The first People of Color Environmental Summit was 30 years ago. How much has changed?
As a four-seat plane flew over Sampson County’s landfill last Wednesday, the stench reached 2,000 feet into the air and filled the cabin.
Richard Moore, the co-chair of the White House’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council and a longtime environmental justice advocate who is based in New Mexico, was one of the passengers on that plane.
“Going up on the plane, on the four-passenger plane and taking a broader sweep at it not from the bottom up but from the top down — just the incredible, incredible, incredible what I’ll call injustice that’s taking place to people here,” Moore said.
In addition to North Carolina’s largest landfill, Moore saw hog farms and poultry farms and wood pellet plants, all grouped closely together in Duplin, Robeson and Sampson counties.
After the plane landed, Moore and two other environmental justice leaders held a panel discussion at Clinton’s Lisbon Street Baptist Church. Like Moore, 30 years ago, Donna Chavis and Pat Bryant were on the seven-person national planning committee of the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit.
The 1991 event drew about 1,100 people to Washington, D.C., and concluded with agreement upon 17 principles of environmental justice. Those principles included the right to self-determination for all people, that public policy be crafted without discrimination; and a halt to the production of any toxins.
“It tells you what needs to be done to address and change the environmental racism that is the floor of everything that happens. It is not a litany of all the bad — the bad is the consequence of the environmental racism or racism in general,” said Chavis, a Robeson County resident and Friends of the Earth’s senior climate campaigner.
Benjamin Chavis was one of the planners
The 1991 planning committee was chaired by Benjamin Chavis, a member of the Wilmington Ten who would go on to serve as executive director of the NAACP. Benjamin and Donna Chavis are not related.
At the time, Benjamin Chavis was serving as executive director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice.
In the 1991 event’s proceedings, Benjamin Chavis wrote that the United Church of Christ had challenged the siting of a PCB landfill in Warren County, an event that is often credited as the beginning of the environmental justice movement.
Benjamin Chavis wrote, “We believe that no community, regardless of race, should suffer environmental degradation.”
At the panel discussion marking the 30th anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit, Moore recalled being moved at the time because he was surrounded by people of color and all of them were working to address environmental issues in their communities just like he was in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
“Conservationism and environmentalism was redefined,” Moore said, adding that the new definition widened to include “where we work, where we live, where we play, where we pray and where we go to school or where we learn.”
Environmental justice under Michael Regan
Environmental justice has received increased attention in North Carolina in recent years. In 2018, the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality formed an Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board. At the time, now-EPA Administrator Michael Regan was serving as the department’s secretary.
Lisbon Baptist Church sits about 1,600 feet away from a Smithfield hog processing facility. The plant looms over a predominantly Black neighborhood that wraps around the facility’s southern edge. Odors from the facility frequently stretch across the city.
Sampson County residents grapple with many of the issues that have drawn the attention of North Carolina’s environmental community. According to the most recent data from the N.C. Department of Agriculture, farmers there raise 38 million chickens, 7.4 million turkeys and 2.05 million hogs.
Sampson County is also home to a biogas processing plant, where methane gathered from the top of hog waste lagoons will be turned into natural gas. And Clinton is home to one of Enviva’s controversial wood pellet plants that churn out biomass fuel mostly for overseas power companies.
Sherri White-Williamson, the NC Conservation Network’s environmental justice policy director, hosted the recent panel conversation. After the group toured Duplin and Robeson counties, White-Williamson said, it made sense to end the day in Clinton because of the sheer number of issues nearby.
“We have the landfill, poultry and hog farms and the other counties don’t have that combination,” White-Williamson said.
Bryant, a Raleigh native who co-founded Justice and Beyond in New Orleans, encouraged attendees to avoid letting the outcome of one legal decision or one event impact them too much. Instead, he said, it is important to focus on the community of people working toward similar goals.
“As I see all of you here, I see churches, the leaders of churches, I see the leaders of organizations — there’s so much power,” Bryant said. “You have the power. You have the power, joined with others, and this is how the People of Color Summit happened.”
Moore, Bryant’s fellow organizer, vowed to bring what he had seen from that four-seat plane to other communities struggling with pollution.
“What I saw today, I will never forget in my life. And you will hear us speak about it whether it’s Mossville, whether it’s Alaska, whether it’s Manchester in Houston and North Carolina and what we saw today,” Moore said, referencing other areas that struggle with contamination.
That could start, Moore vowed, as soon as November’s meeting of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council
This story was produced with financial support from 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 1:17 PM with the headline "The first People of Color Environmental Summit was 30 years ago. How much has changed?."