Canada was founded on enslavement and dispossession, most exemplified by its assimilationist ideologies and policies, the displacement, subjugation and oppression of Indigenous and Black peoples and cultures, and the expropriation of Indigenous lands. The colonial theft of land and the accumulation of capital have been foundational to Canada’s wealth. In this presentation, Dr. Ingrid Waldron uses settler colonial theory to examine environmental racism in Canada to highlight the symbolic and material ways in which the geographies of Indigenous and Black peoples have been characterized by erasure, domination, dehumanization, destruction, dispossession, exploitation, and genocide. She offers a historical overview of cases of environmental racism in Canada and outlines how she has been addressing environmental racism over the last 10 years in partnership with Indigenous and Black communities, and their allies.
About the speaker
Dr. Ingrid Waldron is Professor and HOPE Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID-19 in Black and South Asian communities. Ingrid is the author of the book There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities, which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page, and Ian Daniel. She is the founder and Director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project (The ENRICH Project) and helped develop the federal private members bill a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice (Bill C-226). Bill C-226 was approved at Senate on June 13, 2024, and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities, was published on November 25, 2024. It traces experiences of racial trauma in Black communities in Canada, the US and the UK from the colonial era to the present.
Video of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron
Transcript of A History of Violence: The Legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada with Ingrid Waldron
0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts Lectures where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video, transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website shareable.net just click the link in the show notes. And now here’s the host of Cities@Tufts, Professor Julian Agyeman.
0:00:41.3 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tufts Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman and together with my research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross disciplinary academic initiative which recognises Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on colonized Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we’re delighted to host Dr. Ingrid Waldron. Ingrid is professor and Hope Chair in Peace and Health in the Global Peace and Health Social Justice Program in the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University. Her research focuses on environmental and climate justice in Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities, mental illness and dementia in Black communities, and COVID 19 in Black and South Asian communities.
0:01:42.7 Julian Agyeman: Ingrid is the author of the book, “There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities” which was turned into a 2020 Netflix documentary of the same name and was co-produced by Waldron, actor Elliot Page and Ian Daniel. She’s the founder and director of the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Project, the ENRICH Project and helped develop the Federal Private Members Bill, a National Strategy Respecting Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice and that’s Bill C226.
0:02:20.4 Julian Agyeman: This bill was approved by Senate, the Canadian Senate, on June 13, 2024 and given royal assent on June 20, 2024, becoming the first ever environmental justice law in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s book entitled, From Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter, the Impact of Racial Trauma on Mental Health in Black Communities was published in November last year. The book traces experiences of racial trauma in Black Canadian and US communities and in communities in the UK from the colonial to the present period. Ingrid’s talk today is a history of violence, the legacy of Environmental Racism in Canada. Ingrid A Zoomtastic welcome to Cities@Tufts.
0:03:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: Thank you very much and good afternoon to everyone. Can you all hear me? Okay.
0:03:14.6 Tom Llewellyn: Yep, just fine.
0:03:16.1 Ingrid Waldron: Okay. Great. I’m going to begin with a Quote from a resident of Lincolnville, one of the communities that I met with back in 2013 when I started my project. I wanted to meet the indigenous communities and the African Nova Scotian communities to hear what their concerns were about at that time. So I’m going to start. If you look at the health of the community prior to 1974, before the landfill site was located, and our community seemed to be healthier from 1974 on until the present day, we noticed our people’s health seems to be going downhill. Our people seem to be passing on at a younger age. They are contracting different types of cancers that we never heard of prior to 1974. Our stomach cancer seems to be on the rise. Diabetes is on the rise. Our people end up with tumors in their body and we’re at a loss of what’s causing it. The municipality says that there’s no way that the landfill site is affecting us. But if the landfill site located in other areas is having an impact on people’s health, then shouldn’t the landfill site located next to our community be having an impact on our health too? And that community, as I said, is Lincolnville.
0:04:38.8 Ingrid Waldron: And this is James Desmond. He is, or was, I should say. Unfortunately, he passed away two years ago, but he was a staunch environmental activist in his home in Lincolnville. And during that same meeting, we were filming a documentary called, “In Whose Backyard”, which is available on my website. And we asked James to define environmental racism because at that time a lot of people, particularly in Nova Scotia, where I had begun this work, were very confused by that term, environmental racism. So we asked him to define it, and I find that his definition is one that I use often because it’s extremely simple and concise, but very layered at the same time and aligns well with the more academic definition of environmental racism by Dr. Robert Bullard, who I’ll show his definition just after this one. So James Desmond says here, the practice, which is environmental racism, has been locating industrial waste sites next to African, Nova Scotian native and poor white, communities that don’t have a base to fight back. You ask if that’s environmental racism, it’s environmental racism to its core. And here’s the more academic definition of Environmental Racism by Dr. Robert Bullard.
