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Friends,
<P>In light of the recent discussion of environmentalism, I have attached
an article by Ed Mann which I thought was interesting.
<P>michael Yates</HTML>
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<TITLE>Beyond the Car:Eric Mann
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Lethal Air: Fighting for Public Health in Los Angeles<p>
by <a href="Mann_fn.html#fn0">Eric Mann</a>
<p>
<i></i>The idea of an auto-free cities movement has positive and negative
aspects to it. The positive is just trying to make a bold statement, and I
believe in boldness in terms of organizing. It's trying to say that the auto is
a real threat to public health, and, if that's the main point, it's also a
threat to the internal functioning of a city in terms of congestion. <p>
But I'm here as a former autoworker, and not just as an autoworker,
but as
somebody who cares about working people and unions, and who thinks about the
average person's attachment to the automobile. There's a perception that a lot
of the people who want to get rid of automobiles are people who will get jobs
elsewhere - that is to say, the white-collar or the upper-middle-class person
who doesn't care about the working class. <p>
So workers don't perceive it as an environmental issue; they right
away hear
it as a class issue, and frequently as a race issue, if they hear "auto-free
city." Because they don't really believe we're going to get rid of autos. But
they believe that they may get rid of autoworkers. <p>
We need a social movement that says, Wait a minute, it may not be
catchy as
a
title, but we want to <i>reduce</i> the use of autos, we want to improve public
health and we want to find jobs for you and the people in the community - if
you can convey that total message, I think people will listen.<p>
Our organization focusses on both public health and social equity
issues.
Public health - because that's the main reason we care about the environment
from the Labour/Community Strategy Center's point of view. And equity, as most
of the people we work with are low-income people, people of colour, people with
many other problems besides the fact that our air might be a little annoying.
<p>
So when we did our book <i>L.A.'s Lethal Air</i>, the first thing we
did was
to try to study how bad air pollution is in Los Angeles. And we came to the
conclusion that it's lethal. Carbon monoxide competes with oxygen in your blood
in terms of attaching to the hemoglobin, and cuts down on oxygen use in your
own heart, which eventually hurts your heart tissue and leads to a lot of heart
attacks. <p>
When a family has had a whole group of people dying in their fifties
of heart
conditions, of emphysema, of respiratory arrest, the environment is not an
abstract question to them. But the environmental movement rarely talks about
public health - it's just that this chemical is bad; we have to ban it. <p>
And again, as a result, working people don't resonate, because they're
not
against chemicals. You have to be for public health, and you have to show how
benzene causes leukemia, how chromium causes cancer. We have to change the way
oil is refined. <i>That</i> people can understand.<p>
The second thing has to do with equity and how we pay for anything in
our
society. During the Big Green initiative in California, there was a big
initiative where the movie stars were saying, "You should vote for this
initiative because it's going to ban offshore oil drilling, it's going to cut
down on the use of carcinogens, it's going to cut down on the use of pesticides
in foods" - that was a wonderful idea. <p>
And then big business said, "But the problem is that you can't afford
it, it's
going to be too costly, it's going to raise everybody's taxes and the jobs will
leave California." And the rich movie star says, "No price is too great for our
children's health." Well, that's about the lousiest slogan you can come up
with, because if you're a millionaire you can say that no price is too great
for your children's health. <p>
But if you're poor, you know you are jeopardizing your children's
health in
terms of pesticides - but can I afford the orange? If you're going to tell me
that it's going to double the price of the orange that I'm now making a
judgment about . . . well, I don't want the pesticide but I do want the orange.
<p>
I think the environmental movement does a lousy job of framing the
issues
because it isn't coming out of some of the other social justice movements. I
think if you come out of the women's movement, if you've come out of civil
rights movements, if you come out of the workers' movement, you would come to
environmentalism in a different way. You'd come to it more holistically, and
you wouldn't talk about "auto-free cities", "banning this", "we don't want
that", "no price is too great", but you'd talk more like an organizer and say,
Look, there's a multiplicity of problems that your family faces; let's see as a
society how we can solve these problems.<p>
Ironically, the other thing is that the environmental movement is not
clear
enough about what it thinks about big business. Our organization is strongly
against the domination of society by transnational corporations. We think big
business is the problem, not chemicals. So we call ourselves an anti-corporate,
worker, and community environmental group. We say that there's too much
emphasis on private autos because General Motors wrecked the public transit
system in L.A. <p>
Here's a real, concrete example of two ways to understand social
equity. The
mainstream environmental movement says, "There's all these cars on the road, so
we're going to raise everybody's gas prices, and we're going to tax people, but
then we're going to take the money and use it for public transit." Our argument
is, "Well, first of all, people need these cars to get to work." A lot of them
make six or seven dollars an hour. If you charge them more money to use their
car and they can't live on the six dollars an hour, you can't promise them how
they're going to feed their family.<p>
Second, you're going to take that money and give it to the government.
