The Preferential Option for the Poor beyond Theology

Daniel G. Groody, Gustavo A. Gutiérrez, Daniel G. Groody, Gustavo A. Gutierrez

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268158637
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Since the 1973 publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez's groundbreaking work A Theology of Liberation, liberation theology's central premise of the preferential option for the poor has become one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century. As the situation for many of the world's poor worsens, it becomes ever more important to ensure that the option for the poor remains not only a vibrant theological concept but also a practical framework for living out the gift and challenge of Christian faith. The Preferential Option for the Poor beyond Theology draws on a diverse group of contributors to explore how disciplines as varied as law, economics, politics, the environment, science, liberal arts, film, and education can help us understand putting a commitment to the option for the poor into practice.

The central focus of the book revolves around the question: How can one live a Christian life in a world of destitution? The contributors address the theological concept of the option for the poor as well as the ways it can shape our social, economic, political, educational, and environmental approaches to poverty. Their creative examples serve as an inspiration to all those who are seeking to put their talents at the service of human need and the building of a more just and humane world.

CHAPTER 7

Liberation Science and the Option for the Poor

Protecting Victims of Environmental Injustice

KRISTIN SHRADER-FRECHETTE

Robbins, Illinois, is one of the poorest towns in the United States. Part of South Side Chicago, this African American community is full of small, old, clapboard houses, narrow front yards, and cracked sidewalks. Its unemployment and poverty levels are far above the national averages, and its per capita income is about $7,000 a year. Robbins’s seven thousand minority residents are too poor to support a single gas station, Laundromat, or fast-food franchise in their community. Its thirty-four churches outnumber its twenty-six tax-paying businesses. Partly because local property taxes generate only $250,000 each year, Robbins is $6 million in debt. Although its residents are socially, economically, and educationally powerless, the town leads the nation in one area. Besides being home to some of the highest-polluting chemical industries and manufacturers in the United States, it is host to dozens of incinerators that burn waste, trucked in from wealthier communities in the East. Robbins, Illinois, is like many other poor communities in the United States, and it is an example of a place where the option for the poor could be lived out but is not. Instead, Robbins is an example of how environmental injustice is yet one more scourge of poverty and how it may run rampant in poor communities. In this essay we will see how this is so and the effects it has on residents, then we will see another example of how people of good will, exercising the option for the poor, can stop environmental injustice before it happens.

Because South Side Chicago has some of the worst pollution in the United States, more than a decade ago the American Public Health Association recommended that no new incinerators be built there. But state Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials continue to ignore these recommendations, and five new incinerators are planned for this poor, minority community. While wealthy neighborhoods can pay attorneys and scientists to help them avoid such health threats, Robbins’s residents cannot. In their community, heavily polluting facilities are sited near retirement homes, public housing, and even schools. The latest Robbins incinerator was opened in 1998 by a Pennsylvania company to burn Pennsylvania garbage. It alone annually spews out 1000 pounds of lead and 4400 pounds of mercury, as well as cadmium, other heavy metals, dioxins, and furans into Robbins’s air. The result? Many poor, minority children in South Side Chicago are born with cancer. They are at least six times more likely to be hurt by this pollution than adults. Overall in the United States, children of color (aged five to fourteen) are four times more likely than white children to die from diseases like asthma. They are three times more likely to be hospitalized for it, despite their lesser access to health care. Their cancer rates also are disproportionately higher, partly because they are forced to breathe dirtier air and drink dirtier water.¹

Wealthy people can pay to keep incinerators out of their neighborhoods. They can pay for electrostatic air filters on their furnaces and for reverse-osmosis filters on their water systems. Their lower cancer rates show the effects of their economic protections. Even average-income people can pay for pitchers with Brita water filters. Living in the dirtiest areas and working at the dirtiest jobs, the poor have none of these protections. Social structures thus oppress them twice. First, they render them poor and powerless through educational, economic, and tax policies. Second, preying on their poverty and powerlessness, oppressors expose them to disproportionate pollution—health-threatening wastes generated in producing products, mainly for the wealthy. Oppressors first steal the labor and income of the poor. Once they are powerless, oppressors next steal their very lives and health.

