Environmental Inequalities
Andrew Hurley
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ISS 310, Section 3
Spring 2002
Tuesday, March 18
Prof. Alan Rudy
Preface to Hurley
• The age of ecology is also the age of
environmental inequality… why isn’t he
surprised?
• The issue for him is more “who benefited
and who suffered” from social changes in
relations with the environment than the
recovery of a “pristine nature” or previous
“ecological equilibrium state.”
Ch.1: Class, Race and the
Shaping of the Urban Landscape
• Tell me about his description of the Gary
Products, Inc., chemical spill.
– What happened?
– How did people respond?
– How does he interpret that response?
• What is the importance of “the structure of
power relations” in the production of the
spill and responses to it?
Normal Accidents, Environmental
Dislocation and Political Power
• “For Gary Products, a manufacturer of cleaning solvents and
antifreeze, the spill was a minor inconvenience, an expected
cost of handling hazardous materials.
• For the afflicted population, the acid leak was one of many
environmental mishaps that caused tremendous social
dislocation and disruption, occasionally of tragic proportions.
• More striking, however, was the way in which the events of
that April morning highlighted the hierarchy of environmental
power in this manufacturing city.” (2)
Urban Landscape Uses
• “While some have sought to control urban space for
the purpose of accumulating profits, others have
displayed more variegated motives, including
habitation, recreation and the assertion of social
status.” (3)
• “Historically, the ability to control others through the
political process and through the dynamics of the
capitalist marketplace gave certain groups a decisive
advantage in the struggle to organize and manipulate
the urban landscape.” (3)
Class, Ethnicity, Race and Urban
Landscapes/Environments
• “Although commercial capitalism had driven a sizable
wedge between haves and have-nots much earlier in the
nation's history, the limited skill requirements of
mechanized manufacturing rapidly expanded and defined
the laboring class by creating a virtual army of
interchangeable workers with little bargaining power.” (3)
– The history of class relations is important in terms of the history of
environmental relations because of the relations between class,
race and environmental geography.
• “With the slowing of European immigration after the
outbreak of World War 1, manufacturers increasingly
turned to African Americans to fill the lowest ranks of the
industrial hierarchy, thereby adding a racial dimension to
urban social arrangements.” (4)
Race, Class and Landscape
• 5 million African-Americans migrated to the north
between 1919 and 1960, replacing European
immigrants in the lowest rungs, and most
dangerous and polluted areas, of the industrial
division of labor (and urban neighborhoods).
• Further complicating the urban social structure was
the emergence of a distinct white-collar middle class
in the early-to-mid twentieth century. (4)
– The development of ethnically and racially divided
industrial divisions of labor necessitated the development
of a managerial class from the higher ethnic, racial and
income ranks of the working class.
The Middle Class and Landscape
• “Whereas [small] proprietors had once set the standards of
appropriate behavior and aspirations among these of the
middling rank, salaried [managerial] employees working for
large corporations and government institutions now defined
middle-class values and styles according to their distinctive
needs.”
– Proprietors = C-M-C + Productive Ownership
• Tend to reinvest in their businesses
– Salaried Workers = C-M-C w/o Prod. Ownership
• Tend to increase consumption
• “In contrast to the business class, which championed an ethic
of hard work and thrift, members of the white-collar middle
class [generally] satisfied their social aspirations through
participation in the expanding culture of consumption….” (45)
Class, Race and Landscape
• “By the twentieth century, large-lot zoning and
the liberal use of restrictive covenants in many
cities ensured that elite neighborhoods would
retain their [white] homogeneity....
• Working-class whites, on the other hand, relied
on discriminatory real estate practices to
separate themselves from racial minorities of
comparable economic standing.” (5)
• Residential separations and discrimination =
divisions of consumption.
Class, Race and Safety,
Health and Amenities
• Hurley argues that the power of industry was such that
they were 1) able to obtain all the natural resources
and industrial landscapes they desired, 2) generate
pretty much all the pollution that was cost effective,
and (implicitly or explicitly) 3) control the courts and
legislatures to maintain that power.
• He argues that this situation left the working class
struggling within itself for relative workplace safety,
environmental health and residential amenities… all of
which made race/class divisions worse.
Struggles over Landscape
-- from Hurley
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Immigrant Eastern Europeans in Chicago
Poor African-Americans in East St. Louis
Pennsylvania mill town workers
Gary’s immigrant, Black and, later,
Mexican-American worker-residents
Post-WWII Pollution/Pollutants
• The post-war boom increased to volume of pre-war pollution
(particularly in relation to depression-era reductions in
production).
• Also: “The postwar boom in plastics chemicals, drugs, food
additives, fabrics, and pesticides, for example, introduced a
host of synthetic compounds into the environment. Many of
these new chemical compounds, such as polychlorinated
biphenyls (PCBs), polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs),
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane (DDT), and Kepone, were
later linked to serious medical disorders such as cancer, brain
damage, and liver failure.” (7)
• Many of these were more toxic and more stable than older
pollutants… making where one lived that much more
important.
Class, Race and Pollution
• The processes of economic growth and
increased pollution generated greater classbased, union-style or civil rights focused
struggle (for a piece of the pie) than it did
environmentally-based struggle (for a more
healthy work and residential environment) but
that there was an increase in environmental
and social health concerns.
• If you got your piece of the pie, you ought to
earn a cleaner workplace and be able to buy a
cleaner residence… if you didn’t you couldn’t.
Class, Race and Environmentalism
• Hurley also argues that the middle class culture of
consumption meant that visible “environmental” concerns
were about life outside of production -- wilderness, parks,
“first nature” -- rather than about industry, communities and
“second nature.”
– This meant that those who could afford, and those who would be
welcome and comfortable in wilderness and rural settings (white,
middle class outdoorsmen and white rural hunters and fishermen)
were the environmentalists.
• “Although mainstream environmental activists claimed to
represent the general public interest, we should probe
carefully for any social biases in either the movement's
popular base or its stated objectives.”
Class and the Aesthtic vs. Productive
Consumption of Environments
• The mainstream environmental movement spoke most
directly to the needs and aspirations of white, affluent
Americans focused in the aesthetic, athletic and
reproductive consumption of landscapes rather than on
the productive use of urban and rural land as a means
for earning or maintaining a living.
• In fact, unions and civil rights activists were often (but
not always) opposed environmentalists.
• The countervailing tendency, however, was the eventual
development of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Acts
-- and Sierra Club-NAACP cooperation on highway
construction.
More countervailing instances:
• “Many African American leaders recognized that industrial
pollution was a serious health hazard for blacks who lived in
congested inner-city neighborhoods. Thus, when prominent
African American leaders from across the nation convened in
Gary in 1972 to chart a course for independent black politics,
they included several planks about industrial pollution in
their manifesto for change.” (12)
• “Efforts to improve occupational health and to equalize
access to urban resources, although not considered part of the
mainstream environmental agenda, nonetheless reflected the
deep-seated concerns of workers and minorities about the
quality of physical surroundings. Simply measuring
commitment to environmental reform against a middle-class
standard is inadequate.” (12)
Finally…
• “Because liberal doctrine [Democratic and Republican]
held that economic growth was the most effective, and no
doubt most convenient, route to social justice, policy
makers at all levels of government tended to defer to
private capital on important matters….
• Liberalism might broaden political representation and
deploy public resources on behalf of social welfare, but it
would neither disturb fundamental property rights nor
intrude on the managerial prerogatives of industrial
capitalists.” (13)
• However regulatory, until these relations change nature
and the poor will remain not only economically exploited
and exhausted but environmentally so as well.