainable society? What community organizing strategies and public policies are effective tools against environmental racism?
The paper analyzes the causes and consequences of environmental racism and the strategies environmental justice groups, community-based organizations, and government can use to improve the quality of life for their constituents.
Anatomy of Environmental Racism
The United States is the dominant economic and military force in the world today. The American economic engine has generated massive wealth, high standard of living, and consumerism. This growth machine has also generated waste, pollution, and ecological destruction. The U.S. has some of the best environmental laws in the world. However, in the real world, all communities are not created equal. Environmental regulations have not achieved uniform benefits across all segments of society. [2] Some communities are routinely poisoned while the government looks the other way.
People of color around the world must contend with dirty air and drinking water, and the location of noxious facilities such as municipal landfills, incinerators, hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities owned by private industry, government, and even the military.[3] These environmental problems are exacerbated by racism. Environmental racism refers to environmental policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color. Environmental racism is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions. Environmental racism combines with public policies and industry practices to provide benefits for the countries in the North while shifting costs to countries in the South. [4]
Environmental racism is a form of institutionalized discrimination. Institutional discrimination is defined as "actions or practices carried out by members of dominant (racial or ethnic) groups that have differential and negative impact on members of subordinate (racial and ethnic) groups." [5] The United States is grounded in white racism. The nation was founded on the principles of "free land" (stolen from Native Americans and Mexicans), "free labor" (African slaves brought to this land in chains), and "free men" (only white men with property had the right to vote). From the outset, racism shaped the economic, political and ecological landscape of this new nation.
Environmental racism buttressed the exploitation of land, people, and the natural environment. It operates as an intra-nation power arrangement--especially where ethnic or racial groups form a political and or numerical minority. For example, blacks in the U.S. form both a political and numerical racial minority. On the other hand, blacks in South Africa, under apartheid, constituted a political minority and numerical majority. American and South African apartheid had devastating environmental impacts on blacks. [6]
Environmental racism also operates in the international arena between nations and between transnational corporations. Increased globalization of the world's economy has placed special strains on the eco-systems in many poor communities and poor nations inhabited largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. This is especially true for the global resource extraction industry such as oil, timber, and minerals. [7] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives, cheapest labor, and highest profit.
The struggle of African Americans in Norco, Louisiana and the Africans in the Niger Delta are similar in that both groups are negatively impacted by Shell Oil refineries and unresponsive governments. This scenario is repeated for Latinos in Wilmington (California) and indigenous people in Ecuador who must contend with pollution from Texaco oil refineries. The companies may be different, but the community complaints and concerns are very similar. Local residents have seen their air, water, and land contaminated. Many nearby residents are "trapped" in their community because of inadequate roads, poorly planned emergency escape routes, and faulty warning systems. They live in constant fear of plant explosions and accidents.
The Bhopal tragedy is fresh in the minds of millions of people who live next to chemical plants. The 1984 poison-gas leak at the Bhopal, India Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people--making it the world's deadliest industrial accident. It is not a coincidence that the only place in the U.S. where methyl isocyanate (MIC) was manufactured was at a Union Carbide plant in in predominately African American Institute, West Virginia. [8] In 1985, a gas leak from the Institute Union Carbide plant sent 135 residents to the hospital.
Institutional racism has allowed people of color communities to exist as colonies, areas that form dependent (and unequal) relationships to the dominant white society or "Mother Country" with regard to their social, economic, legal, and environmental administration. Writing more than three decades ago, Carmichael and Hamilton, in their work Black Power, offered the "internal" colonial model to explain racial inequality, political exploitation, and social isolation of African Americans. Carmichael and Hamilton write:
The economic relationship of America's black communities . . . reflects their colonial status. The political power exercised over those communities go hand in glove with the economic deprivation experienced by the black citizens. Historically, colonies have existed for the sole purpose of enriching, in one form or another, the "colonizer"; the consequence is to maintain the economic dependency of the "colonized." [9]
Institutional racism reinforces internal colonialism. Government institutions buttress this system of domination. Institutional racism defends, protects, and enhances the social advantages and privileges of rich nations. Whether by design or benign neglect, communities of color (ranging from the urban ghettos and barrios to rural "poverty pockets" to economically impoverished Native American reservations and developing nations) face some of the worst environmental problems. The most polluted communities are also the communities with crumbling infrastructure, economic disinvestment, deteriorating housing, inadequate schools, chronic unemployment, high poverty, and overloaded health care systems.
The Quest for Environmental Justice
The environmental justice movement has its roots in the United States. However, in just two decades, this grassroots movement has spread across the globe. The call for environmental justice can be heard from the ghetto of Southside Chicago to the Soweto township. The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its humble beginning in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina where a PCB landfill ignited protests and over 500 arrests. The Warren County protests provided the impetus for a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. [10] That study revealed that three out of four of the off-site, commercial hazardous waste landfills in Region 4 (which comprises eight states in the southern U.S.) were located in predominantly African-American communities, although African-Americans made up only 20% of the region's population.
The protests also led the Commission for Racial Justice to produce 1987 Toxic Waste and Race, the first national study to correlate waste facility sites and demographic characteristics. [11] Race was found to be the most potent variable in predicting where these facilities were located--more powerful than poverty, land values, and home ownership.
In 1990, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality chronicled the convergence of two social movements--social justice and environmental movements--into the environmental justice movement. [12] African-American environmental activism emerged from the southern United States, the same region that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. What started out as local and often isolated community-based struggles against toxics and facility siting blossomed into a multi-issue, multi-ethnic, and multi-regional movement.
The 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was probably the most important single event in the movement's history. The Summit broadened the environmental justice movement beyond its anti-toxics focus to include issues of public health, worker safety, land use, transportation, housing, resource allocation, and community empowerment. [13] The meeting also demonstrated that it is possible to build a multi-racial grassroots movement around environmental and economic justice.
Held in Washington, DC, the four-day Summit was attended by over 1,000 grassroots and national leaders from around the world. Delegates came from all fifty states including Alaska and Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands. People attended the Summit to share their action strategies, redefine the environmental movement, and develop common plans for addressing environmental problems affecting people of color in the United States and abroad.
On October 27, 1991, Summit delegates adopted 17 "Principles of Environmental Justice." These principles were developed as a guide for organizing, networking, and relating to government nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). By June 1992, Spanish and Portuguese translations of the Principles were being used and circulated by NGOs and environmental justice groups at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
Environmental Justice Framework
The dominant environmental protection paradigm manages, regulates, and distributes risks. It also institutionalizes unequal enforcement, trades human health for profit, places the burden of proof on the "victims" and not the polluting industry, legitimates human exposure to harmful chemicals, pesticides, and hazardous substances, promotes "risky" technologies, exploits the vulnerability of economically and politically disenfranchised communities, subsidizes ecological destruction, creates an industry around risk assessment and risk management, delays cleanup actions, and fails to develop pollution prevention as the overarching and dominant strategy.
The U.S. EPA defines environmental justice as the "fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Fair treatment means that no group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socio-economic groups should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies." [14]
In 1992, the U.S. EPA published Environmental Equity: Reducing Risks for All Communities--the first time the agency embarked on a systematic examination of environmental risks to communities of color. [15] Environmental equity may mean different things to different people. Equity is distilled into three broad categories: procedural, geographic, and social equity.
Procedural equity refers to the "fairness" question: the extent that governing rules, regulations, evaluation criteria, and enforcement are applied uniformly across the board and in a nondiscriminatory way. Unequal protection might result from nonscientific and undemocratic decisions, exclusionary practices, public hearings held in remote locations and at inconvenient times, and use of English-only material as the language to communicate and conduct hearings for non-English speaking publics.