0:06:00.5 Ingrid Waldron: Dr. Robert Bullard is an African American who teaches at a university in Texas, and he is considered to be the father of environmental justice. He’s obviously my hero, and I had the opportunity to host him at a symposium that I held in 2017 on environmental racism when I was in Nova Scotia. So this is coming from his early work. His very first book was called I believe, Dumping in Dixie, from 1990. But this is how he defines environmental racism. He says, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate location and greater exposure of indigenous and racialized communities to contamination and pollution from environmentally hazardous activities. It is also about the lack of political power these communities have for resisting the placement of industrial polluters in their communities.
0:07:00.2 Ingrid Waldron: The third definition or component of that definition is, the implementation of policies that sanction the harmful and in many cases, life threatening poisons or presence of poisons in these communities. Fourth, environmental racism is racial discrimination in the disproportionate negative impacts of environmental policies that result in differential rates of cleanup in these communities. And finally, environmental racism is about the history of excluding the very communities that are most impacted by environmental racism. Indigenous communities, black communities and racialized communities. We often use that phrase, having a seat at the table. These are the communities that typically don’t have a seat at the table. Even though they’re more vulnerable than other communities to environmental racism.
0:07:52.3 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re often not invited to the table to help develop policy and decisions around environmental racism. As I’ve done in my book, what I want to do now, very briefly is talk about geography in a way and space. Because I think it’s really helpful when you situate environmental racism within a spatial analysis. And I do that a lot in my book. I look at spatial processes and spatial inequality in a way to broaden the discussion on environmental racism, which helps us to address the siloing, I think, sometimes of environmental and climate issues. We have to understand that environmental racism is connected to so many other issues in our places and spaces. So that’s what I will do here. So environmental racism that is a manifestation of white supremacist use of space that has come to characterize the harmful impacts of spatial violence in black, indigenous and other racialized communities. And when we say spatial violence, for me that means policy.
0:08:56.1 Ingrid Waldron: That means what is happening on the ground in terms of the various inequalities and oppressions that marginalized racialized communities are experiencing on the ground due to the various policies that can be harmful in purposeful ways, but also policies just by the absence of or the erasure of the issues that these communities are facing. That’s harmful as well. If the policies are excluding the experiences of, or there’s an absence of the experiences of indigenous and black and other racialized people in policymaking, that’s also harmful in subtle ways and perhaps in very indirect ways.
0:09:35.4 Ingrid Waldron: Teelucksingh and Masouda are both Canadians who are working in the space of environmental racism and spatial inequality. And they observe that space is more than a geographical area. It is also a socially constructed and highly contested product that has significant political, cultural and economic implications. So what they’re saying here is we often tend to look at, or in the past we did, geography as this fixed issue. And now we’re seeing with human geography, health geography, all these really exciting disciplines popping up. We know that it’s not simply about a fixed space. It’s about how inequalities are imbued within spaces. And it also talks about how these spaces are socially constructed.
0:10:23.8 Ingrid Waldron: They’re socially constructed because individuals, communities have relationships with each other and they have relationships with organizations. And there’s the social construction. They’re always manifesting these issues, these inequalities over time. So we have to look at space as always under construction, as fluid, as never fixed, and as ever changing. So this is what Teelucksingh and Masuda argue. Lipsitz, who is another professor I admire who is American, he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At that same event where I hosted Dr. Bullard, I also hosted at the same event, Dr. Lipsitz. They were both my keynote speaker. And I love doctor Lipsitz’ work on the racialization of space and the spatialization of race. It really helped me to open up my view on environmental racism. I had a very, in the beginning, a very constricted view of environmental racism. And after reading his article on the racialization of space, which I think comes from a publication from 2007, it opened up my eyes about the various connections and how we can talk about environmental racism in a more critical way. So he talks about that and he talks about the inequalities, racial inequalities that are imbued and manifest in all our spaces.
0:11:49.4 Ingrid Waldron: And this concept is useful in helping to think through the implications of race, class, gender and other social factors with respect to spatial processes that have the most deleterious impacts in racialized communities. And these include government and industry expropriation of indigenous lands, the formation of neighborhoods segregated by income, class and race, neighborhood revitalization projects that gentrify low income and often marginalized areas by bringing in businesses and housing that ultimately push out long term residents, and also environmental racism.
0:12:31.8 Ingrid Waldron: What these spatial processes have in common is a quest for profit by business owners and industry leaders. And these processes tend to shed light on how spaces of profit are often premised on possession, dispossession and displacement. It’s for these reasons that it’s important to challenge notions of space, as I said earlier, as fixed, neutral, ahistorical and physical.
