Toxic Triangle Hearings Call for End to Environmental Problems Harming Low-Income Communities and People of Color

Oakland Local

While global warming has propelled environmental issues into the mainstream of American politics, an all-day hearing activists held recently in East Oakland showed the difficulty of translating concern into action in the neighborhoods hit hardest by environmental problems.

If the hearing was designed to rally and inform residents of the East Oakland neighborhood where it was held, or to put pressure on area political officials, there is clearly a long way to go. Few attendees said they were from East Oakland, and most officials were longtime environmental activists or already sympathetic to the cause.

But organizers raised many points during the Feb. 13 session to brainstorm solutions to the complex environmental problems faced by many of the Bay Area’s poorest residents.

About 50 environmental activists met at Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church for the first of three “Toxic Triangle” hearings. The public meetings are designed to “call for an end to the unequal enforcement of environmental laws and disproportionate environmental impacts in low-income communities of color” and present “demands for justice” to policymakers, officials and regulators.

Organizers call themselves the Toxic Triangle Coalition, which they say is comprised of more than a dozen local advocates, community and faith-based organizations, research and policy institutes working to end to the “toxic assault” in the Bay Area’s “Toxic Triangle.”

The triangle is spread across the low-income neighborhoods of Richmond, Bay View-Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, and West and East Oakland, where the collection of freeways, heavy truck traffic, oil refineries, abandoned industrial plants, World War II era defense facilities and seaports create a dense soup of environmental pollution.

Margaret Gordon, who helped run the discussion, said these communities have shared issues around land use, air quality, health issues and economic development. Gordon was appointed by Mayor Ron Dellums to the Oakland Port Commission after years working for environmental justice. She said these communities have not had “land use laws, public health laws or air quality laws that answer to any of those issues.”

Peralta Community College professor Nehanda Imara of Communities for a Better Environment, who helped lead the session, said the area’s many environmental problems would not be the focus of the discussion.

“We already know the problems,” she said. “We want to collaborate on recommended solutions.”

Others present included Allen Temple Baptist associate pastor Reverend Daniel Buford and Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition. Other organizations included the Greenlining Institute and Green Action.

Buford, who has worked in the environmental justice movement for several years, said the coalition “wants to put focus and light” on the three targeted communities. Environmental pollution, he said, makes these communities “like gas ovens without walls.”

Buford singled out the East Oakland flatlands, which he said have some of the highest asthma and infant mortality rates, and among the lowest life expectancy rates, in the region. Poor environmental conditions in the Bay Area’s low income neighborhoods, he said, violates three separate human rights treaties: the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Buford said the treaties and all applicable environmental protection laws must be enforced in low income communities.

Organizers circulated a pledge among public officials in attendance, asking them to work with the planning committee to take action on the group’s goals, including setting stricter emissions limits and land-use and zoning guidelines within the Toxic Triangle and the adoption of Climate Action Plans for those communities.

Afternoon panels of officials and regulators included Oakland CIty Councilmember Nancy Nadel, California 14th District Assemblymember Nancy Skinner, East Bay Municipal Utilities District Commissioner Andy Katz, and AC Transit Director Chris Peeples, all of whom have long track records of working for environmental justice.

Nadel, who represents West Oakland for the City Council, said her community’s problem is that “while most of the smokestack facilities have gone,” the area has to deal with toxic waste embedded in “the land they left behind.” Nadel has been fighting for years to convert abandoned industrial properties into spaces for green energy jobs.

“We’re not going to pit the environment and the economy against each other,” she said. “We can improve both at the same time.”

No one attended the session from the offices of Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums or City Councilmember Larry Reid, who represents those who live in the district where the hearing was held, East Oakland’s 7th district.

Organizers said following the meeting that they did not know if anyone attempted to invite the mayor. The group made a “general contact” with Oakland’s city councilmembers, but did not invite them individually.

Marie Harrison, a Bayview-Hunters Point-based activist with Greenaction, said she was “disappointed” that not all the local officials made it, but promised the coalition would press forward to get commitments from public officials to support the coalition’s goals.

“It does not end here,” she said.

Meanwhile, the East Oakland component of the coalition’s work presents unique challenges. Over the past several years, toxic waste abatement and environmental justice groups have worked to clean up Bayview-Hunters Point, Richmond and West Oakland. On the surface, East Oakland appears ready for such community-based efforts as well. There are certainly enough environmentally-related problems and issues to work around.

* A 2008 study of health disparities in Alameda County (“Life And Death By Unnatural Causes“) found that life expectancy in the flatlands is four years less than in the surrounding hill areas (about 73 to 79 years) and 10 years less than in some portions of the county. Researchers attributed some of that disparity to “toxic neighborhoods,” or “areas with high levels of air pollution, such as freeway interchanges, railways and industrial toxic release sites.”

* In 2008, Communities For A Better Environment conducted a study that concluded that particulate matter emissions are dangerously high in the southeasternmost section of the flatlands. The sudy said these emissions can be inhaled “deep into the lungs” and are linked to a number of adverse health problems, including aggravating asthma. The emissions were twice as high in the far end of the flatlands than they were in the hill areas.

* Diesel truck traffic, a significant cause of health-impairing emissions, is especially heavy in the flatlands. Last summer, Communities for a Better Environment counted more than 11,000 diesel trucks in the equivalent of four full days passing through the Hegenberger Road area surrounding the Coliseum Complex.

* The Los Angeles Times reported this week that a recent study by researchers working out of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, the University of Southern California and other institutions determined that “Los Angeles residents living near freeways experience a hardening of the arteries that leads to heart disease and strokes at twice the rate of those who live farther away.” The study was the first to link heightened automobile and truck exhaust from the freeways to “the progression of atherosclerosis — the thickening of artery walls — in humans.”

One of the Bay Area’s most heavily-traveled freeways, Interstate 580, runs the length of the East Oakland flatlands, in some cases directly through the communities of Jingletown, the Fruitvale and Brookfield Village.

But two major differences between East Oakland and the other communities in the Toxic Triangle make grassroots environmental justice organizing much more of a challenge.

The first is that, unlike Bayview-Hunters Point, West Oakland and even Richmond, East Oakland is not a compact community with a core identity. The East Oakland flatlands are a sprawling series of individual neighborhoods with no common core, no common ethnicity and often no more connection than the throughways that run between them.

The second challenge is the scarcity of giant toxic targets to rally against. West Oakland has the abandoned toxin-strewn industrial plants, the port and the old Oakland Army Base. Richmond has the refineries and the leftover residue from the World War II-era shipyards. Bayview-Hunters Point has the old shipyards and industrial plants and the aging PG&E power plant. East Oakland’s environmental pollution comes from many sources; it’s as diverse as the number of drivers who use its freeway to cross the Bay.

But these challenges have not stopped environmental justice groups from making the effort. On Feb. 27, from 1 to 3 pm, Communities for a Better Environment will hold a “Climate Justice & Healthy Living” meeting at Tassafaronga Community Center on 85th Avenue. The agenda includes the question of how the impending global warming crisis will affect Oakland residents.

Meanwhile, the Toxic Triangle Coalition is taking its message to other parts of the area, with the second Toxic Triangle hearing scheduled for June 19 in Bayview-Hunters Point.