Disasters, Equity, and Social Justice

The powerful wind of hurricanes blows away everything that is temporary or delicate, leaving behind that which is more durable and permanent.  Hurricane Katrina was no exception:  it blew away the polite myth that our society has moved beyond race and class, and become a truly egalitarian one.  Race and poverty issues are usually the elephants in the room, topics that we often avoid in civil discourse.  But disasters force us to confront them. 

Katrina's aftermath showed us that, while the damage may be blind to wealth and color, the degree of pain is not:  those with cars and credit cards were able to evacuate, while those dependent on public transportation and cash were not; those with wealth will be able to relocate or rebuild far more readily than those without.  This one event was an echo of the larger finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which stated in its Third Assessment Report:

"There is high confidence that developing countries will be more vulnerable to climate change than developed countries, and there is medium confidence that climate change would exacerbate income inequalities between and within countries." 

Moreover, inequitable distribution of wealth may also increase physical vulnerability.  Population pressure may also lead the poor to habitation, commerce, and agriculture in areas like steep slopes, coastal areas and wetlands, and valley bottoms that are particularly vulnerable to the changes that climate change will bring, such as increased floods and precipitation, changes in patterns of drought, and heat waves.  Thus, we are likely to see more of what we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - more poor people dying because they are unable to evacuate in a crisis, and more inequities in their lives afterwards.

Many companies are already playing a constructive role in addressing the various prongs of the environmental justice issue.  For example, Whirlpool (WHR) provides a refrigerator and range to every Habitat for Humanity home, and has donated more than 56,000 appliances to Habitat since 1999.  At the same time, Whirlpool has long exceeded EPA and industry standards for energy-efficient appliances, and is a founding member of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change's Business Environmental Leadership Council. The company agrees that what we know about climate change warrants taking innovative actions now in order to have a positive impact on the problem.

At Calvert, we often find that companies that pay careful attention to the needs of one group of stakeholders tend to have long antennae for other social and environmental issues as well.  The actions of Whirlpool and other companies that support both environmental and social justice initiatives help us all to understand that climate change is not simply an environmental issue.  In fact, most of the issues we address at Calvert are multi-dimensional, with repercussions that spill over the arbitrary boundaries we often assign to our screens.  Hurricane Katrina has shown us that in a disaster, we cannot separate the human rights issues from the environmental ones.