0:13:02.7 Ingrid Waldron: So rather, space is an embodiment of power relations that are fluid and ever changing. And I also point to Doreen Massey, the late Doreen Massey. Her work on space also resonated with me, specifically her work from this article from 1992. She put it really succinctly when she argued that space is never apolitical, but imbued with a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation.
0:13:39.7 Ingrid Waldron: There have been, in Canada, several cases of environmental racism in Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities. I would say over the last 70 years. I’m going to begin with my work in Nova Scotia. That’s where I began my work on environmental racism in 2012. And what’s on the screen is a community called Shubenacadie First Nation. This is an Indigenous community. And starting in 2014, Alton Gas, which is a company in Alberta, Canada, was planning to build a brine discharge pipeline near the Shubenacadie river near to this community. There are tons of studies in the United States indicating that brine discharge pipelines can be dangerous, although Alton Gas argued that it was not dangerous, it was safe and the community had nothing to be concerned about. But starting in 2014, when this project was announced, the community began resisting.
0:14:39.3 Ingrid Waldron: And in 2021, I’m happy to say that the project was closed. We often don’t find success when we’re talking about environmental racism. There’s often not success. But they spent seven years resisting this pipeline project. They were concerned about the impact of the pipeline on fish, on their health and on climate change. And they used social media and on site, in person practices and approaches to stop this pipeline project from coming into their community. And in the end, they won in 2021 when Alton Gas decided to pack up and leave.
0:15:21.5 Ingrid Waldron: We have another Indigenous community in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s called Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is an aerial shot given to me by a journalist when he was flying over Pictou Landing First Nation. And this is called Boat Harbour. And Pictou Landing was a pristine hunting and fishing ground for the Indigenous community before a mill started dumping effluent into boat harbor in 1967. And over that time, particularly in the 1980s, the government made many broken promises to the Indigenous community, saying that they were going to close the mill. That never happened.
0:16:07.1 Ingrid Waldron: This is another success story, but it took 50 years, unfortunately. In the end of 2019, the Nova Scotia government said that the mill did not come up with an appropriate or robust plan for their waste water treatment, and that he was going to close the mill. And he did. And that happened at the end of January 2020. But you can imagine, 50 years this mill was operating, dumping effluent into Boat Harbour. It became a toxic cocktail of different pollutants.
0:16:42.9 Ingrid Waldron: And the community would say that high rates of cancer, high rates of respiratory illness and skin rashes and other illnesses is due to Boat Harbour. What can I say about Boat Harbour? Yeah, I think that’s really the pertinent issue. There were some rumblings that the mill would open again, which of course concerned the community, but that hasn’t happened. So they’re involved right now in the long process of cleanup.
0:17:09.9 Ingrid Waldron: We have Aamjiwnaang First Nation, another indigenous community near Sarnia, Ontario, and it’s often referred to as Chemical Valley, which tells you all that you need to know. This is a stunning case of environmental racism. I would say the worst case of environmental racism in Canada. Why? Because the community is surrounded by over 60 petrochemical facilities. And it sounds incredible, but I also remember reading, I think it was a New York Times article way back about an African American community in Louisiana that was also surrounded by a lot of toxic facilities or petrochemical facilities. And that community was referred to as Cancer Alley. And they had, of course, high rates of cancer. And they were, just like Aamjiwnaang, surrounded by petrochemical facilities.
0:18:05.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this community, like the other communities I’ve discussed, have extremely high rates of cancer. They have… When I talk about environmental racism, I often say it’s also a gendered issue because many indigenous women have reproductive cancers. They have gestational issues, birth anomalies. So the birth rate ratio is abnormal compared to the Canadian average. I believe there are more female births than male, and it’s extremely out of whack. And of course, all these communities will have mental health issues, the psychosocial stressors of living near to these contaminated sites. Redress is on the way. The Canadian government, the Department of Environment and climate change, is currently working with the community, with the chief, to address this issue.
0:19:04.1 Ingrid Waldron: We also have Grassy Narrows First Nation, another indigenous community near Kenora, Ontario. So in the 1960s and 1970s, mercury was dumped into the Wabigoon English River near to this community. So you can imagine mercury is serious and will have health effects. There was cleanup in 2015. The government put millions of dollars towards cleanup and it was cleaned up. However, in 2022, April, there was a CBC article that came out with residents talking about the enduring health impacts from the mercury being dumped into the Wabigoon English River in the 1960s and 1970s, which just shows you that even though you might have cleanup, the health effects can remain. So they talked about less serious health issues, skin rashes, to more serious health issues such as, cognitive delays, neurological problems such as numbness in the fingers, et cetera.
