Friends Committee on Legislation Education Fund
Peace, Environmental Justice, Human Rights
Responses to the September 11 Attack
Peace, and Oakland, San Luis Obispo Military Schools
Environmental Justice
Human Rights
The Military cornered millions of dollars in the 2000 legislative session by promising to engage young people in education where some people were convinced that more traditional approaches have failed. Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown's plan to open a military charter school was approved by the State Board of Education in a unanimous vote that gave the charter school state sponsorship Oakland Military Institute so that it could work toward opening at the former Oakland Army Base. The controversial proposal got a critical boost from Brown's former chief of staff, Governor Gray Davis. Davis made only his second appearance before the Board of Education to tout the military charter.
The governor also used his budgetary muscle to get approval for establishment of the Turning Point Acadamy at the National Guard's Camp San Luis Obispo that spent over $55 thousand on each student. The plan was to use the facility for certain youth 15-17 years of age who have brought weapons to school.
While no one condones such offenses, it was questioned how many cases present circumstances where it is appropriate to send a youth away to a military boarding school. Experience with confrontational "boot camp" programs in other states has been disappointing, and the California Military Department has limited expertise in dealing with 15-17 year-olds. The legislation by former Senator Adam Schiff, was amended by the Senate to direct Turning Point in a more traditional direction, by requiring teachers to be credentialed, and by prohibiting reliance on boot camp styles of discipline. In subsequent years, the cost factors caused this effort to be abandoned.
Environmental Justice
Various studies have revealed how the poor bear a disproportionate burden of environmental problems. Many environmentally dangerous and offensive facilities are located in or near low-income communities mainly inhabited by people of color. Unlike their wealthier and whiter neighbors they are much more prone to find themselves living near toxic waste, freeways, smokestacks, landfills, and air and water polluting industries.
They must cope with higher levels of poisonous wastes, carbon dioxide, and ozone, and greater than normal incidences of asthma and lead poisoning. The environmental justice movement, emerged in working class and low-income African American and Latino communities since the early 1990s, is an effort to reinterpret the definition of the environment as "where we live, work, and play" to connect new constituencies traditionally outside of the environmental movement.
Communities inhabited mainly by African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, migrant farm workers, and the working poor seem particularly vulnerable because they are perceived as weak and passive, unwilling to fight back against the poisoning of their neighborhoods in fear that it may jeopardize jobs and economic survival.
Environmental justice received a big boost in the early 1990s when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that "communities of color and low-income populations experience higher than average exposures to...environmental pollution." The EPA study provided the basis for an executive order signed by President Clinton in 1994 that required federal agencies to take environmental justice into account when analysis is mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
For California legislation on the issue, see FCL Newsletter, May, 1999
Some of the organizations working on this issue are:
- The Border Environmental Justice Campaign works with social justice groups in the border region to inform workers, increase their capacity to influence conditions that directly affect their health, and to demand cleanup of abandoned and contaminated sites.
- Communities for a Better Environment collaborates with urban communities and grassroots organizations using science based research, legal tools, and organizing strategies to prevent air and water pollution, eliminate toxic hazards, and improve public health.
- Pesticide Organizing Project points out that complete health hazard assessments for pesticides and inert, or secret, ingredients of pesticides formulations is not possible for 90% of the registered pesticides. Knowledge of the possible effects of several pesticides used together, although a common occurrence, is practically non-existent.
- The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice serves as a resource center for community groups working on environmental justice issues, giving information, publications; direct assistance, outreach, referral, network development, training, leadership development.
- The Quaker Eco-Witness promotes government and corporate policies to help restore and protect Earth's biological integrity.
Books:
- Where We Live, Work and Play: The Environmental Justice Movement and the Struggle for a New Environmentalism (Praeger) by Patrick Novotny. Novotny documents the expanding environmental justice constituency through case studies of four community groups ranging from South Central Los Angeles to Louisiana.
- The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, by Christopher H. Foreman, Jr., argues the environmental justice movement is unable to generate a focused policy agenda, refuses to confront the need for trade-offs, inconvenient facts about risks, and the limits of an environmental approach to social justice, and he recommends institutional reforms to recast the national dialogue.
Human Rights
Three human rights issues deserve special attention, following the failure to gain approval of legislation in the 1999-2000 legislative session:
- Giving domestic partners and close relatives leave for family care and medical reasons
- Banning discrimination in housing and employment, based on actual or perceived gender;
- Restoration of Food Stamps and cash assistance for released drug felons.
Friends Committee on Legislation
717 K St., Suite 500-B,
Sacramento, CA 95814-3406
(916) 443-3734
Click Here to Donate to the FCL
|
