During her internship in northern California this past summer, fifth-year political science student Karen Salazar asked a group of kids in her East Bay Area hometown to draw their neighborhood.
More than half the kids drew a large oil refinery in the background as if it was a part of the scenery, like a tree, Salazar said.
They, like Salazar when she was younger, accepted the polluted air from the two refineries near their homes as a normal part of life. They also didn’t think much of the rampant asthma that plagued the neighborhood.
Salazar developed asthma when she was 7 years old. When she moved to Westwood to attend UCLA five years ago, her asthma subsided and she no longer needs medication or an inhaler.
“I never really made that connection” between the asthma and pollution until “six months after entering UCLA, my asthma was gone,” she said.
Salazar belonged to a handful of UCLA students who spent half their Sunday immersing themselves in the sights and smells of one of the most polluted areas in the nation: Southeast Los Angeles.
The students, from the offices of the president and external vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council, took a “toxic tour” Sunday, offered by the environmental justice organization, Communities for a Better Environment. Salazar worked at the organization’s Oakland office over the summer.
The tour is provided once to twice a month to different community leaders and organizations to shed light on the importance of environmental justice, said Jesus Torrez, a community organizer for CBE.
Since its establishment in the late 1970s, CBE has been influencing state policy by advocating community organizations’ tackling issues of environmental justice.
The organization has undertaken dozens of campaigns to rectify the harmful impact of industrial facilities and curb further building of these facilities in low-income communities, which mostly consist of minority populations.
“We’re not against industry,” said Robert Cabrales, another CBE community organizer, standing in front of an industrial yard in the city of Vernon. “We’re against dirty industry being brought here.”
Government agencies maintain incorporating environmental justice into policy has become a priority in the last 10 years, and that Los Angeles is at the forefront of ensuring industries follow environmental regulations.
As a response to community organizing, the federal government became more involved in environmental justice and helped create the infrastructure for it to be implemented, said Romel Pascual, program manager for the environmental justice program in the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies,” according to its Web site.
Still, community organizers say the government has a long way to go in ensuring justice for all communities.
The toxic tour
When taking the Alameda exit off the 10 East freeway to get to the CBE office in Huntington Park, the drastic change in air quality from Westwood becomes apparent. A brownish haze colors the sky and sparse shrubbery is scattered in between pavement. The neighborhood is a staggered mix of power plants and smoke stacks bordering residential pockets, retail complexes and fenced-off schools.
It is in these neighborhoods that residents have become ill with asthma and forms of cancer, experienced miscarriages, and given birth to babies with birth defects for decades, according to the CBE.
It is Sunday and the school yards are empty. So are the industry sites across the street, and the Alameda Corridor that accommodates freight trains for distribution of imported goods from the ports coming into Los Angeles bears no signs of life for now.
But these sights are deceiving, say the CBE tour guides. During the weekday, hundreds of thousands of workers fill the factories as trucks constantly pass through the busy streets.
In front of Tweedy Elementary School in South Gate, the diesel smell of a passing truck is unbearable for some of the students. They scrunch their faces and quickly bring their hands up to cover their noses.
That’s just one truck, Cabrales says as the students grimace. Imagine hundreds of those trucks going by while school is in session, he says.
The tour travels through what is termed “asthma town” in Vernon and then through “La Montaña”, a 30-foot mountain of rubble that consists of remains from the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Only a 10-foot fence separates the mountain of dust and debris from a row of houses on Cottage Street.
On this early Sunday afternoon, two young boys kick a soccer ball down the street and a large group of children emerge out of a van carrying McDonald’s Happy Meals while a mountain of rubble looms in the background.
After the collapse of the Santa Monica freeway in the earthquake, dump trucks relocated chunks of the freeway into this residential area. The neighborhood on Cottage Street changed overnight, say CBE organizers. Suddenly residents found a thick coat of fine white concrete covering their houses and cars.
The owner of the land was sentenced in criminal court for creating a “public nuisance” in 1998 and clean-up of the 5-acre mess began in November 2004.
The tour ended with the guides describing “one of the saddest stories” they’ve undertaken as a campaign, Torrez said.
Standing in front of Suva Elementary School in Bell Gardens, Cabrales points to the chain fence separating the school yard and a shutdown chrome plating facility.
Ten years ago, it was determined that the carcinogenic chemical, hexavalent chromium, being handled at the facility was a factor in the death of over 25 students and teachers, and the miscarriages and birth of defected babies for five pregnant teachers. The facility has since shut down.
“Not tree huggers”
When Cabrales tells his friends he works for environmental justice for a living, he says they think he works to save animals and plants in the environment.
But, “we are not talking about saving the fish, it’s (saving) ... human life,” he says. “We are not tree huggers”
Instead, environmental justice focuses on the effects of pollution on people’s health and well-being in communities.
The movement was rooted in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and began when people, mostly from communities of color, came together to speak up about public health issues resulting from pollution in their neighborhoods, according to the EPA.
In 1994, former President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which “directed federal agencies to develop environmental justice strategies to aid federal agencies identify and address disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations,” according to the EPA Web site.
With the order came the realization that to achieve environmental justice, various agencies and infrastructures needed to work together, says Francisco Arcaute, EPA press officer.
“Environmental justice is not just an environmental issue,” he said. It also includes issues of transportation, housing and public health. “We cannot compartmentalize the way we look at environmental issues.”
It also considers collaboration from scholars and academia for many environmental justice campaigns successful, CBE officials said. And universities have increasingly begun to offer resources to conduct environmental studies in low-income communities.
CBE works with scholars from UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz and Occidental College in its research, Torrez said.
Martha Matsuoka, a UCLA doctoral student in urban planning, believes UCLA has been playing a huge role in promoting environmental justice in Los Angeles.
There are “pockets in UCLA” that provide resources to community organizations, Matsuoka said, citing the UCLA Labor Center as an example.
“UCLA is pretty historically partnered with these (low-income) communities,” she said.
Salazar believes she’s lucky she didn’t live in a community as polluted as Southeast Los Angeles.
She emphasized the importance of privileged communities continuing to promote environmental justice – “for really basic human rights, the right to play as a kid.”