From the Toronto Star:

In his compelling work Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, social critic Jonathan Kozol interviews children and adults in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx.

It's one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S. nited States and an area with alarmingly high incidences of murder, drug abuse, and poverty. (It is usually not a stop on the Disney-Times Square package tours of The Big Apple.)

Unfortunately, this section of New York also has one of the highest rates of asthma in the nation, and children with inhalers are commonplace. One of the main reasons for the soaring asthma rates, according to Kozol, is the medical waste incinerator operating in the neighbourhood.

Kozol learned from a local minister, Rev. Martha Overall, that the waste incinerator handles so-called "red bag products" — amputated limbs, fetal tissue, bedding, syringes, and bandages from 14 New York City hospitals.

Some of these items were slated to be burned at a proposed incinerator on the East Side of Manhattan, but the proposal was successfully blocked by area parents worried about the cancer risks an incinerator posed for their children.

For both Kozol and Reverend Overall, the ultimate home for this incinerator, in a severely depressed area largely of black and minority residents, is no accident.

It is rather an example of what U.S. church groups have labelled "environmental racism."

Environmental racism got so bad in the 90s that then-President Clinton passed Executive Order 12898, which states that environmentally hazardous endeavors must not take a disproportionate toll on poor or minority areas. It was so bad under his administration, that, as of 1993, University of Southern Illinois' Alison Crane noted:

Environmental racism affects many people in the United States. Three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with one or more toxic waste sites and the racial representation in numbers shows that over 15 million African -Americans, over 8 million Hispanics and about 50 percent of Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are living in communities with one or more abandoned or uncontrolled toxic waste sites (Bullard, 1993).

At least thirty-three such communities have populations exceeding 10,000 people (Bullard, 1993).

The Toronto-Star says that, in America, this is still the case.

As Ms. Crane notes in her paper, this takes grassroots motivation within poor and minority areas -- literally knocking on doors -- to combat.

Poor parents should get together to block incinerators like their affluent counterparts -- what, their children don't get cancer? Asthma?

"Legal notices" are often overlooked by poorer people when they are printed in newspapers, and often signs saying "to whom it may concern" are vandalized or ignored by area residents in poorer areas. Those of us who know and see the risk need to tell our neighbors: This sign means that your kids will be sick, are at greater risk, or will die if they build this factory!

The move for Eco-Justice is being led by Christian and interfaith organizations. One Jewish organization leading the way for ecojustice is the (lamentably un-Orthodox) Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL).

Environmental racism is very real, and very ugly and destroys the health of thousands of poor children every year.

Eat organic and boycott, but most of all -- the poor and minorities must let it be known: not in MY backyard, either.

(crossposted to MySpace.)