While studying chemistry at Xavier University in New Orleans, Robert Swayzer III excelled in the classroom during his freshman and sophomore years. Although the twenty-three-year-old Winnsboro, Louisiana, native decided against pursuing medical school early on in his college career, Swayzer’s performance as a chemistry major won him an environmental research scholarship as a junior through Xavier’s Center for Environmental Programs.
That scholarship, which was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), allowed Swayzer to work with Xavier faculty to develop materials that absorb toxic chemicals from waste water. As a result of the research experience, Swayzer grew more interested in environmental science and won another research award. He became an Environmental Justice Scholar at Xavier’s Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) during the 1995-96 school year.
As an employee at the Xavier center, Swayzer now coordinates student programs and publishes community newsletters on environmental issues. Next fall, he expects to enroll in a master’s program in Industrial Hygiene at Tulane University’s School of Public Health in New Orleans.
“My goal is to work in industry in a capacity where I can help a company improve its safety practices in the workplace and assist it in safely disposing toxic chemicals,” Swayzer said.
Swayzer’s story is part of an educational movement that is sweeping historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority institutions. Over the past seven years, a dramatic expansion of environmental education has transpired. Through partnerships with the federal government, largely the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and EPA, institutions have developed environmental education programs that are attracting students to environmental careers.
A total of seventeen schools comprise the Historically Black College and University/Minority Institution Environmental Technology Consortium (ETC), which has been funded for the past five years by DOE. In 1990, ETC was organized to participate in federally-funded environmental programs. Since winning the support of DOE, member schools have dramatically added environmental education courses, content and degree programs to their curricula. They have established outreach programs with their local communities and pre-college students, and have provided environmental education training for faculty.
“We have become part of an effort I where we are among the leading institutions. Traditionally, HBCUs have played catch up,” said Dr. Kofi B. Bota, the consortium’s director and vice president for research and sponsored programs at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta.
Adding momentum to the expansion of environmental education at many HBCUs has been the environmental justice movement and The College Fund/UNCF. Originating as a grassroots community campaign in the early 1980s, the environmental justice movement has prompted four consortium schools, including Xavier, to establish research centers to work directly with communities adversely affected by environmental problems.
Since 1992, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has charged its Office of Environmental Justice “with a broad mandate to serve as a focal point for ensuring that communities comprised predominately of people of color or low income populations receive protection under environmental laws.” EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has supported community-based/grassroots organizations that are working on solutions to local environmental problems with a small grants program.
Terry Davies, director of the Center for Risk Management at Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C.-based non-partisan, environmental issues think tank, said it’s well documented that exposure to hazardous pollutants and polluting facilities. He added, however, that there is a wide range of thought on what the environmental justice movement is supposed to achieve. “It’s not clear what the environmental justice agenda is,” beyond the “universally accepted” idea that subjecting disadvantaged communities to disproportionate levels of polluting facilities is wrong, according to Davies.
Davies said there’s considerable cleanup work to he accomplished in communities.
In 1994, The College Fund/UNCF launched an environmental education program for its member schools. It has coordinated programs which have resulted in research consortiums among member schools working with EPA, DOE, foundations and companies. The College Fund/ UNCF has opened the door to corporations which are looking to improve their environmental records.
Environmental Justice Movement Finds a Home
Along the eighty-mile route between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, lies a swath of chemical processing plants and oil refineries. Residents in communities near the plants have complained for years that toxic wastes and emissions from the plants and refineries have contaminated their drinking water, air and soil. The route is commonly referred to as “Cancer Alley” by residents and activists because blame for the disproportionate number of serious illnesses suffered by residents has been placed on the region’s industries.
For the past twenty years, a national campaign focusing on the disproportionate exposure to pollutants that minority and low-income communities have encountered in places such as Louisiana’s Cancer Alley has emerged into what is known as the environmental justice movement. The crusade for environmental justice has grown largely out of the experiences of African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos whose communities have been overburdened with nearby hazardous waste sites, incinerators, petrochemical plants, lead contamination, dirty air and contaminated drinking water.
