Ingrid R. G. Waldron - There’s Something In The Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities

THERES SOMETHING IN THE WATER

THERES SOMETHING IN THE WATER

Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities

Ingrid R.G. Waldron

Fernwood Publishing
Halifax & Winnipeg

Copyright 2018 Ingrid R.G. Waldron

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Fazeela Jiwa
Cover image and design: Dave Ron
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing
32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0
and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Waldron, Ingrid, author

Theres something in the water: environmental racism in indigenous and black communities / Ingrid R.G. Waldron.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77363-057-1 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-77363-058-8 (EPUB).ISBN 978-1-77363-059-5 (Kindle)

1. Environmental policyCanada. 2. Hazardous waste sitesCanada. 3. BlacksCanadaPolitics and government. 4. Native peoplesCanadaPolitics and government. 5. RacismCanada. 6. EqualityCanada. 7. CanadaEthnic relations. I. Title. II. Title: There is something in the water.

HC120.E5W35 2018 363.700971 C2017-907865-8 C2017-907866-6

CONTENTS

Preface
A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats?: Strategic Inadvertence and Other Shortcomings of the Environmental Justice Lens in Nova Scotia

Conclusion
The Road Up Ahead

This book is dedicated to my family: my late father, Dr. George Waldron, my mother, Myrna Waldron, and my sisters, Marcia Waldron and Terri-Lynn Waldron.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T he Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities, and Community Health Project (the ENRICH Project), upon which much of this book is based, has been an amazing ride over the last six years. Although challenging, exhausting, and frustrating at times, the project has been an intellectually stimulating and exciting endeavour that has brought me into contact with politicians, artists, media, social and environmental activists, faculty and students in a wide range of disciplines, and diverse community leaders from across Nova Scotia.

I owe much of this to Dave Ron, a social and environmental activist who asked me to take on the ENRICH Project in the spring of 2012. As the ENRICH Projects first research coordinator and, later, a volunteer working with the project, Dave has shown unwavering commitment and support over the past six years by conducting literature reviews, helping to organize events, creating promotional material for events, updating the projects website, and providing general advice and feedback on the projects direction. He even designed the cover art for this book! Although Dave and I have had many heated debates over the years about the direction the project should take, they were rooted in our shared passion for community, equity, and justice.

I would also like to thank my good friend Doug Macfarlane for supporting me throughout the writing process for this book and in general. His insights and advice were invaluable and, most importantly, so was our promise to each other when we first met that we would be friends for life. We have both stayed true to that promise. Thanks for holding me down.

In completing this book, I also owe a unique debt to members of the Mikmaw and African Nova Scotian communities that invited me into their lives, and with whom I have been fortunate to have developed relationships over the past several years. I would particularly like to thank the following community leaders for granting interviews, organizing and participating in focus groups and other events, delivering presentations, and sharing their wisdom: Jonathan Beadle, Dorene Bernard, Louise Delisle, James Desmond, Mary Desmond, Cathy Hartling, and Alan Knockwood.

In addition, I would like to acknowledge the indispensable help of the members of the ENRICH Projects Lincolnville Water Monitoring Program Committee who volunteered their time to develop and successfully implement a project that built community members skills to test their own water. Thank you, Wilber Menendez Sanchez, Fred Bonner, Courtney Bonner, Angele Clarke, and Robyn Beckett, for a great job done in Lincolnville.

Thanks also to the many volunteers, research staff, and faculty that have given generously of their time to support the ENRICH Project over the last six years. I owe much to the local organizations Ecology Action Centre ( EAC ), Nova Scotia Public Interest Research Group ( NSPIRG ), and East Coast Environmental Law Association ( ECELAW ). I also appreciate the support of the College of Sustainability, the Healthy Populations Institute, the School of Nursing, and Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University.

Last, but not least, special thanks go to Lenore Zann, who was the first Member of the Legislative Assembly ( MLA ) to return my call and meet with me to discuss the ENRICH Project and environmental racism in the province. Her commitment to and passion for social and environmental justice issues has been inspiring to me and to the community members with whom she has developed relationships over the years. Most importantly, our collaboration led to the development of the Environmental Racism Prevention Act the first bill of its kind in Canada.

Preface

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats?

Strategic Inadvertence and Other Shortcomings of the Environmental Justice Lens in Nova Scotia

If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W.E.B. Du Boiss famous words, the problem of the color line, then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification. (Murakawa 2014: 7)

A s I jumped out of a taxi outside Province House in Halifax on April 29, 2015, I noticed a journalist from a popular online news site approaching me with a smile on his face. He wanted to congratulate me and my team on our efforts to have the Environmental Racism Prevention Act (Bill 111) (Nova Scotia Legislature n.d.a) introduced by New Democratic Party ( NDP ) Member of the Legislative Assembly ( MLA ) Lenore Zann in the Nova Scotia Legislature. I had been collaborating with Zann to develop a private members bill on environmental racism since earlier that year, and the day had finally come for her to introduce it. I smiled cautiously at the journalist, expressing both my satisfaction that the bill had reached this stage and my skepticism that it would eventually become legislation. After all, since a bill asking the government to address environmental racism had never been developed in Canada before, I was being careful about expecting too much, particularly given Nova Scotias complex history of racism.