More than 25,000 people across Europe have suffered heat-related deaths since June, as climate change continues to produce hotter and hotter summer temperatures. And we haven’t even reached the peak of the heatwave season.
But quieter climate catastrophes are closer to home and aren’t getting the same headlines as the European fires. Across the United States, Black and Indigenous communities are deeply affected by the dangers that environmental racism poses to their physical, physiological, and psychological well-being.
Public health scholars have consistently cited environmental justice (EJ) communities as case studies of what happens when corporations are allowed to have their way in low-income, Black and Brown neighborhoods for the benefit of their capitalist and industrialist ventures. EJ communities are neighborhoods affected by urban density and concrete islands that significantly increase heat exposure.
New York certainly has its share of EJ communities. All but one neighborhood in the Bronx — the predominantly White and upper-middle-class area of Riverdale — is classified as an EJ, or “disadvantaged” community. And just as suspected, kids living in the Bronx are five times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma and twice as likely to die from asthma than the national average, due to urban heat island effects stemming from a lack of green space and tree cover, heavy diesel truck usage of the borough’s multiple converging highways, redlining, decades of economic divestment, and a disparate concentration of polluting infrastructure. Think about where all the Black and low-income folks in New York live and do the math. East Harlem, Central and Eastern Brooklyn, Southeast Queens. All EJ communities.
People worry and talk about climate change like it’s a far-off possibility. But some of us who experience environmental harm at the intersection of capitalism, industrialization, patriarchy, and racism don’t have time to worry about the future because we’re worried now.
Now, we don’t have clean water to give to our children because the water is polluted by chemical plants. Now, we are surrounded by family and friends who have the highest rates of asthma and cancer, because we are constantly breathing air tainted by smokestacks and petrol plants. Now, we are suffering from insomnia because the noise that keeps data centers running, fueling our overconsumption of generative AI, is so loud that we cannot sleep or think. We are suffering now.
A disproportionate number of us are low-income Black, Indigenous, and Latiné women who do everything in our power to resist and change how our family is affected by these harms. We educate others about those smokestacks, we plant gardens in our backyards above the soil to feed our families, and we write letters to our city officials to clean up their pollution from where we live.
Recently, I wrote an academic paper that revised the idea of “politicized environmental identity” to assert that for folks who are already marginalized by oppressive institutions, our decisions to care about climate change and environmental harm are deeply intertwined with the politicization of our existence and our bodies as racialized and gendered people in this society. It is our bodies that absorb the brunt of the damage to our world. We pay in disease, in stress, and in anxiety.
Most of these big environmental and climate organizations don’t consider us and what we’re enduring now as they dream of a better future for their children. They don’t realize that for us, morality isn’t pushing our motivation to act; It is our need for survival.
But we need them to act now. We need them to pour money into the research and policy efforts that move refineries away from our homes and advocate for our health. We need them to care with the same intensity that folks care when it’s happening to them.
shola shodiya is a Black Feminist psychologist, Assistant Professor of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project at UCSB.
