Mapping Environmental Racism

Six out of eight of Manhattan’s diesel bus depots are located in northern Manhattan. Two of the city’s largest sewage treatment plants are there, too — powered by huge diesel engines running 24 hours a day. The area is flanked by highways and two major bridges over which trucks (also running on diesel) deliver goods into city into Manhattan. And the two outdoor train yards and elevated rail lines serve diesel locomotives daily.

In addition to diesel exhaust, northern Manhattan contains brownfield sites, vacant lots, and abandoned buildings posing chemical and social hazards.

On April 19, 2003, the New York Times reported on a study that found that 25.5 percent of children in Harlem have asthma — “one of the highest rates ever documented for an American neighborhood.”

Residents of northern Manhattan are predominantly black and Latino.

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West Harlem Environmental Action is:

“a non-profit, grassroots organization working to improve environmental quality and to secure environmental justice in predominately African-American and Latino communities.

Since 1988, WE ACT has worked with citizen groups, youth, community residents, environmentalists, local/state/federal governments, and educational & medical institutions.

Based in Northern Manhattan, WE ACT advances its mission through research, public education, advocacy, mobilization, litigation, legislative affairs & sustainable economic development.”

One of their programs is a mapping initiative using GIS to map health trends, particularly child asthma hospital admissions, air quality, and polluting facilities, as well as waterfront development and access issues.

“The first step toward environmental justice must be an awareness of the hazards. WEACT has an ongoing commitment to enhance community awareness of environmental hazards in northern Manhattan. The maps and ‘tour of hazards’ presented here are an incremental step toward the fulfillment of WEACT’s mission. They are the result of a joint project between WEACT and students from the City and Regional Planning Department at Cornell University. Cornell students created this web page based on interviews with area residents about environmental hazards in their neighborhoods.”

“On January 30, 1999, eight students, part of an Environmental Justice and GIS Workshop class with the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, met with WE ACT staff and several community leaders to ‘address the dire lack of useful environmental justice information accessible to communities in New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico.’ At the time, the nascent GIS system setup in the WE ACT office was a mere four months old, and their collaboration helped to shape its growth to where it stands today!”

Their Toxic Tour links points on the map to photos documenting toxic sites and their proximity to homes and schools.