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Environment
Victims of the past, present and future? - Environmental Injustice and Indigenous Populations in the United States and Australia By Samantha Tancredi, SS Law and Political Science & Katharina Neumann, Deputy Editor, SS Law and Political Science The right to environmental justice can be derived from numerous different articles within the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the right to an adequate standard of living enshrined in Article 25, the right to enjoy one’s own culture and participate in cultural life in Article 27, and the right to security of the person under Article 3. Several of these rights are reiterated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a comprehensive instrument detailing the entitlements of native populations by setting minimum standards for the recognition, protection, and promotion of these rights. The Declaration outlaws discrimination against indigenous peoples and promotes their effective participation in all matters. Despite these ambitious promises, indigenous people often lack effective access to environmental justice, preventing them from exercising their human rights, leading to inherent environmental injustice. This article adopts an understanding of environmental injustice by Professor Juliana Maantay at EEGS Department at Lehman College and is the founder and Director of the Geographic Information Science Program. The definition states: “Environmental injustice is the disproportionate exposure of communities to pollution, and its concomitant effects on health and environment, as well as the unequal environmental protection and environmental quality provided through laws, regulations, governmental programs, enforcement, and policies.” This all-encompassing definition allows for the specific acknowledgement of one or more components for further analysis. This article will explore both parts of this definition through two different case studies. The first is the disproportionate exposure of indigenous communities to environmental hazards, and will be examined with reference to the Native American Population in the United States. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s circumstances within Australian society will on the other hand showcase unequal environmental protection under the law. United States of America: Disproportionate Exposure of Native American Tribes to Environmental Hazards The horrific events of the Church Rock Nuclear Spill occurred on July 16, 1979 on the Navajo reservation at the United Nuclear Corporation facility in Church Rock, New Mexico, USA. The spill itself happened as a result of a defect in the earthen dam system which was used to contain nuclear mine mill wastes. It is marked by University of South Florida Criminology Professor Michael Lynch as being “the largest yet most neglected nuclear accident in US history…with 1,100 tons and 95 million gallons of nuclear waste.” This spill directly contaminated water and land resources and contributed to health issues in the indigenous population. Lynch further remarks that “Church Rock is a small Navajo community with a population of 1,633 in 1980 [according to the US census], and approximately 12 per cent of that population was employed in uranium mining.” However, the breadth of damage is revealed as the community faced further hardship with the contamination of groundwater of the Puerco River, its main water source.
