Lisa Jackson: "People of color didn't have much to say over the land-use decisions that led to Katrina, but they are the ones suffering from those land-use decisions"
Here in New Orleans, we are well aware that the President Obama’s pick for the high seat at the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, hails from our own Lower Ninth Ward. But until now, we’ve heard little about how the first African American chief administrator of the federal agency that regulates the toxins that enter the air we breathe, the water we drink and the soil we tread on will represent the interests of the polluted, poor and majority African American city she left two decades ago.
American Prospect writer Brentin Mock’s article provides a fascinating window into how Jackson plans to balance the interests of the businesses the EPA regulates with the environmental rights of neighborhoods like her home ground along the Industrial Canal. On passage in particular illuminates the well-justified anger that will undoubtedly inform her policy decisions. I’ve pasted the excerpt below:
Jackson’s selection as EPA chief almost didn’t happen. When Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans in 2005, her 80-year-old mother lost her house and all its contents. Afterward, Jackson, bitter over the massive death count among African Americans and the lack of support for survivors, lashed out at government forces and considered leaving the public sector altogether. “People of color didn’t have much to say over the land-use decisions that led to Katrina, but they are the ones suffering from those land-use decisions,” Jackson told me in an interview shortly after Obama announced her as his EPA pick. “They paid the prices with their lives, their fortunes, and their homes, which for many may have been the only savings they had in the world.
The critique comes as a timely reminder of the enormous stakes New Orleans faces as it moves forward with the creation of a new land use master plan for the city. The plan carries the potential to undo the zoning regulations that for generations have encouraged concentrations of poverty, pollution and festering blight. In order, however, for that happen, planners must begin to listen to the recommendations of people like Jackson’s mother, people who have already paid a steep, steep price for the right to be heard.
Read the rest of Mock’s article here
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