Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice
Corporations intentionally select communities with little political power to place their industrial facilities, knowing local residents will have little ability to challenge their extractive actions. Not coincidentally, this leads to a disproportionate negative impact on communities of color. In fact, studies show significant overlap between land previously occupied by enslaved Black workers and now taken over by industrial agriculture.
Groups like the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network and Rural Empowerment Association for Community Help organize Black residents of environmental justice communities to resist corporate agriculture in their state through citizen science and education, civic engagement, and legal action when necessary, as in the litigation against Smithfield Foods in North Carolina brought by Public Justice board member Mona Lisa Wallace. Learn more about the Principles of Environmental Justice.
In some cases, we see these issues in communities of color further exacerbated by delays or the outright refusal to remedy the same conditions in Black communities that get addressed in more affluent, predominantly white communities.
In Delaware, when one town was found to have contaminated drinking water, the Delaware National Guard was mobilized immediately to notify residents and ensure access to clean water.
Less than 20 miles away in Millsboro, DE, community members learned that the nearby Mountaire Farms chicken processing plant had been spraying highly contaminated waste on fields and failing to maintain safe water. Nitrites from industrial animal agriculture contamination can cause or exacerbate health issues, particularly in infants, causing community members to ask whether birth defects and other health problems could be related to Mountaire’s pollution.
It took several months of community organizing and the threat of a lawsuit to secure access to clean water and commitments from Mountaire.
The difference? Millsboro is an unincorporated community with no local political representation, and contains a large Black population living in poverty.
Climate Crisis
Industrial agriculture is the number one cause of water pollution and among the top drivers of climate change. In fact, food production today is responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
However, the government gives industrial agriculture a free pass to pollute. The same environmental regulations that protect communities from other industries’ climate pollution do not apply to agriculture. For example, when the Biden administration announced its plan to comply with the Global Methane Pledge’s goal of reducing methane pollution by 30% by 2030, it included oil, gas, and landfills. On the subject of agriculture, though, the White House failed to take serious action and instead called for the voluntary adoption of so-called ‘climate smart’ farm practices, like factory farm gas.
Instead of curtailing pollution at the source, the government wants to subsidize industry tech-fixes that only make the problem worse – for the climate and impacted communities alike. Factory farm gas traps methane emissions from animal manure to sell as energy, creating yet another revenue stream for factory farms. If you pay polluters for their pollution, they’re going to pollute more. In this way, factory farm gas encourages the expansion of factory farms, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and leaving low-income, rural, and Black and brown communities living beside factory farms to deal with more manure in their air and waterways.
Because industrial agriculture tends to place their extractive, polluting facilities in communities with less political power that often include residents of marginalized communities, industrial agriculture is both driving climate change as well as focusing its impacts in the most vulnerable communities.