0:20:06.8 Ingrid Waldron: This is another indigenous community in Canada, this time in British Columbia, specifically in northern British Columbia. So there is a plan, there has been for a while to develop a multi billion dollar pipeline project near to this community which is called Wet’suwe’ten First Nation. And over the past several years, there have been mass demonstrations, sit ins and blockades that have gripped parts of Canada over the movement to support the leaders of Wet’suwe’ten First Nation, who are opposed, of course, to this multi billion dollar pipeline project near to their community in Northern BC. This is an ongoing issue.
0:21:01.3 Ingrid Waldron: In the United States, it’s not strange to talk about African Americans experiencing environmental racism. But I think in Canada, when people hear environmental racism, they assume that only indigenous people are impacted. That’s not the case, and it’s certainly not the case in Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada. And that’s where I began this work and I spent 13 years there. And what I witnessed during my 13 years there is that quite a few African Nova Scotian communities are impacted by environmental racism. And it’s been… I haven’t seen that in other parts of Canada, but for whatever reason I see it in Nova Scotia, the province of Nova Scotia.
0:21:40.6 Ingrid Waldron: What you’re seeing on the screen is Africville. This is a historical African Nova Scotian community. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they’re in many ways unique. They’re dissimilar from the Caribbean community and the community that comes from the continent of Africa. African Nova Scotians have been in Canada for over 400 years, so they’re not considered to be an immigrant community, although everybody’s an immigrant really, because I could talk about their heritage.
0:22:11.1 Ingrid Waldron: So African Nova Scotians are descendants of black loyalists from the United States who came to Nova Scotia after the War of 1812 that took place in the US. They’re also descendants of Jamaican Maroons and they’re descendants of people from Sierra Leone. So they’ve got all that in their heritage. However, they’re the longest residing black community in Canada with, I would say, unique and very specific challenges related to racism. They fare worse on every social indicator, whether you’re talking about employment and education. They fare worse compared to other black Canadians in other provinces.
0:22:54.3 Ingrid Waldron: So this is Africville. And Africville is one of those historic African Nova Scotian communities. There’s a total of about 45 African Nova Scotian communities. And what makes them unique as well is the fact that they’re located mostly in rural areas. Typically when black people immigrate to Canada, they’re going to Toronto or Montreal or the more urban spaces to find work. The unique thing about African Nova Scotians is that they typically reside. There’s only one community that was urban, and that’s the one that you see on the screen, Africville. But all the other communities are rural. Africville was certainly not wealthy. There are no wealthy black communities in Canada. But they were thriving in terms of they were well connected. And we know that social connectedness is an important determinant of health. Some of them had their own businesses, right?
0:23:47.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in many ways, they were well connected and a healthy community. And then in around the mid-1960s, Halifax, the city of Halifax, decided to gentrify their community and start building or started engaging in industrial development. So they needed this community to get out and so they pushed out this community, which is gentrification, or what we call urban revitalization.
0:24:13.8 Ingrid Waldron: So I would say that Africville is an example of both gentrification and environmental racism. Why is it an example? We know why it’s an example of gentrification because the government was trying to push them out to engage in industrial development. But it was also considered to be a case of environmental racism because a lot of social and environmental hazards were left in the community due to industrial development. And these social and environmental hazards, making this a case of environmental racism, included a fertilizer plant, a slaughterhouse, a tar factory, a stone and coal crushing plant, a cotton factory, a prison, three systems of railway tracks, and an open dump.
0:25:00.4 Ingrid Waldron: Here’s another African Nova Scotian community. So you saw a photo of James Desmond earlier. I said he was from Lincolnville. This is Lincolnville’s dump. Starting in 1974, the municipality placed a first generation, let’s say, landfill, because a dump is different from a landfill. So this is a landfill. They placed a first generation Landfill in 1974 near to the African Nova Scotian community. And just when the community thought that perhaps they were making some headway in getting redress and having the government relocate this landfill, they received a bit of a slap in the face.
0:25:39.5 Ingrid Waldron: In 2006, the municipality put a second generation landfill over the first one. What a slap in the face, of course? So of course, the dirty water is seeping into the second landfill. And the community would say that we’ve seen, as I… That was the quote I presented to you when I first came on the screen. The quote from somebody from Lincolnville who said over the years, since 1974, our health is worsening. Higher rates of cancer, higher rates of respiratory illness. So this is what the community argues, that it’s because of these two landfills that we are seeing poor health outcomes in our community.
0:26:15.8 Ingrid Waldron: If you were able to watch my documentary at all, it ended up on Netflix in 2020 and it was co-produced by myself and actor Elliot Page. You would have seen activist Louise Delisle from Shelburne. Now, the African Nova Scotian community lives primarily in the south end of Shelburne, but the white community lives in the north end of Shelburne. They’ve had a dump. So I’d call this a dump, not a landfill, because there’s no liner. They’ve had a dump in their community since the early 1940s. I would say probably in Canada, this is probably the first case of environmental racism, because all the way back in the 1940s, this dump was placed there. And the community would say everything and anything went into this dump. Syringes from the hospital, items from the military base, dead animals, et cetera, et cetera.
