The Greening of Asian Pacific America (Feature) First and Only APA Congresswoman Dies (in National News) APAs Struggle To Fit Into the Landscape of Progressive Politics (in Bay Area News) Fashion and Compassion (in Business) The Ultimate Sports Fan (in Sports) Out of Hiding (in A&E) Emil Amok: Un-American Airports (in Opinion)

APEN's Laotian Organizing Project participates in a multiracial protest summit on dioxin in 2000. Photo courtesy of APEN.

The Greening of Asian Pacific America

The clouds of putrid black smoke rising above Richmond, Calif., in March 1999 were reminiscent to Laotian refugees of the clouds of war in their native Laos.

But the frightening billows were from a closer and ostensibly more preventable danger — a fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery. Contra Costa County’s emergency warning system telephoned all nearby residents, as it was supposed to in the event of such an incident, though the calls were 20 minutes late.

But the calls did not do much good for the over 10,000 Laotian residents in the area. Over half of this community of refugees from the Vietnam War do not speak English. Because of the explosion, hundreds of people were admitted to hospitals with respiratory problems.

Organizers with the Laotian Organizing Project (LOP), part of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), used the incident to build community involvement and political pressure for changes to benefit Laotians and other immigrant communities in the area. After meetings with the county’s Department of Health Services, the county agreed to offer translated warnings to the Laotian community and educational outreach programs to explain the dangers in the community.

Though the full system has still not yet been implemented, the county’s concessions were a major victory for LOP and APEN. Ensuring people’s basic health, safety and community sustainability was a primary concern. The Richmond emergency warning system is necessary because of the over 350 industrial facilities — including waste incinerators, oil refineries and pesticide, fertilizer and chemical manufacturers — in the area.

The Richmond victory is just one example of how Asian Pacific Americans are changing the face of the environmental justice movement. “Environmental justice” (EJ) is a term coined in the mid- ‘80s, which energized battles around toxic waste dumping and other issues. The movement developed from people working in a number of different movements, including civil rights, indigenous rights, social and economic justice, toxics and hazardous waste and occupational health and safety.

Today, APAs are on the front lines of the movement across the nation, especially with environmental racism targeting immigrant communities. Working both in APA communities and in communities of color, environmental justice activists are making clear that saving the earth has a lot more to do with organizing around racial and class lines than just conservation strategies and catchy bumper stickers.

Breathe This

The environmental justice movement’s expansion into areas not previously recognized as environmental — i.e., things which are not literally green, furry or leafy — has transformed the movement beyond toxic waste to virtually every major aspect of the lives of immigrants and other low income people and people of color.

Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE) in Boston has been active in local transportation issues, to ensure that subways and buses are safe and reliable for citizens.

“People were concerned about high rates of asthma in some neighborhoods and made the connection to air pollution and diesel public transit buses,” said Penn Loh, ACE’s executive director. “We began to say we need to have input in the decision of what types of buses [they] buy.”

Working with larger organizations, ACE was able to force the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to purchase natural gas-fueled buses. ACE has also organized a transit riders union of people who ride the T subway in Boston to lobby for better services and more resources for public transit.

Top: Members of the LOP and APEN celebrate the establishment of a multilingual telephone warning system in Richmond in front of the Contra Costa County office in 2001. Above: Members of the LOP in front of one of the approximately 350 industrial sites in Richmond, Calif. Photos courtesy of APEN.

“East Harlem has the highest childhood asthma hospitalization rate in the five boroughs,” said Prakash. “We think diesel exhaust plays some role [in that]. But regardless of the magnitude, we feel it’s preventable.”

The most polluted areas are often in urban poor and people of color neighborhoods, says Prakash. WE-ACT has filed a civil rights complaint with the federal Department of Transportation, alleging that the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority is discriminating against local residents on the basis of race. Six of the eight bus depots in Manhattan are housed in the largely black and Latino upper Manhattan area.

This pollution of immigrant or people of color areas is not restricted to the air.

When she found out that fish in the San Pablo Reservoir have high levels of mercury, Grace Kong was shocked.

Kong, of LOP, knew that many Laotian refugee families in the Richmond area fish as part of their regular diet, due to their low-income levels and their history of farming in Laos.

“A lot of families were involved in subsistence fishing in Bay Area waters for food and didn’t know it was polluted,” said Kong. So Kong and the LOP organized to educate the Laotian community on the dangers of the polluted fish.

The Definitions of Environment

Another basic survival which environmental justice advocates have been working on is housing. Hyun Lee, director of the Chinatown Justice Project of CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in New York City, says that housing is a basic environmental issue.

“Housing is part of the environment where we live. The environmental conditions in these tenement buildings in Chinatown are atrocious,” she said. “Landlords never spend money to maintain these buildings. You can walk in and see them rotting out, chipped paint, roaches.”

Lee believes it is important to define housing organizing as environmental justice work because of residents and business groups she has encountered in Soho, which borders Chinatown. These groups use the rhetoric of improving “the environment” to try to remove Chinese residents and small businesses, she said.

“So many people are using the rhetoric of environmentalism to displace immigrant communities,” said Lee. “A lot of the pretext people recently used to displace [Chinese merchants] was for the ‘environment,’ saying the merchants were creating garbage and congestion and destroying quality of life.”

