The aeration pond of Georgia-Pacific’s paper mill, located in Crossett, Arkansas, finally closed due to the mill’s air and water pollutants. These pollutants cause high rates of illness to the community, which the mill heavily employed.
The aeration pond of Georgia-Pacific’s paper mill, located in Crossett, Arkansas, finally closed due to the mill’s air and water pollutants. These pollutants cause high rates of illness to the community, which the mill heavily employed.
The detrimental impacts of environmental changes affect every person on the planet, but the effects of environmental racism target people of color at a higher rate.
Environmental racism is defined as how minority neighborhoods with high populations of people of color and low socioeconomic status are exposed disproportionately to hazards that lower their quality of life, according to UNM News.
These hazards can come in many forms of pollution, such as exposure to toxic waste facilities and landfills, and prolonged exposure can lead to sickness. Environmental factors can seem to be something out of humankind’s control, but that is not the case. Many actions of people influence the natural world, and some of the heaviest influences are a result of systemic issues regarding class and race.
Helana Alexander, a University of Arkansas sophomore communications major, said she is passionate about environmental advocacy work. She is the partnership coordinator for Zero Hour Arkansas, an organization at the UofA dedicated to an intersectional approach to climate activism. In the environmental sphere, environmental racism is a relatively new term, Alexander said.
“People don’t really know what it is,” Alexander said. “There’s a lot of just misinformation about it and a lot of misconceptions about what it actually is because the environment itself, like nature, is not racist, right? But the people who create the industries and corporations and policies that control the environment that we live in here in the U.S. and the world as a whole are racist.”
For the state of Arkansas, two areas of major environmental racism impacts are West Helena and Crossett.
West Helena is a predominantly Black community that faces a water crisis similar to that of Flint, Michigan, Alexander said. The Flint water crisis began in April 2014 with contaminated drinking water containing lead and fecal coliform bacteria, according to NRDC.
The town of West Helena has suffered two major water outages within the last nine months, including running out of water during the summer and losing water for two weeks due to winter weather and is still seeking a permanent fix, according to THV11.
In 2016, the paper mill Georgia-Pacific located in Crossett, Arkansas, finally closed its doors after years of advocacy because of the mill’s air and water pollutants, causing high rates of childhood cancer and a low chance of living over 60, Alexander said.
“It being a majority POC community, we see corporations building mills like this in those communities all the time, and that is one of the key ideas of environmental racism,” Alexander said. “But we also see now with those pollutants really affecting the community, white residents are able to move out of Crossett while POC residents aren’t able to as much because of economic status and a reliance on the mill. It comes out to class and that contributes to environmental racism and all these things that are so systematic.”
These issues are because of environmental racism that is seen in Crossett, Alexander said.
Alexander said that issues of environmental racism even happen closer to campus, with a lot of the pollutants in this area coming out of Springdale, which is the most diverse population in Northwest Arkansas.
“There’s a lot of air pollution that comes out of the processing plants in Springdale for Tyson, and that also contributes directly to environmental racism,” Alexander said. “It’s a majority Latinx community and you see them being disproportionately affected. I mean, if you go to Springdale, you can smell the pollutants up through processing plants in the air.”
The majority of landfills and trash are another means of environmental racism because they are near low-income and people of color neighborhoods in NWA, even in Fayetteville, Alexander said.
Camille Gilmore, a doctoral public policy student, and Maria Nabuwembo, a master’s student studying environmental dynamics, gave a lecture March 13 titled “Environmental Justice in the Built Environment,” discussing gentrification and the history of injustices minority groups face as well as groups that contribute to environmental racism today.
“I’ve seen the industrial plants in areas where pollutants (in) air, water, contaminants go over into soil,” Gilmore said. “So people who live in these industrial sites historically have been found with asthma at a higher rate (and) respiratory issues. I’ve seen it in that form. I’ve seen it in terms of placement and zoning for schools.”
Nabuwembo, originally from Uganda, said money can do everything when it comes to the decisions being made about the environment.
“Coming from a developing country,” Nabuwembo said, “you find that if you don’t have money, you don’t make decisions, you don’t make choices. People with money will make choices that will dictate to you everything that you need to do.”
For the U.S., Gilmore said the disparities are systemic because the country developed from racism, discrimination and the enslavement of Africans.
This status quo of the U.S. continues to hurt people of marginalized communities through those foundations, but that can be challenged with substantial change, Gilmore said.
“Let’s not wait for people to solve our problems,” Nabuwembo said. “Let’s act. By acting is ‘What can you do, what can I do?’ Instead of accusing the government, you can also do something.”
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