Women Who Risk Everything to Defend the Environment
LeeAnne Walters has had her house broken into, her tires slashed, and the lug nuts loosened on her vehicle. “I had a stalker at one point,” reveals the award-winning activist, who in 2015 helped expose the Flint, Michigan water crisis. “My husband had his livelihood threatened to the point where I had to pause everything to ensure the safety of my family.”
Walters is one of hundreds of women around the globe currently facing oppression, persecution, violence-even murder and assassination-for defending the environment. Cherri Foytlin, an advocate for climate justice who is fighting the Bayou Bridge pipeline in Louisiana, recently had her cat poisoned to death. She has also had a brick thrown through the window of her car and endured numerous death threats made against her and her husband. Meanwhile Tara Houska, who was charged with criminal trespassing after protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, remembers being zip-tied and locked in a dog kennel when she was arrested, and strip-searched.
Last year, 207 land and environmental activists were killed across 22 countries-almost four every week, making it the worst year on record, according to a report by Global Witness, an international body that tracks the deaths of land and environmental activists worldwide. Women in particular suffer distinct and sometimes heightened risks. According to Global Witness, death threats, arrests, intimidation, cyber-attacks, sexual assault, and lawsuits are just some of the tactics used against activists in an effort to silence them. And it’s only getting worse.
What’s at Stake
Walters, whose citizens’ movement was one of the first to test tap water and expose Flint homes as having lead levels exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency’s safety threshold, says her need to defend the environment doesn’t stem from a philosophical conviction to save the planet. Rather, it stems from a desperate need to save her family.
In 2014, her three-year-old twins were breaking out in rashes and her eldest daughter's hair was dropping out in clumps. At one point, Walters' own eyelashes fell out. She tells me her kids still have serious ongoing health issues from lead poisoning. Her twins, now seven, have hand-eye coordination issues and speech impediments-including other behavioral issues, such as lack of impulse control, says Walters. One of her sons was also diagnosed with bone density issues from lead poisoning. [OTHER LINKS?] “He spent 47 weeks in a cast after breaking his arm repeatedly-the arm just kept breaking in different areas,” explains Walters. The other twin, she says, hasn't grown properly. “They still haven’t figured out exactly why he's so much smaller than his twin.” She pauses to regain her composure. “It takes years to see the full effects of lead poisoning. But my children will not be victims. I'm raising my children to be survivors of this. This will not define them.”
Walters’ efforts made international headlines. Her perseverance forced the local, state, and federal governments to act. But four years later, Walters is still bathing her children in bottled water, which she heats on the stovetop and in the microwave. “They took away the free bottled-water. We still have over 10,000 pipes that need to be removed, and every time they dig into the ground and disrupt that infrastructure they're putting all of that crap right back into people's homes.” (The Flint City Council declined to comment on the official number of pipes that still needs to be removed.) By “all that crap,” Walters is referring how Flint’s river has been used as an industrial dumping-ground for over 80 years. Manufacturers on the river edge discard their waste in water that comes out of tap in people’s homes. “I'm sure Flint isn't the only city this happens in.”
She's not wrong. After I message Indigenous attorney and activist Tara Houska numerous times for an interview, I finally receive a reply on April 27. The email reads: “Hey Sarah, Thanks for following up-the oil refinery across the bay from my house exploded yesterday, so I had to evacuate. The Huskey refinery is located in Superior, WI- the same city that the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline I am fighting, alongside many other people, would end. Crazy situation.” Houska began protesting Line 3 pipeline construction in 2016. Her fight, she says, is one of cultural survival-protecting the Ojibwe territory. “Wild rice is at the core of who we are. The pipeline would pass through the watersheds of some of the richest wild rice beds in the world.” (A spokesperson for Enbridge agreed that pipelines cross a variety of landforms and environments, however the company has "implemented comprehensive safety measures to protect all areas, including wild rice beds, along our pipeline route.")
