Environmental Inequalities

Szasz and Meuser’s article “Environmental Inequalities: Literature Review and Proposals for New Directions in Research and Theory” discusses the issue of “environmental racism” and inequalities, the relationship between the resulting movement and research, and some ignored issues within the environmental inequality problem. The article begins with the building of a hazardous waste landfill in Warren County, NC in 1978 that receive huge amounts of industrial waste. Warren happened to be the poorest county in North Carolina, and was 65% African-American. Its citizens gathered together to try to defeat this proposed landfill, and the opposition became quite violent. The protester's tactics became a synthesis of Civil Rights and environmental issues. This led to the development of the “environmental racism” phrase and the Movement for Environmental Justice. Researchers then began to examine how “environmental risks are unequally distributed in society”.
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Three studies in particular fueled and defined environmental racism research. All are directly related to previous examples of African-American group opposition to waste facility sites. In the first case, the US General Accounting Office (GAO) observed the demographics of communities by four big commercial hazardous waste landfills in SE United States. Three of them were found to be in mainly African-American communities. The United Church of Christ led a study that compared ZIP codes with no TSDFs to ZIP codes with TSDFs. Those with none were 12.3% minority population, those with one TSDF had double that, and those with more than that had the highest amount of minorities. This study found that 3 out of 5 African and Hispanic Americans lived in areas with uncontrolled toxic waste sites. The third study discovered that 21 of 25 solid waste facilities in Houston were found in African-American communities.

Earlier work on environmental racism research began during the 1970s when a group of researcher analyzed EPA air quality data to see if there was a relationship between economic status and exposure to polluted air. These studies showed that poorer neighborhoods do have more polluted air. However, in Chicago it was shown that different pollutants affected different social groups. It depended on where the people worked or lived, no matter what race. Overall, the exposure depended on residential patterns, like living closer to factories versus highways. The pattern of all the studies was consistent, because all across America it was found that the urban poor, who were generally African American, were more exposed to polluted air. The Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards held at U of M further cemented the idea that race is “more strongly related to the incidence of pollution”. Studies grew even more in the 1990s, and most of the work was centered on the quantitative and geographic analysis of waste sites and operating plant pollutants.

The type of waste sites discussed next were sold waste sites (dumps/sanitary landfills), hazardous waste sites or TSDFs that deal with hazardous industrial wastes, and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites which deal with improperly disposed hazardous materials. National and local studies were done involving solid waste sites; nationally no consistent trends were found, but locally more African-Americans were found to live nearer to solid waste sites. There are about 378,000 uncontrolled waste sites in America. None of the studies done involving these are reasonably representative. For TSDFs, some research hasn’t shown any racial environmental inequalities, but some has. Overall the research is like a double-edged sword: TSDF owners can use the research against it to contest charges, but it also suggests the need for a better analysis of social geography.

The main two issues that have been ignored in environmental inequality are the upper social class’s position in this whole issue and its global history. It’s still unknown if this is a result of race or social standing, and researchers tend to focus on the bottom classes. The upper class has basically been ignored. The wealthy are most likely found in the pricier neighborhoods found further from waste facilities, because they can afford those properties. Since this is a general assumption, the topic is most likely not considered researchable. Historically, the literature on environmental inequality has been American. The few articles that aren’t American show the economic development and resource extraction related to indigenous peoples. These do show that the issue is global, though, and that it’s generated by the international political economy.

Swyngedouw's "Power, nature, and the city."

