Air Quality Activism, Environmental Justice and Spaces of Exclusion in the Big Bend Region, 1995-2007

Francisco Dóñez
Energy and Resources Group
University of California, Berkeley

Thursday, May 15, 2008  |  11:00 am - Noon

The Barn, Conference Room (Where?)
University of California, Davis

This project examines the emergence of regional air quality activism in rural west Texas as a case of intersecting landscape protection and environmental justice imperatives. Environmental activism within the Big Bend region was spurred by the phenomenon of visible haze in Big Bend National Park. Activists first became active in 1996, taking haze pollution--and its impacts on the region’s spectacular landscape and tourist economy--as their founding issue. In subsequent years, local residents organized to around several additional air pollution-related issues, including the siting of a new rock crushing plant and a proposed NAFTA highway corridor passing through the region. To deal with these perceived threats, activists adopted a Not-In-My-Backyard (NIMBY) strategy, directed to excluding air pollution sources and impacts from the scenic Big Bend.

However, there are also hints of an environmental justice argument in these regional efforts. Specifically, some community organizers contend that the Big Bend region is home to a significant and growing population of people--many of them retirees--with preexisting respiratory problems, who relocated to the region precisely because of its relatively pristine air quality. They argue that because of this vulnerable population, the region's air quality should be held to a higher standard. This argument echoes environmental justice arguments on the coping ability of vulnerable populations, though Big Bend activists do not use that term to describe their efforts.

These vulnerability claims are strictly delimited in spatial terms, excluding nearby communities that are less invested in "environmental" protection, but that also have potential EJ constituencies. Nevertheless, these claims point toward possible fruitful engagements on air pollution between local, landscape-oriented environmental activism and broader environmental and social movements.

Francisco Dóñez is a doctoral candidate in the Energy and Resources Group, UC Berkeley. He also works on the Air Division staff at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9, in San Francisco.