Opening Spaces: Environmental Justice for (Almost) All

By Elanah Sherman, Avalonia board member

According to the Sierra Club, the environmental justice movement was a response in the 1980s to the dumping of toxic waste in a Black North Carolina community. This event led to the publication of the landmark 1987 study “Toxic Waste and Race,” a study produced by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ that examined the issue across the entire country.

Since then, the environmental justice movement has gathered steam, and the term ‘environmental justice (EJ) community’ has begun to enter common currency. Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) employs a two-tiered definition of an EJ community: “a distressed municipality, as designated by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, or defined census block groups [sic] where 30% of the population is living below 200% of the federal poverty level” (from the DEEP website).

Nationally, race and socioeconomic status are usually recognized as the primary determinants of environmental risk from, for example, water pollution, proximity to waste treatment facilities, air pollution, and unclean energy production. The analysis is convincing as far as it goes. But who (and what’s) missing?

It is not unusual for people with disabilities to be left out of all kinds of demographic considerations. Part of the reason is likely the restrictive point of view that disability conveys a medical condition that renders a person passive and ‘out of view,’ as well as invisible in the context of civil rights. But disability does denote a civil rights category, codified not only in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), but in other federal and state laws.

That disability is frequently neglected as a factor in environmental justice has consequences. First, it leads to disability being under-studied in relevant research. Second, it leads to the absence of people with different disabilities on task forces and planning committees. Two major events crystallized the devastating consequences. One was Hurricane Katrina, when the lack of disability-related planning resulted in disparate rates of suffering; the other was the Covid-19 pandemic, when problems such as inaccessible testing and vaccination sites created a two-tiered system. (It is a sad commentary that during the 15 years between these two events, accessibility lessons learned from the first were not, in general, applied to the second.)

Even without deep research, many risk factors have emerged. For example, lack of accessible transportation, shelter, and medical facilities create a higher level of risk for people with disabilities facing natural disasters. Higher risk also results from the absence of accessible methods of communication (for example, availability of sign language interpretation, written material in large print, and captioned announcements). And the issues extend far beyond disaster response. A lack of trees in cities produce ‘urban heat islands,’ which may have particularly deleterious effects on people with various disabilities. Similarly, trees provide protection against climate change, the effects of which have been shown to especially endanger disabled people, both because of inherent effects and because of inadequate and discriminatory response networks.

Assumptions also play a role in increased risk. I remember asking a woman who was blind and had diabetes about her opinion of municipal registries. These voluntary data banks, held and maintained by some local emergency management departments, contain the names of and contact information for people with disabilities, along with a description of each person’s disability. The purpose is to immediately educate responders on what an individual may need. Here is the woman’s response to my question: “I would list my diabetes, but not my blindness. If they know I’m blind, they will assume I’m helpless.”

Such issues may seem far from the purview of a land trust like Avalonia. Our disability inclusion initiative, based on our knowledge that limitation is a continuum and that greater accessibility is an opportunity more than a challenge, finds focus in our programs and policies. But as part of Connecticut’s broad environmental community, Avalonia is well-positioned to take a principled stand on the importance of including disabled people in the struggle for environmental justice.