It was 1995 when Lynn Jones first heard about environmental racism.
Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian environmental activist who spoke out against decades of unbridled petroleum waste dumping in the West African country, was executed by the state’s military dictatorship.
Jones had grown up in a black community in Truro not far from the town dump. Something clicked when she heard the term environmental racism.
“It was the beginning,” she said from her north-end Halifax apartment, which also serves as a makeshift office with stacks of paper, thick binders and books spread out on her dining room table.
“It was the first even people of colour were hearing about it. Environmental racism was not a term that was used.”
Jones was vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress at the time. The umbrella union group was working on its first national anti-racism report, and Jones included a chapter on environmental racism.
“It was new to me,” she said. “But I remember pushing to have it in this document. My brother, Rocky, took the terminology and the concept and ran with it and, really, around here, he was a leader in naming environmental racism.”
Two decades later, Jones said, environmental racism is still an unknown concept to many. In fact, she avoids using the term when speaking to affected communities.
“It complicates it for the people who are experiencing it. But if you ask them about racism, they’ll know and name all the racism issues. And a lot of those are about the environment. But If I had started off asking about environmental racism, that would have thrown them right off.”
Across Nova Scotia, African-Nova Scotian, First Nation and poor communities have a lopsided number of dumps and toxic waste sites in their backyards. It’s hardly a new phenomenon. Though the term was coined relatively recently, the roots of environmental racism run deep in the province.
Take Africville. The tight-knit and hard-working black community on the northern edge of the Halifax peninsula was home to hundreds of descendants of African slaves. They fished the Bedford Basin, planted crops and worked odd jobs. Away from the city core, residents of Africville could live apart from the racist attitudes of the predominately white population.
But an industrial boom that swept Halifax in the late 1800s brought racism to Africville’s doorstep. Facilities shunned by Halifax cropped up around the black community. Africville’s backyard filled with human feces disposal pits, an infectious disease hospital, an abattoir, a prison, an open dump and an incinerator.
The city dump that was located on the outskirts of Africville. (THE CHRONICLE HERALD ARCHIVE)
Halifax city council minutes from the time suggest the facilities, not tolerated in white neighbourhoods, were considered well-suited to Africville lands. “Residents had no social, political or economic power to stop the city from using their community as a dump, in every sense, and from taking their land,” former Africville resident Irvine Carvery said in his research on the displaced community.
Called a slum and an eyesore, Africville was bulldozed into the ground in the 1960s, but its history stands as one of the earliest examples of environmental racism in Nova Scotia.
Since Africville, the number of black and aboriginal communities with waste sites has proliferated. In the First Nation community of Pictou Landing, the waste runoff from a pulp mill flows into settling ponds in Boat Harbour. Two Guysborough County dumps — an older one with no lining and a new landfill — are located in the small rural black community of Lincolnville. Acadia First Nation in southwestern Nova Scotia has reported arsenic in its water on the Gold River Reserve and contaminated soil from an old dump on the Yarmouth Reserve.
“Environmental racism is the disproportionate location of potentially hazardous sites or industries near racialized, low-income populations and the working poor,” Ingrid Waldron, an assistant professor of nursing at Dalhousie University, said in an interview.
“When you site them in these kinds of communities, it’s because they are marginalized. They don’t have a voice, or the power to speak up.”
Waldron has spearheaded research on the health and socio-economic effects of environmental racism in the province. Her work has spurred the community-based ENRICH project — Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequalities & Community Health — as well as the student-led art project Time to Clear the Air: Art on Environmental Racism by Mi’kmaq and African-Nova Scotian Youth.
Wooden boxes piled high at the old city dump. Africville is in the background and the Rockhead Prison can be seen at top right. (THE CHRONICLE HERALD ARCHIVE)
Waldron’s research has been inclusive and painstaking. She has travelled the province to study different examples of environmental racism, methodically exploring the links between racial inequalities and environmental regulations, industrial contaminants, public health and patterns of disease.
But Waldron acknowledged the experience of environmental racism is at times hard to neatly quantify in a report.
