Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People

The “cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactivematerials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to thepeople for detoxification and containment” The “right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision making, includingneeds assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation” The strict enforcement of processes of informed consent The right to reparations for victims of environmental injustice The right to self-determination for all peoples The freedom from bias in public policy relating to environmental issues The right of workers not to be “forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood andunemployment” Recognition of Indigenous peoples’ special “legal and natural” relationship ofsovereignty and self-determination with the U.S. government Opposition to military occupation and exploitation of lands and peoples The protection of all peoples from nuclear testing and waste disposalFrom its beginnings in the early 1980s, theEJ movement has expanded significantlythroughout the United States, and hasgradually forged a path for governmentagencies and mainstream environmentaladvocacy organizations to confront issues ofthe environment and communities of color.There are now hundreds of grassrootsenvironmental groups based incommunities of low-income and of color,along with scores of academic programsoffering training and support of EJ issues. 6In 1990, leaders of the SouthwestOrganizing Project, in Albuquerque, NM,spearheaded an initiative to prod thecountry’s largest and most influentialconservation organizations (dubbed “theGroup of Ten”) to establish more equitableworking relationships with environmentaljustice groups. The majority of the nationalenvironmental groups, after considerableprodding, have responded in some way,ranging from attempts to diversify theirstaffs to, in the case of the Sierra Club,establishing a national environmentaljustice program to work in partnership withcommunity-based organizations.The urgency for response has also extendedto the climate justice community. Since1988, when James Hansen and SergejLebedeff published the first definitive proofthat the planet was warming, “climatechange” has been transformed from anacademic theory into a global politicalstruggle, with unprecedentedly massiveamounts of resources at stake. 7 In 1992, theUnited Nations Conference on Environmentand Development in Rio de Janeiro resultedin the creation of the United NationsFramework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC), a negotiating framework that hassince governed intergovernmentalnegotiations on fighting climate change. In1997, the third UNFCCC intergovernmentalclimate conference in Kyoto (COP-3)resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, aninternational environmental treaty thatproduced an initial pathway for marketbasedemissions reductions, and in 2009,the COP-15 meeting in Copenhagen saw thenegotiation of the “Copenhagen Accord,”an agreement for modest CO 2 emissionsreductions that was negotiated by five top-Page | 5