Geographic equity refers to location and spatial configuration of communities and their proximity to environmental hazards, noxious facilities, and locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) such as landfills, incinerators, sewer treatment plants, lead smelters, refineries, and other noxious facilities. For example, unequal protection may result from land-use decisions that determine the location of residential amenities and disamenities. Unincorporated, poor, and communities of color often suffer a "triple" vulnerability of noxious facility siting.
Social Equity assesses the role of sociological factors (race, ethnicity, class, culture, life styles, political power, etc.) on environmental decision making. Poor people and people of color often work in the most dangerous jobs, live in the most polluted neighborhoods, and their children are exposed to all kinds of environmental toxins on the playgrounds and in their homes.
The environmental justice framework rests on developing tools, strategies, and policies to eliminate unfair, unjust, and inequitable conditions and decisions. The framework attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that may contribute to and produce differential exposure and unequal protection. It brings to the surface the ethical and political questions of "who gets what, when, why, and how much." Some general characteristics of this framework include the following:
The environmental justice framework adopts a public health model of prevention (i.e., elimination of the threat before harm occurs) and the precautionary principle as the preferred strategy.
The environmental justice framework shifts the burden of proof to polluters/dischargers who do harm, who discriminate, or who do not give equal protection to people of color, low-income persons, and other "protected" classes or vulnerable populations.
The environmental justice framework allows disparate impact and statistical weight or an "effect" test, as opposed to "intent," to infer discrimination.
The environmental justice framework redresses disproportionate impact through "targeted" action and resources. In general, this strategy targets resources where environmental and health problems are greatest (as determined by some ranking scheme but not limited to quantitative risk assessment).
The environmental justice paradigm embraces a holistic approach to formulating environmental health policies and regulations, developing risk reduction strategies for multiple, cumulative and synergistic risks, ensuring public health, enhancing public participation in environmental decision-making, promoting community empowerment, building infrastructure for achieving environmental justice and sustainable communities, ensuring interagency cooperation and coordination, developing innovative public/private partnerships and collaboratives, enhancing community-based pollution prevention strategies, ensuring community-based sustainable economic development, and developing geographically-oriented community-wide programming.
Dumping on the Poor
Hazardous waste generation and international movement of hazardous waste still pose some important health, environmental, legal, and ethical dilemmas. The "unwritten" policy of targeting Third World nations for waste trade received international media attention in 1991. Lawrence Summers, at the time he was chief economist of the World Bank, shocked the world and touched off an international firestorm when his confidential memorandum on waste trade was leaked. Summers writes: "'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs?" [16] Between 1989 and 1994, an estimated 2,611 metric tons of hazardous waste was exported from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries to non-OECD countries. [17]
Transboundary Waste Trade Conventions. In a response to the growing exportation of hazardous wastes into their borders, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the G-77 nations mobilized to pass two important international agreements. [18] On January 30, 1991, the Pan-African Conference on Environment and Sustainable Development in Bamako, Mali adopted the Bamako Convention on the Ban of the Import into Africa and the Control of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous wastes within Africa or the Bamako Convention. [19]
The G-77 nations were instrumental in amending the Basel Convention to include Decision II/12, despite opposition from the United States. On September 1995, the third Conference of Parties to the Basel Convention (COP III) approved an amendment that would ban the export of hazardous wastes from highly industrialized countries (specifically OECD countries and Lichtenstein) to all other countries. [20] While Bamako and Basel may have made certain dumping formally illegal, in practice they have not prevented the transboundary movement of hazardous waste to developing countries. Loopholes still allow hazardous wastes to enter countries that do not have the resources or infrastructure to handle the wastes. For example, Karliner reports that "products such as pesticides and other chemicals banned or severely restricted by the United States, Western Europe and Japan because of their acute toxicity, environmental persistence or carcinogenic qualities are still regularly sent to the Third World." [21] Having laws or treaties on the books and enforcing them are two different things.
Whether at home or abroad, environmental racism disadvantages people of color while providing advantages and privileges for whites. A form of illegal "exaction" forces people of color to pay costs of environmental benefits for the public at large. The question of who pays and who benefits from the current industrial and development policies is central to any analysis of environmental racism.
U.S.-Mexico Border Ecology. The conditions surrounding the more than 1,900 maquiladoras, assembly plants operated by American, Japanese, and other foreign countries, located along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border may further exacerbate the waste trade. The industrial plants use cheap Mexican labor to assemble imported components and raw material and then ship finished products back to the United States. Over a half million Mexican workers are employed in the maquiladoras.
All along the Lower Rio Grande River Valley maquiladoras dump their toxic wastes into the river, from which 95 percent of the region's residents get their drinking water. [22] In the border cities of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoras, Mexico, the rate of anencephaly---babies born without brains---is four times the national average. Affected families filed lawsuits against 88 of the area's 100 maquiladoras for exposing the community to xylene, a cleaning solvent that can cause brain hemorrhages, and lung and kidney damage.
The Mexican environmental regulatory agency is understaffed and ill-equipped to adequately enforce its laws. Many of the Mexican border towns have now become cities with skyscrapers and freeways. More important, the "brown pallor of these southwestern skies has become a major health hazards." [23]
Radioactive Colonialism and Threatened Native Lands. There is a direct correlation between exploitation of land and exploitation of people. It should not be a surprise to anyone to discover that Native Americans have to contend with some of the worst pollution in the United States. [24] Native American nations have become prime targets for waste trading. [25] The vast majority of these waste proposals have been defeated by grassroots groups on the reservations. However, "radioactive colonialism" is alive and well. Winona LaDuke sums up this "toxic invasion" of Native lands as follows:
While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of most invasive industrial interventions imaginable. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 317 reservations in the United States are threatened by environmental hazards, ranging from toxic wastes to clearcuts.
Reservations have been targeted as sites for 16 proposed nuclear waste dumps. Over 100 proposals have been floated in recent years to dump toxic waste in Indian communities. Seventy-seven sacred sites have been disturbed or desecrated through resource extraction and development activities. The federal government is proposing to use Yucca Mountain, sacred to the Shone, a dumpsite for the nation's high-level nuclear waste. [26]
Radioactive colonialism operates in energy production (mining of uranium) and disposal of wastes on Indian lands. The legacy of institutional racism has left many sovereign Indian nations without an economic infrastructure to address poverty, unemployment, inadequate education and health care, and a host of other social problems.
In 1999, Eastern Navajo reservation residents filed suit with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to block a permit for uranium mining in Church Rock and Crown Point, New Mexico. The Mohave tribe in California, Skull Valley Goshutes in Idaho, and Western Shoshone in Yucca Mountain, Nevada are fighting the construction of a radioactive waste dumps on their tribal lands.
The threats to indigenous peoples are not solely confined to the United States. Native and indigenous people all cross the globe are threatened with extinction due to the greed of mining and oil companies and "development genocide." Sociologist Al Gedicks' 2001 book Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations traces the development of grassroots multiracial transnational movement that is countering this form of environmental racism. [27] Over 5,000 members of the U'Wa tribe of Colombia have organized to prevent Occidental from drilling on sacred U'Wa land.
The Threat from Military Toxics. Private industry does not have a monopoly on ecological threats to communities of color. War and military activities are also big players. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has left its nightmarish nuclear weapons garbage on Native lands and the Pacific Islands. In fact, "over the last 45 years, there have been 1,000 atomic explosions on Western Shoshone land in Nevada, making the Western Shoshone the most bombed nation on earth." [28]
The Marshall Islands residents live under a constant threat from radioactive contamination from weapons testing. Many island residents were uprooted, relocated, and displaced from their homeland-never to be fully compensated for their losses. For decades, island residents have waged a campaign for reparations from the U.S. government.