“When you are racialized, sometimes you just know. As somebody who is black … we just know this is another form of invisible, systemic racism that weaves itself in very insidious ways in this province historically and plays out in where these sites are located. It’s hard for some people to understand how race and inequality and power are embedded into this.”
While the intangible aspects may be hard for some to grasp, the numbers don’t lie. A map by the Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group plots out Nova Scotia’s aboriginal and black communities alongside toxic waste sites and landfills. It shows hazardous waste sites, landfills, incinerators and polluting industries repeatedly situated in African-Nova Scotian, First Nation and poor communities.
“One community with a landfill isn’t necessarily racism, just as not all toxic industries are beside marginalized communities,” said Brian Crouse, the group’s resource and administrative co-ordinator. “But it becomes environmental racism when you can say more often than not that these toxic industries end up beside poor and marginalized communities.
“It’s common to hear about environmental issues around landfills or power plants or pulp mills and relatively common to talk about racism. But we’re only now starting to link these things together to see where the environmental issues are often directly related to issues of racism and poverty. That paints a more complex but more realistic picture of what’s actually going on in the province.”
One of the communities that stands out on the map is Lincolnville, a tiny speck on the fringes of Guysborough County. James Desmond has spent most of his life there. He describes it as multicultural, with mostly First Nation and African-Nova Scotian residents.
In 1974, the first dump was opened in the community.
“It had no checks and balances,” Desmond said. “They used to spread diesel and used oil onto the garbage and set it on fire and burn it. There were dead animals, transformers, PCBs. It was open season. The municipality didn’t seem to care about the health effects this was having on the community of Lincolnville.”
Concerns about the dump are similar to those shared by communities across Nova Scotia with waste sites on their doorstep. Desmond said he’s worried about the health and environmental impact of water, air and soil pollution, dwindling property values, declining population and wildlife nuisances.
Then, in 2006, the Municipality of the District of Guysborough closed the first dump and opened a second-generation landfill accepting waste from across northern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton.
“The people in the community feel they are being sacrificed by the municipality of Guysborough for the mighty dollar,” Desmond said. “It’s all about money.”
Lincolnville residents protest the planned garbage dump near their community at Province House in 2006. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff / File)
Sheila Pelly, councillor for Lincolnville, Sunnyville and Upper Big Tracadie, said the dump has been a controversial issue in the area. But she laconically sums up the situation: “It has to be put somewhere.”
Besides, Pelly said, the landfill is an asset to the community. “With the revenues that they’re taking in, we’re able to keep lower taxes. We also have some jobs for people in the community.”
But Mark Butler, policy director with the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax, pointed out that Lincolnville was handled vastly differently than Upper Sackville. Both had first-generation dumps, built before strict regulations came into place. But whereas the Upper Sackville site was lined retroactively to catch leachate — potentially toxic garbage water — before it entered the groundwater, the Lincolnville dump was simply closed and buried.
Moreover, Upper Sackville residents were compensated. Due to foul odours at the dump, 25 families were bought out of their homes and the community was paid $5 million under the Community of Sackville Landfill Compensation Act.
“Landfills are a problem, particularly old landfills,” Butler said. “They’re a ticking time bomb. Forty or 50 years ago, chemistry was advancing faster than our waste disposal rules. Everything was thrown into a smoking pit.”
Butler said it’s hard to know what impact the old dump will have down the road. Though the chances of it affecting drinking water are remote, contaminated waste water could be getting into groundwater without a leachate system in place, he said.
Desmond said he would like to see Lincolnville treated the same as Upper Sackville.
“The people of Sackville were compensated, and when they closed the landfill they put a proper enclosure around it and they monitor it on a regular basis. I don’t think it’s asking too much for us to get the same treatment.”
Despite the evidence, connecting environmental issues to racism is fraught with challenges. Jeffrey Masuda, a Queen’s University associate professor, said drawing a link between race and waste on a map can be helpful. But understanding and addressing environmental racism is more complex and requires historical and political context, he said.
“You can’t just show the map and say, ‘Here it is on the map, and if we can fix this map we’re going to solve the problem,’” said Masuda, director of the Centre for Environmental Health Equity. “If you create a map you can say, ‘Here is a starting point for an investigation.’ But the investigation doesn’t end with a map.