0:27:10.8 Ingrid Waldron: And over the years, they would also say that we’ve seen increasing rates of cancer, and particularly like multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. When I first met with Louise in my office, she said to me, Ingrid, 95% of the people in my community have cancer. Of course I didn’t believe her, but I remembered that New York Times article about that African American community in Louisiana where most people had cancer because they were surrounded by petrochemical facilities. And I said, is this happening in Canada? I really couldn’t believe it when she said 98% of the people in my community have cancer. But she was telling the truth, because if you see the film, she’s driving down a street, many streets in Shelburne, pointing out different houses with people who had cancer. And it’s a stunning part of the documentary.
0:28:00.9 Ingrid Waldron: So it is the case that there are extremely high rates of cancer in Shelburne. Lots of things are happening right now. I don’t have the time to talk about it. Louise is a strong leader and she’s led so many things in that community and so many great things are happening right now, such as a Nova Scotia human rights case. The first part of it, which has found, actually, which is probably the first time in Canada that what’s happening in Shelburne is a case of racism because it’s environmental racism. That’s never happened in Canada where environmental racism by any human rights board or commission has found it to be an example of racism.
0:28:38.6 Ingrid Waldron: So they’re making a lot of headway, and I would say primarily due to Louise’s activism. Here is Toronto. The Greater Toronto and Hamilton area is known for high levels of air pollution, particularly Hamilton. So I teach at McMaster University in Hamilton. And Hamilton is considered to be Canada’s industrial town and increasing rates of immigrant people, racialized immigrant people who are being exposed to poor air quality. And that’s the same in Toronto, particularly in areas such as Scarborough and Etobicoke north in Toronto, where there are high rates of or poor air pollution.
0:29:23.6 Ingrid Waldron: So what have I been doing over the years to address these issues? I founded, in 2012, an organization called the ENRICH Project, the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health Projects, which would be advocating around environmental racism for indigenous people and African Nova Scotian people. First off, in Nova Scotia, now it’s gone broader than that because I’m back in Ontario, so it’s all across Canada now. And I didn’t know what ENRICH would be at that time. I was new to environmental racism. I had no experience. But it has turned out to be incredibly interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, multi approach, multimedia, and very intersectional in its approach, in its viewpoints, in many ways, in terms of how I articulate what I’m finding.
0:30:17.5 Ingrid Waldron: I thought that the first important thing for me to do when I founded ENRICH was to raise awareness because there were a lot of people who were skeptical about what I was doing. They were environmental racism. Are you sure about that? And they thought the term was funny. And I let people know, I said, this isn’t a term that I came up with. This is a term that originated in the United States by Reverend Benjamin Chavez back in the early 1980s. So I didn’t create this term. So don’t get angry at me. They thought I created it and I was playing the race card. And everything that people say about people like me who are staunchly anti-racist and whose work I consider myself to be a race scholar before I would consider myself to be an environmental scholar or health scholar, I focus on race.
0:31:08.5 Ingrid Waldron: So I got a lot of pushback in the beginning. So I thought, well, in order to address the pushback, maybe I need to raise awareness to talk about the structural underpinnings of environmental racism. Because when you look at the term environmental racism, it sounds crazy. Someone would say, anyone could say, yeah, how can the environment be racist? People are racist. How can the environment be racist? So I said to myself, I needed to explain to people the structural policy implications of environmental racism in order for them to understand this as a systemic issue. Just like when we talk about racism in labor, racism in health, racism in employment, this is racism in the environment, and it means that environmental policies are the root of it.
0:31:57.6 Ingrid Waldron: So because I needed to raise awareness, I held so many events in Nova Scotia, in other parts of Canada, and even in the United States. I was asked to talk at various events in the United States as well. And this is one of the events that I held where I brought together communities and activists and government people. And this continues to be what’s on the screen, my favorite event. It was inspiring. It was educational and entertaining. We had drum groups.
0:32:27.2 Ingrid Waldron: And so I try to do different things every time I have events. And I think over time, particularly in the province of Nova Scotia, people began to get it, right? Because I was constantly, every year putting on these events, trying to explain what environmental racism was. And I would say, in Nova Scotia, people get it. And what happens when people get it is that they want to help. And often after my events, people will say, oh, I get it now. I didn’t know this was happening in Nova Scotia. How horrible can you let me know how I can help? And that’s magic to my ears, of course. So I think creating awareness sounds benign, but it has been extremely important for me and for my project, because eventually people want to help out, and it’s really good if I don’t have a grant, it’s really good to have volunteers who really want to help and who are really passionate.