Citing numerous examples, activists have charged companies and local governments with “environmental racism.” These new crusaders have produced evidence showing that minorities are bearing a disproportionate level of exposure to toxic wastes because companies have deliberately built their disposal facilities close to minority communities.
With the wave of environmental education sweeping HBCUs, the environmental justice movement seems to have found an institutional home. In the past four years, four schools have elected to establish environmental justice centers on their campuses. The centers have largely been assigned to assist communities suffering from high exposure to toxic waste disposal and polluting facilities, and to conduct environmental research projects.
Xavier’s DSCEJ was the first center established. Dr. Beverly Wright, a sociologist who founded the DSCEJ in 1993, said the center works with thirteen different communities that are based along Cancer Alley and the New Orleans public schools district. The center, which has nine staff members, coordinates a wide range of projects, most of which are based in the communities with which DSCEJ is partnered.
“Empowering community residents with the knowledge and know-how to help themselves is one of our first priorities,” Wright said.
Tasks have included: helping community residents to evaluate residential buy-out plans by industry; analyzing soil and water samples in communities for toxins; training community residents for jobs in the waste cleanup industry; and training residents to participate in local governing and community councils to influence environmental policy.
At a recent DSCEJ workshop for its community partners, residents were introduced to personal computers and taught to access environmental databases such as the Toxic Release Inventory and Community Right to Know. At other workshops held earlier this year, residents learned environmental terminology, leadership skills, and strategies to influence local environmental policies, according to Wright.
In addition to Xavier and Clark Atlanta University (CAU), Hampton University and Texas Southern University (TSU) also host environmental justice centers. Dr. Robert Bullard, director of CAU’s center, said many HBCUs are located near communities surrounded by environmental problems.
“Our schools have to be involved in finding solutions for our communities, and that’s why I started this center at Clark Atlanta,” said Bullard, who is a sociologist.
Wright believes that each of the four centers has become known for its niche: Xavier for its community programs; CAU for its clearinghouse activities, and as a convener of frequent national conferences and symposiums on environmental justice; Hampton for the technology its center develops around Geographical Information Systems (GIS) or computerized mapping systems; and TSU for its legal activism in the environmental justice arena.
A number of other schools have also established programs in environmental justice. Tuskegee University faculty and students have been working with officials in Pritchard, Alabama, for the past year to help revitalize areas that have been contaminated by toxic waste. Tuskegee officials say the goal of revitalization is to clean contaminated sites and make them attractive to cleaner industry.
“We’re trying to develop a partnership model that we can take to other Alabama cities and towns,” said David Said, Coordinator of Environmental Justice Programs at Tuskegee University.
Expansion Rooted in DOE’s Mission
Just a few years before the environmental justice movement reached HBCUs, the expansion of environmental education had already taken flight with ETC. The idea of having a consortium to expand environmental education came from an EPA official working at CAU who suggested it to university officials in 1989. Later that year, Bota and officials at other schools began exploring the formation of an academic consortium because they believed the federal government would be receptive. The consortium was formally organized in January 1990.
“The basic rationale for the consortium was that unlike other fields, environmental programs require interdisciplinary cooperation across several fields. The feeling among us was that no one institution had all the resources to effectively partner with the federal government on a large-scale program,” Bota said.
In April 1990, DOE began seeking proposals from academic organizations which wanted leadership roles in environmental education and technology development. For more than forty years, DOE had been charged with building and maintaining the nation’s nuclear arms arsenal. During that time, the weapons building process had generated large quantities of toxic, hazardous and radioactive waste. DOE was responsible for the safe management and disposal of the waste.
DOE set out to develop partnerships that would enable academia to play an active role in the agency’s mission of managing and disposing hazardous radioactive waste. Consortium leaders recognized that working with DOE could lead to the overall expansion of science and engineering resources at their institutions. They also recognized that environmental education expansion could draw more minority students into science and engineering careers — one of the stated goals of ETC.