OVERVIEW: LIBERATION SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE

How should believers respond to this dual oppression? Liberation theology is one answer. It is the gospel response and reflection of those who have committed themselves to a prophetic option—expressing preference for, solidarity with, and compassion for the poor and the powerless. Liberation theology “has its point of departure in an experience,” an experience “of dehumanizing poverty and of social and political oppression” suffered by the poor—like the residents of Robbins.² Once believers become aware of this dehumanizing poverty and oppression, how might they use their talents to implement their commitment to liberation theology? How might scientists and engineers, in particular—or even ordinary college students in any discipline—practice what might be called “liberation science”? This is science that contributes to liberating the poor, science that helps ensure that the poor do not bear disproportionate health threats from the pollution and waste of a society that, in many ways, has abandoned them.

Focusing on environmental injustice, this essay provides one answer to the preceding questions. “Environmental injustice” refers to the disproportionate burden of societal pollution—and consequently the disproportionate burden of death and disease borne by poor people and minorities, especially children. Because they are socially, economically, and educationally less powerful than other groups in society, poor and minority communities often are targeted for the most noxious and dangerous facilities, just as the residents of Robbins are. Their same lack of power also places them in the most hazardous and polluted workplaces. As a consequence, they breathe dirtier air, drink dirtier water, and therefore lead shorter, unhealthier lives. Oppression takes not only their money but their very lives, the very resources of air and water given by God in common to all.³

Obviously the greatest burdens of environmental injustice, poverty, and oppression fall on those in developing nations. However, for scientifically literate believers who must live and work in the United States, one option is to use liberation science to serve the poor in their own nation, and later to employ what they have learned at home to serve the poor abroad. This essay suggests how believers might use liberation science in such service. It (1) quickly surveys U.S. environmental injustice and shows why recognizing its severity ought to provoke a response of faith and compassion, suffering with the poor, and helping to liberate them. Focusing on how a largely black, poverty-level community in Louisiana was targeted for a dirty and dangerous facility, next the essay (2) illustrates how science is often and typically misused in environmental-impact assessments that oppress the poor through environmental injustice. Finally, the essay (3) outlines one prominent way in which scientifically literate believers might help liberate victims of environmental injustice in their own nation—and thus gain valuable tools for the much-needed, more difficult task of practicing liberation science abroad.

U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE AND THE NEED FOR LIBERATING POOR PEOPLE AND MINORITIES

In most areas of the world, poverty and powerlessness threaten people’s lives not only because the poor lack money, jobs, education, and political power, but because their very powerlessness makes them a target for life-threatening societal pollution. Minorities and poor people generally bear greater health risks partly because poverty and racism force them to live where homes are cheapest and pollution tends to be highest. Proportionately more landfills, power plants, toxic-waste dumps, bus and rail yards, sewage plants, and industrial facilities are sited in the neighborhoods of poor people and minorities. As a result, these areas bear higher levels of contaminated air, contaminated tap water, cancer, and infectious disease.⁴

Examining the 593 sites on the EPA national toxic-waste-cleanup priority list (Superfund), a U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) study found that in counties with Superfund sites, cancer death rates are higher, blacks live closer to the sites, and blacks have higher cancer rates than whites.⁵ Dr. Glenn Paulson summarized the NCI results this way: “If you know where the chemical industry is, you know where the cancer hotspots are” and where poor people and minorities live.⁶

Of course, environmental injustice is not the only reason for poorer health among minorities and poor people. Fewer educational and employment opportunities, less access to medical care, and less medical insurance are among the other factors that put them at greater health risk. Nevertheless, their environmental injustice risks are significant. A 2004 U.S. National Academies of Science report shows that universal U.S. health insurance could save 18,000 lives each year.⁷ For comparison, note that environmental and health scientists claim that up to 240,000 of the 600,000 annual U.S. cancer deaths are attributable to preventable environmental pollution and occur disproportionately among poor people and minorities, especially their children.⁸ Even the most conservative of all estimates—from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and NCI—show that pollution causes at least 60,000 annual, premature, preventable, U.S. cancer fatalities alone⁹—far more U.S. deaths than are attributable to lack of universal health insurance. Yet this cancer-death figure includes no pollution-related fatalities from noncancer causes, such as heart attacks or asthma deaths induced by particulate air pollution. For instance, NCI studies show that each 10 micrograms of fine particulate pollution alone causes an 18 percent increase in heart-related deaths, an 8 percent increase in lung-related deaths, and a 4 percent increase in overall deaths.¹⁰ CDC statistics show cancer and heart disease each contribute to about a third of all U.S. deaths. This means that, since Chicago’s average annual particulate air pollution is about 17 ug/m³, particulates alone cause roughly 3000 annual, preventable, heart-related Chicago deaths—8 per day—apart from deaths caused by cancer. Even before counting fatalities from other environmental and airborne causes, particulate air pollution alone causes about 10 percent of all Chicago deaths, mostly from heart attacks.¹¹

