March
26 ,
2004
Environmental
Justice Activists Speak on Coalition Building to Challenge
Globalization
Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Teresa
Leal (left) and Joni Adamson |
By Alana Belcon FP
Teresa Leal, a Mexican Opata human rights and environmental
activist from Ambos Nogales (the twin cities located on the Arizona-Mexico
border), and Joni Adamson, associate professor of English and
folklore at the University of Arizona, are pioneers in finding
ways to bridge the long-standing rift between academia and activism.
In a talk titled “Environmental Justice Networking on the
U.S.-Mexico Border” in Gamble Auditorium March 10, Leal
and Adamson argued that globalization policies such as NAFTA
highlight the interconnectedness between environmental issues
and human rights and ultimately affect us all. Their presentation
was the first in a two-lecture series, “New Perspectives
in Environmental Justice,” which was organized by visiting
assistant professor of geography and women’s studies Giovanna
Di Chiro.
Grassroots organizations have always practiced networking as
one of their strongest movement-building tools. However, the
traditional “power-holding” approach,
as Adamson described it, used by academia with respect to activists has proven
detrimental for the ongoing cooperation between the two camps. Leal and Adamson
have been working together for many years to reverse this process and to form
new connections and alliances. “Between scientists and activists there
has always been a hesitancy to work with each other, and this is true also
with industry,” Leal said. “Often we’re antagonistic and
refuse to talk to one another, but we have common needs for survival that
we can organize around: stopping the increase in cancers, reducing toxic
contamination, and improving the quality of life. After establishing those
common threads, we can try to negotiate with each other and look for what
we can agree on and work on.”
This September 23–25 in Tucson, Arizona, Leal and Adamson will bring
together former antagonists to find those common goals as they invite “academics,
activists, artists, scientists, students, and government and industry representatives
to all talk about how we might meet some common environmental and social justice
goals.” Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and
the Environment (ASLE) and the University of Arizona South (UAS), the symposium
will focus on environmental justice, urban ecology, native lands, and grassroots
activism.
For Leal and Adamson, environmental and social issues cannot be separated.
Tohono O’odham and Yacqui students played a major part in showing this
connectedness to Adamson, who taught high school students on the reservation
for eight years and currently teaches college courses attended by large numbers
of Native American students. She talked of listening to her students’ accounts
of living next to open-pit coal mines and breathing in toxic coal dust or experiencing
the daily shocks from dynamite explosions blasting uranium ore from Native
American lands. Adamson said she learned to “reread” the romanticized
view of Native Americans as “closer to nature” and to see instead
how the literature of American Indian authors such as Leslie Marmon Silko
and Joy Harjo tells of the environmental and health impacts of poverty, unemployment,
and cultural annihilation that go hand-in-hand with living next to an uranium
mine or a nuclear waste dump.
For Leal, the interconnections between social and environmental issues became
clear in her early teens when she worked with the United Farm Workers Union
helping organize Mexican farm workers in the cotton fields of southern Arizona.
Fearful of the repercussions of losing valuable work time and even losing
their jobs, farm workers, “protected” by mere scarves tied over their
faces, often continued to pick cotton while crop-dusting planes sprayed DDT
over the fields. Leal’s efforts to help farm workers understand their
economic and human rights and to protect themselves and their families from
exposure to hazardous pesticides indelibly impressed on her the necessity of
looking at both the social and environmental components of her work. “At
the time, we didn’t call what we were doing ‘environmental,’ we
just called it ‘survival,’ ” Leal said.
During their visit to Mount Holyoke, Leal and Adamson also met with Hilda
Colón
and Julia Rivera, community organizers from Nuestras Raíces—a
grassroots environmental justice and community development organization serving
the low-income Latino community in Holyoke.
When asked for advice on how Mount Holyoke students can become involved in
making a difference in the world, Leal and Adamson recommended that students
who are interested in bridging the gap between academia and the community
should volunteer with organizations such as Nuestras Raíces (which means “Our
Roots”). The expression “Think Globally, Act Locally” reflects
a theme that runs through many grassroots environmental justice organizations
and, therefore, working to make a difference in our own neighborhoods should
be our first step, they said. While we should be informed and aware of the
global dynamics of social and environmental issues, our local sphere is often
the place about which we feel most passionate. “Environmental issues
start where we live,” Adamson said. “They start with our values.
What do we value?” To avoid the old problems of the division between
academia and activism, Adamson advised that upon volunteering, students should
view themselves the way she sees herself when she works with environmental
justice communities—as a tool in the toolbox. “Our attitude should
be, ‘Here I am, what do you want me to do?’” she said.
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