Swyngedouw’s article “Power, nature, and the city; the conquest of urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1990” does not only discuss Guayaquil but rather the largest city and the areas that survive off of it. Within the abstract of the article he makes the situation he is dealing with very clear in the pithy phrase (which is much more dramatic in Spanish) “ Agua, drama sin final,” or “Water, a never ending tragedy.”
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The circulation of water is not only an issue of sustaining life, but rather it is deeply “embedded in the political ecology of power, through which the urbanization process unfolds.” The control of water reflects the issues of politics, society, and the economy – or more accurately reflects Ecuadorian dependence on cocoa, bananas, and oil and the implications of each these dependencies.
Simply put, when the number of people in Guayaquil began to rise, the amount of available water went down. Swyngedouw states, “The ecological conquest of water is a necessary component for the expansion and growth of the city,” which requires “considerable capital.” It is the duty for man to engineer the flow of water for himself, but before he can accomplish this he must have the money and power to accomplish anything.
The article goes on to talk about the Guayaquil from the eighteenth century onwards; the city begins with modest roots of 5,000 people using water from wells to the population and the need for water skyrocketing and having to create an intricate system of water politics. In this same section, “The origins of commodified water,” he strikes a blow at the white rich. This mentioning of the rich white folks being able to “defecate in the sometimes silver bowl of the toilet, comforted by the privacy of their custom-made decorated lavatories…the poor continued to use the streets as a public toilet.” This reminds me of the “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema Tribe” article (http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/gerstg/Naciremapg3.htm) that many early Anthropology students are required to read. The article similarly describes how people are obsessed with the use of the bathrooms. Swyngedouw’s article does not mention any sort of shame on the part of the poor in Ecuador which I think is interesting because of the cultural difference. While (most) American’s would never dream of bathing in a river it is what the people in third world countries do because they do not have access to domesticated water and the “necessities” that people take for granted.
Swyngedouw also addresses the issues of cocoa, bananas, and oil. From the 1850s Ecuador’s economy became centered on agricultural exports and by 1890 cocoa accounted for 90 per cent of total exports. The structure of the urban and rural life changed and power and distribution of money were geared towards promoting the interests of the city. As the city expanded though, the supply of water began to slow down. The city would only receive water for a few hours a day. As the cocoa economy crumbled the amount of water began to stagnate. When money began to run short the water supply suffered. The period when cocoa failed is “characterized by political instability.” After more bad political workings, the sanitation works went unfinished. The city was no longer able to invest in itself.
My favorite line of Swyngedouw’s comes when he discusses the “banana bonanza decade of the 1950s.” It sounds like a seventies show with a location change to the equator, but sadly it is not. The situation of Ecuador depending on the banana makes me hate eating Chiquita bananas. The city for a time had the financial ability to promote urban development and housing projects.
Then oil became the source of money once Ecuador lost the banana market. The city would again depend on a new market. Of course the oil prices would fall and the city would face another water crisis.
The overall effect of the article makes a person feel guilty the next time they go to the sink and fill up a glass of water and only drink half of it. Or the next time they’re in a swimming pool. Or any number of things. The focus on “social production of nature and the city is essential if issues of sustainability are to be combined.” Water explores how nature and society are mixed in with political and economic fights. Unfortunately, we can’t just give our extra half glass of water to the Ecuadorians, just like we cannot give the food we don’t eat to the starving people in India. Also bad, the situation in Guayaquil is not a single incidence in the market of water. All over this Earth covered in water people do not have water.
For fun information about what American’s are doing during a drought check out an article from the Wall Street Journal, “Drought turns water into cash crop.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123785079745319125.html

Power, Nature, and the City

“Power, Nature, and the City” discusses the urbanization of Guayaquil, Ecuador, amidst the social struggle for control over and access to water. As of 1992, almost half of the city’s residents do not have access to potable water. Those with no connections to the water distribution system purchase their water from private water vendors for exorbitant prices; for this reason, they can only afford about 20 liters of (unclean) water a day. Swyngedouw reports that this situation is not unusual in Third World countries around the globe.
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The author describes the growth of a city in relation to water supply. In order for the city to expand, its inhabitants must master the flow of water for their own use. This process requires significant wealth to be accomplished; therefore, those who master the flow of water are powerful as well. Thus when a water shortage exists, those with less power are often excluded from access to water. In Guayaquil’s case, as the city grew, selling water became a profitable business due to water shortages. Water vending created stratification between water vendors, who increasingly tended to be white people or those from mixed descent, and water buyers. With the commodification of water, access to water was determined by one’s ability to pay, creating further social stratification.

