The GREEN DMV Report
February 2010
Climate Justice is a Civil Rights Issue
Contributing Writer: Julianne Malveaux

If you live in the United States, the expectation is that when you turn a tap, clean water will come out.  Well, almost clean water, and it depends on where you live, but most of us simply expect a rush of the clean stuff to wash our faces, brush our teeth, power our shower, transform our lives.  We have brothers and sisters around the globe who cannot share our expectations.  They might find the tap simply tapped, the water that we expect to flow just not flowing.  They may have to walk another mile, or two, or three to find the water they once expected.  They have been affected by climate change, and so have we, but our experience is different. Our cities may ask us not to water our lawns, and in Greenville, Mississippi, the water may run brown, but climate change generally doesn’t stop water in the United States from rushing from the tap.

I thought I was clear about environmental justice issues, but I have learned so much in just the past two months.  I sojourned to Copenhagen for the UN climate meetings, and it became clear to me that I had no clue about the many ways climate justice affected brothers and sisters around the globe. In Tuvalu, a small Pacific Island country, global warming means the loss of land.  This, then, is not a theoretical conversation about warming, but a real conversation about loss of territory, and a detriment to survival.  The Tuvalu story is riveting and immediate, and the story of sisters who walk further to find clean water is riveting as well.  The bottom line is that western countries pollute without immediate consequence, and the rest of the world pays.

The climate justice movement in the United States seeks to reveal the challenges we face because we are such heavy polluters.  The concept of climate justice is that we would take responsibility for our violation to the planet by providing dollars to countries that need to mitigate the effects of our pollution. This is an extraordinary challenge – too many of us do not feel that we have done anything wrong, and we do not feel we should have to pay for a history of violating the environment.  Yet, our hubris is harmful both at home and in the rest of the world.

At home, the shortcuts we take cause an unprecedented level of asthma and lung disease on very young African Americans, who now have a nearly one in four incidence of breathing problems.  More than that, researchers have documented the health effects of global worming on a vulnerable population and have suggested that there are ways to ameliorate damage.  If we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is likely that we will see a cleaner and less harmful environment. Yet, that requires us to take sacrificial steps to change the ways we are present in the world.

When we leave the borders of the United States, we find the damage from global warming direct and deleterious on the lives of the most vulnerable.  And yet we also find that for some countries that lag behind us on the development path (such as China), pollution is a necessary driver for economic development.  One of the hot issues in Copenhagen was whether China – the world’s greatest polluter now, but not historically – should be held to the same standard of greenhouse gas emission reduction as the United States.

It is imperative that African American people fully participate in the climate justice movement.  In the United States, we are responsible for fewer greenhouse gas emissions, but we pay more, in terms of our health, for pollutions.  Furthermore, when the price of energy rises, given our income levels, we end up spending a greater proportion of our income on energy costs.  Finally, as legislators forge solutions to energy challenges, they have tended to produce income opportunities for techniques that are not developing in inner cities.  Wind technology is costly, for example, and its efficacy unproven.  Its heavily subsidized (read tax dollars) production is concentrated in states like Idaho and Montana, not Mississippi or North Carolina.

From a global perspective, it is important for us to connect with people in developing countries around the globe who are disadvantaged by world energy consumption patterns.  As I learned in Copenhagen, often women bear the brunt of the consequences of pollution because they are the ones who fetch the water and who engage in food production.  The climate justice movement addresses issues of more fairly sharing the burden of pollution.  In some ways, it is the civil rights movement of the twenty-first century.

Bennett College for Women is fully engaged in education and activism around climate justice.  Our activist in residence, Nia Robinson, comes from the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.  Hershelle Gaffney, a Bennett sophomore, attended the climate talks in Copenhagen and is working with fellow students on ways to make our campus more “green”.  Nia and Hershelle, along with faculty, are planning an after-Copenhagen conference for April 23 that will engage other students in climate justice matters.  And, with scholars Robert Bullock (Clark Atlanta University) and Beverly Wright (Dillard University), Bennett College is developing an HBCU Environmental Justice and Climate Justice coalition.

As the 15th President of Bennett College for Women, Dr. Julianne Malveaux has been the architect of exciting and innovative transformation at America’s oldest historically black college for women.

Dr. Malveaux has long been recognized for her progressive and insightful observations. She is a labor economist, noted author, and colorful commentator. Julianne Malveaux has been described by Dr. Cornel West as “the most iconoclastic public intellectual in the country. Her contributions to the public dialogue on issues such as race, culture, gender, and their economic impacts are shaping public opinion in 21st century America.

Dr. Malveaux's popular writing has appeared in USA Today, Black Issues in Higher Education, Ms. Magazine, Essence Magazine, and the Progressive. Her weekly columns appeared for more than a decade (1990-2003) in newspapers across the country including the Los Angeles Times, Charlotte Observer, New Orleans Tribune, Detroit Free Press, and San Francisco Examiner. She has hosted television and radio programs, and appeared widely as a commentator on networks, including CNN, BET, PBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN and others.

Dr. Malveaux has been a contributor to academic life since receiving her Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1980. She has been on the faculty or visiting faculty of the New School for Social Research, San Francisco State University, the University of California (Berkeley), College of Notre Dame (San Mateo, California), Michigan State University and Howard University.

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