Communities hope a new panel will shed light on historic environmental racism
Vanessa Hartley is an eighth generation Black Loyalist descendant of Shelburne who lives in Halifax.
In 2019, she became involved with a non-profit organization to address the social and health impacts of a landfill in Shelburne.
The landfill is located on the south side of ShelburneNS, an African Nova Scotia community, since the 1940s.
“Growing up in the South,” she said, “I didn’t really recognize what environmental racism looked like.”
Filled with industrial, medical and other types of waste from the council and individual households, the landfill was regularly set on fire during its years of operation to burn off piles of rubbish.
The community is known for its high cancer rates.
In 2016, the landfill was closed as a result of community efforts.
Hartley is the project manager of a new Nova Scotia panel investigating historical environmental racism in the province.
Agassou (Augy) Jones, the chair of Nova Scotia’s Environmental Racism Panel, calls the Shelburne landfill, or Morvan Road landfill, a “glaring example of environmental racism.”
He was appointed in December as the first member and chairman of Nova Scotia’s Environmental Racism Panel.
The purpose of the panel, Jones said, is to empower people in communities like Shelburne to “speak for themselves and tell the story of environmental racism and make it stop.”
The panel, appointed by the provincial government, has seven new members with expertise in Mi’kmaw and African Nova Scotia history, law, health, environment and policy.
They are Angie Gillis, Desiree Jones-Matthias, Gaynor Watson-Creed, Karen Hudson, Lisa Young, Mike Davis and Thomas Johnson.
Jones said the panel is “one piece of a huge puzzle” because environmental racism is just one example of how marginalized communities have been underserved for centuries.
The panel collects information from advisors and community members. It will submit its advice to the provincial government by December 2023.
“It’s a higher level of systematization of something that’s been a conversation for a long time,” Jones said.
He hopes changes are made for Indigenous and African Nova Scotia communities who have experienced environmental racism so they can be “first on the list for the positivity of climate change initiatives.”
‘Move in the right direction’
The newly appointed panel coincides with an inquiry examining the Shelburne landfill.
A team of medical researchers will take blood samples from residents to study possible links between the contaminated site and cancer rates in the community.
Dalhousie University and McMaster University are conducting the research.
Paola Marignani, a biochemistry and molecular biology scientist and professor at Dalhousie University, said she hopes the outcome of the study will support the panel’s work and help guide their recommendations.
Her role in the research is to analyze samples for changes in residents’ DNA that may be due to toxins in the environment.
She said the panel is a “step in the right direction” because it “shows that the government of Nova Scotia is listening to the people of southern Shelburne.”
In August, Marignani and another researcher, Juliet Daniel, will be in Shelburne to begin collecting samples and engaging the community.
“This has been a long time coming, the pandemic has slowed us down,” she said.
Hartley said the research is generally well received within the community and she hopes it will answer some long-awaited questions.
“It will allow deeper conversation and research within the academia of environmental justice and really begin to understand what that legacy looks like here in Nova Scotia and in Canada,” Hartley said.
