Obama Introduces Environmental Justice Bill

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) introduced the Healthy Communities Act of 2005 on November 17, 2005. The bill is cosponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY). The bill establishes an advisory committee, calls for an environmental health report card, establishes health action zones that qualify for grants, calls for environmental health research, and calls for environmental health workforce development. AAEA supports the bill.

Abortion: An Environmental Justice Issue?

Forty percent of abortions in the U.S. are by black women. There are roughly 1.3 million abortions in the U.S. each year. Environmental justice is the equal protection of everybody with respect to environmental issues. There are disproportionately larger numbers of abortions by black women, so it is an environmental justice issue to the extent that black fetuses are not being equally protected. But environmental justice usually speaks to racial disparities in the siting of toxic waste facilities and proximity to sources of pollution.

Abortion is a decision by a black woman regarding the environment of her own body and that of the developing person. Thus, environmental racism is not an issue in an environmental justice context. Black abortions also outnumber black-on-black murders by hundreds of thousands each year. The health and welfare of the fetus in the womb is clearly an environmental issue. A woman's right to choose the environment in her body versus the right of the newly conceived to live is a modern dilemma. What is your position on this vital environmental issue?

Abortion Images & Videos

ANWR Needs Reparations

Alaska Senator Stevens Should Unite With the Congressional Black Caucus

The 2005 defeats of all Congressional attempts to approve drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) should move Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to attach reparations provisions to future legislation. Stevens shook the Senate to its foundation by using inventive legislative maneuvers to attach ANWR drilling to budget reconciliation and military spending. Stevens still came up 4 votes short of invoking Cloture (limiting debate, which would have essentially passed the measure). Stevens even had provisions in the bill to help the poor with their heating bills and Hurricane Katrina victims. ANWR drilling lost earlier in the year when it was taken out of the energy bill, which finally passed after years of failures.

ANWR should be a reparation to all Blacks willing to accept 40 acres and a caribou. Stevens should sponsor legislation stating that drilling can only occur in the event that ANWR is transferred to any Black or Blacks willing to accept the Sherman Special Field Order #15. Individuals or groups of Blacks would then be free to negotiate with Native Alaskans, oil companies or conservationists for the future use of the land. This action would not preclude the federal government from privatizing additional public lands as reparations.

Arctic National Wildlife Reserve

ANWR & Reparations

Do Native Americans Support Reparations For Blacks

African American Reparations From Alaska Oil Lands

Reparations

Nigger: My Symbolic Reparation

Black & Right

The Environment Of Many Black Women

WE KNOW THERE ARE MANY GREAT BLACK FAMILIES, MALES & FEMALES OUT THERE. THIS ARTICLE IS NOT ADDRESSING THOSE SITUATIONS.

Black men did not protect Black women from being kidnapped, shipped to America, enslaved and raped enmasse. Are Black men protecting Black women today? Are husbands hard to find? An eligible Black man could be hard to find because some are underemployed, gay, murdered, in prison, prefer being alone or simply do not like Black women. Some Black men want younger wives. Many Black women do not see White men as an option. So Black women 35-55 are faced with a slim potential husband market.

Many Black women have their own mortgages, cars and stock portfolios but no husband or children. Some have turned to lesbianism. Some have turned to Christ. Some are married to their jobs. Some are very busy. Not that a man is absolutely needed to be fulfilled, but the nuclear family is the ideal. Is this Black woman happy and fulfilled in an environment that finds her alone?

Drain Lake to Protect New Orleans

AAEA is the first group to call for draining Lake Pontchartrain to protect New Orleans. It should only be drained during the hurricane season. The lake, estuary and wetlands can remain the same during the rest of the year. This will also accelerate rebuilding the 9th Ward and other Eastern sections of New Orleans that are being targeted last for redevelopment. It will justify rebuilding by protecting that section of the city from storm surge flooding by the lake during hurricane season.