The military has also spoiled pristine lands in Alaska. Over 648 U.S. military installations, both active and abandoned, in Alaska are polluting the land, groundwater, wetlands, streams and air with extensive fuel spill, pesticides, solvents, PCBs, dioxins, munitions, and radioactive materials. Many of these military installations are in close proximity to Alaska Native villages and traditional hunting and fishing areas. Military toxics threaten the way of life of Alaska Natives. [29]
Residents on the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico are engaged in a heated battle against the U.S. Navy. The tiny island is inhabited by 9,000 residents who are bordered on both sides by the Navy. The Navy has used the U.S. commonwealth island as a bombing range since 1941. In 1999, a stray Marine Corps bomb killed a civilian security guard. [30] Over 600 protesters have been arrested. Opponents contend that the bombing exercises threaten the environment and health of island residents. Several studies point to health-problems which are directly related to the level of noise coming from the ship-to-shore shelling of Vieques. [31]
Residential Apartheid and Discriminatory Zoning
In the real world, all communities are not created equal. Government and industry are major perpetrators of environmental injustice. [32] Racism is a potent factor in sorting people into their physical environment. Racism influences land use, housing patterns, and infrastructure development. [33]
Zoning is probably the most widely applied mechanism to regulate and use. Zoning laws broadly define land for residential, commercial, or industrial uses, and may impose narrower land-use restrictions (e.g., minimum and maximum lot size, number of dwellings per acre, square feet and height of buildings, etc.).
Exclusionary zoning has been used to zone against something rather than for something. On the other hand, "expulsive" zoning has pushed out residential and allowed "dirty" industries to invade communities. Largely the poor, people of color, and renters inhabit the most vulnerable communities. With or without zoning, deed restrictions or other devices, various groups are unequally able to protect their environmental interests. More often than not, people of color communities get shortchanged in the neighborhood protection game. Race still plays a significant part in distributing public "benefits" and public "burdens" associated with economic growth. The roots of racial discrimination are deep and have been difficult to eliminate.
Racism in the United States
Apartheid-type housing and development policies in the U.S. have resulted in limited mobility, reduced neighborhood options, decreased environmental choices, and diminished job opportunities for people of color. Home ownership is still a major part of the "American Dream." Housing discrimination contributes to the physical decay of inner-city neighborhoods and denies a substantial segment of African Americans and other people of color a basic form of wealth accumulation and investment through home ownership. [34]The number of African American homeowners would probably be higher in the absence of discrimination by lending institutions. Only about 59 percent of the nation's middle-class African Americans own their homes, compared with 74 percent of whites. [35]
Eight out of every ten African Americans live in neighborhoods where they are in the majority. Residential segregation decreases for most racial and ethnic groups with additional education, income, and occupational status. However, this scenario does not hold true for African Americans. African Americans, no matter what their educational or occupational achievement or income level, are exposed to higher crime rates, less effective educational systems, high mortality risks, more dilapidated surroundings, and greater environmental threats because of their race. For example, in the heavily populated South Coast air basin of the Los Angeles area, it is estimated that over 71 percent of African Americans and 50 percent of Latinos reside in areas with the most polluted air, while only 34 percent of whites live in highly polluted areas. [36]
It has been difficult for millions of Americans in segregated neighborhoods to say "not in my backyard" (NIMBY) if they do not have a backyard. Nationally, 46.3 percent of African Americans and 36.2 percent of Latinos own their homes compared to over two-thirds of the nation as a whole. Homeowners are the strongest advocates of the NIMBY positions taken against locally unwanted land uses or LULUs such as the construction of garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, sewer treatment plants, recycling centers, prisons, drug treatment units, and public housing projects. Generally, white communities have greater access than people of color communities when it comes to influencing land use and environmental decision making.
The ability of an individual to escape a health-threatening physical environment is usually related to affluence. However, racial and ethnic barriers complicate this process. The imbalance between residential amenities and land uses assigned to central cities and suburbs cannot be explained by class factors alone. People of color and whites do not have the same opportunities to "vote with their feet" and escape undesirable physical environments.
Institutional racism continues to influence housing and mobility options available to African Americans of all income levels---and is a major factor that influences quality of neighborhoods they have available to them. The "web of discrimination" in the housing market is a result of action and inaction of local and federal government officials, financial institutions, insurance companies, real estate marketing firms, and zoning boards. More stringent enforcement mechanisms and penalties are needed to combat all forms of discrimination.
Some residential areas and their inhabitants are at a greater risk than the larger society from unregulated growth, ineffective regulation of industrial toxins, and public policy decisions authorizing industrial facilities that favor those with political and economic clout. People of color communities are often victims of land-use decision making that mirrors the power arrangements of the dominant society.
Historically, exclusionary zoning (and rezoning) has been a subtle form of using government authority and power to foster and perpetuate discriminatory practices-including environmental planning. Zoning ordinances, deed restrictions, and other land-use mechanisms have been widely used as a "NIMBY" (not in my backyard) tool, operating through exclusionary practices. In Houston, Texas, the only major American city that does not have zoning, NIMBY was replaced with the policy of "PIBBY" (place in blacks back yard). The city government and private industry targeted landfills, incinerators, and garbage dumps for Houston's black neighborhoods for more than five decades. Black neighborhood were rendered "invisible." [37] Racism lowered residents' property values, accelerated physical deterioration, and increased disinvestments in the community. A similar discriminatory facility siting pattern have been discovered in people of color communities across the United States. [38]
Racism in Brazil
Racism is still an important factor in explaining social inequality, political exploitation, social isolation, and health and well being of blacks in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. Racism plays a major role in sorting people into Brazil's favelas, South Africa's townships, and the United States' ghettos, barrios, and reservations. Racism provides privileges for "whiteness" at the expense of blacks. [39]
Race remains an important indicator of privilege in Brazilian society. Racism maintains "white supremacy" in Brazil. Race is the main factor determining an individual's social and economic position in Brazilian society. [40] Brazilian society still maintains an "unofficial caste system" based on color. In this system, brancos (whites) remain at the top, people of mixed racial ancestry (mulattos, mestios, morenos, coboclos, etc.) occupy the middle sector, and blacks (pretos) occupy the lowest rung. [41] Nearly half of Brazil's 165 million people are of African descent, the largest black population outside Nigeria. Yet, only 6 percent of the population classify themselves as black. Brazil's "racial democracy" is a myth (Astor, 2000).
A visit to the hundreds of favelas or shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro reveals the faces of racism up close and personal. In the early days of settlement, wealthy inhabitants claimed the land near beaches and harbor, leaving the step, inaccessible hillside to the poor. Over one third of Rio's eleven million people live in the poverty-stricken shantytowns perched precariously along the mountainsides in the hills of the metropolis.
Some of the favelas are more than 100 years old. Others are newer. Whether old or new, the problems are the same. Most favela residents are poor and uneducated. Crime and drug trafficking take a heavy toll on residents. While one may find persons of all colors in the favelas, the color most often seen is black. The densely populated favelas are cities within the city where sanitation, water, fire, police, hospitals and health, and transportation services are not guaranteed. Most of the favelas also lack drivable roads and adequate infrastructure (Hart, 2000; Gewertz, 2000). Racism harms the environment and the favela inhabitants. Residents build flimsy houses on the hillsides where the terrain is fragile. Many are killed and injured by frequent landslides.
