Environment
New Reports Describe the “Green-Washing” of Nativist Hate
originally posted by Walter Ewing for Immigration Impact [click here]
Jul 28th
In a new report, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes the rejuvenated efforts of anti-immigrant groups to repackage themselves as environmentalists who are trying to save the United States from the supposed ecological ills of “over-population.” According to the report, entitled Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism & the Hypocrisy of Hate, the two-faced nature of these efforts is “astounding” given the dismal environmental records of the organizations and political candidates to whom nativist groups tend to contribute funds. Moreover, this “green-washing” of the nativist agenda also amounts to a white-washing of the anti-immigrant movement’s white-nationalist roots.
As the SPLC report describes:
In the last few years, right-wing groups have paid to run expensive advertisements in liberal publications that explicitly call on environmentalists and other ‘progressives’ to join their anti-immigration cause. They’ve created an organization called Progressives for Immigration Reform that purports to represent liberals who believe immigration must be radically curtailed in order to preserve the American environment. They’ve constructed websites accusing immigrants of being responsible for urban sprawl, traffic congestion, overconsumption and a host of other environmental evils.
Yet these sorts of arguments, the SPLC report notes, “have in the last 15 years been
rejected by the mainstream of the environmental movement as far too simplistic … most conservationists have come to believe that many of the world’s most intractable environmental problems, including global warming, can only be solved by dealing with them on a worldwide, not a nation-by-nation, basis.” Furthermore, the anti-immigrant groups engaged in the green-washing of their ideologies belong to the national network created by John Tanton, who has long been “far more concerned with the impact of Latino and other non-white immigration on a ‘European-American’ culture than on conservation.”
The SPLC report echoes the findings of another recent report from the Center for New Community (CNC), which explores “how anti-immigrant forces have corrupted the dialogue on population and the environment.” In that report, Apply the Brakes: A Report on Anti-immigrant Co-optation and the Environmental Movement, CNC points out that “anti-immigrant activists belonging to the neo-Malthusian tradition claim that populations are constrained by the carrying capacity of the environment, and that population growth causes environmental degradation.” Within this narrow and inaccurate worldview, “people become pollutants, with all the racial overtones of such a social construction.”
Both the SPLC and CNC reports lay bear the ugly historical roots and flawed intellectual underpinnings of these faux environmentalists. The environmental rhetoric being spouted by anti-immigrant activists is nothing more than window dressing designed to lend a green tinge to an anti-immigrant ideology. As the SPLC report points out, “the greenwashers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, right-wing nativists who are doing their best to seduce the mainstream environmental movement in a bid for legitimacy and more followers.” This is a siren’s call that serious environmentalists should resist.
Photo by mugley.
BP Cleanup Worker Health Issues Add Up, And So Do Claims
originally posted by Julianne Hing for RaceWire [click here]
Jun 10th
Underwater efforts to cap the oil leak have been partially successful, but up on the water’s surface, the cleanup effort is being hampered by the many health issues cleanup workers have been dealing with. On top of that, temperatures in the Gulf Coast hit 110 degrees yesterday, prompting fireboats to start spraying water on the oil-slicked surface to combat the toxic fumes that the combined oil and chemical dispersants have created.
There are at least 24,400 people working on the oil disaster response, and ProPublica reports that so far 50 cleanup workers in Louisana have become ill. In Alabama, there have been 15 reported cases of illness.
But people don’t have much faith in BP’s ability to keep workers safe from here on out. Not only has the company threatened to fire cleanup workers who bring their own safety equipment, but lax government regulations mean the company is not required to provide respirators to workers or implement other measures that would ensure the safety of workers.
McClatchy reported that the government doesn’t specify levels at which workers can get sick from exposure to many of the toxins that they are being exposed to and BP is not responsible for evacuating workers or otherwise ensuring the safety of people who do cleanup work. One million gallons of dispersants have been used so far in the cleanup.
Meanwhile, the list of people seeking damages and promised claims from BP continues to grow. BP’s hired 700 insurance folks and claims adjustors, Dan Willis, BP America’s Vice President of Resources, said on Capitol Hill. Fishermen can file claims—captains are allowed $5,000 and deck hands make somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000, and once paperwork clears people who’ve lost wages because of the spill are eligible for more from the company. So far the company’s paid out 18,000 claims and predicted it will spend $84 million on claims through just June.