You
can't promise that the government is going to put it back into public transit.
So you might in fact be hurting that family twice: taxing them more, reducing
their income. So we say, Let's have a different strategy. <p>
First, let's take the money from the military budget, let's take the
money
from other wasteful expenditures - less police, which is very controversial but
we would argue that - take that money and use it for public transit. If you
have a real public transit system in place, when you begin to consider
restricting auto use and say to people "You can't use your automobile," and
they say, "Well, how am I supposed to get to work," you will have an answer for
them. <p>
So it's not like we don't see the value of dramatically reducing auto
dependency. But we hang around with the real people who work, who build autos,
who go to work in autos; sometimes I think some of the people at this auto-free
cities conference are trying to come up with environmental policies from Mars,
you know, and it's not going to work.<p>
The person who really influenced my thinking was not a traditional
environmentalist, but was Barry Commoner. And Barry Commoner, who wrote a book
called <i>Making Peace with the Planet</i>, is a leftist. He is a person who
talks about capitalism as a system, he talks about society as a whole and talks
about the fact that fundamentally the environmental movement is a struggle to
control production and control transportation policies and for democratic
decision making in society. <p>
Because there is no reason for some of this madness to exist. I mean,
if
working people really could have some influence in designing a public transit
system, for instance. Let's make a conscious decision. It's your money. How
much do you want to spend on the B-1 bomber? How much do you want for health
care? How much do you want for mental health? How much do you want for AIDS
testing? How much do you want for education? How much do you want for the
police? <p>
You'd find very little support, I think, for the B-1 bomber and the
police.
But what happens is that the people have no money. The government has the money
- and the government doesn't give back to the people the real choices, the real
options, the real power. <p>
So what Barry Commoner was saying is: Isn't the environmentalist
movement
really about a fight for political democracy and economic democracy, of which
ecological sanity is a critical element. So he was very moving to me, because
he could talk my language. He was a pro-union environmentalist; he was a
pro-civil rights environmentalist. He was not afraid to talk about
corporations.<p>
Now I just came back from another conference in Vancouver, which was
very
interesting, called <i>Globe '92</i> - or How to Get Rich By Selling
Environmental Products. It was interesting, and I went, and I watched all
these, you know, environmental greenies, talking about . . . "Well, I will make
this product instead of that product." The irony of it is, if you have a good
social movement that starts to drive real priorities, then business can come
into the back of the parade and say, All right, I have a company; I would like
to do what <i>you</i> told me to do - see what I mean? The social movement has
to drive the priorities. <p>
I don't mind business coming in and trying to make a reasonable dollar
making
what a true social movement told them to make. But what happens is that they
make what they want to make and then they try to force it on us and claim it's
ecological. <p>
At its best, the environmental movement is fundamentally a
revolutionary
movement. And if it doesn't want to be that, it's going to be nothing. I mean,
I really think those are the choices. <p>
The environmental movement is very confused: it says, The world's
coming to
an
end, recycle your garbage; or, The world's coming to an end, read labels in the
grocery store about what's green. I mean, come on. The problem can't be that
serious and the solution that trivial. <p>
We have to go for very fundamental changes in society, and working
people and
people of colour are not just critical to that, they're essential. They're the
centre of any change that's going to happen in our society. So at the Strategy
Center, we go door to door in low-income communities. We take our book,
<i>L.A.'s Lethal Air</i>, and we organize people to get excited first about
their own health and their children's health, and we talk just like this. <p>
I want you to know that it's not that I talk one way for an interview
and
another way in the streets. We train organizers to talk this kind of talk. And
we say to people, Do you know why you're sick? And this is in California, in a
town called Wilmington, right across from the oil refineries. <p>
How do you feel? Well, I feel very bad. What do you feel? I feel I
have
asthma. Did you know that asthma deaths are up 30 per cent in the United
States? No, I don't know that, but I wouldn't be surprised, 'cause my kid is
sick and I'm sick. Well, what do you think is the problem? They say, "Well,
what do you mean? It's Unical, it's Chevron, it's Texaco, it's Monsanto. I know
what it is." So the community already knows that that's the problem. <p>
But you know what they say? They say, "But you can't beat these
people."
