It is the annual Martin Luther King Celebration at South Eugene High School, and Beyond Toxics has been invited to speak.  It’s 9:00 in the morning, and I’m standing in front of the first of three groups that  I will reach out to today.  About 20 expressionless faces gawking up at me. Blank stares. I figured these South Eugene high school students are wondering “What is she going to teach us today I love pressure. I work well under pressure. My best sides come out under pressure. So there I went.

“Environmental Justice! What is Environmental Justice?” I asked. “Mother Earth!” one student shouted. “Justice for the Environment!” another one shouted. “Great start!” I answered, excited that they were going to learn  a new concept. Something to spice up their education.

So what did we do?  We started off with a short and sweet video put together by Beyond Toxics staffer John Jordan-Cascade. It takes you on  the environmental justice bus tour we held in West Eugene last April. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s definitely a “must see” project, involving communities in Eugene and how they’ve been disproportionately exposed to hazardous industrial air emissions. I loved seeing the students’ reactions while playing the video. The scene where students are being dropped off by a school bus looks like an everyday scene of students coming home from school–practically anywhere in the U.S. However, as the narrator, Executive Director Lisa Arkin, describes, kids in West Eugene sometimes encounter a “wall of chemicals” as they try to live normal lives in Eugene’s most concentrated collection of polluting factories. The high school students in the room seemed to lean forward with particular interest. After the video they noted that perhaps we take our air for granted. Who wants to live like that?

I was so proud of the South Eugene high school students today. They got to learn all about. They caught on to the issue of environmental justice, and how it relates to our communities in West Eugene a lot quicker than I thought they would. Teaching them about the term “environmental justice” was so rewarding for me that I found myself imaging a career in teaching. The students went from knowing nothing about the link between environment and injustices facing our community, to becoming social justice advocates and—going further: demanding that something be done for the communities “in their backyard.” Not in our backyard! they said. That made me feel happy, like a proud parent. Particularly knowing that I had planted the seeds of change for over 60 students.  I think Martin Luther King would have thought it was a really good  day for justice.

Sometimes when I think about our Environmental Justice project, I think about the communities we are working with – West Eugene. And then I think to myself, is it really only West Eugene we are speaking about here? I mean, if you think about it, air certainly doesn’t stay within neighborhood boundaries. Air particulates don’t say to one another “Oh, we’d better stay here.” And yet, people tend to think they are safe if they don’t directly smell, see or experience air pollution.  Perhaps they feel “Well, I don’t live in West Eugene. Why should I care?”

Say for instance you don’t live in West Eugene and you read the story in the paper about how your fellow Eugeneans are suffering from polluted air from train idling or industrial pollution. You take a sniff, and think, “I don’t live there.” And you move on to the sports section.

Or, let’s say you do live in West Eugene. You get days when it is just unbearable to go outside, open your windows, ride a bike or take a walk. But you have no choice because you’ve invested everything in your home and can’t afford to move to a different neighborhood.  And your children probably love their local school, you like your local church and your neighborhood association, and you bought your home with high hopes for a better life.  From what I learned from some West Eugene residents, underlying a sense of community is also a sense of being stuck without a way to change things (think about train idling!). That can feel frustrating.

The same goes with other environmental justice issues, such as wage theft in the Latino immigration community. When an undocumented worker for instance is not getting paid, it not only affects their family, but the state as well. We learned from Ramon Ramirez of PCUN last week that over 8000 wage claims were filed with Oregon’s state labor bureau, totaling $24.5 million in wage theft. According to a study by the Perryman Group, if all undocumented immigrants left the state, Oregon would lose over $3,000,000,000 in revenue from their purchasing power.

Air pollution issues aren’t as concrete as wage theft. However, it has become obvious that disproportionate exposures to air toxics also have a ripple effect through our community. We, as a community united in working for a sustainable and healthy Eugene, could benefit from taking steps to reduce how air pollution harms not only nearby neighbors but everyone in our entire Eugene airshed. We can learn a lot from Northwest Portland Activists such as Neighbors for Clean Air who hammered out a “good neighbor” agreement with ESCO to reduce pollution from the company’s foundries by an estimated 20 percent.  So let’s figure out a way to work together to help out our West Eugene community.  Just because we can’t see it or smell it doesn’t mean that it is not there.