Gordon Mar, director of the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) in San Francisco, who also works on housing issues as an environmental justice issue in recent years emphasized that, “The environmental justice movement was important to connect with because it has been one of the most vital movements in the last decade in this country.”

Left to right: Swati Prakash, environmental health director at West Harlem Environmental Action; Penn Loh is executive director of Alternatives for Community and Environment in Boston; and Ritu Primlani is executive director of Thimmakka in Oakland, Calif.

When the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in 1991, there were just a few APAs among the hundreds of attendees. Today, however, as the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, called “Summit 2,” approaches in late October, APAs have a much more visible presence in the environmental justice movement.

Penn Loh helped organize this year’s summit, which will be held in Washington, D.C. It will feature delegates from specific communities throughout the country, in a U.N.-style format — who will vote on a national environmental justice agenda.

“[We will] be revising the EJ principles and making real decisions about our strategies, from the local to the national level. This will set a tone for grassroots movements across the country,” said Loh. The question that summit attendees will try to answer, he says, is “How can we best coordinate to build power and affect power at the national level?”

The challenge will be bringing together the various interests of many local groups from across the country into a single platform and agenda.

“It’s actually a good challenge. It really focuses all of us to look at what our long term goals are,” said Joselito Laudencia, executive director of APEN who has also helped organize the summit. “Just because we come from different perspectives and movements, does that mean we’re fighting for different things? No.

“We all want to push this concept that everyone deserves the right to live in a clean, healthy, safe environment,” Laudencia said. “Everyone should have a decent, affordable quality of life. There are just different approaches we use.”

That such an ambitious plan for a national agenda could be attempted from disparate groups across the country shows how far the EJ movement has come since the 1980s.

“When you look at the EJ movement,” said Laudencia, “its strength is really that it comes from a diversity of movements and [trying] to integrate them.”

The growing strength of the EJ movement can also be seen in the Environmental Justice Fund, established in 1995 by six networks, including APEN, the Indigenous Environmental Network, Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. The Fund was created to help build existing EJ networks and fund emerging networks.

Often confused with wildlife conservation and other ecological environmental movements, environmental justice has a specific focus, which distinguishes it from these more well-known causes, say advocates.

“I would really characterize the mainstream environmental movement and the environmental justice movement as two separate movements,” said Laudencia. “The mainstream environmental movement focuses on open space, wildlife conservation and preservation, whereas the EJ movement has really looked at not only recognizing the role people play in the environment but also the role poverty and racism play.”

These differences make for tensions. One of the largest incidents came after the passage of Proposition 187 in California. In 1998 population control advocates in the Sierra Club organized a vote on whether the half-million member group should oppose immigration. The referendum was voted down, but it left environmental justice activists bitter with the larger environmental movement.

The other main difference between the two movements, noted Laudencia, is the focus on on-the-ground organizing in Environmental Justice work, as opposed to large environmental groups’ focus on public policy work in Washington, D.C.

“Grassroots leadership is the central piece,” he said. “There is space for policy change and litigation, but to really make change, the community needs to be at the forefront and leadership of this movement.”

Laudencia pointed to youth leadership and educational programs at APEN, ACE in Boston and CAAAV in New York City as examples of the importance of developing leaders in low-income communities.

Laudencia’s group runs a youth program, which he hopes will develop community leaders who will advocate for environmental justice. His group not only teaches skills, but also puts young people into action in real life campaigns like the early warning system in Richmond. It’s a model that has become common for communities, which have high immigrant populations and relatively little acclimation to the political systems in the United States.

In recent years, national environmental groups such as the Sierra Club have begun hiring organizers to work on local environmental justice issues. But many existing local organizers are often cautious to leap into any work with people “parachuting” in.

“There’s always wariness when they’re outsiders,” said Loh, who has worked with some regional and national groups, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, on climate change. “There’s so many people who come every day and say, ‘We’re going to save you.’ ”

But Loh doesn’t get involved with most large national groups “unless someone’s willing to build a relationship, not just for funding or convenience, but a long-term strategy that makes sense.”

Outsiders and Insiders

Prakash, like Loh, is an APA who works in a predominantly black and Latino community. Prakash must often represent the interests of Harlem residents at conferences and other meetings among environmental health experts.

At the same time, Prakash’s work focuses on developing local leaders in Harlem so that they can attend various events and represent the community themselves.

“Whenever I go anywhere I always say that this is the community I work in but by no means am I speaking for anybody,” she said. “At same time they say, ‘We want the Harlem voice on this.’ So for me there’s always a fine line. In a way I’m in two worlds simultaneously.”

Both Loh and Prakash attempt to be a “bridge” between communities they work with and government officials.

“I’d say one of the things that we as an environmental justice movement have, is a real commitment to building a multiracial movement,” said Loh, who works with residents of the predominantly black and Latino Roxbury area near Boston. “As an Asian it’s been interesting, because I’m not white but I’m also not black or Latino. There’s some ways for me to be a bridge builder and to strengthen a multicultural, multiracial voice.”

Reach Tomo Geron at tcgeron@yahoo.com.

For info on the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit that will be held Oct. 23-27 in Washington D.C. go to www.ejfund.org/summit/summit.html.