According to a federal filing made by BP today, the current cost of its response to the oil spill stands at $1.43 billion.
Photo: Getty Images/Win McNamee
In Oil Spill, Bayou Tribes Confront Yet Another Invasion
originally posted by Michelle Chen for RaceWire [click here]
Jun 9th
How many invasions can a community take? The Indians of Pointe-au-Chien in Southern Louisiana have endured centuries of colonization and exploitation–under the French, the Americans, and now, the oil industry. But the tiny Pointe-au-Chien community, which is cut off from critical disaster relief resources due to a lack of federal tribal recognition, has never seen a combination of human and natural catastrophe quite like the BP oil spill.
The Washington Post reports on local efforts to put the disaster in historical perspective:
“I would say it’s probably the worst thing” in the tribe’s history, said chief Verdin. He meant because the oil has shut down the fishing grounds, which had sustained the tribe for decades. “It’s shutting down our way of life. . . . Even during the Depression, during hard times, you grow your garden, you fish. You still eat.”
For members of the Pointe-au-Chien tribe, the question now is whether to take a temporary job laying boom in the marsh for BP’s cleanup contractors. The chief had urged even bitter tribe members to do it.
Not because he thinks the boom works: In fact, the oil seems to be sneaking underneath it. But because he thinks BP’s generosity will eventually run out.
“Whatever you can get, get it now,” the chief said.
The sense of hopelessness is surely deepened by the community’s economic dependency on the faceless corporation that caused the disaster. Reflection will come later; right now, people are just desperate to cobble together whatever help comes their way before the well runs dry.
If the federal government recognized the cultural and economic sovereignty of indigenous peoples, tribes might be able to weather environmental disasters by demanding that compensation take into account the weight of historical injustices. Currently, the Pointe-au-Chien Indians are at the mercy of a multinational company that seems more focused on limiting its liability than compensating victims.
The oil and gas industry has been encroaching on the Bayou habitat for decades now, and the tribes that inhabit the area, including the Houma and the Chitimacha, are oddly accustomed to living in the midst of perpetual crisis. But the fatalistic tone of one Houma tribal member says a lot about how this disaster might be the last they’ll ever face. Jamie Dardar, a crabber of Houma descent told the Miami Herald:
“The oil has locked us in… Everyone is on top of each other now and you can’t even drive a boat through there for all the traps.
“But it’s only a matter of time before they shut it completely down. It’s only a matter of time. This oil is just going to finish us.”
On Democracy Now!, Rosina Philippe of the Atakapa-Ishak community remained determined to hold onto their traditions, in part because the alternative was simply unimaginable:
We’re going to fight to stay here, because this is more than just our place, you know, like on a map, like a geographical location. This is our place in the universe. This is where we belong. This where we connect with nature. We’re part of this natural cycle. And if we weren’t here, we wouldn’t be who we are.
The plight of the indigenous communities magnifies the historical continuity between colonization and energy exploitation. Their identity is rooted in their sheer survival of one existential threat after another. But today, even they don’t know how this chapter of their story will end.
Texas Settlement Could Be Blueprint for Disaster Recovery
originally posted by Michelle Chen for RaceWire [click here]
Jun 8th
While the government struggles to confront the mounting catastrophe on the Gulf Coast, a legal settlement in Texas is set to put hundreds of millions in long overdue relief funds into the hands of disaster victims.
Since the 2008 hurricane season, some of the most vulnerable communities, who suffered displacement and other damage, have been short-changed by the Texas government’s recovery plan. The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and Texas-based partner groups announced on Monday that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has approved an agreement with the state that would “assure that federal disaster recovery funds expended in Texas will protect and benefit people with low incomes, African Americans and Latinos as well as elder and disabled populations.”
The groups originally complained that Texas had failed to deliver adequate aid to poorer households and people of color impacted by Hurricane Ike, neglecting their needs for affordable housing and protection from housing discrimination—a pattern bearing an eerie resemblance to the post-hurricane housing crises still afflicting New Orleans.
In Texas, someone has apparently gotten the message. The new recovery plan, according to NLIHC’s announcement, provides about $417 million to be invested in housing for low- and moderate-income survivors. Another $300 million in aid will go to “some of the hardest hit regions in the state whose housing needs were not addressed in Texas’s original disaster action plan.” Another feature of the new plan is a housing voucher initiative, known as “move to opportunity,” which will enable survivor families to secure affordable housing in other communities within the state that have better job prospects and stronger schools.
