Activism, drama and Environment

The Third World Conference and XI All India English Teachers' Annual Conference jointly organised by WASLE, IASCL and Department of English, MCC, got underway today. The third session was on Activism, Drama and Environment: Ongoing Struggles for Environmental Justice of Asian Immigrants in America, delivered by Kaori Mori, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan.

Excerpts from her Lecture:

"Environmental Justice" is relatively a new notion, first recognised officially by the United Nations' Environmental Summit in 1992. This notion seeks for environmental justice for all the people whose residential areas are environmentally unhealthy and dangerous. In an American context, those who need environmental justice are, for example, Native Americans whose residential areas are near nuclear waste processing facilities. African and Hispanic Americans also pursue environmental justice because some of their residential areas are notorious for crimes. We could see that environmental justice is intertwined with racism. However, is environmental racism a recent phenomenon?

If we read American minority literatures carefully, we can see how American minorities have lived in environmentally disadvantageous areas throughout history. Monica Sone, a second generation Japanese American writer, depicts how her family had undergone environmental racism in 1930's in Seattle, in her Nisei Daughter. Her family lived in Skidrow, "with shoddy stores, decayed buildings, and shriveled men" (8). When they looked for a better house in a white people's residential area, because of their race, they were told, ""I am sorry, but we don't want Japs around here" (114) by a white woman. Thus, American minorities had to live in environmentally problematic areas, and they had struggled for better living environment.

As a strategy to overcome environmental racism, Asian immigrants had tried to have better education. Harry Kitano and Roger Daniels report that Asian Americans "choose the so-called safer professions, where visibility is not as important as the quality of their education and credentials" (82).