Spring 2001
FACES FOR THE FUTURE
The Health and Environmental Justice Project (HEJ) of SVTC proudly launched its dynamic and innovative Family And Community Environmental School (FACES) in January 2001 to educate, organize and mobilize working class persons of color in Santa Clara County around issues of toxic exposure to hazardous chemicals. The HEJ project is an innovative collaboration between SVTC, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, researchers at UC-Berekeley and the Santa Clara County Health Department.
The HEJ staff devised an educational and inter-active curriculum around the “5 Basic Building Blocks to Improving Our Health and Environment”, which include “Toxics From A-Z”, “Living Healthy in a Toxic World”, “Environmental Bad Guys”, “Everyone’s A Leader” and “Thinking Globally”. FACES covers the basics of environmental racism and justice, environmental health, and organizing for social change.
According to the 1998 US Census Estimates, Santa Clara County is 27% Latino, 23% Asian Pacific Islanders, 4% African-American and 1% Native American Today, the faces of Santa Clara County are now predominantly people of color. However, the disproportionate growth of wealth in Silicon Valley has left communities of color marginalized from the “benefits” promised by the romance of high-tech industrial development. The dot.com “revolution” has laid bare an urban environmental crisis in which extreme wealth lies side-by-side with poverty, whose witnesses are thousands of temp job workers and hundreds of homeless families.
The slow but effective poisons used by the high-tech industry, brought Santa Clara County 29 Superfund sites (the most number of government high-priority toxic clean-up sites than in any area in the United States). The companies put working people into assembly jobs with high-risk toxic exposure. Workers have suffered miscarriages, reproductive and other cancers. Others have died. The same companies released millions of pounds of benzene, arsenic, lead, toluene, glycol ethers, trichloroethylene and other toxics into our environment. These corporations have earned the wrath of the public for environmentally hazardous and unacceptable production methods. Short-term vision and unrealistic profit margins have made companies choose profits at the expense of environmental and human sustainability.
The environmental contamination of Silicon Valley also came with a comprehensive social, political and economic context. These corporations are partially responsible for the huge disparities between the rich and the poor in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley’s super-inflation of housing and rent prices is forcing more working families of color and those on the other side of the ‘digital divide’ to do with less. On top of it, the soaring energy crisis has resulted in a severe decline in the disposable income of families of color.
The first batch of FACES participants learned to link issues of environmental justice and exposure to hazardous chemicals to the burning issues of the day. According to FACES participant, Annie Sayo, “Toxic exposure does not poison all peoples equally. It starts with those nearest to it, for example the workers. Then it moves like a poison to the most vulnerable and marginalized elements of society. But, toxics also see no color lines...sooner or later, it means to get everyone.”
Jay Mendoza is the Director of the Health and Environmental Justice Program.
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