According to the Houston Chronicle, “The state did not acknowledge any discrimination,” but agreed to reallocate funds in response to the groups’ complaint.
The settlement could serve as a roadmap for advocates pushing for policy changes in the response to other disasters.
Advocates from across the Gulf Coast want HUD to extend its commitment evidenced in this historic victory in Texas to states affected by Hurricane Katrina by ensuring federal housing dollars are not diverted to unnecessary or discriminatory projects that will not benefit the most vulnerable populations. Advocates urge HUD to seek equitable resolution of cases pending in Louisiana and Mississippi in ways that similarly benefit families with low and moderate incomes and people of color.
But just when it seems like racial and economic justice activists are finally making headway in their pursuit of accountability in the government’s disaster response, a new crisis hits. The horrors of the Gulf Coast oil spill are just starting to surface, and the human toll will surely deepen as more communities and workers are exposed to toxic hazards and cut off from their economic lifeblood. And many are still reeling from Katrina’s fury, not to mention the economic collapse.
Both the impact and the recovery effort for the spill are likely to drag on for years longer than they did for recent hurricanes. These are uncharted waters for state and federal authorities, but if they’ve learned anything from their experiences in the Gulf Coast, they’ll make sure the survivors of BP’s nightmare are spared the devastating wait that communities endured in the wake of past storms.
Image: Frank Franklin II / AP
BREAKING: Feds Target Oil Spill Workers in Immigration Probe
Jun 4th
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have been targeting BP’s job sites in Louisiana in a hunt for undocumented workers who are risking their lives to clean up the disastrous oil spill. El Diario/La Prensa and Feet in 2 Worlds, a public radio investigative journalism project, broke the shocking story today. ICE spokesperson Temple H. Black confirmed the report (via Erin Polgreen):
ICE, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, visited two command centers, one in Venice and the other in Hopedale, twice in May. ICE agents arrived at the staging areas without prior notice, rounded up workers, and asked for documentation of their legal status, according to Black.
The command centers, located in the marshes a few hours east of New Orleans, are among the largest, with hundreds of workers employed at each site.
“We don’t normally go and check people’s papers—we’re mostly focused on transnational gangs, predators, drugs. This was a special circumstance because of the oil spill,” said Black.
[snip]
There were no arrests at either site, according to the ICE spokesman. But he said if undocumented workers had been discovered, they “would have been detained on the spot and taken to Orleans Parish Prison.”
Workers report that federal officials showed up in unmarked cars and out of uniform. Black insisted, “These weren’t raids—they were investigations.”
They certainly weren’t investigations into worker safety, though. As ColorLines’ Julianne Hing reported Tuesday, BP has not only failed to provide proper training and haz-mat gear for workers braving its toxic stew; it has also threatened to fire workers who use their own protective gear, provided by the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.
But if ICE spokesperson Black is to be believed, federal oversight is more concerned with scapegoating immigrant workers for the region’s downward-spiralling economy. El Dairo/La Prensa and Feet in 2 Worlds report:
“We visited just to ensure that people who are legally here can compete for those jobs—those people who are having so many problems,” said Temple H. Black, a spokesman for ICE in Louisiana.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thousands of Hispanic workers, many of them undocumented, flocked to the region to help in the reconstruction of Louisiana’s coastal towns. Many stayed, building communities on the outskirts of New Orleans or finding employment outside the city in oil refineries and in the fishing industry.
These Hispanic workers have been accused of taking away jobs from longtime Louisiana residents, and the tension has grown as fishing and tourism jobs dry up, leaving idle workers to compete for jobs on the oil spill clean-up effort.
We’ll have more on this story next week.
Photo: Reuters/Sean Gardner
Conflating Immigration and Climate Change: When Wedge Issues Collide
originally posted by Wendy Sefsaf for Immigration Impact [click here]
Jun 2nd
Today in Politico, hard right, conservative Gary Bauer continues the restrictionist tradition of blaming immigrants for everything from pot holes to climate change. In his editorial, Bauer cites a 2008 report by the restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies and seeks to link climate change legislation and immigration reform legislation (and a half dozen other ideas for which he advocates) to make the wholly unclear point the immigrants are once again to blame for our environmental problems.
