Aggie Almanac; 131; Environmental Justice

You Coming up on Aggie Almanac experts attending at a misuse social justice symposium get a first-hand experience with one community's dilemma Hi, I'm Hilary Floren and thanks for watching Aggie Almanac your window on some of the amazing things going on at NMSU Every year NMSU sponsors a symposium on social justice bringing together researchers, activists and policy makers to find solutions for a wide range of problems.

This year's focus environmental justice and participants didn't have to travel far from campus to come across some real-life examples. It was a symposium where the participants were invited to leave the lecture hall and take a short bus trip to see area environmental justice issues firsthand. The tour took them past a chemical plant in the ski accused of potentially polluting groundwater. As you can see the houses are right next to the past. And to South Valley dairy farms where residents sometimes complain about the smell and flies. Further south near the Mexican border they got a view of the old Asarco plant, a smelter that operated here for a hundred years and is believed to be a source of lead contamination in the soil. They also saw the side of a mining operation near Mount Cristórae and they approached the gates of the state's largest landfill, Camino Real. Let me tell you just a little bit about our demographics.

The group ended up in a town hall meeting in Sunland Park where the mayor was blunt about his community. Sunland Park is a community that started up as a cheer determination because we felt the certainly extended neglected. We were at the tip corner of the southern portion of the state of New Mexico. We felt that we were the dumping ground for a lot of things that were happening. I think it was out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people in the state of New Mexico. Sunland Park is a community of about 14,000 people, 96% Hispanic, 85% Spanish speaking, where only 20% of the population have finished high school. Less than half a percent have a college degree. The per capita income is just $6,500 a year. The city budget is a fraction of other towns of similar size because of a small gross receipts tax base. In addition to dealing with those challenges, the residents of Sunland Park believe they are the victims of environmental injustice, with not one but several potentially harmful industries located in their backyard. We know that Sunland Park is a sacrificed zone, an environmental sacrificed zone.

There are heavily polluting industries that surround this community, regulated by different agencies. Mexico and one side, the landfill is a couple of miles up the road. A circle is three miles down the road. The El Paso Electric Company has a generation plant. There's mining up on this mountain, and in the community of an opera, where I volunteer, you can't find one home, where people don't have respiratory problems or other illnesses. One concern of area residents is lead contamination in the soil, but they say the state has refused to acknowledge the problem, or even test lead levels in children. But they also mistrust their giant neighbor, the Camino Real landfill, which they believe makes it difficult to improve their community.

The worst thing when I came here as mayor, when I saw, we were known as a landfill city. When people talk about Sunland Park, they associate it immediately with a landfill. And one of the things that is hard to determine is how can you get the people's spirit and vision when you know that you're going against, you're already in the negative in regards to trying to bring things to happen. Restaurant owner Robert Artovino told the group the city's image makes it tough to attract customers. And the perception of Sunland Park has always been the same thing. You're crazy to reopen a business here. It makes no sense. Who's going to go to that business, and who's going to eat fine food at that business? Luckily, I've been able to prove them wrong. I'm happy to say I have a pretty successful business here. But it's an uphill struggle all the way. The perception of the people in this town, of the people who live in this town, and of the town itself is that it's a dirty community.

And it's a hard, hard perception to get rid of. We try every step of the way. But landfill officials contend they are, in fact, good neighbors. It's public relation officers showed up at the hearing wanting to know why the tour group didn't enter the landfill to see the operation firsthand. You guys just came to the edge and turned around and went, there's the landfill and took off. And we had issued the invitation. I'll issue it again. Please come to Camino Real and see what's going on. Camino Real is a regional landfill. Now 20 years old, built on the site of a former dump. It's now the biggest landfill in the state, serving southern New Mexico, El Paso, and American companies in Mexico. It does not accept hazardous medical or liquid waste. I think it's important that you understand the difference between a dump and a landfill. A landfill is really highly engineered. It has a piping system in it. It has liners to protect the ground water.

How do we know that the groundwater is protected? We've got wells all around the landfill. The groundwater flows the same direction that the river does. We test the water before it gets to Camino Real. And we test the water after it leaves Camino Real so that we know exactly what is in that groundwater. This is an award-winning landfill. We're a very progressive landfill. We're very proud of the work that we do. We understand that this community is very resistant to the landfill in spite of the fact that it's been there for 20 years doing a great job, is inspected constantly by New Mexico Environment Department. Taylor certainly has had a campaign against a sarco and against other polluting entities in this area. And we support him in that. But he's lumping Camino Real landfill in with those other polluting entities. We are not a polluting entity. But this group still had questions and doubts. As a resident of Santa Park, I don't question the technology. I think the problem is the proliferation of the industry and core community.

