The Fire This Time

By Kelly Hearn, AlterNet. Posted December 10, 2004.

Richard Moore's ceaseless schedule of meetings, conferences and borrowed couch space is a window into the activist fire that drives him.

From his office in New Mexico, the soft-spoken Puerto Rican American and award-winning environmental justice activist measures his words carefully when talking about the state of the Hispanic EJ movement, its health, its relationship with mainstream conservation groups and its potential to catalyze Latino political power in 21st century America.

He rewinds a decade to the seeds of the EJ movement, when minority groups first pressed predominantly white enviro groups to open their doors to diversity. Then he fields questions about a recent National Resources Defense Council report showing Latinos bear disproportionately heavy environmental costs in the United States.

Good work? Yes. Needed? Always.

But, in the end, says the founder and director of Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, the nation's largest network of Hispanic environmental justice groups, the report is more confirmation than revelation.

To the uninitiated, the report, issued in October and entitled Hidden Danger: Environmental Health Threats in the Latino Community, offers up alarming statistics:

• Of nearly 38 million Latinos in the U.S., some 26 million reside in areas that violate federal air quality standards.
• Nearly 90 percent of U.S. farm workers are Latino, and many of these laborers and their families are routinely exposed to toxic pesticides.
• Non-Hispanic white children are half as likely as Latinos to have unsafe levels of lead in their blood.

As the Bush administration stands poised to dismantle environmental protections in the coming four years, the study is fodder for a Hispanic EJ movement that many hope will jumpstart lagging Latino political involvement.

Because membership information is hard to track, it's difficult to draw a bead on exact numbers. Clark Atlanta University professor Robert Bullard, a pioneering scholar in the EJ movement, produces a directory that in 2004 counted 400 people of color groups from 45 states and Puerto Rico. A third of those are Hispanic organizations, most in the Southwest and West. Moore's group has nearly 60 affiliate member groups in the U.S. and northern Mexico, counting, he says, thousands of individual members.

From opposing toxic dump sites and zoning ordinances to protesting conditions in north Mexican maquiladores, Latinos are perfecting the art of activism. A Latina group, Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, Texas scuttled PGA plans to build a golf course atop a major water aquifer. A group called the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation sided with Arab-Americans to confront a polluting auto manufacturer in Michigan. And in Florida, claiming them ecologically wrongheaded and culturally insensitive, African American and Hispanic sugar cane workers blocked measures intended to restore the Everglades.

"The Hispanic environmental justice is alive and doing very well, at least in California," says Manuel Pastor, a professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, adding that because of its demographic profile, California is a bellwether of future national trends.

Activists like Moore and U.S. Congresswoman Hilda Solis (D-CA), widely praised for her environmental work, say the environment is an all-inclusive hot-button issue for Latinos. And, they say, the increasingly interconnected and seasoned movement is producing street level power brokers and networks that could have wider spillover effects for political power.

"The main challenge is to gain and garnish power through training and collective strategies," says Moore, who teaches community organizing, power structure analysis, fundraising and leadership development to help disenfranchised groups sit at tables of power, whatever the issue.

Few hopes are pinned on the federal government. Though the EPA has an environmental justice program, observers say the payoffs have been sparse and will dwindle further in Bush's second term.

"If we gauged the successes of the environmental justice movement only by what the EPA was doing, then it would not be good," says Rep. Solis in a telephone interview from Washington. "We are going to see things get worse under Bush, things like the dismantling of superfund sites which oftentimes are in high minority communities."

Hispanic groups often find themselves at odds with Caucasian-led mainstream green groups seen as exclusivist and, at times, patronizing. Caesar Chavez and John Muir may have sung in the same key, but they've come to symbolize vastly different choirs. Observers say class and race are constant undercurrents in well-intentioned conservation groups, and minority activists – often adopting an in-your-face and into-the-streets kind of activism – often fall at odds with the conservation brand of tax-break activism.

Kelly Hearn is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a former science and technology writer for UPI.

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