Bauer cites a 2008 CIS report which identified immigrants as the cause of global warming:
Immigrants would ultimately produce less CO2 if they just remained in their “less-consuming, less-industrialized, and less CO2 emitting” home countries.
Bauer then goes on to write:
As a conservative, I maintain a healthy skepticism of the theory of man-made global warming. I also believe that more people enjoying the fruits of modernity and economic development is a good thing — as long as those people arrived legally and obey the law.
In other words, he doesn’t believe in global warming, but we should stop immigration because immigrants are a huge contributor to the factors that cause it. Besides being a ridiculous argument, Bauer seems to contradict himself—wouldn’t immigrants still be the cause of global warming even if they came here legally?
As the IPC previously stated:
When it comes to the environment, immigrants are not the problem—the US lifestyle , our systems of production and consumption and the policies that shape them are. We need real, rational solutions and leadership on environmental issues, not scapegoats. CIS assumes that we are in a lifeboat with limited resources , and with too many people, we’ll all sink. Yet when it comes to the global warming crisis , we’ll all sink or swim together.
The number of strange correlations Bauer attempts to draw in this piece is confounding. One thing, however, is clear: Bauer and CIS’s intent isn’t environmentalism. They’re only politicizing and exploiting the issue—and highlighting shoddy research—in order to continue a crusade to tar immigrants (and liberals).
The only thing Bauer and his friends at CIS are doing when it comes to these two critical issues is attempting to distract attention from the real solutions to immigration and the global warming crisis. We do need a better, more regulated approach to immigration and the environment, but wishing away immigrants and blaming them for climate change does nothing to that end.
Photo by \<.
BP Threatens to Fire Cleanup Workers Who Use Their Own Safety Gear
Jun 2nd
Contract workers from BP load absorbent booms onto a boat before departing from a staging area to clean up oil impacted marshes June 1, 2010 near Venice, Louisiana. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Fishermen who’ve been hired to do cleanup and containment work in BP’s Gulf Coast oil spill have been told they would be fired for using their own respirators or safety equipment that wasn’t provided by BP, reported Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a Louisana-based environmental group.
“It appears that, despite the obvious potential for exposure to respiratory toxins, BP does not consider respiratory protection necessary equipment,” said Paul Orr, Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper in LEAN’s statement. “And even so to prevent the fishermen from using their own respiratory protection if they chose to do so is deeply troubling.”
This news comes on the heels of reports last week that ten cleanup workers had to be hospitalized after reporting dizziness, nausea and difficulty breathing. The news prompted the Coast Guard to demand 125 commercial fishing boats participating in containment work to return to shore.
Hundreds of fishermen, already risking their own health and using their own boats to help ferry materials and place containment booms to stem the oil’s spread, had won a restraining order earlier in May against BP ordering the company to provide proper haz-mat training and safety gear to workers when it was clear that workers were not receiving either. LEAN had since been providing Tyvek suits, face respirators, nitrile gloves and booties to workers.
Both the crude oil gushing out of the underwater leak and chemical dispersants being sprayed on the surface of the water are highly toxic. Crude oil contains volatile compounds like benzene, toluene and xylene that cause respiratory illness, nausea and dizziness, all symptoms that workers reported. The chemical dispersants cause similar symptoms. Over the long term, exposure to these chemicals has been shown to lead to brain damage and leukemia.
Obama: BP Does What We Say, & You Can Hit the Local Beaches
May 27th
President Obama said today that BP is responsible for what’s estimated to be the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but the federal government is telling the company how to fix the situation. It’s the feds who approved the so-called “Top Kill” approach yesterday that engineers now say is working to stop the oil spill that began April 20 and has killed 11 workers.
Why work with BP at all? Obama said the very folks who created the problem have the technology and expertise to fix it and the government doesn’t.
In one of those politicians-say-the-most-obvious-things moments, Obama acknowledged the special place oil corporations have in DC: “The oil industry’s cozy and sometimes corrupt relationship with government regulators meant little or no regulation at all.” He said he’ll separate the folks who give oil companies permits from those who oversee the industry’s safety issues. The top oil regulator Elizabeth Birnbaum already got the ax.
Obama’s hitting pause on exploratory deep-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico for the next six months and also in Alaska, where Shell is arguing (we’re not kidding) that they should be ok’d for drilling because they’re going in shallow waters.
