Gore tours toxic sites with environmental activists
Group points out polluted areas in Houston’s minority neighborhoods
At Hartman Park in Manchester, a mural painted by children depicts the park full of families and surrounded by industrial facilities.
Streets along the edge of the park are lined with chemical storage tanks and other facilities.
“Houston is segregated, and so is pollution,” Robert Bullard, namesake of Texas Southern University’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, explained on a “toxic tour” Saturday attended by former Vice President Al Gore. “And as you go west, it gets whiter and whiter, and healthier and healthier.”
As the bus passed the railroad tracks in Fifth Ward, Bullard told tour attendees the city of Houston and Harris County have threatened to sue Union Pacific, adding pressure on the railroad business to clean up the longstanding soil and groundwater contamination in Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gar
“They have been waiting for years knowing that this site is dangerous. The community has to wait and wait, get sick and die. That’s the injustice. That’s environmental racism up close and personal — when you have the facts, you still have to wait.”
Robert Bullard, a professor of environmental and climate justice at TSU
dens, where higher rates of cancer have been identified.
TEJAS, an environmental justice organization based in Houston, hosts these bus tours of toxic sites in minority neighborhoods, including the cancer cluster in Fifth Ward and industrial facilities in east Harris County.
“They have been waiting for years knowing that this site is dangerous,” Bullard said. “The community has to wait and wait, get sick and die. That’s the injustice. That’s environmental racism up close and personal — when you have the facts, you still have to wait.”
Gore had just spent several days hosting an activism training in Houston through the nonprofit he founded, the Climate Reality Project. The nonprofit held the conference in Houston in part because there are a number of strong grassroots organizations across the Gulf region, he said in an interview. Gore called the climate activists in Houston “extraordinary.”
On Saturday, he was on the bus with some of them.
Gore has known Bullard, who sits on the nonprofit’s board, for decades. Gore said that when he and John Lewis introduced the first environmental justice legislation in Congress, Bullard, who is known here as the father of environmental justice, was the lead witness.
Environmental justice issues were among the most important topics Gore believed people in Houston should be focused
on, along with the job force transition to clean energy and the global economic transition.
Communities had felt for so long like they were being sacrificed — and that has “become intolerable,” he said.
Youth drawn to the civil rights movement was intertwined with the growing activism around environmental justice, in his view.
“We’re seeing the desire for justice push people, particularly these younger activists, to really identify the systemic issues that have to be addressed, and really focus in on them,” Gore said. “And environmental justice fits that like a glove, and I think you’re going to see a lot more activism in that area.”
Along the way, the Houston tour pointed out a fertilizer plant within walking distance of homes and a school; the Port of Houston area; and industrial facilities that emit more than a dozen chemicals.
“If you look to the left, we’ve got Manchester that is covered on all four sides by industry,” TEJAS cofounder Ana Parras said. “And to the right, we have one of the largest metal crushers.”
The population of Manchester is over 90 percent Latino, Parras said.
Parras started hosting the toxic tours over 20 years ago.
Community advocates are fighting for language justice, demanding that state environmental regulators at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality provide proper notice to and seek input from those who speak limited English.
As a result, TCEQ will host two upcoming meetings in Houston about public participation and language access — on Nov. 1 at Milby High School and Nov. 2 at Sam Rayburn High School in Pasadena.
The Harrisburg Manchester area is one of the oldest parts of Houston, dating to 1826, Parras said.
“Manchester was here before the refineries,” Parras said. “A lot of people always ask that question. What first came out of here was cotton, and the oil industry came through.”
Some of Houston’s founders are buried at Glendale Cemetery in Manchester.
“This tells you a lot about this area. It’s a historical area,” Parras said.
Today the community faces the health impacts of living among industry — children living within a 2mile radius of the Houston Ship Channel have a 56 percent greater chance of getting leukemia than children living elsewhere, according to research from University of Texas’s School of Public Health.