Gulf Coast Communities Join People's Climate March

From our friends at Advocates For Environmental Human Rights:

Groups to Urge a Southern Initiative on Climate Change at People’s Climate March and Summit

From Texas to Maryland, a delegation of students and professors of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), environmental and social justice advocates, leaders of faith-based organizations, and survivors of Hurricane Katrina will join the People’s Climate March and Summit in New York, which precedes the United Nations Climate Summit.

“The painful experiences of Hurricane Katrina compel us to change our thinking that a climate treaty will save the day,” said Dr. Beverly Wright, Executive Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University. She was displaced for two years from her home and predominantly Africa American neighborhood in New Orleans, which were under eight feet of water during Katrina. “We need a southern initiative on climate change that supports the people who are most vulnerable to hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and tornadoes and most likely to suffer from racial, social, and economic inequities which set back our ability to be climate resilient,” she said.

Although some of the loudest voices denying climate change in the US Congress and Senate come from southern states, the delegation points to the critical role that the South has in climate change. Much of the fossil fuel energy produced in the United States come at the expense of communities in the South, where there is significant air and water pollution and coastal erosion. In both scale and magnitude, climate-related disasters in the South outnumber those in other regions of the country. In addition, the largest number of people who are less likely to rebound from a climate-related disaster as a result of social and economic disadvantages live in the South.

“A southern initiative is critical to the United States making and keeping a commitment on climate change,” said Dr. Robert Bullard, Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Policy at Texas Southern University in Houston. “The work of people, organizations, and institutions represented in this delegation is about climate action as part of the long fight for human rights and civil rights to bring about racial, gender, environmental, economic, and social justice in this country,” he said.

Members of the delegation have organized teach-ins at Empire State College on Saturday, September 20. The first teach-in focuses on how HBCUs can support communities in being climate resilient and effective advocates for transforming environmental and economic policies. This teach-in is followed by a workshop on the actions being taken by organizations in the south to sustain communities and ecosystems.  The delegation will be near the front of the People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21, where organizers have reserved space for marchers who hail from communities on the frontlines of climate change.

“The People’s Climate March and Summit are about our human rights and how we want to live free from the control that the oil, gas, and coal industries currently have over our laws and economy,” said Monique Harden, who co-directs Advocates for Environmental Human Rights in New Orleans. “This is a critical time as our coastal cities in the South are projected to be under water if we don’t take control,” she said.

Obama, Romney, and Race(less De)Baiting , By Rosana Cruz

Reprinted from the Bridge The Gulf blog:

While Romney and Obama dance around race, the Gulf Coast continues to suffer devastating racial disparities, worsened by the government's inaction

New Orleans finally came up this week in the presidential contest – in a soundbite about race and the government's response to Hurricane Katrina. But before anyone gets too excited – the soundbite won’t do a thing to support our struggles for justice, equality, and safe, healthy communities on the Gulf Coast. It won’t help us build affordable housing, it won’t strengthen our struggling school systems, and it won't help reform our corrupt police departments. Our brief reemergence in national prominence won’t address other regional challenges that could desperately use national concern and intervention – not damage from Hurricane Isaac, the staggering mass incarceration of African Americans in Louisiana, coastal land loss, nor the ongoing health disaster wrought by BP’s oil.

Instead of talking about these very real and pressing racial disparities, the presidential campaigns on both sides have turned talking about race, and (barely) acknowledging racism, into the political version of the cooties.



We watched Obama-opponents use Katrina as a political football this week. A conservative website “released” a video from a 2007 speech by then-Senator Obama, in which he said things that most of us on the Gulf Coast don’t find too scandalous – that the federal government’s response to Katrina “tells me that the people down in New Orleans, they don’t care about as much.” But because the message was delivered to a Black audience and because it displayed the slightest acknowledgement that racial injustice is a national problem, conservatives used it, two days before the first presidential debate, to reiterate their idea that in "post-racial" America, any and all talk about race is divisive (especially when coming from people of color).




On Wednesday, we watched President Obama take the “post-racial” bait in a “post-racial” debate. In a 90-minute debate about the economy, neither the President nor Mitt Romney made a single mention of race, let alone discuss a plan to address the yawning economic and racial disparities in America.

While both parties take a cowardly and opportunistic approach to talking about race, the entire Gulf Coast, especially poor communities and communities of color, bear the brunt of very real racial disparities, which we need our next President to acknowledge, talk about, and fight.

Here’s just one conversation we can't have if our President won't talk about race: A conversation about the Stafford Act, which legislated how the government responded to Hurricane Katrina, and how it responds to all national disasters. In the supposedly inflammatory 2007 video of Obama talking about Katrina, he implies that the federal government applied the Stafford Act unequally – by waiving the requirement that local governments match a percentage of the federal funds after 9/11 in New York, but not on the Gulf Coast after Katrina.

What Obama didn't say is that the Stafford Act, even when it is upheld and used to the full benefit of disaster victims, still falls short. Survivors have no rights to the most basic emergency medical care or food. The government has total discretion whether and how to spend funds in the wake of a disaster. As Advocates for Environmental Human Rights has been arguing since Katrina, disaster survivors in the United States would have many more rights and protections if we adopted principles used by the United Nations which ensure the right to recovery for people in similar situations in foreign countries. Adopting a rights-based approach to disaster recovery would benefit all communities in the U.S., not just communities of color.