Racism in South Africa
Section 24 of the South African Constitution states that "Everyone has the right: (a) to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being, and (b) to have the environment protected for the benefit of present and future generations." (South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, 1996: 7). The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, while speaking directly to the environment, is very serious about "equal protection for all." Nevertheless, blacks in the U.S. and blacks in South African have had to grapple with the legacy of legalized segregation or apartheid and dismantling "separate and unequal."
The environmental and health crisis faced by present-day South African originates through the combination of poor land, forced overcrowding, poverty, importation of hazardous waste, inadequate sewage, dumping of toxic chemical into the rivers, strip mining of coal and uranium, and outdated methods of producing synthetic fuels. Apartheid herded approximately 87 percent of the black population into 13 percent of the country's territory. Such a policy spelled environmental disaster (Kalan, 1994).
Government Response
After much prodding from environmental justice activists and advocates, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acknowledged its mandate to protection all Americans. The EPA defines environmental justice as: "The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Fair treatment means that no group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socio-economic groups should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies." [42]
Today, millions of Americans have heightened concern about the threat of exposure to chemical and biological agents. The tragic events of September 11, 2001 (terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon in Washington, and the plane crash in Pennsylvania) and the Anthrax scare heightened concern and worry. However, toxic chemical assaults are not new for many people of color who are forced to live next to and often on the fence line with chemical industries that spew their poisons into the air, water, and ground. These residents experience a form of "toxic terror" twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. When chemical accidents occur, government and industry officials tell residents to "shelter in place." In reality, locked doors and closed windows do not block the chemical assault by polluting industries on the nearby communities.
Increased globalization of the world's economy has placed special strains on the eco-systems in many poor communities and poor nations inhabited largely by people of color and indigenous peoples. [43] Globalization makes it easier for transnational corporations and capital to flee to areas with the least environmental regulations, best tax incentives, highest profit, and cheapest labor. [44]
POVERTY AND POLLUTION - GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Double Burden -- Poverty and Pollution. Poverty and pollution are intricately linked. [45] Poor people are disproportionately exposed to hazards [46] in their environment that in turn makes them sick due to the lack of clean and fresh water, and adequate food, shelter, fuel and air. [47] Poverty impacts health [48] because it determines how much resources poor people have and defines the amount of environmental risks [49] they will be exposed to in their immediate environment. It is the "poorest of the poor", that one-fifth of the world's population living on less than $1 a day and unable to secure adequate food, water, clothing, shelter, and health care, who is most vulnerable to environmental threats. Most of the governments in the poorest part of the world spend around $10 per person per year on health care. [50]
Over 25 percent of all preventable illnesses are directly caused by environmental factors. [51] Almost one third of the global burden of disease falls on the most vulnerable population-children under 5 years of age who constitute no more than 12% of the world's population. Three environmental problems (contaminated drinking water, untreated human excrement, and air pollution) account for 7.7 million deaths annually or 15 percent of the global death toll of 52 million. One in five children in the poorest regions of the world will not live to see their fifth birthday, mainly because of environment-related diseases, i.e., mostly due to malaria, acute respiratory infections or diarrhoea-all of which are largely preventable. This amounts to 11 million childhood deaths a year worldwide. [52]
Inadequate Sanitation. Of the 7.7 million deaths, five million deaths result from poor drinking water, poor sanitation, and lack of infrastructure. More than one billion people in developing countries live without adequate shelter or in unacceptable housing and more than 2.9 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation and all of these are necessary for good health. [53] Lack of sanitary conditions contributes each year to approximately 2 billion diarrhea infections and 4 million deaths, mostly among infants and young children in developing countries. [54] In the United States, inadequate sanitation accounts for 940,000 diarrhea infections and about 900 deaths each year.
Water Poverty. An estimated one-sixth of the world's population (1.1 billion people) remains without access to improved sources of water. More than 1.4 billion people lack access to safe water. Dirty water is the worlds "deadliest" pollutant. [55]
In-Door Air Pollution. Air pollutants adversely affect the health of 4 to 5 billion people worldwide. A growing world population is burning more fossil fuels, emitting more industrial pollution and driving more automobiles. Over 2.7 million annual global deaths can be attributed to air pollution. [56] Two-thirds of the global air-pollution related deaths occur in rural areas, where the burning of biomass fuel. Over 3.5 billion people, mostly in rural areas, are exposed to high level of air pollutants in their homes. An estimated 2 million deaths result from exposure to stove smoke inside their homes. [57]
Access to Clean Energy. More than two billion people in the world today do not have access to sufficient energy to meet their basic needs. Some 80 percent of all energy used in the world comes from fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the main contributors to environmental and health problems. In 1998, new renewable energy accounted for only about 2% of all primary energy consumption globally.
Childhood Lead Poisoning. In most large cities in the developing world the percentage of children affected by lead poisoning is staggering. Motor vehicles account fro up to 90 percent of all airborne lead contamination in urban areas where leaded gasoline is still widely used. Although lead from air pollution causes relatively few deaths, it causes a great deal of disability, particularly among children. According to the Global Lead Network, 47 countries has completed phase-out of leaded gasoline in January 2002. [58] However, many other countries and regions still sue gasoline with high lead content, including Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The World Health Organization estimates the effect of lead poisoning to be about 1 to 3 points of IQ lost for each 10 ug/dl lead level. At higher levels, the effect may be larger. Lead affects almost every organ and system in the body-including the kidneys and the reproductive system. Recent studies supported by NIEHS suggest that a young person's lead burden is not only linked to lower IQ and lower high school graduation rates but to increased delinquency. An estimated 16 percent of juvenile delinquent behavior in the U.S. is attributable to high lead exposure. [59]
Toxic Production. An estimated 40 percent of world deaths can now be attributed to various environmental factors, especially organic and chemical pollutants. Approximately 80,000 different chemicals are now in commercial use with nearly six trillion pounds produced annually in the United States. [60] More than 80% of these chemicals have never been screened to learn whether they cause cancer, much less tested to see if they harm the nervous system, the immune system, the endocrine system or the reproductive system. [61] The current U.S. approach is also not based on real life exposures since people and animals are not exposed to one chemical in isolation, but rather are exposed to an array of toxic chemicals. [62] Of the top 20 chemicals reported to the U.S. Federal EPA under the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) as those released in the largest quantities in 1997, nearly 75 percent are known or suspected neurotoxins.
Pesticide Poisoning. Nearly 3.3 million pounds of pesticide product were exported from the U.S. between 1997 and 2000. [63] The bulk of these products were shipped directly or indirectly to the developing world. Pesticide poisoning continues to be a severe environmental and health problem in developing countries. An estimated 25 million poor farmers and farmworkers suffer from pesticide poisoning each year; hundreds of thousands die. [64] In the U.S. between 3-5 million migrant farm workers labor in the fields at low wages and unsafe, unsanitary, and unjust work conditions.