I don't question the technology. It's a page of a problem. It's on top of us. It's on top of a core working community that we struggle. We struggle day to day to put foot on the table. Let's take it somewhere where it does not affect our health, where it does not affect our livelihood. During the summer, you walk around the street. It smells. You guys walked in here. This is nothing compared to walking by Anita, Luda. By training your conditioner at night. We literally cannot turn out your conditioner at night because it brings the smell in. Will we invite you in the summer? How many time you want? You can be the best thing that will happen to Santa Park. But still, we don't want to move with the one you're here. We don't need you here. We move here by five years ago, my wife and my family. And everything has gone different with our health. Former State Representative J. Paul Taylor said, some park residents first raised objections to a landfill 20 years ago.

And I have always been an advocate for the kinds of things which the community feels are best for them. And at that time, when the landfill was in its beginning state, at that time, the community did not want the landfill. They made it known to me to many other people. And this seems to have continued and it's gone on and on and on. And I would respectfully ask that you listen to the community and take heed to what they are saying. This is their community. Dr. Greg Mittman was an invited speaker at the symposium. He's done research on the environmental history of asthma. Although the landfill might be completely in compliance in terms of environmental regulation, in terms of monitoring of wells and so forth.

It's clear that the community has a point where they no longer want that landfill there. And it should be within their rights to say whether it should be there or not. He and the others took up the landfill's offer to pay them a visit, where the intense debate continued. I would say I think if the government would actually push for more recycling, the problem wouldn't go away. But it would reduce considerable. Because one can recycle almost everything. Absolutely. But the government, especially from the Mexico, I don't know, it's not really pushing a lot of recycling. It seems to me. You know, recycling is an economic-driven situation. No, it's a value situation, not economic-driven. It's a value. Sometimes you have paid for values. In the wide open spaces, I'm going back to economics. It's more economically feasible to do this, and it is to recycle. So...

It's a problem of more of values than sticking up to this and paying for them. And paying for them. And you know what, you're right. And I think as more and more, we have to look at what is good for us and our kids and our grandkids and their grandkids. You know, recycling's got to be one day, they'll probably mine these old landfills for the resources. Every area should have its landfills. The rich section of El Paso's got a landfill. We understand why a community could say, okay, we really don't want this anymore, because it used to exist at a time when the community was a few miles away. Now it's close. These trucks are coming through their community and it's affecting ambient air quality, and it may be affecting respiratory health issues. Is that something that you would be willing to work with the community and exploring in terms of relationships between ambient air quality and respiratory health? Sure. Why not? I would certainly think so.

And I think there's probably validity in the aggregate. Certainly, certainly it is documented what happened with the service. And there's documented evidence there that shows that case. And what I would say, you know, show me evidence because I don't want to do anything that harms people. Money is not worth it. And I don't think it. I ignore to you. So certainly we don't want to harm the environment. We don't want to harm people. We consider this a pollution-preventing facility rather than a pollution-causing facility. We also want to do a near urbanism type concept and bring businesses and retail in this community. Sunland Park does in fact have a plan to improve the community. They're building an entertainment corridor centered around the existing casino and racetrack. But they also put out an appeal to this group of experts on environmental justice issues to keep the Sunland Park situation in mind. So I ask that you be our ambassadors, that you be our ambassadors to this cause. Because without you going out and bringing conscience to those who regulate, it becomes out of sight out of mind.

So what we're asking for as from Sunland Park grassroots environmental group is to stop. Up until we can have independent, honest, environmental assessment and an independent, honest, health assessment. And it's going to require something more than just an independent health assessment and environmental assessment because they've squandered the trust of the people who are forced to trust them. One of the things that I think I saw it really saw at this symposium is that there's a beginning here to try and bring together the communities that are facing these issues with university experts and to kind of help lead to the model of community-based participatory research in which the community through self-empowerment and through self-determination. Is able to bring the tools of science through experts, for example, from the university to be able to bring those tools of science as a way of forcing regulatory agencies and other bodies for change.

