E-mail a friendMonique Harden
airdate October 11, 2007
An environmental justice attorney, Monique Harden is co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a nonprofit, public interest law firm in New Orleans. She also coordinates international coalitions of community organizations that advocate for human rights and environmental justice. Since Hurricane Katrina, Harden has worked for the rights of displaced Gulf Coast residents. Her achievements have been featured on TV and print news, as well as books, magazines and documentaries.
Monique Harden
Tavis: Monique Harden is an environmental justice attorney based in New Orleans and the co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights. In that capacity, she's represented citizens in New Orleans and elsewhere, for that matter, in cases of environmental injustice, including the high-profile case of Mossville, Louisiana. Monique, nice to have you on the program.
Monique Harden: Thanks for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: We'll get to Mossville in just a second. For those who are not familiar with, as we are, this whole notion of environmental injustice - we know injustice, but environmental injustice is what?
Harden: Environmental injustice is governmental systems that have subjected African American communities and other communities of color to toxic, hazardous environments. So in the places where many of us live, where we work, where we worship, where we play, it's in the shadows of toxic facilities, it's on top of contaminated sites and landfills.
Tavis: The government does that?
Harden: The government permits it; the government approves it and authorizes it in our communities.
Tavis: And why?
Harden: Well -
Tavis: Why there, I should say?
Harden: Why?
Tavis: Why there? Why in these communities?
Harden: Politically, it's because this is the path of least resistance, and it's also continuing forms of racism that have long plagued our country. It's also the places where, in Louisiana in particular, where African American communities mostly are unincorporated and so they do not have political decision-making. And most of the governmental approvals of the industrial facilities that are in these communities really got rooted at a time when the individual residents did not have the right to vote.
Tavis: And the impact of this environmental injustice on these communities of color, broadly speaking, has been what, is what?
Harden: Oh, well, significant health problems - cancer, asthma, reproductive damage, learning disabilities - all related to the pollution released by these industrial facilities that have been authorized by government.
Tavis: The EPA is aware of this?
Harden: The Environment Protection Agency is very much aware of it. In fact, they've been collecting a database of information that shows 79 percent of African Americans live in polluted neighborhoods.
Tavis: Seventy-nine percent -
Harden: Seventy-nine percent.
Tavis: - of African Americans across the country -
Harden: Across the country.
Tavis: - live in polluted neighborhoods.
Harden: Yes. So this is a true crisis that we're talking about, but it's one that does have a solution. We really need to change the system in which we go about protecting our environment so that we can have safe distances between residential communities and industrial manufacturing, so that we can have safeguards that protect our health from toxic pollution, so that we can reduce our dependency on toxic chemicals and fossil fuels.
Tavis: I want to get to this example again in Mossville, Louisiana, an empirical example here in just a second. And I'm asking these questions mostly - and I'm not being naïve here; I know a lot of this, as you well know - but I'm asking for those watching tonight who have not been exposed to this particular issue. Now, on this program over the last five years - we start our fifth season in January, so four or five years I've been doing this program on PBS, and have had any number of environmental conversations with environmentalists.
And we're talking about the water, we're talking about the air, we're talking about the animals, we're talking about all kind of stuff except for this particular issue. And I raise that not to cast aspersion on them, but to ask if this issue is that important, if 79 percent of Black folk in America live in polluted areas, why is this issue not at the top of the agenda for these environmentalists who are making the rounds on TV all the time?
Harden: I think it's an issue of racism, that where the situation for African American communities are invisible communities. So we go from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," we now have invisible communities. If you look at big, multinational corporations like Shell and Exxon, they are operating in places that people have really never heard of.
Small, little places, far away from the interstate, far away from a lot of our urban centers, where this is where their profit is coming from. But it's at the cost of a lot of lives, and the health of the folks who live in these communities.
Tavis: What role do African Americans who are citizens have, and what role do African American elected officials have to raise this issue, and how are we - and for that matter, churches. How are we, as a community, doing in the raising of this issue higher on the agenda?