Cancer and the Environment. Of the 80,000 pesticides and other chemical in use today, 10 percent are recognized as carcinogens. [65] There are more than 8 million Americans who have cancer. [66] Cancer-related deaths in the U.S. increased from 331,000 in 1970 to 521,000 in 1992, with an estimated 30,000 death attributed to chemical exposure. [67] The fraction of cancer deaths caused by occupational exposures vary from four per cent to over 20 per cent due to the lack of data on the carcinogenic potential of most industrial chemicals and the absence of effective public health surveillance systems for occupational disease. [68]
Toxics on the U.S.-Mexico Border. All along the Lower Rio Grande River Valley maquiladoras dump their toxic waste into the river, from which over 95 percent of the region's residents get their drinking water. Shantytowns or colonias are home to 1 of every 5 residents of the 14 Texas counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. Of the 11 million border inhabitants, about 50% live in the three twin cities of: Ciudad Ju‡rez -- El Paso; Mexicali -- Calexico; and Tijuana -- San Diego. In 1998, about 3,000 maquiladoras were in operation within the country of Mexico, of which 2,400 were situated in the border region. In 1997,maquiladoras employed more than 900,000 people working at more than 3,000 plants, mainly along the border. Heavy exposure to toxics is not limited to workers. The maquiladoras produce large quantities of hazardous waste, little of which finds it way back to the country of origin for proper disposal. In addition, the air and water of local residential communities is fouled by toxic emissions in the air and untreated industrial waste.
POVERTY AND POLLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES
Toxic Foods. The United States has one of the safest food supplies in the world. Still, Food borne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325 000 hospitalizations, and 5 000 deaths in the U.S. each year. [69] Known food borne pathogens account for 14 million of the illnesses, 60,000 hospitalizations and 1,800 deaths. [70] Unknown agents account for approximately 81% of food borne illnesses and hospitalizations and 64% of deaths. [71]
Number One Environmental Threat to Children. In many African cities, childhood lead poisoning can be as high as 90 percent. Even in the United States, lead poisoning continues to be the number one environmental health threat to children, especially poor children, children of color, and children living in inner cities. [72] Lead poisoning affects an estimated 890,000 American preschoolers or 4.4 percent of the under 5 age group. [73] African children are five times more likely to be poisoned than white children. Some 22 percent of African American children living in pre-1946 housing are lead poisoned, compared with 5.6 percent of white children and 13 percent of Mexican American living in older homes.
Geography of Air Pollution. The number of automobiles is increasing three times faster than the rate of population growth. According to National Argonne Laboratory researchers, 57 percent of whites, 65 percent of African Americans, and 80 percent of Hispanics live in 437 counties with substandard air quality. [74] In the heavily populated Los Angeles air basin, the South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates that 71 percent of African Americans and 50 percent of Latinos live in areas with the most polluted air, compared to 34 percent of whites. Air pollution costs Americans $10 to $200 billion a year. [75]
Asthma Epidemic. The number of asthma sufferers doubled from 6.7 million in 1980 to 17.3 million in 1998. [76] Over 4.8 asthma sufferers are children. [77] Asthma hits poor, inner-city dwellers, and people of color hardest. African Americans and Latino are almost three times more likely than whites to die from asthma. [78] In 1995, more than 5,000 Americans died from asthma. [79] The hospitalization rate for African Americans and Latinos is 3 to 4 times the rate for whites. [80] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that asthma accounts for more than 10 million lost school days, 1.2 million emergency room visits, 15 million outpatient visits, and over 500,000 hospitalizations each year. Asthma cost Americans over $14.5 billion in 2000. [81]
Toxic Wastes and Race. Nationally, three out of five African Americans and Latino Americans live in communities with abandoned toxic waste sites. [82] Discrimination influences land use, housing patterns, and infrastructure development. Zoning ordinances, deed restrictions, and other land-use mechanisms have been widely used as a "NIMBY" [83] (not in my backyard) tool, operating through exclusionary practices. [84] The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that there are between 130,000 and 450,000 brownfields [85] (abandoned waste sites) scattered across the urban landscape from New York to California. Most of these brownfields are located in or near low-income, working class, and people of color communities. [86]
Toxic Housing. A 2000 study by The Morning News and the University of Texas-Dallas found that some 870,000 of the 1.9 million (46 percent) housing units for the poor, mostly minorities, sit within about a mile of factories that reported toxic emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency. [87] Homeowners have been the most effective groups to use "NIMBY" (Not in My Back Yard) tactics and practices in keeping locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) out of their back yards and communities. However, racial discrimination prevents millions of people of color from enjoying the advantages of home ownership. A little over 46 percent of African Americans and Latinos own their homes compared with 73 percent of whites in 1999. If blacks and Hispanics owned homes at the same rate as whites of similar age and income, their homeownership rates would have been 61 percent in 1998 versus 72 percent for whites. [88] African American and Latino American households, on average, must pay discrimination "tax" of roughly $3,700. [89]
Toxic Schools. More than 600,000 students in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and California were attending nearly 1,200 public schools that are located within a half mile of federal Superfund or state-identified contaminated sites. [90] No state except California has a law requiring school officials to investigate potentially contaminated property and no federal or state agency keeps records of public or private schools that operate on or near toxic waste or industrial sites. [91]
Toxic Jobs. Farm work is the second most dangerous occupation in the United States. Farm workers suffer from the highest rate of chemical injuries of any workers in the United States. EPA estimates that pesticide exposure causes farmworkers and their families to suffer between 10,000 to 20,000 immediate illnesses annually, and additional thousands of illnesses later in life. [92] Of the 25 most heavily used agricultural pesticides, 5 are toxic to the nervous system; 18 are skin, eye, or lung irritants, 11 have been classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as cancer-causing; 17 cause genetic damage; and 10 cause reproductive problems (in test of laboratory animals). [93] Annual use of the pesticides causing each of these types of health problems totals between one and four hundred million pounds. [94]
Farms employing less than 10 workers are exempt from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Over 85% of migrant farm workers work on farms with fewer than 10 employees. Over 80% of migrant farm workers in the U.S. are Latinos. An estimated 250,000 children of farm workers in the U.S. migrate each year, and 90,000 of them migrate across an international borders; half of all migrant children have worked in fields still wet with pesticide and more than one third have been sprayed directly; over 72.8% of migrant children are completely without health insurance.
An estimated of 137 American workers die from job-related diseases every day. [95] This is more than eight times the number of workers who die from job-related accidents. Fear of unemployment acts as a potent incentive for many workers to stay in and accept jobs that are health threatening. This practice amounts to "economic blackmail." Workers are often forced to choose between unemployment and a job that may result in risks to their health, their family's health, and the health of their community.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that more than half of the country's 22,000 sewing shops violate minimum wage and overtime laws. [96] Many of these workers labor in dangerous conditions including blocked fire exits, unsanitary bathrooms, and poor ventilation. Government surveys also reveal that 75% of U.S. garment shops violate safety and health laws. [97]
Military Toxics. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has left its nightmarish nuclear weapons garbage on Native lands and the Pacific Islands. In fact, "over the last 45 years, there have been 1,000 atomic explosions on Western Shoshone land in Nevada, making the Western Shoshone the most bombed nation on earth." [98] Over 648 U.S. military installations, both active and abandoned, in Alaska are polluting the land, groundwater, wetlands, streams and air with extensive fuel spill, pesticides, solvents, PCBs, dioxins, munitions, and radioactive materials. Many of these military installations are in close proximity to Alaska Native villages and traditional hunting and fishing areas. Military toxics threaten the way of life of Alaska Natives.
The U.S. Navy has used the tiny island of Vieques, Puerto Rico as a bombing range since 1941. [99] Fifty years of military exercises including the use of bombs, artillery shells, depleted uranium ordnance, and napalm have left local communities with serious health problems and destroyed ecosystems. Nearly three-fourths of the island's 9,000 residents live in poverty. Soils are degraded and contaminated, and both Navy and independent testing of bombing areas have found at least 10 toxic constituents including metals, benzene, and chloroform.