What is most troubling about cancer and other premature deaths is not merely that so many of them are, as the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment put it, “environmentally induced and theoretically preventable.”¹² Most worrisome is that this burden of death and disease is borne disproportionately by the poorest and most vulnerable among us. As the American Public Health Association (APHA) puts it, “Exposure to environmental risks varies based on race and … income.”¹³

The prominent medical journal Lancet pointed out that on average whites live six years longer than African Americans in the United States. The essay also noted that, for most causes of death, the mortality differentials between the two groups are increasing, not decreasing. Even worse, the article charged, is that the United States is the only Western developed nation whose government does not collect mortality statistics by class—that is, by income and education. When the author looked at class-based mortality data for the only diseases (heart and cerebrovascular ailments) on which the U.S. government collects class-related information, the class data showed an even wider disparity than the race data. If the author is correct, then the health of poor people and minorities is getting worse—in part because of environmental injustice.¹⁴

In the United States, the percentage of people of color living in counties with commercial hazardous-waste facilities is three times higher than in counties without these facilities.¹⁵ U.S. people of color also live, in greater concentrations, in areas that have above-average numbers of air-polluting facilities and that fail to meet federal air-quality attainment standards. In the United States, 52 percent of whites, but 71 percent of Hispanics, live in counties with high ozone concentrations. Only 5 percent of whites, but 10 percent of African Americans and 15 percent of Hispanics, live in air that violates all four air-quality standards (carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and particulate matter). Similar statistics hold for other areas of the world. In the UK, for instance, half of all waste incinerators are in neighborhoods comprising the poorest 10 percent of the country.¹⁶

As a result of environmental injustice, U.S. black and Hispanic children have much higher incidences of death and disease than do white children. Among poverty-level U.S. black children, nearly one-third have blood-lead levels above the recommended health standard. CDC studies show that blood-lead levels are consistently higher for black than white children, for younger than older children, and for children in lower, than higher, income families. They reveal that 8 percent of poverty-level children are lead poisoned, as compared with only 1 percent of children above the poverty level. About 11 percent of black children are lead poisoned, as compared with about 2 percent of white children.¹⁷

Even when different racial and socioeconomic groups are exposed to the same levels of pollutants, APHA data show that minority and poor children are likely to be more severely affected than white or non-poverty-level children. Besides lack of health care, poorer economic conditions also encourage poorer nutrition, poorer housing, and thus greater susceptibility to environmental pollution. Repeatedly researchers have shown that mortality is strongly related to a nation’s income inequality, rather than to median income, per capita income, or actual poverty levels. In short: what kills people is income inequality, not mainly poverty. One reason may be that, the greater a nation’s societal and economic inequality, the more the rich can pay to avoid threats like pollution, often by dumping them on the poor. The poor, however, cannot avoid them. In democratic societies with greater economic equality, pollution typically decreases because more people can speak for and protect themselves, and others are less able to exploit them or force them to bear higher levels of pollution, transferred from the wealthier sectors. As the Robbins case illustrates, a good example of such U.S. transfers is the largely minority, South Side of Chicago. Because it is impoverished, residents there are forced “to make ends meet” by accepting garbage, including toxic wastes, from many states far away. These wastes are then incinerated, causing massive air pollution from heavy metals, air toxins, and particulates.¹⁸

Of all developed nations, pollution and public health effects of income inequality are worst in the United States. It has the shortest average life expectancy—and the highest levels of income inequality, infant mortality, poverty, and percentage of children in poverty—of any Western industrialized nation.¹⁹ Such statistics—and the fact that income inequality rather than poverty increases mortality—help explain why U.S. poor people and minorities face more serious health threats than those in other developed nations, even where everyone is exposed to the same levels of pollutants.

• The U.S. death rate for one- to four-year-old children is double that of nations like Finland.

• Even when one controls for the higher U.S. murder rate, the U.S. death rate for fifteen- to twenty-five-year-olds is double that of countries like the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

• The U.S. infant-mortality rate is triple that of places like Singapore, and more ...