Environmental justice and habitat

The concept of environmental justice started with a focus on the toxic issues of low-income communities of color, but it has evolved into a major tool for addressing a multitude of psychological, social, and environmental issues confronting urban areas. In the past, cities, with hardly a thought or a serious study, allowed industries to build all sorts of polluting facilities next to low-income residents. Today many of these plants are closed down and abandoned, and developers treat the contaminated and neglected lands as prime sites for development, with little thought to the impacts on the historic communities.

But these lands also offer great opportunities for restoration as parks and wildlife habitat - uses that bring direct benefits to the adjacent communities that have so long suffered from negative uses. Environmental justice thus offers a remarkable convergence of old and new environmental concerns - parks, open space, wildlife habitat, toxics, and urban land use.

The long-forgotten North Richmond shoreline, for example, offers a fine opportunity to protect core environmental values - aesthetics, habitat, and open space - while warding off the selfish interest of a few developers who will build anywhere, including housing on toxic hot spots. Indeed, though, developers and city staffs often support locating housing projects on toxic sites, as Richmond was going to do at the Zeneca site, but seem unwilling to look at those sites as future restored habitat and protected wildlife areas.

Many have addressed habitat from the perspective of birds, bees, mice, and other wildlife - but for residents of low-income communities, who lack the transportation resources to get out of hectic urban environments, Wildlife-habitat needs are also our human needs. The Sierra Club Bay Chapter has long advocated both for protection of habitat and for creating parklands near low-income communities. The Chapter, for example, has been a leading force in the creation of the Eastshore State Park and Point Pinole Regional Park, and in protecting Candlestick Point State Park in San Francisco.

Population growth just augments these needs. We must now factor in the psychological, social, and environmental implications of not having access to natural areas of open space, which are very different from the limited open space traditionally preserved in city parks.

The North Richmond shoreline communities of North Richmond, the Iron Triangle, Parchester Village, and West San Pablo have been organizing to protect our communities, including the shoreline, since the late 1940s and have created an interactive approach to address a wide range of environmental issues. The Chapter has worked closely with the North Richmond shoreline communities to protect their shoreline. A recent great success for those communities was the East Bay Regional Park District's eminent-domain action to purchase Breuner Marsh to protect it from development and to make good on a promise - made by the private developers of Parchester Village back in the '40s - that residents would have an open shoreline and park.

Environmental justice offers the opportunity to focus not just on parks, but also on healthy environments for low-income communities. This connection is environmental justice!

Whitney Dotson Whitney Dotson is one of the leading defenders of the North Richmond shoreline.