Fortifying the levees will still be needed to protect the city if the commercial and industrial channels are maintained in their current configuration. Of course,maybe these channels should be eliminated and tens of billions of dollars would not have to be spent to rebuild and reenforce them. (Hurricane Katrina)

NIGGER: My Symbolic Reparation

PRESIDENT'S CORNER. By Norris McDonald

But what does it have to do with the environment you might ask? Well I believe support for reparations, transfer of certain public lands to African Americans as payment for slavery, is a conservative position. Moreover, land privatization is an American tradition. Privatization of land is an important part of the Republican agenda. Preferably such reparations land to pay for the U.S. government's support of slavery would include tens of millions of acres with valuable products and minerals, such as timber, oil, gas, uranium, coal and oil shale.

Now back to the heading. Whites cannot use this term in public. It is like screaming 'fire' in a theatre (1st Amendment rights do not apply). It is a small price to pay for the sins of their ancestors. Paradoxically, or ironically, it is a term of affection amongst most blacks in the African American community. And I don't blame today's whites for not feeling responsible for the actions of their ancestors. But although the symbolic reparation is personally gratifying, I prefer a substantive reparation: 40 acres and a mule.

China Police Kill 20 at Power Plant Protest

It is being reported that Chinese police killed 20 people protesting a proposed coal-fired electricity power plant in the town of Dongzhou near Hong Kong in the Shanghai Province. Evidently the killings were provoked when protesters launched fireworks at police. The protest included farmers complaining that they had not been compensated for the use of their land for the plant. Washington Post, Seattle Times, CBS News, The New Zealand Herald, Asia News, ABC News, LA Times

Clinton: "I Never Had Climate Change With..."

Former President Bill Clinton committed to something at the Kyoto Protocol Climate Change Convention in Montreal, Canada that he never committed to during his eight year term: supporting the Kyoto Protocol. But Clinton being Clinton didn't just stop there. He essentially recommended the Bush administration technology solution as a compromise to attract the U.S. to support the protocol. We also noticed that mainstream media covering the event portrayed Clinton as a Kyoto Protocol supporter when they know better.

Bill Clinton never supported the treaty during his presidency and never submitted it to the U.S. Senate for ratification, which passed a 1998 resolution 98-0 rejecting consideration of the treaty. Now the mainstream media portrays President Bush as being a climate change prevention protagonist, when he has reasonable, voluntary technology-based programs that will not harm the U.S. economy. Message to the media: the election is over and you lost.

Pro Nuclear Rally Points to Our Energy Future

Allen Burks, N. McDonald & Derry Bigby at Control Room

McDonald & Bigby Outside of Grand Gulf Nuclear Power Plant

View Rally

History was made in Jackson, Mississippi when nuclear power proponents from the environmental movement, government agencies and industry rallied at the state capital to proclaim the benefits of the emission-free electricity producing technology. The Grand Gulf site in Port Gibson, MS has been selected as a location for building one of the first new plants in decades.

AAEA Podcast On Tech, Energy & Environment

Listen Now

The above link is an interview conducted by our Blog Technician Marshall Kirkpatrick with Norris McDonald, President of the African American Environmentalist Association (AAEA). The podcast is about 18 minutes and covers a variety of topics including:

1) This blog, the AAEA Hollywood Blog and AAEA's experiences with constituents on these blogs.

2) Will podcasting take off or do most people prefer their talk on the radio and music on their iPods?

3) Nuclear power. The AAEA supports it as the solution to air pollution and global climate change problems.

Cloning Frankenstein's Stem Cells

People identify the monster with the name Frankenstein although the monster never had a name. A similar disconnect is happening with cloning and stem cell research. No one wants to use cloning to make a child to harvest its organs, but many want a possible cure for diabetes and spinal cord injuries. What to do? Dr. Frankenstein wouldn't care. It would be full steam ahead and anything goes. Ethicists and Christians know there is a sacred component to human life that should not be tampered with by mere mortals.

Somatic cell nuclear transfer doesn't care whether the stem cells come from discarded aborted embryos or from cloned ones. Stem cells can still develop into almost any of the body's specialized cells, thus the potential for treating diseases. So using stem cells from still births or from adults might be okay for some research to some people, clearly, applying capitalism and establishing abortion factories to produce cloned stem cells to harvest ogans and body parts would be evil to most people. Hollywood has repeatedly shown us the end result of Frankenstein-type experiments from The Matrix to The Island of Dr. Moreau. Hitler's Nazi scientists had the will but not the technology at the time to 'make a better human.' So where do you stand on this issue?