As I said last week, I grew up on the Mississippi River in Memphis, TN, and water is tied deeply to my soul. As I meditate upon the place water has in my life, It occurs to me that this connection may be one of my primarily motivations for the work that I feel called to do. I am preparing for a short sabbatical, and my only criterion for a place to stay for a week was access to water.
Many things matter to me, and I am vocal in several spheres. But it is articulating and uplifting the moral voice in the care of Creation that makes up most of my work. I believe that we who live in that world are ideally placed to help us transform and shift as a culture into one that can thrive in a world of radical global change. Climate apocalypse is already reality for many, as much of the refugee population fleeing Central America right now is being driven by storms, flooding, and earthquakes. And of course we who grok science understand that more frequent and severe storms are part of the consequences of global warming.
This is only one example of two issues that clearly intersect into the world of Environmental Justice. Climate Change meets Immigration Reform and creates a new lens for the thousands of families in crisis right now. Because Creation is fundamental to all things, these Environmental Justice intersections can be found in every situation of oppression, denial, harm and damage, marginalization, stripping of rights and consent -all the spheres of social justice are potential areas in the fight for Environmental Justice. 30 years ago, delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit drafted 17 Principles of Environmental Justice and reading through these can help hone a sense of the scope of EJ work.
All over the world, water can be framed at the core of conflict, commodification, and co-morbidities (access to clean water is key in many health initiatives). On the other hand, water protection and water reclamation have also become venues for community development and empowerment, innovation and technical creativity, and the deeper integration of humanity into our larger eco-systems. No place is this more clear than in the fights against oil and gas pipelines that are happening all over the country. And now, my home of Memphis has its own case, its own pipeline crisis, its own historically significant and systemically ignored Black community, its own fight to protect the region’s drinking water. The Byhalia Pipeline must be stopped altogether, not rerouted, and certainly not according to the current plan.
I recently completed Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project training, and of course I think of his whole project as something of home as well. Al Gore was my Senator long before he was the nation’s Vice-President, near-President, or Climate Champion. I cut my teeth as a campaign volunteer before I could vote, supporting Gore’s first Presidential run in 1988. Talking with my brother about this series I am writing, I was reminded that then Senator Gore traveled to Memphis several times in the 1990s giving the slideshow that would become the movie An Inconvenient Truth. Much of what is informing my understanding of the water oriented Environmental Justice struggle happening in Memphis right now comes from this recent training. The Byhalia fight was a primary focus of the training content, You can peruse the Climate Reality Project’s EJ resources here.
In addition to personal accounts from friends on the ground via social media, I am regularly reading the coverage from a Memphis news outlet committed to journalism with integrity and infused with an ethic for justice, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism. MLK50 has also focused its EJ work around this local battle and is tracking and reporting on the spectrum of issues touched but he Byhalia Pipeline. They have traced the relevant money streams, documented the experiences of Black homeowners in Boxtown and other communities along the proposed pipeline route, and held the elected officials accountable by mapping and disseminating the often arcane and difficult to navigate political processes of property rights and responsibilities. You can peruse MLK50’s Byhalia Pipeline coverage here.
The Byhalia Connection Pipeline is a new venture of regional oil refining company Valero (San Antonio, TX) and an oil and gas mid-level group that negotiates logistics and facilitates the placement of pipelines throughout North America, Plains All American Pipeline (Houston, TX). None of this oil sludge being piped will benefit anyone local, as it is to be shipped out of the Gulf of Mexico. There is a storage facility for oil traveling along the line that is planned for Northern Mississippi, and that will bring its own deleterious effects.
This venture is not the first to threaten the integrity of the Memphis Sands, the giant underground aquifer that supplies fresh drinking water to the entire region. Over a million people right now, and of course an untold number of future residents and generations, depend on this water supply. It should never need this kind of protection -to even consider breaching it, as TVA would like to do, or contaminating it, as an oil pipeline will, should be an obscenity. And an impossibility from a regulatory standpoint. Part of the certainty in the contaminate factor of a future pipeline is that the Memphis Sands is located in a major seismic activity zone.
The intersection with justice here is the route, as it very often is -routing and siting. The Federal Highway system bifurcated and segregated communities of color from the 1950s through the 1980s, eviscerating the economic and social bases of urban communities. (Memphis actually forced a re-routing of I-40 that went all the way to the US Supreme Court but that’s a story for a different day.) The routes of the recent Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines could have shown cultural sensitivity and competence in their recent spread, and few of us would have heard of those fights without the desecration and sacrilege of uprooting lands sacred to our Native peoples. The assumption on the part of oil and gas strategists is that routing its infrastructure through vulnerable, frontline, disenfranchised, or otherwise oppressed regions and populations will present less of a fight than routing through communities with resources to fight.
Fear tactics about losing property in court work better with communities who have never had access to legal support or aid through the morass of property law and regulation. Lump sums of money are a significant temptation for the trapped in cycles of poverty. Community investment is hard to ignore even if it comes with a pipeline -a new playground is something good for the kids now. It’s easy to see how this works.
And always, a fight with oil and gas -or any polluter- is framed to seem too big to fight, inevitable, a cost of progress, and simply the way things are. And yes, their resources are virtually bottomless for now. For now. But so is our will to stop this madness, to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and to heal our broken and poisoned world.
Next week, I’ll delve into what’s happening on the ground in Memphis that you can support. I’ll discuss what pipeline projects and other fossil fuel infrastructure projects might be threatening your own community, and what you can do about all of it. For far too long, the earth and all peoples have born the costs of oil and gas infrastructure development. Water has its own infrastructure needs, and those must be what we work to restore and expand.