Radioactive Colonialism. There is a direct correlation between exploitation of land and exploitation of people. It should not be a surprise to anyone to discover that Native Americans have to contend with some of the worst pollution in the United States. Native American nations have become prime targets for waste trading. [100] The vast majority of these waste proposals have been defeated by grassroots groups on the reservations. However, "radioactive colonialism" is alive and well. Winona LaDuke sums up this "toxic invasion" of Native lands as follows:
While Native peoples have been massacred and fought, cheated, and robbed of their historical lands, today their lands are subject to some of most invasive industrial interventions imaginable. According to the Worldwatch Institute, 317 reservations in the United States are threatened by environmental hazards, ranging from toxic wastes to clearcuts.
Reservations have been targeted as sites for 16 proposed nuclear waste dumps. Over 100 proposals have been floated in recent years to dump toxic waste in Indian communities. Seventy-seven sacred sites have been disturbed or desecrated through resource extraction and development activities. The federal government is proposing to use Yucca Mountain, sacred to the Shone, a dumpsite for the nation's high-level nuclear waste. [101]
Radioactive colonialism operates in energy production (mining of uranium) and disposal of wastes on Indian lands. The legacy of institutional racism has left many sovereign Indian nations without an economic infrastructure to address poverty, unemployment, inadequate education and health care, and a host of other social problems.
Eastern Navajo reservation residents have been struggling to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission form permitting a uranium mine in Church Rock and Crown Point, New Mexico. The Mohave tribe in California, Skull Valley Goshutes in Idaho, and Western Shoshone in Yucca Mountain, Nevada are currently fighting proposals to build radioactive waste dumps on their tribal lands. Native and indigenous people all cross the globe are threatened with extinction due to the greed of mining and oil companies and "development genocide." A growing grassroots multiracial transnational movement has emerged to counter this form of environmental racism. [102]
Climate Justice. Climate justice looms as major environmental justice issue of the 21st century. [103] The United States emits one quarter of the world's gases that cause global warming. People of color are concentrated in cities that failed EPA's ambient air quality standards. Global warming is expected to double the number of cities that currently exceed air quality standards. A study of the fifteen largest American cities found that climate change would increase heat-related deaths by at least 90 percent. People of color are twice as likely to die in a heat wave. Global warming will increase the number of flood, drought and fire occurrences worldwide. Also, low-income people typically lack insurance to replace possessions lost in storms and floods. Only 25 percent of renters have renters insurance. Climate change will reduce discretionary spending because prices will rise across the board. Poor families will have to spend even more on food and electricity, which already represent a large proportion of their budgets. Indigenous people are losing traditional medicinal plants to a warming climate, and subsistence households are suffering from the loss of species that are unable to adapt.
Conclusion
The environmental justice movement emerged in response to environmental inequities, threats to public health, unequal protection, differential enforcement, and disparate treatment received by the poor and people of color. Poverty and environmental degradation are intricately linked and take a heavy toll on billions of people in developing and industrialized countries alike. Thus, any search for sustainable development must address the root causes of both poverty and pollution and seek solutions to this double threat.
Redefinition of Environmental Protection. The environmental justice movement redefined environmental protection as a basic right. It also emphasized pollution prevention, waste minimization, and cleaner production techniques as strategies to achieve environmental justice for all without regard to race, color, national origin, or income. Many countries have environmental and human laws to protect the health and welfare of its citizens-including racial and ethnic groups and indigenous peoples. However, all communities have not received the same benefits from their application, implementation, and enforcement.
Design a Holistic Approach to Environmental Protection. The environmental justice movement has set out clear goals of eliminating unequal enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and public health laws, differential exposure of some populations to harmful chemicals, pesticides, and other toxins in the home, school, neighborhood, and workplace, faulty assumptions in calculating, assessing, and managing risks, discriminatory zoning and land-use practices, and exclusionary policies and practices that limit some individuals and groups from participation in decision making. Many of these problems could be eliminated if existing environmental, health, housing, and civil rights laws were vigorously enforced in a nondiscriminatory way.
Clean and Affordable Energy. Governments should initiate an action program to make available finances and infrastructure to bring clean and affordable and sustainable energy sources to the 2 billion people who lack these energy service by 2012. Governments should adopt a target increasing the global share of new renewable energy sources to 15% by 2010.
Decrease Pesticide Use. Institute protocols and plan to decrease pesticide use, including prohibiting the export of banned or never registered pesticides, implement integrated pest management (IPM), evaluate the hazards posed by pesticide exports, and improve the quality and quantity of information pesticide production, trade and use and publish information in the public record.
Reduce Children's Exposure to Neurotoxicants. Abate lead in older housing; complete phase-out leaded gasoline; target high-risk children, screening, early detection, treatment; increase allocation of medications that help reduce or remove lead; use new, safe lead removal techniques; and dietary improvements.
Strengthen Legislation and Regulations. A legislative approach may be needed where environmental, health, and worker safety laws and regulations are weak or nonexistent. However, laws and regulations are only as good as their enforcement. Unequal political power arrangements also have allowed poisons of the rich to be offered as short term economic remedies for poverty.
Design Strategies to Combat Economic Blackmail. There is little or no correlation between proximity of industrial plants and employment opportunities of nearby residents. Having industrial facilities in one's community does not automatically translate into jobs for nearby residents. Many industrial plants are located at the fence line with the communities. Some are so close that local residents could walk to work. More often than not, poor are stuck with the pollution and poverty, while other people commute in for the industrial jobs.
Close Corporate Welfare Loopholes. Tax breaks and corporate welfare programs have produced few new jobs by polluting firms. However, state-sponsored pollution and lax enforcement have allowed many communities of color and poor communities to become the dumping grounds. Industries and governments (including the military) have often exploited the economic vulnerability of poor communities, poor states, poor nations, and poor regions for their unsound, "risky", and nonsustainable operations. Environmental justice leaders are demanding that no community or nation, rich or poor, urban or suburban, black or white, should be allowed to become a "sacrifice zone" or dumping grounds. They are also pressing governments to live up to their mandate of protecting public health and the environment.
Forge International Cooperative Agreements. Governments will need to take responsibility and develop policies that address global environmental racism. The poisoning of African-Americans in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," Native Americans on reservations, and Mexicans in the border towns all have their roots in the same economic system, a system characterized by economic exploitation, racial oppression, and devaluation of human life and the natural environment.
Environmental Reparations. The call for environmental and economic justice does not stop at the U.S. borders but extends to communities and nations that have been the "victims" of economic exploitation via the export of hazardous wastes, toxic products, "dirty" industries, indigenous resource extraction, and nonsustainable development practices. Much of the world does not get to share in the benefits of the United States' high standard of living. From energy consumption to the production and export of tobacco, pesticides, and other chemicals, more and more of the world's peoples are sharing the health and environmental burden of the United States' wasteful throw-away culture. Hazardous wastes and "dirty" industries have followed the "path of least resistance." Poor people and poor nations are given a false choice of "no jobs and no development" versus "risky low-paying jobs and pollution."
Building A Global Environmental Justice Movement. The environmental justice movement has begun to build a global network of grassroots groups, community based organizations, university-based resource centers, researchers, scientists, educators, and youth groups. Better communication and funding is needed in every area. Resources are especially scare for environmental justice and anti-racist groups in developing countries. The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool for those groups who that have access to the worldwide web. Erasing the "digital divide" becomes a major strategy to combat environmental racism.
__________
Robert D. Bullard is the Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark Atlanta University, 223 James P. Brawley Drive, Atlanta, GA 30314. Phone: (404) 880-6911; Fax: (404) 880-6909; E-mail: ejrc@cau.edu.
