By Lucas Zucker

It would be fitting for Oxnard to be the last stand of fossil fuel power plants in California. Like so many other low-income communities of color who live in the shadow of power plants, oil refineries, and drilling sites, burdened by the nation’s insatiable appetite for dirty energy, the residents of Oxnard are fighting back, pitting high school students from farmworker families against Fortune 500 company lobbyists in a power struggle whose effects could ripple across the state

Pre-release party for the new issue of Race, Poverty & the Environment, Conversations on Race & Resistance.

Thursday, March 23, 5:30 - 8:30 pm
Bissap Baobab Restaurant, 381 15th St., Oakland 94612

Reimagine! is pleased to announce the publication of Alive!, the second volume of RP&E produced under our collaborative editorial model.  To be independent and sustainable, we need your support.  Please use the tabs on the right to donate, subscribe, and join our email list, where you can receive our digital editions, learn about our open editorial process, and become a part of Movements Making Media.  To read the entire issue in beautiful print format, please subscribe!

Introduction

By Jess Clarke and Marcy Rein

The resurgence of direct action as a viable strategy for change has energized a new generation of activists and provides a springboard for launching a movement of movements that can challenge the domination of capital in social, economic and political spheres. Street protests are just one part of this expanding constellation of strategies. Cultural consciousness and personal healing are also being brought to bear in the effort to foster long-haul sustainability. From inside of prison, from inside the heart—people are moving out into community and into connection with the earth.  Read More...

By Marcy Rein

Santa Clara County's low-income transit users face some common challenges, whether they live in Gilroy, the Latino communities of East San Jose, or Sunnyvale. The buses they depend on cost too much, take too long, don’t run often enough or late enough, and are always at the end of the line for transit funding.The transportation sales tax proposed for the November 2016 ballot  could begin to close the funding gap, but competition for the $6 billion the tax could raise will be stiff, and low-income transit users will need to press their case in a political process that has been dominated by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which represents the region’s major employers. But a diverse new coalition, the Transportation Justice Alliance (TJA), is taking the challenge head-on.

By Joseph Smooke and Dyan Ruiz

A group of community workers, along with mostly Latino and African American working-class parents, hold hands in a prayer vigil at a suburban Bay Area neighborhood. They huddle together in the shade on the front lawn of a townhouse complex as their children play with protest signs and run around with friends. So close to San Francisco with its rent control and modest eviction preventions, the Silicon Valley city of San Mateo provides no security for tenants.

By Virali Gokaldas

The roots of the environmental justice movement lie in an archetypical struggle between low-income communities of color and industrial polluters—refineries, incinerators, landfills, and dirty ports, to name a few. In the last few years, leaders of this movement have worked ardently to infuse an environmental politic into racial and economic justice campaigns and to underscore local control of common resources and community-based solutions to social and ecological ills.[1]

Now the fruits of this labor are becoming evident. What was seen as isolated pockets of noxious industrial impacts are now being viewed as symptoms of larger phenomena that create other social inequities. People are connecting the impacts of toxic industry to other injustices, such as forced migration and poverty jobs, and coming together to address these multiple crises.   

On a hot July afternoon in Detroit last summer, over 300 movement organizers from across the United States gathered to plot a course for ecological justice as part of the U.S. Social Forum. “We come from environmental justice communities who have been on the frontlines of the effects of polluting industries like waste incineration. But [we] also come from economic justice struggles... and immigrant [communities that] understand the connection between land and life,” said Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, strategy initiatives director for Movement Generation based in Oakland, California.