Two of the participants in this year's symposium at NMSU are with us right now in the studio. We welcome Stuart Pym, an NMSU alum who is currently the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School at Duke University. He is a conservation biologist, studying the scientific issues behind the global loss of biological diversity. He's currently focusing on ecosystems in Florida and Brazil. And our second guest is Angus Wright, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies at California State University in Sacramento. He has done research on the social and environmental consequences of agriculture and property ownership in the Americas. He also authored a book entitled The Death of Ramon Gonzales, the Modern Agricultural Dilemma. He also co-authored another work to inherit the Earth, the landless movement and the struggle for a new Brazil.

Thank you, gentlemen, both for joining us today. First of all, let's talk a little bit about this concept of environmental justice. What exactly does it mean for us? I think environmental justice is really about the intersection of problems of social justice as we're also at the same time trying to figure out how best to relate to the environment. And so a lot of the classic problems of social justice had to do with people who were poor, often from minority groups, who it turned out not too surprisingly, were much more likely to be located near toxic facilities, landfills, various kinds of things that posed a real danger to their health. And so the question of how would it be best to deal with those problems environmentally and also how would it be best to assure that to the extent that there's a burden of danger that it's shared equally and not just visited on the people who are poorest and most disadvantaged in our community. And since that time, I think, since sort of the term environmental justice started on that basis, it's really been broadened out to a much broader kind of category that includes all kinds of problems about how it is that we deal with the environment in a healthy way,

at the same time that we share the burdens and the responsibilities and the fruits of the Earth in an equal way in a way that's fair to all. And why is it so particularly important to focus that here on a board area where there are a lot of underserved here? Yes. I think people need to realize that the environment does an amazing number of things for us. It gives us clean air, clean water, beautiful scenery, a lot of different services nature provides. And environmental justice to me as a conservation biologist comes from the fact that sometimes people are deprived of those services that nature provides, and it's like stealing from them in any way that you take money away from people. You can take away those nature services. In the area here, we have lots of examples. Water issues, major water issues in New Mexico, issues of pollution, all of those problems that fall differentially on different people.

And often it's the poor people who get the poor water, the pollution, and all the rest of it. Right, that's true. So why is it important then to talk about it here in this setting rather than say Washington DC? I think it's just as important to talk about it in Washington DC. But here is a wonderful place to talk about it because I think the state of New Mexico and this end to this other end of New Mexico has a lot of issues that really epitomize the character of the problems that we're talking about. Today this morning we heard a little bit about the colonias and the kinds of problems they have with water, sanitation, health services, and the ways in which a lot of the environmental problems of the areas a whole with water and sewage and garbage and so forth tend to be problems that where the difficulties, the dangers that come from not having resolved all those issues. And of course at the border, the border itself is a kind of classic in for those of us who think about environmental justice issue because all along the border are all of these issues about how it is that the way that we're dealing with our resources, the way with our dealing with our natural environment tends to have consequences that are much more severe for poor people and for people involved in all the problems of migration and the problems of the environment.

And the problems of very rapidly growing cities at the border, the problems of the maquilas along the border and the toxics that they produce, all of those are issues that are kind of classic problems of environmental justice and make this a very good place to take time to look at those problems and try to figure out how we can do better with them. I agree. One of the things that I've got out of this meeting so far is an enormous amount of local creativity, wonderful work that's been done here in New Mexico State, for example, dealing with local solutions. That's not to say that we shouldn't be doing things in Washington DC, we must. But a lot of these problems can be solved here with people who are passionate and talented about looking at local issues.

Right. And people that can see it firsthand because a lot of people who are so far removed maybe wouldn't get a chance to see what we see living in the borderland every day. Yeah, exactly. So talk a little bit about the possible solutions that have been discussed. I know you obviously outlined the problems and seen what's happening in the colonias and areas like that. Go ahead. Do they discuss this? Yeah, I'm a little, you know, I'm the visitor coming in. So I'm frankly a little reluctant to talk about the local problems because I really do believe that those are problems that need to be worked out by local people. But as Stuart was saying, what we have enjoyed while being here is seeing that a lot of local people are working on these problems in a very creative way. And in ways that offer potential solutions this morning, we saw some presentations about the role that wind and solar power can play in this region. We saw a very, very interesting presentation about how the manufacturer bricks in the El Paso Juarez area can be done in a way that is both far more environmentally safe.

