1. Environmental Justice: A Method for Engagement
Dr. Richard Perry
Lutheran School of Theology - Chicago

2. ‘The Pastoral Circle’ Biblically based: Luke 24: 13-35
A method which can be employed in any context
Six Steps
Adapted from Social Analysis: Linking Faith and Action. Joe Holland and Peter Henriot, S.J. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1981), 8-10.
July 22, 2012

3. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
IMMERSION
July 22, 2012

4. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
July 22, 2012

5. George Washington Carver
Race, science, and religion supported the subjugation of African slaves. Yet, African slaves turned this experience on its head. The natural environment became a source of sustenance and healing. The role of African American women is significant here. Using the tools at hand (e.g., a hoe and a handful of seed), African American women could maintain a garden that yielded vegetables to sustain their families (Glave, 2006). I remember my maternal grandmother tending her garden in the backyard and canning tomatoes, green beans, and okra. And my siblings and I helped her with the canning process. We, though, would not dare play in the backyard for fear of doing something to her garden!
George Washington Carver, born several years after the Emancipation Proclamation, I consider to be the most significant scientist who contributed to the African American legacy about nature. In an essay published in 1912, Carver, who was on the faculty of the infamous Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), wrote about the relationship between creation and the creator. “To me,” said Carver, “Nature in its varied forms is the little windows through which God permits me to commune with Him, and to see much of His glory, by simply lifting the curtain and looking in.” Carver continues, “I love to think of Nature as wireless telegraph stations through which God speaks to us every day, every hour, and every moment of our lives” (Carver, “The Love of Nature,” Guide to Nature, Dec. 1912, 228). Carver’s love of nature was inseparable from his Christian faith as he sought to commune with the Creator. And he communicated this to the farmers in the Tuskegee area.

6. Modern Era – 1970s “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)”
Writer/s: Gaye, Marvin P
Lyrics © EMI Music Publishing Released 1971
July 22, 2012

7. Warren County, North Carolina
The modern environmental justice movement began with a protest in Warren County, North Carolina. Warren County was one of the poorest counties in North Carolina with a per capital income of around $5000 in The population was more than 65% African American and included poor whites. The fundamental problem was that the state of North Carolina decided to build a landfill to store PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls, a member of the family of halogenated aromatic hydrocarbons). PCB’s contained DDT and Dioxin, known to be hazardous to life and thus indestructible. However, PCB’s could not be completely incinerated as the EPA suggested. This meant that PCB’s entered into the food chain, being carried by water and ending up being stored in oils and fats of plants and animals. The 1982 Warren County protest pointed out a very clear trend, “They [the state of North Carolina] would rather experiment with poor people, poor white people, than to experiment with the middle or upper classes … The regulations are such that allow landfills to be placed in environmentally unsafe, but politically powerless areas,” said one of the residents of Warren County. PCB’s had been illegally dumped along the roadways in fourteen North Carolina counties in 1978 and the roadways cleaned up in 1982.

8. United Church of Christ Report
A national movement for environmental justice was born and “officially” connected with civil rights organizations. It was this mobilization of African American citizens that brought out what they understood to be environmental racism. The Rev. Benjamin Chavis, Jr., who was working with the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, coined the phrase. He defined environmental racism as “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the presence of life-threatening poisons and pollutants in communities of color, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the environmental movement” (Preface, Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice & Communities of Color, edited by Robert D. Bullard, [San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994], xi-xii).
The 1987 Report Toxic Wastes and Race: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: United Church of Christ) produced by the UCC Commission for Racial Justice documented a racial pattern of locating landfills in communities of color was national in character. Moreover, the Report identified race, among other indicators, as the best predictor of the location of hazardous waste facilities in the United States.

9. Environmental Justice Summit 1
And so a watershed event occurred in 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. This summit was convened in Washington, D.C. The event included almost 1,000 environmental justice activists from across the country, Africa, and South America.

10. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
THEOLOGICAL
REFLECTION
July 22, 2012

11. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
PLANNING
July 22, 2012

12. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
ACTION
July 22, 2012

13. THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
DEBRIEFING
July 22, 2012

14. Some Book Resources
July 22, 2012

15. Step 3 Theological Reflection
THE PASTORAL CIRCLE
Step 3 Theological Reflection
Step 4 Planning
Step 5 Action
Step 1 Immersion
Step 2 Social Analysis
Some Websites
Debriefing
July 22, 2012