Edited Volume Read Along: Environmental and Reproductive Justice
Imagine drinking, bathing in, and cooking with poisoned water. Imagine eating fish living in that contaminated liquid, and wildlife drinking the poison. Imagine the earth itself leaching toxins into anything growing from it, and the very air you breathe bringing toxic fumes and physical pollutants into your lungs and bloodstream. This is the daily reality for many communities of color in North America, especially indigenous communities living near superfund sites. Superfund sites are locations requiring long-term cleanup and can be anything from landfills to industrial waste, to radioactive contamination. There are 19 recognized superfund sites in Maryland alone.
In her chapter, “Environmental Reproductive Justice: Intersections in an American Indian Community Impacted by Environmental Contamination,” Elizabeth Hoover talks specifically about the Akwesasne Mohawks living on land bordering New York and Canada. The St. Lawrence River runs through their land, and dams for hydroelectric power and industry giants like GM used that river for their own benefit. Industry has created contamination and disaster in so many ways. Fluoride emissions browned trees and crippled and killed cattle. Polychlorinated Biphenyls, not banned until 1978, were flushed by GM into artificial lagoons. These lagoons repeatedly overflowed, poisoning the St Lawrence river, other local rivers and streams, and seeped into the groundwater.
“Akwesasne has been described as an environmental justice community— a population and a space disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination leaching from an industrial plant that did not benefit them, powered by a hydroelectric dam built on land taken unscrupulously from the tribe, and for which they were never compensated” (Hoover, 2022, p. 240).
PCBs can bind to soil, poison air and water, and can accumulate in the systems of animals that people eat. They are carcinogens in humans and animals, impact thyroid and liver functions, and can cause reproductive problems in women from menstrual irregularities, to prenatal cognitive defects. PCBs can also build up in breast milk and poison babies who are breastfed. These are all alarming facts but are especially prescient during a nationwide baby formula shortage. There are indigenous mothers having to make impossible choices about how to feed their babies.
This intersection of reproductive health and environmental contamination is the central focus of the chapter. The environment one lives in has major impacts on their health, from acute to chronic impacts. This influence can be as simple as the idea that people who live by the sea will consume more seafood in their diets than those who live in the mountains. With these different diets, the two populations might have different concentrations of vitamins and minerals in their systems, they might have different nutritional deficiencies, and different benefits from the nutrition they typically consume. They might also be exposed to different forms of pollution, the mountains might deal with coal ash and mining runoff, while the seaside communities will be more likely to encounter industrial and agricultural waste and mercury poisoning.
Like with so many things in this country, systemic inequality plays a huge role in which communities suffer the most from contamination. Historically, we are much more likely to place landfills, junkyards, slurry pits, and waste disposal sites near communities of color. The idiom of living on the wrong side of the tracks was derived from the concept that through redlining, gentrification, and segregation, low-income communities of color were forced to live downwind from train tracks, where the wind would carry the majority of the pollutants, smoke, and coal ash. This phenomenon also impacts indigenous communities. Though their land is sovereign, they can’t control what people put into the water upstream from their homes.
In the case of the Akwesasne Mohawks, GM and other corporations poisoned their soil and water, leading to significant health impacts for individuals throughout the community. Hoover focuses particularly on the increased instances of miscarriage. For many families, these events constitute personal tragedies. Women have to face extremely difficult decisions and sometimes have no choices at all. In a time when women’s reproductive freedom, in general, is under attack, it is important to remember that while access to safe and healthy abortions should be a right, so many women, even during the height of Roe v. Wade, had limited reproductive justice and autonomy due to other factors.
“In addressing issues of women’s reproductive rights, the liberal feminist movement has focused largely on reproductive choice, through ensuring sufficient access to birth control and abortion. But definitions of reproductive choice might diverge for ‘communities where people undergo nonconsensual sterilization, where toxic chemical concentrations produce infertility, or in which children are taken to be raised in boarding schools” (Hoover, 2022, pp. 243-244).
For Indigenous communities, the problems of reproductive and environmental justice go beyond the personal. The disproportionate impact of environmental contamination on people of color means that there is also a disproportional decrease in reproduction and fertility in those communities. This is particularly impactful given the history of forced sterilization and the kidnapping of indigenous children in attempts to eradicate indigenous languages and cultures. This environmental degradation impacts cultural reproduction as much as it does individual reproduction. Many indigenous cultures are matrilineal, and decreasing populations make it harder and harder to keep the cultures thriving. In many ways, environmental contamination is simply a more subtle continuation of the systematic destruction of indigenous communities.
For many, issues of pollution invoke images of car exhaust, city smokestacks, and farm runoff, unfortunate side effects of modern life that we should seek to mitigate. There is a pervasive idea that the deliberate elimination of toxic waste near people, dumping poison in rivers, and digging unlined pits to bury garbage are relics of a past when we didn’t know better. However, not only do corporations and the government continue these hazardous practices, the errors of the past continue to impact people today. Further, many people don’t even know that the water they drink is poison, the food they give their children impairs cognitive and skeletal development, or that because of their environment breastfeeding could kill their babies.
As I marched in protest at the supreme court, I had to consider that so many, including myself, were only motivated to that extent when it became clear that the attacks on women’s rights might directly affect them. For low-income women, women of color, and indigenous women, abortions have been inaccessible for decades. Additionally, we take for granted the idea that our choice is between pregnancy and abortion, and we don’t have to consider forced sterilization, repeated miscarriage, infertility, or how to be a mother in an environment full of hazards to ourselves and our children.
Hoover points out in her chapter that the most significant determining factor in where we dispose of waste is race. This shows a bleak picture of the people our societies value and those whose lives they do not. As we steadily approach the end of this edited volume I am struck by how fundamentally intertwined problems of race, environmentalism, feminism, health, and justice truly are. Advocating for one of these issues alone is insufficient. As with so many chapters in this book, Hoover could not have known the climate around women’s rights that would be present surrounding the publication of this book, yet somehow her words and research fit perfectly in our contemporary moment. The importance of intersectionality in our fights for equality, equity, and justice is more obvious than ever, and we can’t ignore the way injustice anywhere informs the world, environment, and society in which we all live.
About the Author
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.