Living Downstream

For this final Living Downstream episode of the season, we're dropping in on three recent webinars:

One gathering considered Social and Environmental Justice at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Another knitted together poetry and a powerful environmental film. It was put on by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. And a third event was cheekily called Toxics are a Drag, and was billed as a panel discussion on toxic beauty products in the queer community. That was hosted by one of the most important grass roots environmental groups in the country: New York City's WEACT for Environmental Justice.

Find more information about all these events in the Resources section of our website at https://norcalpublicmedia.org/resources/living-downstream-resource-guide

First, this show has an update on what's happening right now, the last week of October 2021. I called White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council member Dr. Robert Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice in this country. He spoke to me just days before leaving for COP26, the United Nations climate change conference set to start next week in Glasgow.

More than a year into the pandemic, the Bronx is still the New York City borough with the highest death rate from COVID-19. That's where we begin the second season of our Living Downstream podcast.

Last year, Ese Olumhense, former Bronx reporter at THE CITY, explored why residents there were dying from the virus at a rate double the city's average. Public health experts said Bronx residents, who are overwhelmingly Black and Latinx, were more likely to work outside of their homes, regularly exposing them to the virus. The borough also sees high rates of chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma, which can make COVID-19 infection more dangerous.

Non-Federally Recognized Tribes Struggle to Protect Environmental and Cultural Assets

By Debra Utacia Krol and Allison Herrera

Read more about federally non-recognized tribes.

Valentin Lopez was handed a dilemma: how to honor his elders’ admonition to fulfill an ancestral directive to guard and protect the ancestral lands of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, a small tribe along California’s Central Coast and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

“In 2006 the tribal elders came to a council meeting,” says Lopez, who’s served as chairman of the 600-member tribe since 2003. “They said our creation story tells us the Creator gave us the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth and all living things, and Creator has never taken away or rescinded that obligation. We have to find a way to do that.” Lopez left that meeting “just shaking my head saying, ‘How in the world could we ever do that?’”

One huge roadblock: Lopez’s tribe lacks federal recognition. Unlike recognized tribes, Amah Mutsun can’t use federal Indian laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA or access federal funding to pursue environmental and cultural site protection. And, most of the tribal members have had to move east to the San Joaquin Valley, priced out of their stunningly beautiful—and expensive—homeland, because they don’t have a reservation or other trust lands to call home.

So, how could Lopez honor his word to the elders?

[Photo: Valentin Lopez. Credit: Debra Utacia Krol]

Lopez isn’t alone: Some 55 Indigenous communities in California aren’t on the BIA’s List of Recognized Tribes, the document used by the feds to provide funding and technical assistance to tribal governments for education, health care, governance, environmental protection and many other programs. In fact, California has the dubious distinction of the state with the largest number of unrecognized tribes. Entire cultural groups such as the Ohlone, Esselen, Salinan and other cultures fell completely through the cracks, while others like the Chumash, Mono and Maidu peoples have both recognized and non-recognized communities.

So, how can non-recognized tribes manage to protect their ancestral sites and exert environmental stewardship over their lands? In California, some state laws and policies offer at least some paths to protection.

In September 2011, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. issued an executive order that requires all state agencies to engage in meaningful consultation with Indigenous tribes in California, whether federally recognized or not.

The California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, was amended in 2014 provisions for tribal cultural protections. And, these cultural provisions apply to non-recognized tribes. Under the terms of the amendment, known to tribes as Assembly Bill 52, California tribes have legal standing to issue a notice for consultation regarding any proposed project covered under CEQA in the tribe’s traditional and culturally-affiliated lands.

More state agencies, most notably the California Coastal Commission, have enacted tribal consultation policies. And, the state’s Native American Heritage Commission coordinates consultation as well as identifying and cataloging Native American cultural resources with state borders.

For small, resource-poor tribes such as the Amah Mutsun and the yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe (also known at the ytt Northern Chumash), whose lands lie about a four-hour drive north of Los Angeles on the Central Coast, utilizing these state regulations can be a challenge. Mona Olivas Tucker, tribal chair of the ytt Northern Chumash Tribe, manages relationships with a variety of state and local agencies.

Tucker believes that the state’s efforts to support tribes has a mixed record. “I think the Native American Heritage Commission tries very hard to be helpful to tribes federally recogn...

On this episode of Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast, Victoria Bouloubasis visits a rural county where the multicultural workforce kept America fed during the pandemic. We'll meet Esmeralda, who has become a community health worker, and her mother Marta, who works in a poultry plant.

In the face of blatant mistreatment and inadequate protection, food factory workers in North Carolina became sick, and died, in unacceptably high numbers. This mother-daughter team stepped up to protect the health of their neighbors and coworkers, efforts they continue today.

"Smackdown" tells the story of Richmond California, a working class town that grew up in the shadow of a massive Chevron refinery. The refinery emits a toxic soup of chemicals and residents suffer an asthma rate that is double the national average.

Explosions and fires have periodically shaken the refinery since 1989. But Chevron is also the biggest employer in town and its taxes supply tens of millions of dollars for city services. Can Richmond maintain a healthy economy while transitioning away from fossil fuels and lessening its reliance on Chevron? And what role does electoral politics play in the mix?

In October, 2018, Chevron settled a suit brought by the U.S. EPA, requiring it to pay nearly $3 million in damages, and spend about $160 million dollars upgrading refineries around the United States, including the facility in Richmond, Calif.

(Pictured: Community demonstrates against Chevron, April 20, 2012. Credit: Daniel Arauz, Flickr)

Listen to Smackdown, produced and reported by Claire Schoen.

Learn more about refinery towns in the U.S.

For a technical but very accessible animation describing the explosion and fire at Chevron's Richmond refinery in 2012, see below. The video was produced by the U.S. Safety and Chemical Hazard Investigation Board.