Later, I hear on the news that the unrelated April explosion at the Husky Energy oil refinery injured at least 11 people and forced many of the city’s residents to evacuate. A few weeks later, Houska jumps straight to the point over an impromptu call: “There was a massive amount of smoke, a huge cloud of toxic fumes in the air. My eyes were watering, my lungs were hurting. Just as the Mayor [Jim Paine] was saying the air is fine to breathe and the evacuation was just precautionary.”
Though the EPA states that they have found no elevated levels of anything toxic in the air, toxic soil became a question and concern at the time of the explosion. “The oil refinery had this massive container of something called Hydrofluoric acid which they were cooling somewhere above ground. They admitted that they were trying to make sure it didn’t explode because if it did, there would’ve been a toxic gas cloud that can eat through people’s skin. I mean, that’s terrifying to hear!” Thankfully, the container did not explode, though the risk of it exploding still remains. A spokesperson for Huskey Energy said it is continuing to work towards stabilizing and winterizing the refinery site, with operations expected to resume in 2020; adding that a third-party consultant did not identify visible soot deposition from the incident in the community, and indicated that chemical concentrations are below health-based thresholds.
Foytlin, who lives in a small town in South Louisiana, knows what it’s like to have to evacuate her home on account of environmental degradation. “Here in Louisiana, we lose about a football field of land every 45 minutes. We've lost over a million football fields to date,” she says, referring to how the oil industry is cutting several canals for pipelines, allowing saltwater from the Gulf to poison the wetlands. The wetlands, she explains, are important because they soak up the water from hurricanes like Katrina, Rita, and Isaac. “I don't live in a declared flood zone, but my home’s been flooded each year for the last two years. I'm paying mortgage on a property that may someday, in my great-great-grandchildren's lifetime, be oceanfront or underwater.”
Foytlin, an indigenous woman of Diné and Cherokee descent, says she feels a moral obligation to protect this country’s land-not only for her sake, but for her children and future generations. This is also a key concern for Elizabeth Yeampierre, a New York attorney and climate justice leader who spent her childhood in a community exposed to high levels of air pollution from nearby fossil fuel industries. She says she almost died from a bilateral pulmonary embolism-even though she doesn’t smoke. “Because I grew up exposed to a lot of toxins, this fight feels very personal," she says. "My father died of an asthma attack. He was 52 years old."
In 2014, Yeampierre was part of the leadership of the People’s Climate March, which saw 400,000 people protest the lack of action around climate change. Last year, marchers reunited nationwide to take on President Trump’s climate policies. “It is scary, what we're currently seeing happen all over the United States," she says. "We just had wildfires in California. A hurricane in Texas. A hurricane in Miami. A hurricane in Puerto Rico. We can't slow down, because climate change is not slowing down.”
Violence on the Rise
Facing emotional and physical harassment for defending the environment is something these women know all too well. Houska describes what happened at Standing Rock in North Dakota as “a crazy thing to explain to people.” She says: “Water cannons were used on people, infiltrators disrupted the peace, armed trucks were brought in, overhead surveillance with helicopters-that’s right, counterintelligence efforts. All of that done to U.S. citizens peacefully demonstrating.”
Sixty-four anti-protest bills have been introduced by the state legislators since November 8, 2016-an unprecedented level of hostility towards protesters in the 21st century, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. North Dakota legislators narrowly defeated a bill that would have allowed drivers to run over and kill protesters without being jailed; meanwhile an increasing number of states want to make it a crime to plan a pipeline protest. Houska believes that the U.S. is actively seeking to criminalize people for getting off the grid and moving to renewable energy. “Whether that's Oklahoma or Wyoming, all of these states that have big oil interests, they are now trying to find ways to silence any sort of free speech before a major protest against their projects,” she says.
Foytlin is currently fighting Energy Transfer Partners' Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, the latest project from the Fortune 500 corporation behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. According to Foytlin, she has been arrested 10 times on account of environmental issues. “Last time I was arrested, they chained me to a wall and they wouldn't let me go to the bathroom. Once they have you, they turn the air conditioning down where you're real cold, they don't give you no blankets, they do a full-body search, not once, but a couple of times. They find a way to make an example out of you.”