“We have a checkered history in terms of how we treat particular populations of Canadians and the way that we have relied upon the environment in terms of building our country and economy.
“In the case of First Nation communities and toxic waste proximity, we have to point to something and say, ‘There is the injustice. The injustice is colonization, the injustice is the Indian Act, the injustice is … reserves, the injustice is the lack of environmental regulations and assessments that are tokenistic rather than authentically democratic.”
Waldron has been lobbying the government to recognize environmental racism in order to spark change. Since completing provincewide research on environmental racism, Waldron has been meeting with government players.
“Government people may not have a critical understanding of race and class and power and privilege, but an environmental racism lens needs to be incorporated into what they do,” she said. “It starts with community members being heard.”
Waldron’s lobbying appears to be paying off. NDP MLA Lenore Zann plans to introduce a private member’s bill on environmental racism next week.
“Environmental racism is real in Nova Scotia,” said Zann, who grew up in Truro. “But the province has never embarked on any sort of official consultation or review to examine the matter.”
The timing could be ripe for environmental justice legislation. In a historic announcement earlier this month, the province introduced a plan to close and clean up Boat Harbour. Closure will happen by January 2020, and the government has set aside $52.3 million for remediation.
In 1864, land was set aside for the aboriginal community that became known as Pictou Landing First Nation. A hundred years later, Scott Maritimes announced plans to build a mill at Abercrombie Point. The pulp mill promised hundreds of jobs in a rural community that had seen better days. But what to do with 25 million gallons of toxic waste water, the daily byproduct of the pulping process, was a problem.
The solution was to set up a treatment lagoon for effluent on the reserve. Boat Harbour, once a fertile hunting and fishing ground, was turned into a waste site with a toxic cocktail of zinc, cadmium, mercury, dioxins, furans and hydrocarbons.
“It was a place that was completely destroyed and ruined by pollution,” said Jonathan Beadle, who lives in the First Nation community. “When it became polluted as fast as it did, a whole generation of people were completely lost.”
Jonathan Beadle is seen before speaking at an Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health ENRICH event at the Dalhousie Student Union Building in Halifax last October. (TED PRITCHARD / Staff / File)
Promises to decrease the adverse effects of the waste water and close the treatment facility have repeatedly fallen through. Then last year, an effluent leak in the pipeline near Indian Cross Point sparked a blockade, kick-starting dormant talks between the government and the band.
“It’s caused a lot of upset,” Beadle said. “We’re a small community, but there were times when heads were butting all the time over this. I became so entrenched in the fight it took a toll on me personally.”
Beadle said he’s optimistic the government will follow through on its most recent promise. “I feel like I have no choice but to be hopeful,” he said, pointing to his five children as his source of optimism for a better future.
Whether the province fulfils its pledge to clean up and shutter Boat Harbour remains to be seen. But Environment Minister Randy Delorey said the government is committed to action and not just rhetoric. “We’ve promised change, and that’s what we’ll deliver,” he said. “Our track record shows that we’re actually doing things, not just talking.”
Delorey said it’s premature to comment on Zann’s proposed bill. “It’s hard to comment on legislation we haven’t seen yet, so I can’t say whether it’s something we could support.”
Still, Delorey said he is committed to engaging with communities on environmental concerns.
The Boat Harbour treatment site, located near Pictou Landing, is seen last August. The site processes waste water from the Northern Pulp mill. (CHRISTIAN LAFORCE / Staff)
Delorey’s department has no official definition of environmental racism.
But officials are aware “that for some communities and organizations, environmental racism is about where industrial development gets sited and how environmental impacts and concerns get addressed when raised by a particular community,” the minister said in a followup email.
He’s heard concerns from places, including Pictou Landing First Nation, where people feel they are dealing with a “disproportionate level” of environmental impacts.
“I am committed to ensuring that the department takes an effective, consistent and equitable approach to our regulatory responsibilities, regardless of where these environmental impacts occur in the province,” Delorey wrote.
“Our government has committed to taking action on the longstanding issues affecting Boat Harbour and has been working directly with Pictou Landing First Nation to address concerns.”