"It's an issue of life and death," said Mikaela Marmion (senior-letters, arts and science). "People are dying every day because of an issue called environmental racism."

Marmion showed an excerpt from a video entitled "Earth Keeping: Toxic Racism," which highlighted the origins of the environmental racism movement, and led a discussion afterward.

According to the video, the term "environmental racism" came out of a movement in the early 1980s which argued that areas populated by minorities are unfairly targeted by businesses as sites for high-pollution producing facilities like toxic waste incinerators and landfills.

The video showed what they said was a case study of environmental racism, in which a company applied to open a toxic waste incinerator in a California town with a large population of migrant farm workers. The company had previously placed a toxic waste dump in the same community, and assumed the people would not fight back. However, the residents sued the company, and the judge ruled that because the public hearings on the possible incinerator were held in English, the Spanish-speaking population was excluded from the process. With the majority of the residents not part of the planning, the court threw out the town's approval of the incinerator, and the company decided not to pursue it any further.

"The residents were fortunate, but it doesn't always work that way," Marmion said, adding that these problems often come from the idea that a company has to make a profit in order to survive.

"Where will you make a profit? In the place with the lowest penalties and where people are supposedly unlikely to fight back," she said.

The forum was coordinated by Undergraduate Student Government Environmental Affairs Director Tressa Gibbard along with Marmion as part of Unity Week.

Much of the discussion after the video focused on the difficulty in raising awareness of the problem.

"For justice to happen, people have to care," Gibbard said. "The reality is we're all affected by it, we just don't realize it."

Marmion said environmental racism and classism are issues that are in tune with Unity Week's message, but largely ignored by civil rights and environmental activists alike.

"Movements get so segregated. We don't see the connections between them," Marmion said. "It's important to be able to understand the meaning of unity."

She said the hardest part of addressing the issue is knowing where to start, since a majority of people are not aware of the issue.

"If it's not overwhelming, we haven't even begun the journey. It makes it difficult to think about 'what can I do?'"

Marmion said that power in numbers is a key part of approaching the problem.

"It's almost impossible to do something as an individual," Marmion said. "People as a collective have a lot more power than one person."