How to build an equitable and just climate future | Peggy Shepard
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It's TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Huge disparities exist when it comes to who has access to clean air, water, and soil. Health hazards of pollution aren't spread evenly. In her 2022 talk from TED Countdown's New York session, environmental justice leader Peggy Shepard describes how safer, cleaner communities must be seen through the lens of justice.
It should be no surprise that every community should have a right to a clean environment.
What disparities exist in access to clean air, water, and soil?
Yet some are sacrifice zones. Sacrifice zones, communities living on the front lines of pollution and environmental hazards. But the good news is that we have a unique opportunity to address legacy pollution as we together build an equitable and just climate future. Now this is a story about communities in crisis. Mostly these are communities of black and brown and indigenous peoples. It's often a story of low-income communities, but race, race is the decisive factor. Now studies show that an average middle-income black family with an $87,500 income is likely to live with more pollution than a white family making $22,500 a year. Now, my organization, We Act for Environmental Justice, works within a movement of hundreds of environmental justice groups here and abroad to address the disproportionate impact of pollution borne by our communities.
So I'm talking about environmental justice, which is a civil rights and a human rights analysis of environmental decision making with a focus on the permitting, the permitting process that gives polluters permission to pollute within a regulatory standard for air, water and soil. Now, these permits, they're an allowance that sacrifices the health of community residents. The cumulative effect of multiple facilities sited in a community that emit high levels of pollution in close proximity to where people live, that contributes to glaring health disparities. Now, Harvard University studies among black Americans living in areas like Harlem and the South Bronx Those are communities which do not meet clean air standards as set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
And those studies have found that black Americans have died of COVID-19 at higher rates than others due to living in air polluted communities. Now, that's not a surprise since the majority of people who live in areas that do not meet clean air standards are Latinos and black Americans. And that's the case in an area called Cancer Alley. Now, there's a song sung by the late Nat King Cole called Unforgettable. And that is what Cancer Alley is. It is unforgettable. It's in the worst possible way. It's a 75-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It's a continuum of petrochemical and plastics manufacturing facilities on acres of former plantations. Now, these facilities have created an intergenerational history of death from cancer, with some communities suffering cancer rates higher than the national rate.
Now, communities experience environmental hazards and pollution exposure in diverse ways. In urban areas, mobile sources, contaminated sites, they're really the challenge. And local governments generally manage the infrastructure of pollution. But in smaller cities and rural areas, industrial and oil refineries, landfills and incinerators, they're usually the problem. And in places like Texas and California, there may be no zoning laws that separate industrial facilities from residential backyards. So environmental racism and injustice results from a complex legacy of housing segregation, land use and zoning discrimination, and from unequal enforcement and policies.
What are sacrifice zones and their impact on communities?
Now, decades ago... policies such as redlining denied home loans to people of color and to certain communities. And this government policy reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investments away from those communities, creating large disparities in home ownership as well as urban heat environments of few trees and no open space. So today, we're still living out the legacy of those racist policies. Now, I first began organizing around these issues as an elected Democratic district leader in my West Harlem neighborhood.
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