And that eliminates or greatly reduces major environmental threats to the region as a whole while at the same time continuing to provide a good, decent living to people who are doing that work. And, you know, this is, and that was the main speaker on that was a professor here of chemistry, Antonio Lada, and he has worked with students and others to develop the technological solutions. Very simple, very cheap, technological solutions that can address this kind of issue. My interest in environmental justice comes from work that I do in Brazil and Africa, working with some of the poorest people on the planet, people who live almost in the Stone Age, their only access to modern technology may be a machete. And one of the things that I've learned is they need a voice, they need a way of explaining their needs and their worries, with the onslaught in the case of the work we do in Ecuador, of oil companies coming in and taking their land.

One of the things that we understand from that experience is people need a voice and people can solve their own problems if you give them some options. And so that's a message I think that resonates well with what's going on here in New Mexico on the borderlands. You need to give people a voice if they're being harmed, if the services nature provides them are being taken away. They need a voice to complain about it, and they need help with the solutions to fix the problem. You're absolutely right. Well, I'm going over a quick list here of the different things that the symposium is looking at. One of them was contaminated landfills, the impact of pesticides on farm workers health. What can you tell me about that? Well, that's a problem that I've worked on quite a lot, both in California and in Mexico and in pesticide issue. And it's an ongoing problem. It's a very serious problem. In the best of circumstances, people working with pesticides in the field or living in and around the field pose a real danger to the people who are working with them.

They're going to impose serious dangers to people who live in those areas, as well as to wildlife and all living things in and near the field environment where the pesticides are being used. Fortunately, there are a lot of things that can be done to provide alternatives in different ways to control pests that greatly minimize the kinds of dangers that pesticides pose. But one of the things that I think really touches on the justice issue very particularly is that one of the things, I think the thing that we have learned most about protecting people from such dangers is that they're never really protected until they themselves understand the dangers and are able to organize and express themselves and become involved in the solutions. As long as they're just simply the target of regulatory agencies, their problems are really never going to be reliably attended to. They need to be aware, they need to be active in both scene and monitoring, appreciating what the situation is and be able to respond to it when something's going wrong. So hopefully this weekend will be a perfect time for everybody to become more aware.

I think this meeting is a enormously useful function of bringing people together with very, very different experiences, different backgrounds and suddenly you make connections between people who you would never meet before. And you think, oh, I've got a solution and perhaps I've got a piece of it and you've got a piece of it. And that's wonderful at this conference. Well, thank you both so much for coming on. There's so many more questions, but we're out of time. Thank you. Thank you, that was on the show. It was a pleasure speaking with you. And it is time now for our amazing Aggie of the Week when we honor someone on campus involved in something that we think is amazing. It's easy to see Manuela Diaz Chavez loves kids and being in the classroom. After observing her with her students, it's also easy to see why her co-workers have nominated her as an amazing Aggie. An NMS U grad, this Aggie now spends her days teaching students who are in the process of learning English at Booker T Washington Elementary. The trick, they're all at different levels of mastering the language.

Our goal is to solidify the foundation that the students bring to school. And what I mean by that is we make sure that they are well grounded in reading, writing all the basic skills. For most of the day, Ms. Diaz Chavez teaches the basics in Spanish. Then there's an English lesson and science and social studies. Children need to learn the basic skills in their own language. You can't expect for children to learn a second language and the academic skills in that second language, as well as they can when they learn all those basic skills in their own language. And then when they've done that, that transfers to the second language a lot faster. Diaz Chavez recently attended a conference for the National Association for bilingual education, where she learned the latest trends and theories in bilingual ed. But she says basically it all comes down to this. Kids need to know that their first language is valuable and their second language is valuable. So they have to value both. Sometimes bilingual education is seen as subtractive. And so what you try to do is have kids get rid of the first language so they can assimilate or so they can quickly jump into the second language and forget all about their first language.

You'd never want to do that. And sometimes we even have parents that say, I don't want them. I don't want them to learn Spanish anymore. I just want them to speak English. And so we have to teach the parents it's valuable what you bring and what they've got is valuable. And it'll only help them as they add on the second language. Congratulations, Manuel Diaz Chavez for doing such an important job and doing it well. And if you would like to nominate an amazing Aggie or have any comment about the show, call us at 646-2818 or send an email to Aggie Almanac at Yahoo.com. And that is our show for this week. I'm Hillary Floren. Thanks for watching. Thanks for watching.

You Thanks for watching.