The author includes a brief history of water in Guayaquil. In 1884, a reservoir filled with water piped from the nearby Agua Clara River was created by a French company. Lavatory businesses moved in, and as a result, social stratification increased, as indoor plumbing came to be a sign of high social class, and “status, gender, and power became reflected by the odors of the body” (p. 4). Thus exclusionary water practices centralized power and demarcated social stratification, with the wealthy white people using fancy toilets and the poor people continuing to use the streets as their toilet. Occurring in parallel to the seizing of control over water, Ecuador became an agroexport country for cocoa, placing it squarely in the global economy. Seventy percent of the land was controlled by twenty families, and the need for wage labor greatly increased. A wealthy merchant class centered around cocoa formed as well. This bourgeoisie class extracted rent from immigrating wage workers and assumed considerable control over the city’s institutions, including newspapers and even schools. The city grew, as “a process of rapid urban development through the accumulation, investment, and consumption of the rents and riches from cocoa production was initiated” (p. 7) Sanitation and wages declined. In 1900, urban water projects were deemed to be of national importance and received funding from the national government, along with sanitation, so conditions improved. This went well at first, but when the city outgrew its water network, private water vendors moved in.

After struggling with ways to bring more water to the city, inhabitants of Guayaquil received a plentiful supply of clean water through a new water system, La Lolita, around the clock from 1928 to 1932, during which yellow fever disappeared, likely due to the clean water. However, as the cocoa economy crumbled, the powerful merchants and bourgeoisie desperately searched for other ways to uphold their wealth. With shifting powers, the water urbanization process floundered. Money from the national state that was promised to the water system ultimately was spent on other things or did not even reach the city. The water flow fell from 20 hours a day in 1932 to 6-7 hours a day in 1946, and contamination became more common. While the flow of water dwindled, the city continued to grow. Soon only the inner city containing 45% of the city’s inhabitants had a domestic water supply.

During the 1950s, U.S. banana corporations moved into Ecuador, revitalizing Guayaquil and other coastal cities. As a result, the city grew rapidly, more than quadrupling its population between 1950 and 1976. At the beginning of the banana boom, a new potabilization plant was built in Guayaquil. However, within its first decade, the population had already expanded to the plant’s anticipated full operating capacity, and water shortages once again ensued.

With the creation of the bioengineered “Chiquita” banana in the 1950s, the U.S. banana business moved back to South America. While large producers in Ecuador managed to stay afloat, thousands of small- and medium-sized producers were forced to join the urban lower classes, causing the city to expand further. Living conditions grew worse, and violent riots and protests followed in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the urban water crisis took a backseat to the political turmoil. However in 1959, in an attempt to prevent such social unrest, the national government created an organization whose official goal was to “keep on insisting for a supply system that provided every household with unlimited quantities of water” (p. 15). The organization blamed water shortages on “technical and natural constraints” (p. 16), using nature as a scapegoat for the government’s failure to provide the city with water.

In the 1960s and 1970s, control over the city’s water system changed hands several times, but any alterations they made to the water system were outpaced by the city’s rapid population growth. The rise of the oil business in Ecuador in 1972 again altered Guayaquil’s water structure. The La Lolita pipe was closed, but money made from oil was used to capture more water for the city. In 1974, the World Bank granted a $24 million loan to water projects in the area, but few projects were actually put into place. With the collapse of the oil business in Ecuador in the 1980s, people flocked to urban areas even as funding for cities dwindled. An earthquake in 1987 and El Nino exacerbated the situation. In the midst of its worst water crisis yet in 1987, $51 million in loans was allocated to the city from worldwide organizations, which was promptly suspended two years later when the organization in charge of the water system did not honor the terms of the contract. Since then, structural changes have been made such as expanding water pumping, but nothing has solved the dire distribution problem.

