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Modesto Bee Friday, June 20th, 2003 
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Neighborhoods focus of forum By SARAH T. HALL Jane Magaña thinks back to her days at Modesto High School and remembers the stench. "It was a smell that made you want to throw up," the 19-year-old said about the odors that wafted across the school from cereal and tallow plants at the southern edge of the city and beyond. She offered this recollection during Thursday afternoon's Environmental Youth Forum at Modesto Junior College. The forum focused on "environmental justice," a term defined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as "fair treatment for people of all races, cultures and incomes, regarding the development of environmental laws, regulations and policies." Many forum participants said Stanislaus County was guilty of "environmental racism." "Stanislaus County has forever been doing this," said Rosenda Mataka, one the forum speakers. "You take a disadvantaged area and you put your garbage there." Mataka is a member of the Grayson Neighborhood Council, one of the forum's sponsors. Grayson is on the county's West Side, home of the county landfill and a garbage-burning plant, and a tire-burning plant that is no longer in operation after the adjacent tire pile went up in smoke in a 1999 fire. Natalia Bernal, youth organizer for Greenaction, a San Francisco-based organization that co-sponsored the event, said it was important to draw children's attention to pollution in their communities. "I love working with youth and getting young people fired up about issues that matter," she said. Bernal has perspective on how to teach young people about the environment -- she has been an activist since the age of 14 or 15. "The first step is to educate them about the issues -- what environmental injustices are occurring right now," Bernal said. She said children often are not aware that they are being affected by pollution -- their eyes may burn or they have trouble breathing but do not know why. Forums like this one "give them a chance to express how they feel about it and focus it towards a social good," Bernal said. Participants were divided into three groups: "West and South Side," "North Side" and "Del Rio." Each group discussed problems within their designated communities. One exercise started with people in all three groups lining up, side by side, then taking directions from different scenarios, such as: "If your neighborhood has safe parks, take one step forward," and "If your neighborhood smells bad, take two steps back." By the end, the "North Side" and "Del Rio" groups stood at the front of the room, while the "West and South Side" group stood at the back. Another forum speaker, John Mataka of Grayson, said he was sick of his community being considered a "throwaway." He said people should speak up to change the perception of the community as a place to send and burn garbage. "The air in Grayson is worse than LA," he said. "Asthma is rampant in this county. Burning makes steam, which makes electricity. But what's the trade-off?" To Magaña, the biggest environmental problem is the lack of cohesion that she senses within the community. "People are not informed about it," she said. "I don't think that local government, city council, the schools are doing enough. "There's nothing about Modesto that unifies our people." Copyright © 2003 The Modesto Bee. |