And
then you ask them, Well, then, why are you living here. Why do you think I'm
living here? 'Cause it's lousy here. That's the only place I can afford. I know
why I can afford it. I'm affording it because I'm living across from this oil
refinery. If I move away from the oil refinery, I can't afford to live. <p>
These are the real economic choices that real people are trying to
make in the
midst of this, and an environmental movement that can't speak to them can't
organize them.<p>
<p>
I think there has to be a revolution within the environmental movement, in
which there's going to be a split in a positive sense. I mean, I'm a white,
middle-class person who's lived most of my life with people of colour and with
working people, but also with whites. I am not one of these people who doesn't
know where I came from or is ashamed of where I came from. <p>
The white middle class has played a very potentially progressive role
in
American society: lots of white, middle-class kids went down to Mississippi to
help register voters; lots of kids worked against the war in Vietnam and
supported the demands of the black movement. But now, in the nineties, after 12
years of the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, we live in a very recently
segregated world, where the classes don't talk to each other, where the races
don't talk to each other. <p>
So the environmental movement has to re-integrate people who want to
work
together. But the difference is that our organization is, according its own
by-laws, more than 50 per cent people of colour. In our organization, we have
more than 200 people <i>active</i> on projects from public health, to
industrial, to transportation policy - more than 60 per cent of whom are
Latino, African-American and Asian-American. And while, unfortunately, our
organization is an exception, you'd be surprised how many white people feel
uncomfortable in contexts dominated by people of colour. <p>
Just at this conference today, a racist remark was made in one of the
workshops. A white man stood up and said, "Well, I don't see any black people
in the room today." He was trying to make some observations, and there was this
black person standing two feet away from him. And then he said, "Oh, I'm sorry,
I didn't see you; because I was about to say that . . ." I wouldn't want to say
what he said. <p>
But he said something terrible, and the whole room was quiet and
polite. And
then, thank goodness, one woman stood up and said, "If you don't mind, don't
make racial stereotypes about people." And what I'm saying is that white people
who are anti-racist can be part of the future of the new environmentalism. <p>
There was a real implicit racism in the room - and that group is going
to have
to do some major changing in its consciousness before it can change anything.
So that's real life, and we're trying to do some work to change some of those
dynamics.<p>
Now I'd like to return to transit policy. A lot of people here think
the fight
is between the automobile and other modes of transportation. But let me just
tell you about two interesting things happening in Los Angeles. <p>
In Los Angeles, there's a Blue Line, which is a high-speed rail that
starts in
a port city called Long Beach and goes to the centre of downtown Los Angeles,
to what's called the Central Business District. Except for one problem. It goes
<i>through</i> the black and Latino community called South Central, where the
recent rebellions took place because of the Rodney King verdict - and makes
very few stops there. <p>
It goes so fast that it's killing people - because kids are scooting
around
and trying to get around the fence, cars are trying to get away from the train
and it's killing people. So the only thing you hear about the Blue Line in
South Central is, Be careful, be careful, stay away from the train. <p>
So the train in the poor community is something to stay away from
`cause it's
going to kill you. That's an example of class and race politics that has
nothing to do with the automobile. <p>
Second, in terms of bus service in Los Angeles from the downtown
business
district, there is a very excellent bus service to suburban areas called
Pasadena and Burbank and very, very bad bus service from the Central Business
District to South Central Los Angeles. Why? Because very few lower income black
and Latino people work in the downtown office highrises, except to clean them.