0:33:21.0 Ingrid Waldron: As I said, multimedia has been part of what I’ve done. Multimedia is a way of sharing information, just like an event. So I’ve done a lot of it. And I like to be creative. I recognize, particularly as a professor, I’ve got students in my class, and students want to learn differently, they want to be assessed differently. Some students are good at writing essays. Some students are good at multiple choice, right? So for me, this is about targeting my audience in a way. Who needs to hear about environmental racism? Who needs to do something about it? Is it the policymaker? Is it the educator? Is it the ENGO?
0:33:58.4 Ingrid Waldron: So I have to think about who I’m targeting and then what multimedia, creative multimedia resources can I create or use? One of those was a map using GIS analysis, a map of Nova Scotia that actually shows the location of toxic facilities, different types in African Nova Scotian and Indigenous communities. What is on the screen is a flat map, but if you go onto my website, you will see one layer for indigenous communities and another layer for the black communities. So basically, this is not saying that white communities are not close to these sites, but it shows undeniably that black and indigenous communities are disproportionately near these different sites.
0:34:42.1 Ingrid Waldron: And here is actor Elliot Page. This is a kind of a long story, so I can’t get into it, but we connected through Twitter in 2018, just a few months after my book came out. Elliot had apparently read my book and loved it and wanted to express that on Twitter. So I noticed that my Twitter page was extremely active and I saw somebody following me called Elliot Page. I didn’t connect it to the actor. I didn’t realize it was the actor. And I had seen Elliot’s movies like inception with Leonardo DiCaprio and Juno and other movies. And I said to myself, is this the actor? Like, why would he be trying to connect to me? And it was. So I DM’d him. And I said, I want to thank you for promoting my book and for supporting my Enrich project and supporting the women on the front lines. And he said to me, I’m trying to find a way to use my celebrity to help. And Elliot’s from Nova Scotia, interestingly, and his family is near to Shelburne, which I just talked about.
0:35:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: So he had a kind of very personal connection to this. We ended up talking at the end of 2018, the week of Christmas, on the phone with his friend who actually connected us. Because when the friend found out Elliot had connected with me on Twitter, the friend said to me, oh, I’ve known Elliot for 15 years, Ingrid, do you want me to connect you guys? And I said, yes. So we did it on the phone and we didn’t really come up with anything. Then we met again in January of 2019 and we decided we would do some maybe posts and videos, short videos, 10 minute videos to post on Twitter. And then we changed again.
0:36:37.1 Ingrid Waldron: I had an opportunity to see the full film. Elliot had come down to Nova Scotia where I was living and filmed me in my home, and then went out to the community to film the indigenous people and also Louise Delil, the African Nova Scotian woman in Shelburne. And Elliot invited me to his mother’s home in Halifax to see the film. And I noticed when I was looking at the film, I said, people are crying. This seems really emotional. I don’t think slapping it onto Twitter is going to do this topic of environmental racism justice. I said to them, Elliot and the co-director, Ian Daniel, I said, we want awareness, don’t we? We want to make an impact. What better way than to create a documentary? And Ian said to me, are you talking about like a 70 minute documentary? I said, yes, and we could submit it to the Toronto International Film Festival and Robert Redford’s Film Festival.
0:37:38.7 Ingrid Waldron: And the Berlin Flag just kept going. And they agreed and we submitted it very late. I would say it was after the deadline, to be honest. And we got into the Toronto International Film Festival and it premiered in September of 2019. And Elliot’s publicist also arranged for us to speak to all these high profile media outlets. So we spoke to the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Rolling Stone Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, which is an Entertainment Magazine, and other media outlets, Television, Entertainment Tonight Canada, et cetera, et cetera. It was an extremely exciting day to have this film based on my book. It was actually based on my book. My very first book premiere at a film festival at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is widely considered to be the best film festival in the world. I’m a bit biased.
0:38:38.0 Ingrid Waldron: And then to have all these media outlets that we connected with to get this issue out into the public, this is what we call, as academics, knowledge mobilization, but for me, prime knowledge mobilization. And for this to happen to me and to my first book, I’m still very shocked by it after all these years. So this was 2019, I’m still shocked. And then we heard rumblings that it was going to go to Netflix. And I was like, okay, I can’t believe this. And that came from Elliot. We were walking with Ian Daniel to a Japanese restaurant in Halifax and I think Elliot said, I think it’s going to Netflix. And at that time, Elliot had started that show called the Umbrella Academy, which was on Netflix. And I thought, oh, maybe this is kind of going to happen because Elliot’s already on Netflix. And it did happen. We found out in October of 2018 it was going to Netflix. And it started streaming on Netflix March 29, 2020, just a few weeks after COVID hit.