1. Robert D. Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press, 1993.
2. Robert W. Collin and Robin Morris Collin (1998). "The Role of Communities in Environmental Decisions: Communities Speaking for Themselves," Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation 13: 3789.
3. Laura Westra and Peter S. Wentz (1995). Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.; Luke Cole and Sheila R. Foster (2001). From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
4. Bullard, Confronting Environmental Racism, Chapter 1.
5. Joe R. Feagin and Clarece B. Feagin, Discrimination American Style: Institutional Racism and Sexism. Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger (1986); Christopher Bates Doob, Racism: An American Cauldron. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.
6. Alan B. Durning, "Apartheid's Environmental Toll," Worldwatch Paper 95. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute (May 1990); Heteen Kalan, "Apartheid and the Environment: Polluting the Poor," Toward Freedom (January 1994); South African Department of Environment and Tourism (1996). An Environmental Policy for South Africa: Green Paper for Public Discussion. (October). Posted on the South African government website at www.policy.org.za/govdoc/green_papers/enviro.html.
7. Al Gedicks, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations. Boston: South End Press, 2001; Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land Rights and Life. Boston: South End Press, 1999.; Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1997.
8. Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
9. Stokeley Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power. New York: Vintage, 1967, pp. 16-17.
10. U.S. General Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983.
11. Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. New York: United Church of Christ, 1987.
12. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie, Chapter 1.
13. Charles Lee, Proceedings: The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, New York: United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, 1992.
14. U.S. EPA, Guidance for Incorporating Environmental Justice in EPA's NEPA Compliance Analysis. Washington, DC: EPA, 1998; Council on Environmental Quality, Environmental Justice: Guidance Under the National Environmental Policy Act. Washington, DC: CEQ (December 10, 1997).
15. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Equity: Reducing Risk for All Communities. Washington, DC: U.S. EPA, 1992.
16. Greenpeace, "The Case for a Ban on All Hazardous Waste Shipment from the United States and Other OECD Member States to Non-OECD States," (June 1993 ), pp. 1-2.
17. Greenpeace, The Database of Known Hazardous Waste Exports from OECD ro Non-OECD Countries. 1989-1994. Washington, DC: Greenpeace, 1994.
18. Rozelia S. Park, "An Examinatioin of International Environmental Racism Through the Lens of Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes," Indiana University Law School Journal (1999), Website: www.law.indiana.edu/glsj/vol5/no2/14/14parks.html.
19. Bamako Convention, Bamako Convention on the Ban of The Import into Africa and the Control of Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes Within Africa, opened for signature (Jan. 29, 1991).
20. Mary Tiemann, Congressional Research Service Report to Congress Waste Trade and the Basel Convention: Background and Update (December 30, 1998).
21. Karliner, The Corporate Planet, p. 152.
22. Beatriz Johnston, Hernandez, "Dirty Growth," The New Internationalist (August 1993).
23. Tom Barry and Beth Simms, The Challenge of Cross Border Environmentalism: The U.S.-Mexico Case. Albuquerque, NM: The Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center, 1994, p. 37.
24. Valerie Taliman, "Stuck Holding the Nation's Nuclear Waste," Race, Poverty & Environment Newsletter (Fall 1992), pp. 6-9.
25. Al Gedicks, The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations. Boston: South End Press, 1993.
26. Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land Rights and Life. Boston: South End Press, 1999, pp. 2-3.
27. Gedicks, Resource Rebels.
28. LaDuke, All Our Relations, p. 3.
29. Pamela K. Miller, "The War Against Military Toxics in Alaska," in R.D. Bullard, People of Color Environmental Groups Directory 2000. Flint, MI: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
30. Jessica Reaves and Mark Thompson (2001). "Vieques Under Fire: Standoff in Puerto Rico," (April 27), posted on TIME.com website: www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8559,107846,00.html.
31. See CNN.com, "Second Day of Protest Greets Vieques Exercise," (April 28, 2001), posted on CNN.com website: www.cnn.com/2001/US/04/28/vieques.protests/.
32. Robert. D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Beverly H. Wright. "Confronting Environmental Injustice: It's The Right Thing to Do." Race, Gender & Class, Vol.5, No.1, 1997: 63-79.
33. Robert D. Bullard, J. Eugene Grigsby, and Charles Lee, Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for African American Studies Publication, 1994.
34. Florence W. Roisman, "The Lessons of American Apartheid: The Necessity and Means of Promoting Residential Racial Integration," Iowa Law Review (December 1995): 479-525.
35. Bullard et al., Residential Apartheid.
36. Eric Mann, L.A.'s Lethal Air: New Strategies for Policy, Organizing, and Action Los Angeles: Labor/Community Strategy Center, 1991.
37. See Robert D. Bullard, Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1987.
38. See Bullard, Dumping in Dixie; Robert D. Bullard, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1996.
39. Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998; France W. Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997; Bullard et al., Residential Apartheid.
40. Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy.
41. Darin J. Davis, Avoiding the Dark: Race and the Forging of National Culture in Modern Brazil. Research in Migratioin and Ethnic Relations. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 1999.
42. U. S. Environmental Protection Agency. Guidance for Incorporating Environmental Justice in EPA's NEPA Compliance Analysis. Washington, DC: USEPA, 1998; See Robert Bullard and Glenn Johnson. "Environmental and Economic Justice: Implications for Public Policy." Journal of Public Management & Social Policy, Vol. 4, No.4, 1998: 137-148.
43. Robert Bullard. "Confronting Environmental Racism in the 21st Century." Paper prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Conference on Racism and Public Policy, September 2001, Durban, South Africa. http://www.unrisd.org/racism/a-bullard.htm
44. See Robert D. Bullard. "Environmental Racism Shifts the Costs of Industry to the Poor." Daily Mail & Guardian, August 27, 2001, http://www.mg.co.za/archive/2001aug/features/27aug-environmental.html
45. Robert D. Bullard. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
46. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly H. Wright. "Environmental Justice for All: Community Perspectives on Health and Research Needs." Toxicology and Industrial Health, Vol. 9, No. 5, 1993: 821-841.
47. Robert D. Bullard. "It's not just pollution." Our Planet, Vol.12, No.2, 2001: 22-24.
48. Kenneth Olden. "The Complex Interaction of Poverty, Pollution, Health Status." The Scientist 12(2) 7, February 16, 1998; See NIEHS: Division of Extramural Research and Training: Health Disparities Research, http:www.niehs.nih.gov/dert/programs/translat/hd/ko-art.htm
49. Robert D. Bullard. "It's not just pollution." Our Planet, Vol.12, No.2, 2001: 22-24.
50. Nat Quansah, "Pharmacies of life," Our Planet 12 (2001): 12.
51. Thorbjorn Jagland, "Everything Connects." Our Planet Vol. 12, no. 2 (2001): 7.
52. Leslie Roberts, World Resources 1998-1999. London: Oxford University Press, 1998.
53. Kirit S. Parikh. "Poverty and Environment Turning The Poor Into Agents of Environmental Regeneration." (Working Paper Series). United Nations Development Programme Poverty Related Publications, October 1998. See http:www.undp.org/poverty/publications/wkpaper/wp1
54. Geoffrey Lean. "At A Glance," Our Planet Vol. 12, No. 2 (2001): 16.
55. Ibid.
56. Davis J. Tenenbaum, "Tackling the Big Three," Environmental Health Perspective 106 (May, 1998).
57. Ian Johnson and Kseniya Lvosvsky, "Double Burden," Our Planet 12, no. 2 (2001): 19.
58. Global Lead Network, "Worldwide Phase-Out of Leaded Gasoline," Global Lead Network website at http://www.globalleadnet.org/policy_leg/policy/leadgas_progress.cfn.