Currently (as of 1997), another potabilization plant is being built on a $75 million loan from the Spanish government. This will improve the services for those already receiving water, but inhabitants without domestic water access will have to continue to rely on private water venders. The author concludes that the urban water system in Guayaquil has always been embedded within and influenced by the social and political environment of the city. It seems ridiculous to me, yet unsurprising, that water, which I consider a basic human right, is not available to everyone. I recently read Blue Covenant by Maude Barlow for another class, which is about the global water justice movement. The book is filled with (briefer) histories such as these from around the world, including how people fought against water shortage. Thus, the situation in Guayaquil is, unfortunately, not unique, as both Swyngedouw and Barlow would agree.

Planet of Slums

The first article concerning Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums begins with a description of the worldwide trend towards urbanization. Due to an increase in urbanization and a shrinking countryside population worldwide, “cities will account for all future world population growth” (p.1). It is significant that most of this growth will occur in the cities of developing countries, in which “there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services”. (p.1-2). Not only are supercities becoming larger, but small villages are becoming cities, and small cities are becoming larger cities, likely resulting in increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes. However, this urbanization is not due to expanding job opportunities from industrialization; rather, agricultural deregulation is resulting in a surplus of rural laborers who flock to urban areas. Because urban areas are suffering from an increase of debt and depression rather than an increase in employment opportunities, these laborers end up in urban slums. While other sources blame nations’ governments for global slums, Planet of Slums blames globalization, neoliberalism, and inequality. Davis compares Slums’ warning about the disastrous effects of growing global urban poverty to the dire consequences of global warming, which I believe is an effective way to illustrate to the reader just how serious this problem is.
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Slums are defined as “overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure” (p. 5) and make up a third of the urban population worldwide. While classic slums were located in inner cities, modern slums are more likely to be located on the outskirts of cities. There is a trend towards slums being greatly undercounted. As a result, many of the statistics in this article are preceded by “there may be…”, indicating that many of the statistics are closer to guesses. For instance, there “may be more than a quarter of a millions slums on Earth” (p.6). Davis’s argument would benefit from more accurate statistics, but unfortunately they seem to be unavailable.

Many slum dwellers occupy their land illegally, making eviction a constant threat. To make matters worse, many slum dwellers lack adequate sanitation services (the worst of which are those in Africa) which lead to the death of at least two million urban babies and small children every year (p. 7). They are also prone to flooding, mudslides, and pollution from neighboring factories.

According to Davis, the 1980s inevitably led to an explosion of slums when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) implemented a Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) in which world economies were restructured through privatization, using the debt of poor countries as leverage. People in rural areas could not compete with global corporations. Thus by taking away state control, the rich are becoming richer, while the poor are becoming poorer, all but eliminating a middle class. Davis describes strategies that women desperately devise to survive and contribute income to their families, including factory work, piece work, and prostitution, among others. It seems that once again, minorities and women get the short end of an already short stick. Despite immense expansion of worldwide trade in the 1990s, urban poverty continued to worsen.

Davis compares globalization to the original creation of the Third World. In the latter, peasants from around the world were forced into the global economy to their own detriment. Globalization is causing a similar phenomenon, leading millions to struggle to survive as members of an informal working class consisting of “unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade” (p.11), resulting in the perpetual
reproduction of absolute poverty.

Unfortunately, uprisings by these informal workers tend to be “episodic and discontinuous” and are usually focused on immediate issues rather than the overall picture (p.14). This perhaps depressed me most of all—that they are not finding significant ways to fight back against their appalling situation. Davis emphasizes that we cannot use past revolutions to predict the behavior of those living in slums today, as “history is not uniformitarian” (p.14). As an example of how the current situation differs from the trends of the industrial revolution, Davis describes an increase in religiosity in developing countries in contrast to the secularization of the working class during the industrial revolution. Some, such as Jean Comaroff, argue that this turn to religion is a form of resistance, as many of these churches organize ways of helping its members to meet their survival needs.