0:39:38.3 S4: And then I also heard then it also went to Apple TV. I think it’s still on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and also Microsoft Xbox. So I’ve done a lot of media stuff, I’ve done a lot of creative stuff because I think it’s important to share information about studies in creative ways. This is Nocturne, Halifax’s annual nighttime art festival. This was during the height of COVID We did this on Zoom. It was really interesting. We had the community activists, indigenous and black, in five minutes, talk about environmental racism in their community.
0:40:19.4 Ingrid Waldron: And then they were paired with an artist. So whether it be a musician, a spoken word artist, or poet, a dancer, a multimedia artist, the goal of this project that I developed was to pair one activist with an artist on Zoom. And it was very well received. People loved it. And the fact that we were able to do it on Zoom, something like this was just an achievement, really. So it’s just another example of how I like to be creative, to share knowledge.
0:40:50.0 Ingrid Waldron: So media is really important to me, and I continue to give interviews to television and radio and podcasts and magazines and newspapers for all my research projects. Of course, I have to do research. I’m a professor. I’ve done a lot of research. But the one that’s wrapping up right now is Focus on Shelburne. I mentioned to you that Shelburne, they’ve had a dump since the 1940s. I mentioned multiple myeloma and cancer and high rates of cancer. So we’re trying to figure out with this study, why are there such high rates of cancer in Shelburne? And we’re looking at four issues as causal factors potentially. Is it the dump? Is it racism and other structural determinants of health? Is it lifestyle factors such as smoking, nutrition, diet, exercise? Or is it African ancestry and genetics? So we have a black cancer biologist on the team, and she looks at race and cancer, cancer in black people, particularly black women.
0:41:54.2 Ingrid Waldron: So we’ve done the focus groups and interviews. We’re just waiting for the DNA sampling to come in. So we took blood at a town hall two years ago when we went to Shelburne, and the DNA sampling stuff takes a while to come in. That’s going to come in soon, and we’ll write a report on that. But we’ve already written a report on the focus groups and the interviews, and we’ve shared that on social media. Of course, I have to publish, and this is my very first book on environmental racism. I look at environmental racism in Canada, but of course, Nova Scotia is a bit of a case study.
0:42:29.2 Ingrid Waldron: I also talk about the United States and the leaders there, such as Dr. Bullard and others. And this was the book that the Netflix documentary was based on. I like to build capacity in communities. I don’t want to be a professor, a researcher who goes into communities and just takes from them and never returns. So I like to build capacity. And one of the many ways that I’ve done that is by water testing. Many of these communities, specifically Lincolnville and Shelburne, have always wanted to test their water, but they didn’t want the government to do it because they didn’t trust the government because the government would probably say everything’s fine, right?
0:43:10.7 Ingrid Waldron: So I got together a team comprised of a hydrogeologist, an environmental science professor and environmental science students. We formed a working group in 2016 to test the water of Lincolnville. And we tested the water at no cost. That’s the whole point of this. These are low income black communities in Nova Scotia. They don’t have the money for this. So we did this in the environmental science professor’s lab at no cost. We tested the water, we wrote a report on the findings, we went back to the community, we shared our findings and we educated them on how to keep your drinking water healthy, how to manage your drinking water.
0:43:53.8 Ingrid Waldron: And we continue with various projects like Healthy Wells Day. Many rural communities in Nova Scotia are on wells. They’re not on municipal water. Well water can be contaminated. So we have done this kind of multimedia social media on site project, awareness project for Nova Scotians to say, you’ve gotta find ways to keep your well water healthy. And we post infographics on social media. We did Facebook live and we also chose four communities to test their water on site. We collected the water from them and it’s a whole day, one day, typically it’s October, where we just educate the Nova Scotian public about keeping your well water healthy.
0:44:44.3 Ingrid Waldron: I’ve recently got into climate change, I would say maybe since 2021. I would say most of my projects now are on climate change. And I didn’t think I would be interested in this topic, but I realized that it operates very similarly to environmental racism. Who are the communities that are most vulnerable and exposed to climate change? It’s black communities once again, it’s indigenous communities. Why? Well, it’s because these communities tend to be low income. If they’re low income or poor, they’re living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor.
0:45:16.3 Ingrid Waldron: Low income and poor neighborhoods are less prepared for climate change. Their public infrastructure might be fragile, their housing might be poor. So when people often say to me, Ingrid, everybody’s impacted by climate change, not just black people and indigenous people, I say to them, yes, climate change doesn’t choose black people to impact, but they’re more vulnerable to it because they tend to be. In Canada, black people and indigenous people are our poorest, lowest income groups. And that means it’s like a Domino effect. That means they’re going to be living in neighborhoods that are low income and poor. And that means that their public infrastructure will be fragile, including their housing.
0:45:57.9 Ingrid Waldron: And that means that they will be less prepared for the onslaught of climate change. And it also means that they are the communities that are less… They’re not given attention by policymakers, climate policymakers. So these are the reasons why black and indigenous communities and racialized communities and low income white communities will be more vulnerable to climate change. I’ve looked at legal remedies for environmental racism, particularly with Ecojustice.