59. H. Needleman, J. Reiss, M. tobin, G Biesecker, and J. Greenhouse. "Bone lead levels and delinquent behavior." Journal of American Medical Association 275, 5 (1996).
60. See http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/gary-cn.htm
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Al Krebs, "Chemical Poison Exports Abroad Increase in 1997-2000 by 15% from 1992-1996, Including 65 Million pds. Of U.S. Banned Poisons," Agribusiness Examiner No. 142 (February 4, 2002).
64. Geoffrey lean, "At a Glance," Our Planet Vol. 12, No. 2 (2001): 16.
65. Environmental Pollution and Degradation Causes 40 percent of Deaths Worldwide, Cornell Study Finds." Cornell News, September 30, 1998. See http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept98/ecodisease.hrs.html.
66. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Environmental Diseases from A to Z. NIH Publication No. 96-4145. http://www.nieehs.nih.gov.
67. Environmental Pollution and Degradation Causes 40 percent of Deaths Worldwide, Cornell Study Finds." Cornell News, September 30, 1998. See http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept98/ecodisease.hrs.html.
68. Occupational and Environmental Working Group-Toronto Cancer Prevention Coalition. Preventing Occupational and Environmental Cancer: A Strategy for Toronto, 2001. Also see http://www.uswa.ca/eng/hs&e/prevcancer.pdf.
69. P.S. Mead, L. Slutsker, V. Dietz, L.F. McCaig, J.S. Bresee, C. Shapiro, P.M. Griffin, and R.V. Tauxe, "Food-Related Illness and Death in the United States," Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal 5 (September-October 1999).
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Environmental Diseases from A to Z. NIH Publication No. 96-4145 (1996); NIEHS, "Lead -- The #1 Environmental Hazard to many Children," NIEHS Fact Sheet #8, LEAD (March, 1997). http://www/niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/fslead.htm.
73. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, "HHS Helps in Effort to Eliminate Childhood Lead Poisoning," HHS Fact Sheet (March 4, 2002).
74. D. R. Wernett, D. R. & L. A. Nieves. Breathing polluted air: Minorities are disproportionately exposed. EPA Journal, 18: (1992): 16-17.
75. Robert D. Bullard. "Climate Justice and People of Color." http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/climatechgpoc.htm.
76. "Asthma's At-A-Glance 1999." http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/asthma_old/ataglance/default.htm
77. Ibid.
78. Centers for Disease Control, "Asthma: United States, 1980-1990," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 39(1992), pp. 733-735.; See also Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000.
79. "Asthma's At-A-Glance." http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/asthma_old/ataglance/default.htm
80. H.P. Mak, H.Abbey, and R.C.Talamo, "Prevalence of Asthma and Health Service Utilization of Asthmatic Children in an Inner City," Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology 70 (1982), pp. 367-372; I.F. Goldstein and A.L. Weinstein, "Air Pollution and Asthma: Effects of Exposure to Short-Term Sulfur Dioxide Peaks," Environmental Research 40 (1986), pp. 332-345; J. Schwartz, D. Gold, D.W. Dockey, S.T. Weiss, and F.E. Speizer, "Predictors of Asthma and Persistent Wheeze in a National Sample of Children in the United States," American Review of Respiratory Disease 142 (1990), pp.555-562; F. Crain, K. Weiss, J. Bijur, et al., "An estimate of the Prevalence of Asthma and Wheezing among Inner-City Children," Pediatrics 94(1994), pp. 356-362.;See also Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. Race, Equity, and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves. Atlanta, GA: Environmental Justice Resource Center, 2000.
81. "Asthma's At-A-Glance 1999." http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/asthma_old/ataglance/default.htm
82. Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic wastes and race in the United States. New York: United Church of Christ, 1987.
83. Robert D. Bullard and Beverly H. Wright. "The Quest for Environmental Equity: Mobilizing the African-American Community for Social Change." Society and Natural Resources, Vol.3, 1990: 301-311.
84. Robert D. Bullard. "The Legacy of American Apartheid and Environmental Racism." St. John's Journal of Legal Commentary, Vol.9, Issue 2, (Spring 1994): 445-474; See also Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (3rd ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000.
85. R. Twombly. (1997). "Urban uprising." Environmental Health Perspective 105 (July): 696-701.
86. See Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. Race, Equity, and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves. Atlanta, GA: Environmental Justice Resource Center, 2000.
87. "Study: Public Housing is too Often Located Near Toxic Sites." Dallas Morning News, October 3, 2000. See http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/10/03/toxicneighbors.ap/
88. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. Race, Equity, and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves. Atlanta, GA: Environmental Justice Resource Center, 2000.
89. Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres. Race, Equity, and Smart Growth: Why People of Color Must Speak for Themselves. Atlanta, GA: Environmental Justice Resource Center, 2000.
90. Child Proofing Our Communities Campaign. March 2001. Poisoned Schools: Invisible Threats, Visible Actions. Falls Church, VA: Center for Health, Environment and Justice; See also http:www.childproofing.org/mapindex.html.
91. Cat Lazaroff. "Pesticide Exposure Threatens Children at School." Environmental News Service, January 5, 2000.
92. Caroline Cox. "Working With Poisons on the Farm." Journal of Pesticide Reform, Vol. 14, No.3, (Fall 1994): 2-5; U.S. General Accounting Office. Pesticides on Farms: Limited Capability Exists to Monitor Occupational Illnesses and Injuries. Report to the Chairman, Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, U.S. Senate. Washington, D.C. (December 1993).
93. Caroline Cox. "Working With Poisons on the Farm." Journal of Pesticide Reform, Vol. 14, No.3, (Fall 1994): 2-5; A/L. Aspelin. "Pesticide Industry Sales and Usage: 1992 and 1993 Market Estimates. U.S. EPA. Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances." Office of Pesticide Programs. Biological and Economic Analysis Division. Washington, D.C., (June 1994); D.P. Morgan. "Recognition and Management of Pesticide Poisonings. Washington, D.C.: U.S. EPA. Office of Pesticide Programs. Health Effects Division, 1989; U.S. EPA Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. List of chemicals evaluated for carcinogenic potential. Memo from Reto Engler, senior science advisor, Health Effects Division to Health Division Branch Chiefs, et. al. Washington, D.C.(August 31, 1993); U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Public Health Service. Centers for Disease Control. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances. Microfiche Edition. Sweet, D.V. (ed.). Cincinnati, OH (January 1993).
94. Caroline Cox. "Working With Poisons on the Farm." Journal of Pesticide Reform, Vol. 14, No.3, (Fall 1994): 2-5.
95. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Environmental Diseases from A to Z. NIH Publication No. 96-4145. http://www.nieehs.nih.gov
96. See Sweatshop Watch: Frequently Asked Questions. http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.html
97. "Sweatshops and Women of Color." http://www.incite-national.org/involve/sweatshops.html.
98. LaDuke, All Our Relations, p. 3.
99. Jessica Reaves and Mark Thompson, "Vieques under Fire: Standoff in Puerto Rico," TIME.com. Teme website at http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,107846,00.html.
100. Al Gedicks. The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations. Boston: South Ends Press, 1993.
101. Winona LaDuke. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land Rights and Life. Boston: South End Press, 1999, pp. 2-3.
102. Al Gedicks, Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Corporations. Boston: South End Press, 2001.
103. Robert D. Bullard. "Climate Justice and People of Color." http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/climatechgpoc.html