The second article, “Slum Ecology: Inequity Intensifies Earth’s Natural Forces”, emphasizes the poor living conditions of people living in slums. People are moving to scarier conditions out of sheer survival, conditions in which “the destructive power of natural elements leaves today’s slum residents in an ever more vulnerable state” (p.22). These conditions include toxic waste, ground collapse, flash floods, and landslides, sometimes in seismically active areas. A more immediate fear is fire. A slum’s “mixture of flammable dwellings, extraordinary density, and dependence upon open fires for heat and cooking is a superlative recipe for spontaneous combustion” (p.23). Often, these fires are set by landlords who do not feel like waiting for (or paying for) court demolition procedures. As a horrific example, Filipino landlords prefer to douse a rat or cat in kerosene, set it on fire, and let it loose in the slums; it will set several shanties on fire before it dies, after which the fire will spread easily. It sickens me that human beings can have such little regard for life, human or animal.

In addition, poor cities do not have sufficient urban planning, which would provide open spaces and a separation of industry from inhabited areas. Instead, poor cities are mixed in with factories and do not have open spaces to provide room for recycling the massive amounts of waste they produce. There is a large gap between waste generation and disposal in poor cities, leading to an overflow of waste. In fact, “digestive-tract diseases arising from poor sanitation and the pollution of drinking water are the leading cause of death in the world, affecting mainly infants and small children” (p.25). Finally, the restructuring of poor urban economies around the world has left them with no way to fight against their conditions by taking away public healthcare. Thus natural forces and human forces have combined to limit and even exterminate millions of impoverished people around the world.

Planet of Slums

“For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”
Davis starts out with this little f act. He tells us that this transition may have already occurred in the third world. In fact, the world population has exploded way faster than anyone could have ever predicted. There are now 400 cities that have over one million people inhabiting them. By 2015 it is predicted that there will be 150 more cities that have such a big population. The cities will continue to keep growing but it seems as if the rural areas have reached their peak and will begin to dwindle down.
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In the urban climacteric he goes on with some more numbers concerning the population. Davis tells us that there will be megacities that reach the eight million mark and there may even be hyper cities that reach more than twenty million inhabitants. To me it’s beginning to sound a bit repetitive, at least until he moves on to one of the problems of this population boom.
“But if megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three-quarters of the burden of population growth will be borne by faintly visible second-tier cities and smaller urban areas: places where, as UN researchers emphasize, ‘there is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.’”
If the thought hadn’t occurred to you already the problem becomes clear after reading this section. A lot of these cities simply aren’t equipped to handle all of these people. They don’t have the space or the resources. The reason this is happening is because people are moving into smaller cities and causing them to grow. The big city problems are now being extended out to the smaller cities in the world. It’s as if millions of people are moving into small town America, those small towns simply can’t handle all of the new people. This population boom in the small cities is pretty much destroying the whole idea of a small town. Small towns never used to have the big city problems and with this growth they are gaining problems they have never faced before.
“ The mountain of trash seemed to stretch very far, then gradually without perceptible demarcation or boundary it became something else. But what? A jumbled and pathless collection of structures. Cardboard cartons, plywood and rotting boards, the rusting and glassless shells of cars, had been thrown together to form habitation.”
Here comes the heart of the problem. Davis describes the slums so well that you really can’t ignore the sad feeling that comes over you. It is estimated that there were 921 million people living in slums in 2001. That is an astonishing number. The people who live in these slums are said to earn less money than the cost of their minimum required daily nutrition. The sad thing is that countries like to ignore this problem by lying about it. An example of this is Bangkok; their poverty rate is only 5% but after a survey is was shown that a quarter of their population was living below the poverty line! The countries are massively undercounting the slum populations.
“The urban poor, meanwhile, are everywhere forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains—over-steep hill slopes, river banks and floodplains. Likewise they squat in the deadly shadows of refineries, chemical factories, toxic dumps, or in the margins of railroads and highways.”
The poor are forced to live in these terrible conditions on the edge of cities because they have no other choice. Poverty has created a whole new urban disaster. The people living in these areas are at constant risk for floods, mudslides, and plant explosions along with the dangers of the toxic fumes surrounding them. The sad thing is this doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon. It is estimated that two billion people will be living in slums by 2030. It is estimated that 40 to 50 percent of the total population of cities by 2020 will be living in poverty.

