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Friends,
PIn light of the recent discussion of environmentalism, I have attached
an article by Ed Mann which I thought was interesting.
Pmichael Yates/HTML
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TITLEBeyond the Car:Eric Mann
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Lethal Air: Fighting for Public Health in Los Angelesp
by a href="Mann_fn.html#fn0"Eric Mann/a
p
i/iThe 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 ireduce/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 iL.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. iThat/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
