Environmental Justice in Baltimore
I lived nearly all of the first 30 years of my life within thirty miles of Baltimore City, including four in it. Since leaving I’ve gotten interested in environmental history and environmental justice, but I’d never looked into the history of these issues back home. So as the week of demonstrations and violence has unfolded I’ve been wondering: what role have environmental factors – like pollution and the distribution of park space – played in the anger and disenfranchisement so many people feel in Baltimore? Two papers presented themselves readily to me in the admittedly cursory research I’ve done on this topic in the course of my day, by a team of authors led by Christopher G. Boone of Arizona State University. The history of systemic racism covered in them tracks closely with other research on race in America that came out last year, like “The Making of Ferguson” in The American Prospect and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic. But unlike these, Boone et. al. focus on Baltimore, and they add a close look at industrial pollution and access to green space.
If “environmental justice” sounds squishy to you, you might not be buying the relationship between green space, or even pollution, and looted Baltimore liquor stores being shown on the news. But I would argue, and I think Boone et. al. would too, that this week’s “theater of outrage” is the result of urban black people facing higher levels of risk of all kinds for decades, whether it’s the risk of lead-poisoning or death by cop. I also think that the vast majority of Baltimore protesters have a sense of the history of the distribution of risks and resources in their city and in this country, and that environmental factors are an important piece of that puzzle.
Boone et. al. point out that Baltimore’s population peaked in 1950 at 950,000 and has been in decline ever since. The “loss of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs,” the MLK riots of 1968, “the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s and rise of violent crime,” and “the powerful lure of suburban schools, homes, and jobs” put the city’s population at 622,000 as of 2013. Current residents have inherited “still-functioning and polluting facilities” all over the city, facilities that produce far more toxins than anything in the surrounding areas: “On average, each resident of Baltimore City endures 191 pounds of released toxins compared to 47 pounds per person for the suburban counties in the metropolitan area” (“Parks” 2). The city is 64% African American, a “finding that agrees with the vast majority of environmental justice findings” (“Parks” 2) about the relationship between race and residential toxicity.
Unsurprisingly, people who are relatively wealthy and white are far less likely to find themselves living in toxic environments than people who are relatively poor and black. These conditions are the result of thousands and thousands of tiny decisions made by individuals and groups of people, only some of them overtly racist in intent. Examples of these kinds of clearly racist decisions include: The 1910, 1911, and 1913 city ordinances that “legally segregated [the] city into ‘white’ and ‘colored’ blocks” (making Baltimore the first city in the country to do this, but not the last); the restrictive neighborhood association rules that enforced this segregation after the city ordinances were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1917; and “government-sponsored redlining” that defined African American neighborhoods as “hazardous” for bank lending and real estate sales, paradoxically driving housing costs up so that many black residents payed more for housing than whites (“A Long View” 779, 781). (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Reparations” article has a thorough history of housing costs for urban African Americans.)
In cities all over the country, these “hazardous” areas either already had industrial pollution in the form of a factory or plant or landfill, or soon got it. Boone, et. al. point out, though, that Baltimore is a little different from other American cities: the people most likely to live in places in Baltimore with what’s known as a high Toxics Release Inventory are white. There are many reasons for this, of course, but one of them is a legacy of discriminatory housing policies: “In the first few decades of the twentieth century, living close to a factory job was a privilege afforded primarily to white Baltimoreans. The city has undergone significant demographic shifts but many of these older white communities remain close to what are now designated as toxic releasing facilities. … White privilege and accompanying segregation in essence ‘backfired’ on white residents now living in toxic neighborhoods while black Baltimoreans were subjected to grossly unjust rules and institutions” (“A Long View” 2). So, while it’s true that black Baltimoreans have been historically boxed into the most environmentally toxic part of their state, it is also true that the areas immediately surrounding toxin-producing facilities are often occupied by whites.
Boone et. al. also show that Baltimore’s African Americans in general have access to many fewer acres of green space than do its white residents. While most African Americans in Baltimore live within walking distance of a park, the person-to-park-acreage ratio is much lower in places where few whites live. Also, some of the parks are of questionable value: “Swann Park, located … next to the former Allied Chemical Plant now owned by Honeywell, was recently closed to the public after arsenic levels in the soil were found to be 100 times acceptable levels” (“Parks” 783). Citing several peer-reviewed papers, Boone et. al. point out that parks typically strengthen social connections and people’s sense of security, make exercise more common, and improve mental health. They also cool the ambient temperature, reduce air pollution and flooding, and increase property values so significantly that the increases can “more than offset the costs of building the park” (“Parks” 769). Importantly, parks also provide spaces for civil disobedience.
I’m not at all suggesting that more parks and fewer toxins would have prevented this week’s events in Baltimore. But I’m tired of a national discourse on “race relations” that, as Jelani Cobb pointed out in a recent New Yorker podcast, too often seems to boil down to how much people of different races like each other. If we’re going to face these issues squarely, we have to talk about all the many, many decisions we’ve made that add up to disenfranchisement. We too easily accept narratives of obvious, Klan-style racism because we can feel righteous about having gotten past all that. But those stories lull us into a false sense of progress. Much harder to deal with, but much more reflective of present reality, are stories about problems that are still around because they’re part of the way our economy or our culture functions, like school funding formulas based on property taxes or police departments that, despite no shortage of good cops, are still insular and brutal.
References not already linked
Boone, Christopher G., Michael Fragkias, Geoffrey L. Buckley, and J. Morgan Grove. “A Long View of Polluting Industry and Environmental Justice in Baltimore.” Boise State University ScholarWorks: Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations. Feb 1, 2014. Web. USDA Forest Service. April 28, 2014. Later published in Cities.
Boone, Christopher G., Geoffrey L. Buckley, J. Morgan Grove, and Chona Sister. “Parks and People: An Environmental Justice Inquiry in Baltimore, Maryland.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99.4 (2009): 767-87. Web. USDA Forest Service. April 28, 2014.