<p>
For janitors who are trying to go home at night, it's very, very hard
for them
to get bus service. But for the executives, they get all dressed up and they
can get a bus that'll get them there within 10 minutes of the stop and get 'em
home. So rather than just thinking that class issues have to do with the
automobile, even when you start discussing the train, when you start discussing
buses, there are race and class issues. <p>
We're trying to get involved, therefore, to fight for reconstructing
the Blue
Line, reconstructing intra-community transportation policy, so that a person
can go from a shopping centre to her mother's house, pick up the kids, go buy
some food, read a magazine and get home - and have a bus that's close enough to
your house so that you don't get beaten up or have your groceries stolen on
your way home. Those are some of the real-life dynamics that, again, I think
the mainstream environmental movement doesn't understand when it talks about
transit policy.<p>
I think the first step to changing urban policy is to build social
movements
that want it. We're in a very bad dialectic in the United States, but I don't
necessarily know that it's fundamentally different in Canada. Many people have
given up trying to get the government to do anything positive. They only get
involved politically when there's something absolutely horrible that's
happening to them and they want to stop it. And the minute they stop it - if
they can - they go back to passivity. <p>
So we're trying to organize different ethnic and racial communities to
have
longer range conversations - to say, What kind of city do we want? All right,
we want some jobs in here - What kind of jobs are we looking for? What kind of
housing would we like? What kind of transportation system would we like? Now
you have to understand that in low-income communities at first they may think
you're smoking some kind of drug. I mean, nobody is even going to give them any
food stamps, and you want to ask them what kind of community they would like.
<p>
But we say to them: No, no, we're not talking about utopian urban
planning.
But if we're going to fight for something, and you say the system is so hard to
change, why not fight for changing the big picture? I mean, why get involved
for a little bit? You're right, the system doesn't change - I know it and you
know it. Except for one problem. Do you like your life? No. Okay. Well, what
don't you like about it? Everything. Right. So, if you don't like everything
about it, why fight for the little pieces? Let's try to change everything. <p>
Do you like your housing? No. Do you like your schools? No. Do you
like your
health care? No. Do you like your transportation? No. Do you like your air? No.
Well, let's go for it. Let's develop a comprehensive strategy. If we lose,
we're no worse off than we are now. But if we win, we could change something in
a big way. And we call this "big picture organizing" and, given the fact that
people are so depressed right now, it makes more sense to them than the more
"popular" theory among Alinsky-style organizers: "Because the system is so hard
to change, let's focus on `winnable victories` such as closing down a few
liquor stores or stomping out graffiti." <p>
And people say, Yeah, but if the liquor store closed down, my kid'll
go two
blocks away and drink liquor or get crack cocaine; I mean, that doesn't make
it. So we disagree with the theory of organizing that says, If you make the
issue real little, people get all excited about it 'cause they can win it. Not
in our society. Because it is commonly understood that you can't win anything.
And I think that the bigger the picture, the chance is - the irony is - if you
win, you can begin to set a lot of things in motion and win a lot.<p>
I think it's fair to say that the Labor/Community Strategy Center is
one of
the most influential grass-roots environmental organizations in Los Angeles. We
are more influential than most, if not all, of the mainstream environmental
movements, because we've spent three years going door to door, working with
community groups, working with labour unions - and most of us have been in the
city for 15 or 20 years, fighting on other issues. <p>
So when the environmental movement says to us, Well, you're new to the
environmental movement, we say, Yeah, but we weren't sitting at home. We were
fighting for civil rights, we were fighting to keep plants open, we were
fighting to reform the labour movement. So we've come into the environmental
movement with a lot of clout from our other constituencies. <p>
And secondly, we have a different way of talking to people about
environmentalism. You have to remember that, for instance, we're talking to an
immigrant worker, who we have already worked with, because she's a waitress or
a maid at the Hyatt Hotel, and she's Spanish speaking - she's a Latina, she's
from Mexico or Central America. And we fought with her to help her get a decent
contract against Hyatt when they wanted her to clean more rooms than humanly
possible. <p>
When we talk to her about the environment - and the fact that after
she kills
herself all day, and she's working with solvents and cleaning fluids on the
floor that are attacking her lungs, she has to go home and live across from a
metal-plating factory or a chromium plant - she doesn't say, "Well, I don't get
it; I'm not into the environment." We both have the credibility, we have the
communication, and we have the organicism to say, "Oh, that means the
environment is an <i>extension</i> of the conversations we've already been
having." <p>
So we're pretty excited about our work right now; it's taking off.
