Environmental Justice Fellows pause during South L.A. field reporting.	Julio Cesar Ortiz, right, describes Boyle Heights to two other Fellows.

Journalists ‘Falling Down on the Job,’ Environmental Justice Speakers Say

By Victor Merina

The topic was the environment.  The focus was on health risks.  And the conclusions were provocative:

Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are burdened by a disproportionate amount of industrial pollution and public health problems, yet are often voiceless in the political tug-of-war over environmental impacts.

And a media that has focused their reporting on dollar signs more than health concerns are “falling down on the job” when it comes to investigating the impact of air pollution, toxic waste and other environmental problems that threaten public health.

Those viewpoints were among the opinions and challenges from speakers at an ethnic media fellowship conference in Los Angeles sponsored by the Institute for Justice and Journalism (IJJ).  The seven-day workshop – titled “Urban Environmental Justice: Reporting the Full Story” – opened April 30 with a forum at USC.

The fellowship program is supported by a grant from the McCormick Foundation.

During a panel discussion on how economics and public health can collide and coexist in environmental policy, some speakers made it clear that any coexistence is fragile.
 
The political will to take meaningful action is lacking, said Jane Williams, the executive director of California Communities Against Toxics. Her group represents 70 local organizations working to curb pollution in their regions.

“I believe very much that we are going to have to see a complete retooling of the way in which we get from place to place and the way we use and produce energy.  It is going to be a matter of necessity,” she said.

Williams said 24,000 people a year in California are dying because of air pollution with a majority of those deaths in the Los Angeles area.

“Think about it,” she said.  “We kill more people with air pollution just from particulate matter than we do with cars and homicides.  And is the press talking about that?  No.”

S. David Freeman, the president of the Los Angeles Harbor Commission and a newly appointed deputy mayor, was equally blunt.  He lamented the lack of urgency in dealing with environmental dangers and blamed the media for some of that complacency.

“Frankly we’re in a fight for our lives in this civilization and I just want to say this to the press: You are falling down on the job,” he said.  “You are writing down the press releases handed down by our utility brethren and oil and gas companies.”

Journalists are reporting about global warming but not connecting those stories and writing about what oil companies, gas companies, car companies and the Legislature are doing to contribute to the problems, Freeman added.  Journalists also are too wrapped up in assessing the price tag for pollution controls while overlooking the more important cost to public health.

“Give me a break,” he told his audience.  “If you’re eating poison and the doctor prescribes a different kind of food, the first question is not ‘how much does it cost?’ but ‘where the hell can I buy it?’”

The IJJ fellowship conference featured an array of speakers, including scholars, researchers, government officials, community activists and journalists. The program was developed by Institute staff and IJJ Senior Fellow Janet Wilson with the assistance of Andrea Hricko, associate professor of preventive medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. (Click for full schedule and speakers.)

The conference included a short history of environmental justice, presented by Eileen McGurty, associate chair for Environmental Sciences and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. She spoke about the link, in many cases, between the health impacts of environmental hazards and communities of color or poor neighborhoods.  Those communities are often the venues of hazardous sites and their residents more likely the victims of poor air quality, contaminated water and toxic wastes.

“The environment isn’t isolated from the social context of the situation,” said McGurty, author of the book “Transforming Environmentalism:  Warren County, PCBs and the Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement.”  

Her book focuses on African American residents of a North Carolina county who resisted state efforts to build a local landfill that would be filled with the toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.  The years-long protest took place three decades ago, but McGurty said there are more recent examples that have fueled the environmental justice movement.  She cited pollution from oil refineries in Richmond, Calif., that have affected a largely African American community nearby and the lack of a “tree canopy” in a largely black Baltimore neighborhood that has worsened the air quality in that community.

“Environmental problems are not just environmental problems,” she added.  “They actually can and do make social and economic ills worse.”

It took time for some civil rights groups and mainstream environmental groups to coalesce regarding environmental justice, McGurty said, with some fearing that it would detract from civil rights issues and others seeking a broader vista for environmental issues.

But solving environmental problems must be addressed in concert with alleviating poverty and oppression, McGurty said.  “We can’t separate the problem; therefore, we can’t separate the solution.”

Manuel Pastor, a USC professor and director of the university’s Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, echoed some of those same themes. 

Pastor’s group joined with researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in examining industrial air pollution data in a number of communities across the country.  In a newly published report, they found that “as with so many other environmental hazards, it turns out that the problems are disproportionately borne by low-income communities of color.”

The extent of racial, ethnic and class-related disparities in environmental quality varies across the country, Pastor said, but the overall impact is largely the same.

“Issues that are going on around environmental inequality in the United States are very serious and very real,” he told the conference audience.  “[They are] particularly acute in the urban landscape, although there are serious impacts for indigenous rural communities as well.”

How to report on those disparities was among workshop topics. Wilson, IJJ’s Senior Fellow for Environmental Justice, and other journalists discussed the challenges of covering complex environmental stories during a time when newspapers and other news media are slashing the size of their editorial staffs.

The nine Fellows taking part in the conference all work for ethnic media organizations or regularly cover ethnic communities or issues of racial justice. The goal of the fellowships is to contribute to the professional development of participating journalists and to improve the coverage of urban environmental justice. The nine journalists will publish or broadcast stories that focus on environmental health issues in communities of color or low-income neighborhoods.

The Fellows are:

• Edwin Buggage, editor-in-chief of The New Orleans Data News Weekly
• Lori Edmo-Suppah, editor of the Sho-Ban News in Fort Hall, Idaho
• Nadra Kareem, who writes for newspapers, including the L.A. Watts Times, and Web sites
• Kari Lydersen, an environmental and science writer based in Chicago
• Brentin Mock, a staff writer for The American Prospect magazine
• Julio César Ortiz, a news reporter at Univision’s KMEX television in Los Angeles
• Devin Robins, senior producer of “The Michael Eric Dyson Show" on public radio
• Huáscar Robles, a reporter for Metro San Juan magazine in Puerto Rico
• Talia Whyte, a freelance journalist and blogger, who writes for the Bay State Banner and other outlets.

The journalists and some of their editors spent two days touring neighborhoods in Southern Los Angeles County, where residents endure some of the region’s poorest air quality or live near hazardous waste facilities. The group also visited the Port of Long Beach as well as impacted schools in southern and eastern Los Angeles.

The program’s second part will take place July 25-30 in Chicago, with invited Chicago journalists joining the ethnic media Fellows. Some of the sessions will be conducted at Columbia College Chicago.

By improving the quality of news coverage about social justice issues, IJJ is also working to alert and inform the public and policymakers about vital local and national topics, said IJJ Director Steve Montiel. Created with Ford Foundation funding, IJJ was established at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2000 to strengthen journalism about issues involving justice and injustice. This summer the institute is leaving USC and continuing operations from Oakland, Calif., as an independent 501(c)(3) public charity.

The McCormick Foundation is committed to strengthening the nation’s free, democratic society by investing in children, communities and country. In 2008, the Chicago-based foundation funded IJJ fellowships on immigration for ethnic media journalists.

 Victor Merina, the author of this piece, is an IJJ Senior Fellow.