Empowering communities is key, says environmental justice scholar

Beverly Wright presents second talk in President’s Lecture Series

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

When Beverly Wright was a girl and would drive with her father to Baton Rouge, La., she would scrunch her nose and complain about the bad smells from the petrochemical complexes in the area. Her father would answer, “That’s progress.”

Photo by: Jeff Fitlow Beverly Wright, a leading scholar on and an advocate for environmental justice, gave a President's Lecture at Rice this week to share her experiences working to help communities speak and act for themselves in fighting for freedom from environmental harm.

Little did they know the high cost of that progress. “We didn’t realize the environmental and health hazards that existed,” she said, nor that those hazards were disproportionately impacting people of color.

Today Wright is a leading environmental justice scholar and advocate. She is the founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), a community/university partnership that addresses environmental and health inequities in the Lower Mississippi River Industrial Corridor. An 85-mile long stretch of land along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, it is home to 133 petrochemical plants and six refineries — as well as residential communities. The population that lives in this area, called “Cancer Alley,” is largely to African-American.

Wright gave a President’s Lecture at Rice this week to share her experiences working to help communities speak and act for themselves in fighting for freedom from environmental harm.

Empowering communities is key, she said. Respect the people in the community and their knowledge and involve them. Wright operates on the “teach a man to fish” philosophy: involve the community, teach them and train them so the knowledge remains with the people long after a project is over.

“Conducting a project in a community, bringing in student volunteers to work with the community is one thing, but when you leave, you take everything with you,” she said. “The thing to do if you want to have staying power is to train the community people who are there, who are vested in their own community, who really could benefit then by training other people in their community. ”

The DSCEJ offers workshops for community members to learn about environmental-justice-related issues like legal procedures, pollution prevention, GIS mapping, and environmental monitoring and reporting procedures. An important part of the organization is its worker-training programs.

It’s an approach that garnered Wright and the DSCEJ accolades and awards, including the prestigious Heinz award in 2009 and a spot on the 2010 list of 100 history makers by theGrio, a video-centric news community site devoted to providing African-Americans with stories about perspectives that are underrepresented in existing national news outlets.

After Hurricane Katrina, the DSCEJ met with thousands of people to train them in soil remediation, sheetrock remediation and how to make their homes safe enough for them to work in while they were rebuilding. The organization also held conferences and symposia and developed A Safe Way Back Home program in collaboration with unions to clean the neighborhoods of the “toxic film that had coated everything.”

“After Katrina everything was so polluted, and (the DSCEJ was) trying to figure out what we should do,” Wright said. “We decided we should do a demonstration project to show the federal government what they ought to be doing.” Working in a neighborhood in a neighborhood in New Orleans East that had been devastated by the floodwaters, the group led hundreds of volunteers who worked to remove and replace top soil, resod yards and wash down houses and streets.

The project was a success and even awarded the 2008 EPA Environmental Justice Achivement Award. But, she noted, it was just a demonstration project, and much of the city still needed help from the government to recover, help that many continue to wait for.

“People who were largely affected were African-American,” she said. “But regardless of income, white people were recovering better.”

Wright discussed the many racial inequities that plagued post-Katrina New Orleans, but she noted the inequities existed long before Katrina, in housing, education, recreation infrastructure and health care.

“In looking at New Orleans now, the only thing I can really say is that there were some policy decisions that were made that negatively impacted certain people and benefited others.”

In the Q-and-A session that followed the talk, an audience member commented that many Rice students engage with and serve communities throughout the nation through the Comminuty Involvement Center’s Alternative Spring Break program. But what can students do from campus, he asked.

“Create social change through education, the media and exposing people,” she said.