Land Use

PART I: ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Introduction

Chemicals

Land Use

Rural Environmental Justice: Summary

Solutions

A Brief History of Environmental Justice

Examples

Resources

PART II: HOW CAN RESEARCH HELP?

Participatory Research and Environmental Justice



Microsite Credits

[ Planning ]    [ Participation ]    [ Privatization ]    [ Empowerment ]   

A. Planning

Urban environmental justice activists have also turned their attention to city and regional planning, housing policy, community and economic development, and the availability of parks and greenspace. Often, the planning and zoning laws governing these elements disenfranchise communities of color by isolating them in urban developments while encouraging suburban infill and development on the fringe. This reduces opportunities and disempowers communities by excluding them from decision-making. Several cities around the nation, including Rochester, New York; Chicago, Illinois; urban Maryland; and the San Francisco Bay Area, are taking steps towards involving communities, and combating gentrification and displacement. At a recent meeting of Bay Area environmental justice partners, one participant suggested that the environmental justice movement, with its stated emphasis on inter-group collaboration and fairness, might provide a model for how to live together, and end the racialization of urban sprawl where white populations leave the inner city and take business opportunities and jobs with them.

Planning and zoning disenfranchisement, gentrification, and displacement are also key issues in rural areas. It is not recognized that both urban neighborhoods and rural communities have a strong sense of place. The Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment defines displacement as when:

low income and often people of color are forced to move out of their neighborhoods because rents become so high that they can't afford to pay them. This usually happens when services get better and people that make more money start to come in. As quality of life gets better, it gets harder for low-income folks to afford to stay in the community (9:1, 2002).

Unrecognized Native peoples, family farmers and foresters, and forestry, farm and mining laborers are some of the groups that face displacement in rural areas. As urban refugees flood to rural areas to retire, property values increase, making it difficult for locals to find affordable homes and property. With retirees and tourists come businesses and job opportunities that may not cater to the local populations culture or budgets. Forest Community Research and the Pacific West Community Forestry Center are able to gather and assess the community, county, and regional-level data needed to determine the degree of displacement, land ownership, renting, gentrification, and housing problems in rural areas. The two organizations look at specific populations to see who is being particularly affected and how to ensure that county or regional efforts will have equitable outcomes. They are involved in economic and community development projects that fit with the needs of the local population.

According to a Bay Area environmental justice activist: (developers) come in, take resources, and develop the community for the city, but not for the communities. If the word city is replaced by the terms county or region, this statement echoes the concerns of rural people. While tourism can be a viable part of an economic development strategy, it is important that the community remain a responsive home to its residents. On a visit to the Hopi reservation, a Pacific West Community Forestry Center associate found that one store was particularly successful because it not only bought items from local artists to sell to tourists, but also sold materials and tools that were specifically targeted towards locals. Similarly, the results of 31 case studies in 35 communities for the Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative Assessment, a project of Forest Community Research and the Pacific West Community Forestry Center, showed that projects that targeted both locals and visitors were successful and embraced by the community.

Strategies to combat gentrification and encourage equitable development can be shared between rural and urban groups. By maintaining contact with urban groups and compiling a list of rural groups and environmental justice issues, the Pacific West Community Forestry Center hopes to build alliances between rural and urban coalitions for valuable knowledge sharing and the formation of powerful watershed-wide coalitions. Some urban solutions to gentrification and displacement that can be applied to rural areas include building affordable housing, rehabilitating dilapidated buildings, training residents to own co-operative businesses, raising community awareness, forming land trusts, and conducting community mapping efforts. Community-based research efforts can include creating an affordability index (identifying rent or mortgage as a percentage of household income), compiling homeowner rates, conducting a spatial analyses of race and poverty, writing a housing affordability plan, forming housing co-operatives (democratically resident-controlled housing), and investigating land use, zoning, and tax policies.

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B. Participation

Environmental injustices related to land use in rural areas are also intimately connected to (1) the stakeholder community's ability to participate in decision-making, and (2) the community's feelings of entitlement to participate in the first place. The Pacific West Community Forestry Center supported capacity-building among Southeast Asian mushroom harvesters who had been left out of timber-harvest planning on national forest lands where they harvest mushrooms, a cornerstone of their livelihood. The harvesters purchase permits from the national forest in order to harvest mushrooms, making them stakeholders in forest management decisions, a point the Forest Service has been slow to recognize. With the help of ally organizations like the Jefferson Center and the Quincy Library Group, a map was created that showed the remarkable overlap between timber sales and prime mushroom harvesting areas. It should be noted that these ally organizations made a concentrated effort to stay behind the scenes, maintaining the mushroom harvester community's ownership over the struggle, and facilitating community leadership during the process. Harvesters and allies presented the map to the Forest Service ranger unit, which subsequently recalled the timber sales and agreed to consult harvesters as stakeholders in future decisions. Without allies such as the Pacific West Community Forestry Center, the Jefferson Center, and the Quincy Library Group, the harvesters may have remained voiceless regarding a key element of their livelihood.