Harden: Well, there's a tremendous number of environmental justice organizations, grassroots organizations and resource advocacy groups, academic research, sociology organizations, that have been paying attention and working on ways of combating environmental racism. Churches have had a particularly strong role in communities.
Elected officials need a lot more education and awareness around ways in which they can use their authority to protect the health and the lives of people who live in communities, and this really calls for fundamental change in how this country goes about making products, how it goes about refining oil, how it goes about making - disposing of a lot of waste.
It really needs to be rethought and transformed, and it's communities that are on the front lines making these calls, making these demands.
Tavis: Fair to say - and I'm not, again, trying to cast aspersion on him - but fair to say that if Al Gore or John Kerry or any number of the other - Lori David - any number of the other environmental activists - Robert Kennedy - fair to say that if they were successful in getting the issues addressed that they consistently raise, that this issue would automatically be raised, or does it require a little extra effort to get this issue specifically of environmental racism addressed?
Harden: It requires a lot of extra effort, unfortunately, because some environmental organizations, and people who are thought of as environmental leaders, are not focusing on the plight of communities of color who are subjected to disproportionate levels of toxic pollution right in the places where they live.
So when we talk about clean water and we talk about clean air, we're talking about areas and places that are removed from our communities, that really, really need this level of protection. It also needs something more than technological shifts or changes, or pollution trade schemes. It really requires a fundamental change so that we really are protecting human health, the right to life, the right to health, the right to racial equality. But we have an environmental regulatory system that ignores that.
Tavis: Tell me specifically about Mossville, Louisiana as a case in point.
Harden: Well, Mossville is located in southwest Louisiana, near the city of Lake Charles, near the Texas border. And this was a community that was founded in the 1790s by emancipated Blacks, and it was a very pristine environment for several generations as they settled this area and named it Mossville. It had churches, businesses, and a real community structure, and it was also a place where African Americans felt that they had a safe haven away from some of the real brutal forms of racism that existed in Louisiana.
That this was a safe haven for them. Beginning in the late 1930s, however, encroachment of industrial facilities took root in the community. And so today, we have 14 toxic industrial facilities - oil refineries -
Tavis: Fourteen?
Harden: Fourteen.
Tavis: In this one area.
Harden: Within a - yes, that's right, within a quarter-mile distance from the -
Tavis: That's impossible.
Harden: It's not.
Tavis: Fourteen in a quarter-mile area?
Harden: From a quarter-mile from the boundaries of Mossville, mm-hmm. Yes. And this is a very congested industrial area, and Mossville is roughly - it's a very small, tiny community of about 300-something households.
Tavis: Is this a worst-case scenario, or is this pretty indicative of the way these communities get beaten down?
Harden: It's pretty severe, but it's also indicative. It's also representative of what a lot of communities of color are going through. There's a section of Mossville, a neighborhood that now has been relocated because of contamination caused by industrial facility leaks into the ground, and that was one of the first areas settled in this community.
It no longer exists. All the homes were razed, it's now overgrown with weeds, and it looks as if no one ever lived there. And if you go into communities around this country you will see that some of them also have signs of those kind of ghost town neighborhoods, where in the past people lived, children played, people went to church, people worked, and there's no sign of any human habitation in these areas anymore because of contamination.
In the state of Louisiana, we've lost four communities because of contamination, four historic African American communities, Reville Town (sp), Morrisonville, Sunrise, and Diamond.
Tavis: Because these persons, to your earlier point, in the final analysis, are so often powerless, they are disenfranchised politically, economically, socially, what recourse do they have?
Harden: It's really in political organizing and in community organizing. A great number of success stories have come about by residents taking charge and demanding environmental justice, and these victories have been in the form of stopping the permitting of a toxic facility or a hazardous operation, it has meant relocating a community away from a toxic contaminated area, it has meant legislation and policy changes at the state and local levels to bring about a healthful environment.
So that has only come about because people decided to come together and demand environmental justice
Tavis: Monique Harden, first of all, I thank you for your work.
Harden: Thank you.
Tavis: I'm glad to have you on the program to talk about this important issue.
Harden: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: My pleasure.
Back to October 11, 2007