COMMUNITIES FOR A BETTER ENVIRONMENT

We often speak about leaving a cleaner planet for our grandchildren, but in a disproportionate number of low-income communities of color this dream has already disappeared. Pollution doesn't respect our boundaries or our timetables. In the predominantly Latino working class communities dotting the Southern Los Angeles coastline, citizens are facing overwhelming amounts of pollution from power plants, refineries, industrial waste facilities, and the intersection of five major freeways. Never mind the environmental legacy that we leave for future generations, kids can't breathe today.

Asthma rates are reaching epidemic proportions because people of all ages are constantly exposed to higher levels of diesel exhaust and flaring of toxic fumes from oil refineries. While federal authorities want community members to point to a source of the problem, the cumulative impacts of all these different industries, night after night and day after day, is the true cause. With our demand for more energy, transport, and manufacturing the health burden is increasing in these vulnerable communities, while access to hospitals and other health facilities is decreasing.

Communities For A Better Environment, a non-profit founded to improve public health and achieve environmental justice through activism in Northern and Southern California, took us on a sightseeing tour to better understand the problem. This wasn't your typical Hollywood tour - instead of gazing onto stars and celebrity footprints, we walked into neighborhoods where oil refineries are a literal hop over a fence, drove through streets littered with used car parts and other refuse, and looked at a town that houses row after row of industrial buildings but seems utterly void of people.

Click on the video to the left to join us.

"WE ALL DESERVE CLEAN AIR"



This may be your story, but if it isn't, I'd like you to try to imagine growing up with a glass recycling facility on one side of you, a freeway on the other, and an oil refinery in your backyard. The glass dust exacerbates asthma, the freeway is a relentless assault of noise and more pollution, and the refinery is more of the same. After 20 minutes standing on a residential street off of the freeway beside an oil refinery in Wilmington, CA, my eyes stung, my lungs felt dirty, and I had a headache from the smell and noise. But the biggest discomfort was seeing kids no older than 5 playing in their yard, just a stone's throw away from the refinery.

Communities For A Better Environment community organizer Roberto Cabrales knows something about this experience. He grew up in Southeast Los Angeles and now leads "Toxic Tours" of the city and fights for environmental justice for and with members of his community. Cabrales got involved with CBE when he was 17 and has been working for them ever since. His approach to grassroots organizing emphasizes relationship and community: "It's not what you do, it's what we do in the community. . ."

Click on the video to the left to meet Roberto Cabrales and learn more about Communities For A Better Environment.

BILL GALLEGOS: ORGANIZING FOR CHANGE



There is no "them," at least not when it comes to the environment. We are all in this together, as Communities For A Better Environment Executive Director Bill Gallegos explains. Gallegos has been a community activist and labor organizer for decades. He states, "What gives meaning to my life is fighting for a world where there's general social justice and equality." That fight has taken on greater urgency since the California Air Resources Board recently adjusted its estimate of the annual premature deaths due to particle pollution from 8,000 to up to 24,000. "About 3,000 people died in the Twin Towers disaster. This is eight times as many people per year that are dying because of poor air quality," says Gallegos.

A majority of these deaths occur in places like the Southern California coast in communities with the highest exposure to pollution from diesel trucks, coal-power plants and other fuel sources, volatile areas that Gallegos describes as "a poster child for environmental racism because the majority of the population in these areas are Latino or people of color."

Every effort to rid these vulnerable communities of toxins literally saves lives. CBE has been highly successful in using the law as an instrument of social change.

Gallegos details the struggle to instill a "crude cap" on Chevron's oil refining process and the ways we can all participate in environmental activism in the audio podcast to the left.

Simran Sethi