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C. Privatization

Privatization of lands that were, and continue to be, tribal homelands is another long-standing environmental injustice with implications for cultural and community disruption. Privatization occurs through designating lands as public (i.e. national forests or parks, BLM land, etc.) and shifting management to state or federal jurisdiction; or transferring lands to a private individual or company. Barring access to traditional use areas makes Native people trespassers on traditional lands, curtailing cultural continuity.

In addition to the creation of national forests and other federal holdings on Native lands, private exclusive recreational and retirement developments have permanently displaced traditional economies. A host of agreements between national forests and tribes have taken initial steps toward remedying these issues, but have not addressed conflicts with private landholders, or the rights of unrecognized tribes. The Pacific West Community Forestry Center supports the work of the Maidu Cultural and Development Group, which represents a large, unrecognized northern California tribe facing all of these issues and working to implement traditional management on 1200 acres of national forest land. The Maidu Cultural and Development Group is also establishing networks with other tribes working towards similar goals.

The Pacific West Community Forestry Center also facilitated participation of associates in agency efforts to implement environmental justice. The Environmental Protection Agency, CALFED, and the Office of Planning and Research were three of the entities that held forums and meetings to gather information on environmental injustice from constituencies. Center associates brought the concerns of rural groups to the table.

CALFED is the consortium of federal and state agencies working to improve the environmental health of the Bay-Delta ecosystem, which provides drinking water to 20 million urban Californians, serves as a backbone of the inland and coastal fishing industry, and provides agricultural water for much of the $8 billion California agricultural economy. CALFED has been criticized for its lack of attention to the concerns of the states rural areas where the water originates. In addition, unrecognized and recognized tribes question the legality of agency ownership at all, since treaties were never established with the aboriginal inhabitants. Land was simply seized and privatized, whether privatization meant becoming agency land, public land, or individually owned property. Where have the tribes been in the CALFED project? asked Leslie Lohse of the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians. Many state agencies haven't interacted with tribes and need to do outreach to tribes, and the federal trustees for Indian tribes (BIA, etc.) need to be at the table. Even recognized tribes must struggle to keep agencies cognizant of the importance of the required government-to-government relationship, not to mention the work of unrecognized tribes to simply establish their place at the table.

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D. Empowerment

Both rural and urban groups bearing environmental burdens or feeling the consequences of discriminatory policies are often disempowered, dispersed, or marginalized. A statement by Southwest Organizing Project staff warns:

Companies prey on low income people and people of color. They look to cite their facilities where they figure they will encounter the least amount of resistance. Working class communities of color often lack the infrastructure, organization, and resources to participate in permit hearing requiring technical experts and attorneys.

In the experience of the Pacific West Community Forestry Center, this was true for mushroom harvesters in that the Forest Service was able to schedule timber harvests in prime harvesting areas because the group was not organized enough to provide comment and resist. Help from partner organizations and capacity building among harvesters disproved this misconception.

As such, empowerment of communities, groups, and populations is a key element of the environmental justice movement. Constituencies must believe in the righteousness of their cause, in their ability to affect change, and in the possibility of building alliances with other communities and with networks and organizations like the Pacific West Community Forestry Center, the Southwest Organizing Project, or the Indigenous Environmental Network. In order for environmental injustices to be eliminated, groups need to be empowered to advocate for systemic changes, and provide proactive alternatives. In The Crisis of Color and Democracy, Manning Marable offers the following definition of empowerment:

Empowerment is essentially a capacity to define clearly ones interests, and to develop a strategy to achieve those interests. Its the ability to create a plan or program to change ones reality in order to obtain those objectives or interests. Power is not a thing, its a process. In other words, you shouldn't say that a group has power, but that, through its conscious activity, a group can empower itself by increasing its ability to achieve its own interests.

Internationally, communities are becoming empowered and building the internal capacity to maintain their livelihoods. People are organizing themselves all across the nation. They are standing up, fighting back and getting better at it every day, wrote Southwest Organizing Project staff.

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