After submitting one of thirteen proposals to DOE, the consortium was chosen, in September 1990, to develop a plan for environmental education and technology development. Starting in fiscal year 1991, DOE began allocating $5 million annually to ETC. The annual funding, which was divided among the seventeen schools for a period of five years, enabled them to address four areas: community outreach and pre-college education; undergraduate education and post-secondary training; graduate and postgraduate education and research; and technology transfer.
“We were the first such consortium to work with DOE as an academic partner,” said Bota, adding that other schools have joined together to copy the ETC model while competing for DOE programs.
Consortium school officials say participation in the DOE program has accelerated the pace of environmental education expansion. In 1992, Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss., established a Ph.D. program in environmental sciences. It is the only program of its kind in Mississippi and one of the largest in the United States with twenty-nine students, according to Jackson State officials. Dr. Abdul Mohamed, dean of the School of Science and Technology at Jackson State, credits the consortium with helping the institution beef up its overall environmental curriculum and establish a Ph.D. program.
“The process would have been much slower [without ETC],” Mohamed said.
Because of DOE’s influence, consortium schools have begun successfully competing for environmental education and technology grants from other federal agencies. For example, the U.S. Department of Defense, burdened by its own waste management responsibilities, has awarded several ETC schools environmental education and technology grants.
Tony Cortese, president of the Boston-based organization known as Second Nature which advocates environmental education at American colleges and universities, said growth in environmental education in American higher education has “exploded” over the past ten years.
“More than 500 colleges and universities now have environmental studies programs,” said Cortese, who acknowledged that over the past decade, ETC has emerged as a leader in providing extensive environmental education opportunities.
The College Fund/UNCF Jumps onto the Fray
In an effort to boost environmental education at private HBCUs, The College Fund/UNCF began coordinating environmental education initiatives for its member schools in 1994. The move, spearheaded by The College Fund/UNCF President William Gray, has attracted support from the federal government, private foundations and corporate sponsors. The fund coordinates programs which are sponsored by EPA, DOE, foundations and corporations.
“It was a logical next step for UNCF,” according to Dan Durett, director of the fund’s department of environmental education programs. “Our role is to provide leadership for the UNCF schools and to identify sources of technical assistance and fiscal support for environmental education. “
Durett was previously the director of environmental justice outreach for the Washington, D.C.-based Committee for the National Institute for the Environment. He joined The College Fund/UNCF in 1994.
The EPA is providing money for The College Fund/UNCF’s Pejer grants program, which supports environmental justice research. The Heinz family and Andrew Mellon foundations also support environmental education programs.
The College Fund/UNCF programs include a DOE-supported fish subsistence survey at the Savannah River nuclear plant in South Carolina that was conducted by seven schools. The purpose of the ongoing study is to determine to what extent people rely on fishing in the Savannah River to meet their food and economic support needs, Durett said.
Another program, supported by WMX Technologies, Inc., of Oak Brook, Illinois, is designed to introduce students to possible careers in the waste management industry. In another instance, Star Enterprise of Houston, Texas, a petroleum products company, is working with Huston-Tillotson College to develop a risk communication and public awareness program for the company.
Attracting corporate help is critical because it broadens the base of support for such programs. And with pressures on the federal budget mounting from year to year, “it behooves us to seek out additional sources of support for environmental education so we don’t allow all our eggs to be put in one basket,” said Durett, who added, “It’s very easy to point the finger at industry as the bad guy. But at the same time, industry is a key player in solving the problems.
“We need to build bridges between corporate America and the colleges and their communities. Corporate America has a bottom line and they can meet their bottom line by utilizing the skills and talents available on our campuses,” Durett said.
DOE funding has infused environmental content into courses across the academic spectrum, according to consortium officials. Pleased with its performance during the first five years of its partnership, DOE has pledged to support the consortium for another five years. And as consortium schools shift their focus to more technology-intensive tasks, officials say they are optimistic that environmental interest will grow stronger at their schools.
“The emphasis has changed from one primarily of environmental education to one of technology development. We’re getting to the bread-and-butter issue of cleaning up the environment. We’ve got to help DOE solve the problem,” Bota said.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Cox, Matthews & Associates
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
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