These photos accompany a story on environmental racism in Eugene, OR as well as around the world. The full story, Problemas de polución: racism and the environment, can be found at http://www.envisionjournalism.com/archives/4266.
Josefina Cano and her two children, Dulce and Emanuel, can often smell pollution on the air as it travels across West Eugene. Many families in the area, including the Canos, usually hesitate to open windows and doors during warmer months because the chemical stench enters their homes and becomes inescapable.
Across the street from a popular neighborhood park, industries spew harmful pollution into the air, which children and parents often can smell while outside.
Dulce and Emanuel Cano enjoy hanging out and playing basketball with neighborhood friends in Lark Park but always consider the risk that they are breathing in pollutants from nearby factories.
Lisa Arkin, executive director of Beyond Toxics, has been working with the company for over a decade to address the root causes of pollution in Oregon and assist vulnerable communities with advocating for themselves and gaining access to clean water and air.
Behind fences and No Trespassing signs, many industries with sites in West Eugene tend to leave potentially harmful waste products and trash lying around in yards rather than properly managing the waste.
"Our society needs to do a better job of figuring out the life-cycle costs of using toxic chemicals, and who is bearing the burden.” Lisa Arkin
Tracks run straight through the center of West Eugene, which sits along an industrial corridor and experiences heavy railway traffic as timber industries and chemical manufacturers haul supplies and products through the area.
Mercedes Lu, an employee with Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide (ELAW) for 22 years, has worked throughout South America and the Pacific Northwest to give a voice to communities suffering from environmental injustices.
No Trespassing signs and the smell of chemicals greet everyone who enters West Eugene. Union Pacific uses West Eugene as a main thoroughfare and has rail yards and tracks throughout the area.
“It is far more complicated than the polluter and the affected, or the rich and the poor indigenous. That is something that I see in the ways that funders operate, that environmental organizations operate. [...] There’s a hierarchy: The Helper, and the Helped. And as long as the latter is ignorant and needy, we are more validated.” Mercedes Lu
What should be a communal area where children can play with their friends is instead a reminder of the injustices areas like West Eugene often suffer, where lower-income residential areas and communities of color are pressed against manufacturing and processing plants emitting dangerous pollution.