0:46:25.9 Ingrid Waldron: This is a law charity, environmental law charity in different cities in Canada. So I’ve worked with them so that they can develop a case for some of the communities I talked about. This confidential information, so I don’t have much information unless I get permission from community members, which I have in the past, just to say that it was really convenient that we had water testing results because we were able to hand over those water testing results to Ecojustice to help them make their case for many of the communities that I have worked with.
0:47:00.0 Ingrid Waldron: Then we get into politics. I wanted to have an environmental justice law for Canada for a long time and that started just provincially. I wanted an environmental justice law for Nova Scotia and that never happened. And I co-developed the very first environmental justice private members bill with former politician Lenore Zann. And she put that private members bill forward in Nova Scotia several times. It never went anywhere.
0:47:30.1 Ingrid Waldron: So in 2020, she moved over to the federal department as an MP Liberal for Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister. And she said, Ingrid, remember that bill we developed back in 2015? And I said, yes. She said, well, it’s now 2020 and I think we should take that bill and turn it into a federal bill for all of Canada, not just Nova Scotia. I said, fantastic idea. I said, because we can deal with all the pipelines in indigenous communities across Canada.
0:47:58.7 Ingrid Waldron: So we took that 2015 Nova Scotia private members bill and we turned it into a federal Canadian bill, hoping that it will become environmental justice law in Canada. We didn’t know at the time that it would. And that private member’s bill was called Bill C226. And it eventually, shockingly went to Senate, third reading at Senate in June 13th of 2024. And I thought to myself, this rarely has a chance of becoming the very first Canadian environmental justice law. And I don’t even know if the United States has this a law. I know everything is being dismantled by that president that you have, but I think this is maybe really groundbreaking, I thought.
0:48:45.6 Ingrid Waldron: And then on June 20, 2024, it passed. It was given Royal Assent, which means it became Canada’s first, very first, environmental justice law. And I’m, of course, happy that I was part of it, that I helped to develop it with Lenore Zann. Part of this law, there is a policy, it’s called the National Environmental Justice Policy, which requires the government to do consultations across Canada with impacted communities and to allow them to give them an opportunity to be part of the policy making. If you remember earlier, I talked about having a seat at the table, and I said, one aspect of environmental racism is that [inaudible] table. With this new legislation, this new law, and with the national environmental justice strategy, which is essentially a policy, the communities now have, I think, a seat at the table because in addition to sharing their concerns about environmental racism in their communities, they get an opportunity to say, this is what I think should be in this policy. So they’re, in a way, co-creating this national environmental justice strategy with government.
0:50:02.2 Ingrid Waldron: So I’m happy really to say that this law, this environmental law and the strategy specifically, has to wrap up. With the law, its going to be there forever, but the strategy has to wrap up next year. So right now, the government is engaged in consultations with indigenous and African and other communities across Canada, but their deadline is next year. And that’s it. I thought I would leave you on a high note. So we have a law in Canada, environmental justice law. Yay. Thank you very much.
0:50:37.9 Julian Agyeman: Well, thank you so much, Ingrid. What a tour de force presentation on all of the issues in Canada. Unfortunately, we’re out of time for questions at the moment. I just… One little thing that I was thinking, but you’ve addressed it at the end. Environmental racism is the kind of negative. Environmental justice is the goal. And I notice in your bill, it’s a bill for environmental justice. Can you just say in one minute a word or two about your use of the two terms environmental racism and environmental justice?
0:51:11.3 Ingrid Waldron: There was a bit of a debate about that. We wanted it to be called environmental racism, and the government wouldn’t let it go. They said, we’re not going to agree to that unless you put in the title environmental justice. But that’s fair, because that’s what we want. So for me, people obscure. People use those terms interchangeably. Environmental racism, environmental justice. What we want is environmental justice. So for me, what environmental justice is, it’s the tools, the actions, the resources that we put in place to advance environmental justice by addressing environmental racism.
0:51:50.1 Ingrid Waldron: So for me, the bill is one of those tools. You can use various tools. You can use activism, you can use advocacy, you can use a private member’s bill, you can use the legislation that we developed. That’s a tool to advance environmental justice, which means that you are addressing environmental racism. Environmental racism is the sickness, it’s the condition, it’s the illness that we have to deal with. Environmental justice is the antidote, it’s the medication. That’s the way that I describe it.
0:52:22.2 Julian Agyeman: On that note, can we thank Ingrid with a warm Cities@Tufts round of applause. Thank you. Thank you, Ingrid.
0:52:30.2 Tom Llewellyn: We hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript and graphic recording or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Anka Dregnan. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey, and the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others so this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.
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