The intimidation techniques don’t stop there. Foytlin, whose book “Spill It! The Truth About the Deep Water Horizon Oil Rig Explosion” was published in 2011, has received several death threats. And of course, her cat was poisoned, something she feels is “straight out of an action movie." Part of the problem, she says, is the idea that she is trying to take jobs away from people who rely on the oil industry. Instead, she is simply asking for leaders to help transition to a new economy that depends on renewable energy. After all, use of coal in the U.S. fell 36 percent from 2007 to 2017, while jobs in the solar industry grew 12 times as fast as overall job creation in the U.S. in 2015-surpassing those in oil and gas extraction, or coal mining. More than 250,000 people worked in the solar industry in 2017 nationally, with large wind and solar being as cost-competitive with fossil fuels.
Women Put Up a Fight
Although nine out of every 10 murdered activists last year were male, women activists continue to face gender-specific threats including sexual violence. They are often subjected to smear-campaigns, with threats against their children and attempts to undermine their credibility commonplace; sometimes from within their own communities. Female activists face two fights: a public battle to protect natural resources, and a hidden struggle to safeguard their own right to speak out. “Women rarely receive the same level of support as their male colleagues,” says Rachel Cox, Campaigner from Global Witness. “Deeply held gender discrimination creates an invisible system of beliefs that limit women’s ability to speak out, while hiding violence against women within their organizations and families.”
Walters is a clear example of how when women become too strong to silence, they are put in their place and subjected to violence from within their own community. She was forced to hire an attorney after her husband was threatened by his previous military unit to be sent to a mental institute because he was “too damaged from Flint,” unless he would rapidly “handle his wife and get her under control,” according to Walters. Her husband had served 22 years with the Navy. “It's very hard to be a whistleblower and even harder when you are ostracized from the people that are supposed to be your brothers,” says Walters. While her attorney’s investigation into his treatment by the Navy is still ongoing, she adds: “Nobody should tell a husband to handle their wife and get her under control.”
Juggling family responsibilities while being a full-time activist is an additional concern. In many communities, women still take on the brunt of domestic chores, their home and families depending on them. When they are attacked, the entire structure they hold up is threatened. Walters says that she hates being away from her kids. “My little ones are seven and so to be away from them for three weeks and seeing them on Skype and hearing them count down how many sleeps until Mommy gets home. That takes a toll.” According to Global Witness, gender discrimination and misogynistic insults such as being labelled "bad mothers" historically form part of the repression of women opposing extractive projects. For Foytlin, being a mother of six and an activist can sometimes feel like an impossible task. Last year, someone posted a video about her where Foytlin was called “public enemy number one.” This led to someone calling child welfare. “They tried to get my kids taken away from me. Do you know how frightening that is?”
And yet, “there's been a lot of single moments of strength,” Houska says. "Nothing can defeat our spirit.” Houska admits that each time she gets arrested, she returns feeling undefeated, with a bigger appetite for change, and more strength to fight.
She's not alone. According to Bridget Burns, Director of the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), an advocacy organization focused on women's environmental leadership, there has been an increase in women-led groups in the U.S. pushing the fight for clean air and water. This is echoed by Rachel Cox from Global Witness, who argues that despite the obstacles they face, women activists are increasingly taking on leadership roles in the many battles against mining, deforestation, and other destructive industries. Think Winona Laduke, Julia Butterfly Hill, or Yong Jung Cho-to name a few.
Women tend to lead this fight, Yeampierre believes, because of their life-giving connection to their children and the earth, and their frustration with gender inequity. “We think like people who come from struggle,” she says, adding that women of color have been holding this space for years, and are now, finally, getting the visibility they deserve. “We tend to have this respect for Mother Earth as an extension of our culture and spirituality. So it's not surprising for me to see such an intergenerational group of badasses leading the way.”
On November 29, the world paid tribute to the hundreds of thousands of women who work tirelessly to defend human rights in every sphere of society, forInternational Women Human Rights Defenders Day.
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