Does Environmental Compliance = Environmental Justice?
by Chloe Nunn at 10:10 in Environmental
'…a policy memo to members of Congress on accelerating offshore wind energy development in U.S. waters; the introduction to my book on climate solutions; a presentation for a powerful corporation on how technology can advance ocean-climate solutions; a grant proposal to fund a network of women climate leaders; a fact check of a big-budget film script about ocean-climate themes, planting vegetables with my mother in our climate victory garden.'
Is this a list of things you would support? A list of things which would further your own environmental values? Because it's also a list of things which Black climate expert Dr Ayana Elizabeth Johnson was unable to get done last week. In her article 'I'm a black climate expert. Racism derails our efforts to save the planet' she cites Toni Morrison stating that 'The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.'
Not only does racism cause distraction to Black employees across environmental industries, environmental injustice itself disproportionately impacts Black people in the UK, the US, and across the globe. This is true on local levels where waste facilities are frequently located in predominantly Black and Brown communities. It's also true on global levels where Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) communities are already experiencing worse climate change impacts than those in predominantly white communities and countries. Unfortunately, the true impact of environmental action, or lack thereof, on BIPOC communities isn't known, because even within our corporate industry of compliance, very little documentation exists*.
Environmental compliance and consulting covers a wealth of services and interacts with virtually every other industry there is: Policymakers created the regulations to implement through advice and data management. Waste collectors and pickers carry out the physical work which results from those policies. Companies from all manufacturing and distribution industries enlist our services to help them adhere to the law and sometimes to voluntarily do better for the environment. Technology services meld with environmental services to support the work. All of those interactions create an industry which is supposed to be helping heal environmental injustice through deliverable action.
This interdisciplinarity of the industry may create a greater challenge in combatting systemic racism. Not only do we need to tackle racism in our own backyard, but we work with members of varied industries, all merging in the environmental compliance realm. We should be taking some responsibility for anti-racism across the board. This includes preventing micro-aggressions in the office, like ensuring Black employees know they are valued for their skills and not there to fill a quota, to halting racist incidents when we are out and about.
Not supporting Black people in this industry is detrimental to the success of their work, and consequently our collective work. In fact, it has been proven that a diverse workplace is a more likely to be a financially successful workplace, but that still requires supporting our BIPOC colleagues. Even if the employee diversity percentages matched the UK population (which they don't) there is still more to do. We need to make sure that the BIPOC employees are able to do their work effectively and do not have to fight internal systems while trying to do so.
*If you would like to help combat this lack of knowledge – please contribute to our informal survey here.
If you would like to start combatting racism in your workplace and don't know where to start, here's the UK 2017 McGregor Smith Report, and the 'One year on' report.
Please get in touch here to find out what else we are doing to combat racism.
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