Environmental equity, or fairness, means that a city, or a region, or a
country should not inflict its environmental problems on the poor or the
powerless, but should share both the problems and the cost of cleaning them
up equally.
What does Environmental Equity Have to Do With the Environment?
Nearly everything. Without environmental equity, an environmental
program simply doesn't work.
If decision makers can get away from pollution and the problems it
causes, they have no incentive to deal with it. If politicians can arrange
things so that pollution mostly hurts people who rarely vote, and who don't
contribute to their campaigns, they don't have to solve the problem. Too
often, we've seen politicians shaking each other's hands in a staged photo-op,
congratulating each other on having "cleaned up" a part of town or built a
park, while children elsewhere clutch their asthma inhalers.
Really dealing with pollution requires sacrifices. If environmental
groups take the easy, low road, speaking for educated, wealthy, and
articulate communities and ignoring the needs of the poor, then they will
have no credibility when they ask us to pay extra for hybrid cars, or
when they ask us to make any of the many other sacrifices we will have to make
for a really "clean" environment.
If people who call themselves environmentalists and claim they have
a "green" solution turn out to want to move the problem, rather than solve
it, then they care less about the environment than about something else:
their real estate values, their quality of life, and their health. Real
concern for the environment demands a real solution, not sweeping the problem
under someone else's rug.
What are the Ideals of Environmental Equity?
Environmental equity has three ideals. The list below gives these ideals
in order of their value: the best and most important first, then the
second best solution, and finally the least desirable answer.
It shares its highest ideal with the rest of the environmental movement:
don't pollute. Choose the clean solution. Achieve the best quality of life
for everyone with the least impact on the Earth and on future generations.
We don't yet have a complete solution to the problem of pollution. Where
we can't avoid environmental problems, share them. Don't shunt the problem
off to another part of town, or another part of the country. When someone
proposes an environmental solution, ask whether the "solution" will really
eliminate pollution, or just move it. If research into alternatives is under
way, ask who will have to live with the pollution until the research produces
a working alternative. Shared pollution is pollution everyone has a strong
incentive to reduce.
Sometimes, we can't share pollution problems directly. Sometimes, we
have to clean up one part of town first. When that happens, the communities
that have to wait deserve recognition and compensation.
Environmental equity really only excludes one approach: claiming we have
solved a problem, when in reality we have only dumped it on people who don't
have the power to refuse it.
What Does Environmental Equity Have to Do With Canada?
When we dump on the poor and the powerless, we not only commit a moral
outrage, we generally produce the worst pollution and environmental
degradation. This country's worst environmental atrocities, in both human
terms and in sheer environmental terms, have involved dumping pollution on
poor communities.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ontario government allowed pulp and paper
companies to dump tons of methyl mercury into the rivers of north-western
Ontario. People of Grassy Narrows First Nation got very ill with mercury
poisoning. Twenty years later, the community still feels appalling health
and social effects. They have suffered other environmental assaults beside
mercury poisoning: in the 1950s, Ontario Hydro manipulated the water levels
in the rivers in order to generate "clean" hydro power, and wiped out the
Grassy Narrows wild rice harvest. And today, the Province of Ontario has
licensed Abitibi to clear-cut in the Whiskey-Jack forest, traditional
hunting and trapping grounds of the people of Grassy Narrows. To stop the
destruction of their hunting grounds, the people of Grassy Narrows have
blocked the roads into the forest.
Over the previous two decades, the Canadian government has sanctioned
NATO military flight training over Labrador. The Innu people have suffered
through thousands of low-level training flights generating up to 125 decibels.
The flights have disrupted their lives, their environment, and their society.
The Canadian government has rented the airspace over the Innu, as well as
their health and their tranquility, to various air forces. Many of these air
forces could not train in their home countries because of resistance of
their local environmental movements.
What Does Environmental Equity Have to Do With Toronto?
Cities have a particular need for environmental equity. Nowhere does
pollution present more of an urgent problem than in cities, and nowhere
does dealing with it fairly matter than in a multicultural city such as
Toronto, where we reap the benefits of many cultures working together. To
ensure everyone's willingness to contribute, upon which our prosperity and
success depend, we must deal with all parts of the city fairly.
