Martin, Environmentalist

One thing that gets slept on about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is that the civil rights leader was quite the environmentalist. Most of our friends and associates in both the public and private spheres were so quick to quote something from the “I Have a Dream” speech each January 15^th yet marginalize the context of his own words and actions the other 364 days of the year. Certainly it is true that Brother Martin departed this life a poor man – advancing black causes tends to thin out the pockets of its primary advocates – but the larger takeaway is the fallacy that money alone does not matter as we pillage our way into untold profits is nowhere near the principle of Leave No Trace, which merely means leave the world a better place than we found it. After all, our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom…Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

As the American government sets its budget annually, why is it that the Pentagon gets an obscene amount of loot yet the day-to-day social programs get short shrift and blamed for the deficit? Is annihilation of a darker-hued people a larger priority and protection of whiteness by default (and American exceptionalism) at all costs than following through the basic promise of symbolizing a shining beacon the rest of the world can only hope to emulate? What does that say to the hungry families who have only the churches to rely upon for sustenance?  Are the disabled among us simply throwaway citizens? As a bonus question, what is the real reason for propping up Israel for the past seventy years knowing it has the world’s second strongest military after our own as we tell children to buck up and deal with the hardscrabble circumstances they were born into not limited to citizenry? I’d like to think we all have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment; imagine having to stand outside at the bus stop wearing a respirator or not being able to swim in the same now-murky creeks our parents skinny-dipped in as children.

We have flown the air like birds and swum the seas like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers. #MLK

— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) January 28, 2018

Consider the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike just days before his assassination in 1968. On its face, King was advocating for equal pay for black and white sanitation workers in Memphis as evidenced by the I Am a Man signs the marching crowd wore in protest of their substandard living conditions and pitiful work environments.

Understand we do not have a concrete set of statements either expanding or dispelling King’s own environmental stance for the movement took off after his death. Ecological thinking – the precursor to the green movement we all know, like, and occasionally loathe depending on the Toyota Prius driver doing 10 below in the left lane – was in its infancy and reserved in the ivory towers of academia prior to the Nixon White House establishing the EPA a few years later welcoming green technology and society to the mainstream where it was formerly marginalized by hippie culture. Beyond the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act which all makes environmental concerns mandatory for major actions undertaken or permitted by the federal government and guarantees that all public environmental concerns will be heard.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects us all indirectly. #MLK

— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) January 28, 2018

What if I told you environmental quality was also interrelated to an inescapable network of mutuality regarding the locations of our landfills, chemical waste management facilities, and industrial parks in towns large and small? Hear me out.

When cities seek locations for landfills, where do they typically end up? In rural or impoverished areas away from current population growth, or among the less affluent and/or where other historically discriminated citizens reside. Eventually, sprawl happens, and those dumps end up moving further and further to the outskirts to another poor area until the two are forced to coexist. In Florida, I recently noticed that on one side of the Florida Turnpike was a landfill albeit neatly manicured in appearance and across the toll road, a nature preserves for the most endangered creatures indigenous to the southern part of the Sunshine State.  In many areas, that dump would cause homeowners’ property values to drop – who would want to live next to last week’s garbage? Only those who were redlined into the area or unable to afford housing elsewhere, that’s who.

In the grand scheme of things, everything matters. Who would want to eat three-eyed catfish caught from parts of the Saline River or hunt bulletproof deer that roam the riverside for their survival if we are dumping waste indiscriminately only because doing the right thing is more trouble than simply leaving trash where we litter?

How does this explain places like Flint and Mound Bayou and any other community of color that has a disproportionate percentage of poisoned water supply in the name of profit as city, state, and corporate leaders sit by idly reaping the fruits of job creation or time has forgotten about and the resources necessary to maintain a decent filtration system have dried up?

“Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”

Then we have light pollution, which we all are guilty of to one extent or another. When was the last time we went outside to pitch-black darkness and only saw the moon and stars? For the sake of our health, do we even shut down our bodies long enough to get proper rest despite those bright blue smartphone screens that inevitably keep us awake much longer than necessary? Maybe this is a reason why some of us clamor to exit the grid and live simply. Since we do have to share Planet Earth as a temporary home, the least we can do is take care of it; in King’s view, it would be foolhardy to integrate schools or lunch counters if the same concern were not exhibited toward the survival of the world in which to be integrated.

We will never know the extent of King’s positions regarding the environment as he was not only taken too soon from us but also those opinions were not as fully formed into a context we all can understand as the famed civil rights stances. What we do recognize is he maintained more than a basic understanding of how the world and its inhabitants (man, animal, plants, etc.) are all intertwined to ideally make this place work smoothly as God intended, and even within his own sermons, had the uncanny knack of connecting the dots to express a related issue of the day. In this context it could be appropriate to add environmentalist to the list of descriptors of the greatest American of the past one hundred years.

Your reminder to always continue to learn #MLK pic.twitter.com/WR9irRWQ4I

— A. Cedric Armstrong (@cedteaches) January 28, 2018