We're hot
-
I mean we really are - and we've been cool earlier. We move slowly, but we're
at a critical mass now. We just had a meeting of two hundred and twenty people
in a low-income community around the "right to know" which chemicals they were
exposed to.. <p>
Before we even get into how you change industrial policy, you have to
know the
chemicals to which you are exposed. You have to know how much toluene, xylene,
chromium, hexavalent, and benzene is really being emitted from a factory. You
have to know.<p>
We hire our own environmental scientists now. We publish reports in
Spanish
and English. We go door to door and say, You see that factory over there? Would
you really like to know what chemicals they're emitting, the quantities and
reasonable projections about the health risk to you and your children? We're
finding this an enormously inspirational movement, because what I'm finding is
that people don't just want environmental health, they want democracy. And if
the environmental movement starts getting involved, then the corporation is
going to deny you the democratic right to even know what the corporation's
producing. <p>
You know what half the people say? "Well, I'm not even feeling sick.
But, on
general principles, the companies have to tell me. Don't I have the right to
know? I <i>want</i> the right to know." And so we find that half the people are
angry because of the environment, and the other half are angry just on general
principles of being denied information. <p>
So if you ask me how are we going to change industrial policy in L.A.,
come
back in a year or two. How are we going to change transportation policy in
L.A.? I don't really know. But I know the first step is to build a social
movement of people who want to do it. You have to have an organization, a
philosophy, and a movement, and we've got all three. <p>
And that's the hard part. Once you're in the game, now we can move to
coming
to conferences like this and learn. We could take ideas, and when we go home we
have a base. We have a movement from which these ideas can be translated into
policy in Los Angeles, and hopefully throughout the United States.<p>
I think the globalization of the economy is a critical element for
anybody
right now who is organizing, because the solutions don't really exist locally -
or even regionally. So we have to have a multiple layer of strategies. <p>
The first thing is to find regional problems that do exist and that
are
solvable. And some of them are. The other thing is to build a regional model
that begins to throw out a theoretical model internationally and find your
allies. I mean, we're increasingly finding allies in New York in Washington
D.C., in Toronto; I didn't just come here for a conference in Toronto. I met
with the Canadian Auto Workers. I met with a group in Toronto called the Green
Work Alliance, whose slogan is, "Green Jobs Not Pink Slips."<p>
We're starting to correspond with the Third World network in Malaysia
to learn
about what they're trying to do internationally. In terms this conference, one
of the best workshops was about the implications of transport policy in the
Third World and the fight between the north and the south. Those are not yet
answers, but any regional group that isn't having an international dialogue, I
think, is irrelevant. <p>
And the first step is to find your counterparts throughout the United
States
and throughout the world. The next step is to come up with strategies. We're
not really at that level that I can tell you what our international strategy
is. But I can tell you that the first step of our strategy is to think
internationally. <p>
Finally, I hope one way that you would consider continuing this
dialogue
with
the Strategy Centre is to order and use our book, <i>L.A.'s Lethal Air: New
Strategies for Policy, Organization and Action</i>. It's not just about L.A.
It's a methodology of how to think about urban environmental organizing; how to
integrate issues of class and race; how to organize; how to understand public
health issues; how to think about transportation policy, industrial policy, tax
policy, international dynamics - and to talk about them in a comprehensive way.
The book is being read all over the world right now. We're getting orders; it's
being used in a TV show in England; classes of people in New York state are
reading it. <p>
I think one of the keys to building an international movement is the
exchange
of information and theory internationally. If people are organizing but not
writing about it - if they're not recording it on video, if they're not finding
ways to essentially export their theory - then I think the work is almost
irrelevant. Because for awhile, small but significant victories are going to be
won and then they're going to be crushed - in my opinion - most of the time at
a regional and local level. <p>
But as you break the ground for a moment, you have to capture it, take
a
picture of it, analyze it, and then disseminate it throughout the world, so
that other people can say, Aha, something important happened in Toronto, or in
Detroit or Philadelphia, or South Africa. The construction of an international
discourse is one of the things that the Strategy Center is trying to do.<p>
<p>
<p>
Director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center since 1989, <b>Eric Mann</b> is
the principal author of the centre's latest book, <i>Reconstructing Los Angeles
from the Bottom Up</i> (1994). His work can also be found in <i>The Nation</i>,
the <i>New York Times</i> and the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>.<i></i><p>
<i></i><p>
Thanks to Mark Surman for providing additional interview material.<p>
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