As Rev. Schulz’s words reminded us this morning, “Social and environmental justice is a religious obligation. The future is never fated.” We come together each week to commit ourselves to practices of justice and equity, because those practices are not merely intellectual ones, but emotional and spiritual ones as well. Walking the line of not ignoring the harm that is being done to our Earth, while also not despairing, is a hard thing to do. So often the temptation is to fall into one or the other. When we can bring ourselves to face the future of our planet with authenticity and courage, it usually feels easier to do that among one’s own people, among one’s existing community, alongside those who you already know agree with you about most of the reasons and methodology for doing this work. The idea of facing the inherent challenges of environmental justice while at the same time reaching beyond your in-group and meeting new collaborators, building new coalitions, can be even more intimidating. This combination definitely rises to being a varsity-level practice on the spectrum of justice-making efforts. Sometimes I get caught up in the despair, but sometimes I feel positive and powerful.
Some of you may know a young-adult Unitarian Universalist who lives in Atlanta, Amelia Shenstone. Amelia grew up in a UU congregation in Massachusetts and lived in New Orleans for a time as part of the post-Katrina rebuilding effort. Now she works for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, which is an organization my wife and I support as part of our practice of charitable giving. I had the privilege of leading an Earth Day service with Amelia at my previous congregation. In that service, she described the problem of toxic waste disposal that we are facing right now in Georgia. When we burn coal, it emits pollutants into the air like mercury, which makes its way up the food chain and can cause birth defects if one eats too much fish during pregnancy. Filtering out the mercury helps the air pollution situation, but then you are left with toxic crud accumulating on the equipment that filtered it out. Our response is then to wash that crud off of the equipment with water, and place the resulting toxic sludge in a holding lagoon, and wait for the toxic elements to settle to the bottom. Then we dump the water back into the river or wherever it came from, and are left with the toxic sludge. It’s a process that we have learned from decades of dealing with the toxic ash that is left behind from the burning of coal, ash that contains even more toxic elements than the sludge made of captured air pollutants. According to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy website, “In our region alone, we have over 118 billion gallons of toxic coal ash and wastewater in 450 impoundments, which can collapse and spill catastrophically; many are more slowly contaminating nearby groundwater and surface water.” The SACE and other organizations are working to clean up those ash pits, but the goal of putting the waste in dry landfills that are safely sealed off from the environment presents another important question: where should those landfills be? Where is “away” when we throw something away, store it away, and who lives there?
In the service that we led together, Amelia said:
“There is no imaginary away. ‘Away’ is very real, and it is more real for some groups of people than for others. Disposability harms all of us and I don’t want to minimize that. And it follows familiar patterns about whose life matters, and whose is treated as though it doesn’t.”
According to the NAACP’s “Just Energy Policies” report, “More African Americans live near coal fired power plants, nuclear power plants, or biomass …power plants than any other demographic group in the U.S. Over the past several decades, approximately 68% of African Americans live or have lived within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant. As a result, African Americans are more likely to suffer health problems from the pollution that these facilities produce.” The Office of Minority Health, an office of the Department of Health and Human Services, reports “An African-American child is three times as likely to go to the hospital, and twice as likely to die, from an asthma attack than a white American child.”
Think about that. We live in a country where you’re two to three times more likely to get sick from toxic waste based on the color of your skin. And it’s not just toxic waste that effects some worse than others.
An additional impact of environmental harm that we are seeing is extreme weather related to climate change. One need look no further than the hurricanes of the last year to see that this is another area where humans are inflicting unequal damage on different communities, in this case thanks to our colonialist mindset. America has done a decent and respectable job responding to the hurricanes that ravaged Texas in 2017, but Puerto Rico is still, this week, suffering the large-scale ill-effects of the hurricane damage, because it didn’t receive the same response. Puerto Ricans are US citizens, they were granted the right of citizenship in 1917. It may have been legitimate to note that it’s harder to do disaster relief on an island back in September, but here we are with island-wide power outages seven months later. There is no legitimate reason for their post-hurricane suffering to be so much more prolonged than that of Texas. Priyanka Arabindi noted this week that “In a just world, the botched response to Hurricane Maria would lead the news every night until things were fixed.” Just as our government has demonstrated it is more willing to accept damage to certain communities by its choice of where to locate toxic ash from coal plants, so are we demonstrating a willingness to accept greater harm to some hurricane-ravaged areas than others.
Social and environmental justice is a religious obligation. Environmental justice is not separate from social justice, but rather they intersect. They are intersectional. Any ethically acceptable response to the environmental issues facing us will acknowledge and repair the racial inequity of how environmental damage has been perpetrated up until this point. Will acknowledge that we are all in this together, and that treating harm to one community as more acceptable than harm to another is unjustifiable.
And when we are confronted with that reality, that we must not only come up with solutions to real and scary environmental dilemmas, but that we must also do so while avoiding and repairing the pitfalls of the inequitable solutions we have relied on for decades and centuries, it can seem overwhelming. We are greeted by a whole host of negative emotions, from guilt, shame, and defensiveness, to fear, anger, and hopelessness. If you are feeling any of those right now that is fair and normal and natural. No one who does this work well, none of the leaders that we want to follow in making a way forward here have ignored those feelings, but rather they have acknowledged them, and kept breathing, and found a way to overcome the impetus to inaction or panic that comes with them. That’s where spiritual practices and spiritual community come in, because we all need renewal, regeneration, reassurance in this work that it is worth doing, and that we are not alone in it. Learning those things once just doesn’t cut it, rather the emotional reality of being in the generations-long struggle for environmental and social justice is that a habit and a routine of spiritual reconnection is necessary for success.
And then, we have to find ways to go forth together and do what needs to be done. Too much navel-gazing isn’t helpful either. The world needs us to make actual differences, and we need the positive feelings of comradery and success to keep us going. If you come to the Earth Day fair today after the service, you’ll see some genuine opportunities to tap into positive actions we can take to build a more environmentally just and equitable world. We know that, other factors being equal, locally-grown food is better for the environment, and Truly Living Well is here today to share how you can get involved with their mission to “provide our community with a dependable, consistent source of fresh produce, much of which can be earmarked specifically for those who cannot afford to purchase it otherwise.” They will have information on their CSA, which is a healthy and delicious way to support that important work. We will have an array of other Earth Day fair participants here, including a fair-trade table with packets of ground coffee for sale, an RE and Youth table, a bioblitz table with microscope and pollinating insect specimens, a letter-writing table for those wanting to contact lawmakers and environmental groups, the family friendly eco-movie Rare showing, and the Northwest kitchen crew and Earth Ministry providing healthy, organic and locally sourced food for coffee time. A huge thank-you to everyone who is making that happen, especially Linda and Tom Couch who are the Ministry Team Leaders for our Earth Ministry. We couldn’t do this without you.
There will also be a table for the West Atlanta Watershed Alliance. Who here went took part in the bridge-building project with them yesterday? I will tell you as an interim, as someone coming in with fresh eyes, that kind of commitment that makes a measurable difference in one’s community while feeding the sense of purpose and satisfaction of those who undertake it is a truly special thing to be able to do, and not one that can be taken for granted by any means. Thank you, and keep up the great work!
We’re all in this together. And that can be daunting because it means we don’t have total control and we are affected by others’ actions. But it can also be a source of hope, knowing that those of us who see environmental and social justice as a religious obligation are joined in that commitment by some pretty fierce and persistent superstars. People like Amelia Shenstone. People like all of you. I am grateful to be in the struggle with you.
Peace, Salaam, Shalom, and may it be so.
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
April 22, 2018
© Rev. Jonathan Rogers