Obama wasn’t saying any of this in that 2007 speech. He wasn’t calling for what we really need - a change in the Stafford Act. He was simply calling for the equal application of the Stafford Act. Now, in this 2012 political contest, even that position is being recast as extreme. This is the dynamic of how we talk about race. Over the past few decades, real conversations about race have been pushed underground. It’s gotten even worse in “post-racial” America, when even the most basic calls for racial equity made by Senator Obama of 2007 are being cast as extreme for President Obama of 2012.

 This public discourse on race is incomplete and dishonest, and it doesn't bring us closer to a more democratic and inclusive America. On the Gulf Coast, it doesn't bring us closer to justice or recovery.



Until 2008, we had never had a President who could have seen himself reflected in the faces of people stranded on roof-tops after Katrina, or in the bodies shot down on the Danziger Bridge. When Senator Obama voiced his anger over the Stafford Act and the government’s response to Katrina, he showed he was someone who could empathize with our experience in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. Since 2008, our President seems be too hamstrung  to do much with that empathy, and he has shied away from even talking about racial equity. In 2012, empathy and understanding are just too politically risky.



Ultimately, it’s on us to push both candidates to be more honest, and it starts with being honest ourselves. We must tell our stories – about our lives, our experiences, and how they've been shaped by racial inequity and injustice. We must acknowledge people's suffering and anger, and insist on remedies that address root causes.

In New Orleans, on the Gulf Coast, and in communities across the country that were excluded or ignored in the debate this week – we can’t let our experiences be reduced to soundbites for someone else’s political gain. That means saying we still have a race problem, and that problem continues to fester each day we, our elected officials, and the media, buy into the fantasy of post-racialism.

Rosana Cruz is Associate Director of VOTE (Voice Of The Ex-offender). Previously Rosana worked with Safe Streets/Strong Communities and the National Immigration Law Center. Prior to joining NILC, she worked with SEIU1991 in Miami, after having been displaced from New Orleans by Katrina. Before the storm, Rosana worked for a diverse range of community organizations, including the Latin American Library, Hispanic Apostolate, the Lesbian and Gay Community Center of New Orleans, and People's Youth Freedom School. Rosana came to New Orleans through her work with the Southern Regional Office of Amnesty International in Atlanta.

Devastating Report Exposes Feinberg's Unequal Treatment of BP Illness Claims

Kenneth Feinberg, administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) set up in the aftermath of the BP Drilling Disaster, has broken with his own past practices - as well as the evidence compiled by scientists and the experience of Gulf Coast residents - to deny all health claims filed by Gulf Coast residents.

In a devastating report released today, Advocates for Environmental Human Rights (AEHR), a public interest law firm that has taken a leadership role in environmental justice struggles on the Gulf Coast, has documented the hypocrisy and injustice behind Feinberg's policies.

Up to this point, Feinberg has denied all damage claims for illnesses associated with exposure to the toxic BP crude oil and/or toxic chemical dispersants that were applied to the oil spill. In doing so, he has said that he requires medical proof of causation showing that the illnesses were caused by toxic exposures during the BP oil cleanup work. In their report, AEHR shows the problem with this position:

Feinberg’s requirement of medical proof of causation for BP illness claims is a break from his past practices in processing claims and pay-outs in the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund and the Agent Orange Settlement Fund. As the administrator of those funds, Feinberg did not require medical proof that a claimant’s illness or disability was caused by being exposed to toxic air pollution resulting from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or the toxic chemicals in Agent Orange sprayed during the Vietnam War. These disaster fund programs paid claimants based on a showing that they were in the vicinity where harmful chemicals were present and had a medically diagnosed illness or disability. The rationale for not requiring medical proof of causation in the Agent Orange Settlement Fund, which was replicated in the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, is “the inconclusive state of the scientific evidence” to demonstrate that a specific toxic exposure caused a specific physical harm.

By creating a significantly higher burden of proof standard for illness claims by people exposed to toxic chemicals during their cleanup of BP’s oil disaster, Feinberg effectively denies all damage claims for illnesses associated with exposure to the toxic BP crude oil and/or toxic chemical dispersants that were applied to the oil spill. Feinberg’s unprecedented standard implies that the sacrifices that cleanup workers and volunteers have made to protect the coastal communities, livelihoods, culture, marine species, and wildlife of the Gulf Region from the largest environmental disaster in the history of the United States are of lesser importance.

It also implies that people living in or visiting the Gulf Coast who were exposed to BP’s oil and/or chemical dispersants do not deserve the same level of protection afforded to the residents and visitors in the vicinity of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, who received financial compensation for toxic exposure-related illness without medical proof of causation.

As the chart below shows, this policy has led to radically different treatment for victims of the BP disaster as measure against those previous processes.

This is not the first time that AEHR has intervened for justice in the claims process. On June 11, 2010, less than two months after the BP oil drilling disaster, AEHR exposed the fact that BP contracted with a claims processing company that promoted its record of reducing lost dollar pay-outs for injuries and damage caused by its client companies. This company, ESIS, Inc., was administering the claims filed by people who suffered injuries and losses from the BP oil disaster.

A few weeks later, Kenneth Feinberg was appointed as the administrator to take over the BP claims process and he established the Gulf Coast Claims Facility. Clearly, the fight for justice for those affected by the BP disaster is not over.