As a friendly business service reminder, Obama said all but three beaches in the Gulf Coast are open for tourists and their dolares. But we’ll recommend you check out Julianne Ong Hing’s report on what the Vietnamese families are experiencing in the area and put your money with the community groups making a difference on the ground.
It’s Official: We’re Desperate for a BP Oil Spill Solution, Suggestion Box Opens
May 26th
Today BP started to work on the “top kill procedure,” another attempt from a myriad of failed tactics to try to stop the oil leak in the Gulf coast. But after so many tries, people are beginning to lose faith in BP and are starting to come up with their own ideas, and are even asking Bill Nye The Science Guy for a solution.
YouTube and PBS’s Newshour have partnered up to open a “suggestion box” and are accepting video and text responses from the general public on how to stop the spill.
Among the solutions submitted via YouTube? A giant ShamWow towel.
Times are desperate.
Gulf Coast Fishermen Face Maze of Barriers to Jobs, Pay After BP Oil Spill
May 21st
Channak Khath, (R),who’s husband is a shrimp fisherman, holds her children while filling out forms to receive a $100 food voucher on May 20, 2010 in Port Sulphur, Louisiana. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
It’s now been a full month since the offshore Deepwater oil rig exploded in the Gulf Coast, killing eleven workers and setting off the oil spill that’s still yet to be fully contained. Over the weekend, BP congratulated itself for successfully setting up an insertion tube to take crude oil gushing from the leaks and funnel it away from the water.
And yesterday, the oil, seeping out of the underwater leaks at a rate of 5,000 barrels a day had reportedly reached the coastal Louisiana wetlands. But for the people who live on the coast and make their living on the water in the fishing industry, the recovery period is only just beginning. According to local groups, Vietnamese American fishermen are feeling the impact particularly hard.
BP, which has admitted responsibility for the oil spill and is partially funding local cleanup efforts, has instituted a program called the Vessels of Opportunity Program for out-of-work fishermen to take part in the cleanup efforts. Pay is based on boat size, and contingent on a person’s getting properly trained to head out in the water. Most of the work thus far has been to ferry materials to and from shore and assist with placing the containment booms, the plastic shields meant to stem the spread of the oil.
But Vietnamese fishermen were locked out of those initial outreach efforts, said Trinh Le, an organizer with the Hope Community Development Agency in Biloxi, Mississippi. After fishermen sign up on a database–”more like a waitlist,” Le said–they sit through a compressed four-hour training. And at the end, they are made to sign worker contracts if they want to be hired to work. Contracts that, until local groups took BP to court, forced fishermen to assume all liability for any personal injuries or damages their own equipment sustained while they were working on BP’s oil spill cleanup.
“Everyone’s being warned not to sign anything without legal counsel present,” said Le. “But there’s a lack of affordable or trustworthy legal advice available. They’ve been thrown into a legal world that they don’t understand.” And many people’s basic rights and entire livelihoods are at stake.
According to John Nguyen, the Environmental Justice Coordinator with the Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans, 16,000 people had signed up and been approved to be take part in the VOP, but only 680 vessels had been deployed. And since the trainings were done entirely in English in the beginning, many local Vietnamese fishermen were unable to take part.
People who do not take part in the VOP can also file a claim with BP, but BP pays different rates based on people’s job titles. According to Le, BP is paying boat captains a flat $5,000 fee, and deck hands around $2,500. But BP forces deck hands to show papers that prove their employment, and many deck hands don’t have access to their employers’ licenses. Those who cannot produce paperwork do not get paid.
Le said there was no corner of the local fishing community that had not been hit. The shrimping, crabbing and fishing is done primarily by men, but women work in the seafood processing facilities. And that industry has been halted by the oil spill, perhaps indefinitely.
Entire families are out of work, desperate for information, and looking for answers. The fishing season, which lasts about seven months, was just kicking off before the spill. Nguyen said families were just coming out of a slow season, getting ready for the beginning of the fishing season when people make the bulk of their yearly income.
The situation has reached a frenzied state. Last week Congressman Joseph Cao dispatched a staff member to the Gulf Coast to help coordinate fishermen and serve as a liasion between the community, BP and government officials. Cao announced earlier this week he was extending the deadline on repayment for small business loans for businesses that had been affected by the oil spill.
But according to Le, the BP oil spill is forcing everyone in the Gulf Coast to re-evaulate long term solutions, now that the fishing industry has been hurt so badly.