The best part is that the Reagan and Bush administrations helped this along with the IMF. The IMF is supposed to be helping people but instead they are hurting, they simply don’t have the knowledge needed to help these people.

Ecological Legitimacy

Laura Pulido discusses cultural essentialism as having assumptions about indigenous groups and “third world” communities thus leading to negative assumptions of these people based on pre-conceived connotations made by what she refers to as “officialdom”.
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The relationship between the Hispanos in northern New Mexico and the United States government is used as the case study about ecological legitimacy and essentialism. This area was originally inhabited by Pueblo Indians until Spanish conquistadors and mestizo settlers began to settle the region. Hispanos lived in the area and their communities were based on collective ownership over the land. After the United States gained control of the region in 1848, they did not recognize communal land ownership, thus leading to the commodification of the land, this in turn increased resource consumption. All of this lead to the economic downfall of the Hispano people, and although there were some attempts for development projects, rarely did they address the loss of the Hispano land. All the development within the region focused on changing the individual while ignoring the original thriving rural economy, which was relatively self-sufficient.

Laura Pulida attempts to shed light on the misinterpretation of ecological legitimacy among traditionalistic poor populations. She uses the case of the Hispanos in New Mexico and their communal land tenure and once becoming commodified lacking very little if any means of subsistence. Pulido points towards the misinterpretation and negative bias towards traditional cultures inability to properly and sustainably tend to the land in an environmentally friendly way. While these people have successfully grazed and persisted on these lands since the late 17th century, once commodified, and government control of the land took over, the Hispano people lost their traditional way of subsistence. Are now being blammed for their poverty while the government is failed to be seen for its actions.

Economic Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism

Do the poor harm the environment more than others? Laura Pulido's piece analyzes two prevailing thoughts regarding land use by the poor. One idea is that the poor are a threat to the environment because they use wasteful land-management practices. The other idea is that poor and indigenous peoples are so connected to the environment that they understand the importance of preserving nature.
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Pulido argues that it is important for poor and indigenous peoples to shed some of the myths surrounding their use of land. In order to do so, they must establish ecological legitimacy. For a group to have ecological legitimacy, it must be seen as truly committed to preserving the environment. Ecological legitimacy is important for groups in order to earn respect when it comes to broad acceptance of their practices and support for their plans (and thus a lessening of resistance to said practices and plans).

Pulido uses the example of Ganados del Valle (meaning Livestock of the Valley), a collaboration among Hispano farmers which was formed in the 1980s. The collaboration helped to increase the incomes of nearly four dozen households in rural New Mexico. At the same time, they also exercised environmentally sustainable practices, such as avoiding pollution and resource extraction while growing organically-grown lamb.

Despite these environmentally conscious practices on the part of Ganados, their efforts to acquire land in order to expand faced opposition from environmental groups as well as the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish - opposition which, according to Pulido, stemmed from the aforementioned belief that poor and indigenous people lack environmental legitimacy. Ganados worked hard to gain the respect of the owers that be, but to little avail at first. It was only after they illustrated the close relationship between their culture and their management of natural resources that they were able to develop ecological legitimacy among those outside their group.

Despite the success of Ganados, Polido cautions that culturalism is not necessarily a fail-safe way for poor and indigenous peoples to establish ecological legitimacy. One of the reasons she makes this argument is that many cultural arguments used to establish this legitimacy are often vague. Additionally, cultural preservation arguments are based on the usually flawed idea that given certain circumstances, the culture will die unless the action they support are taken. She believes that both may have caused Ganados's strategy to backfire.

Nonetheless, Ganados is seen as a turning point in the way poor and indigenous people's relationships with the environment are viewed. "Ganados is building a a rare example of social and environmental justice," she argues, one that, while not necessarily perfect, is promising in debunking people's misconceptions about these relationships. Whether these misconceptions are truly done away with remains to be seen.