This is The Color of Climate, a weekly column from OneZero exploring how climate change and other environmental issues uniquely impact the future of communities of color.

On Wednesday, a recording of two San Bernardino teens pleading for Amazon to address its environmental impact was played at the company’s annual shareholder meeting. Former Amazon employee Maren Costa transmitted the audio during her comments to shareholders.

Teens Amy and April, who only used their first names, said they both have asthma and asked the shareholders to reduce the amount of air pollution the company creates in their predominantly Latinx community. They said their mother has worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Inland Empire, the Southern California region where San Bernardino is located, since 2012.

“A lot of our friends have asthma. It is normal here. We can’t run without our inhalers,” April said.

Their message was part of a proposal presented by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ), a nationwide group of former and current Amazon workers pushing the company to adopt more environmentally just policies. The proposal called for an investigation into the environmental impact of Amazon operations in U.S. communities of color, reparation for harm caused in those communities by pollution from Amazon’s facilities, and mitigation of future potential environmental harms. It was one of 12 proposals that were up for a vote at the meeting. The day before the meeting, AECJ published a Medium post outlining how Amazon’s fulfillment centers cause air pollution in communities of color.

But the proposal was voted down by shareholders. The board of directors, which includes Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, recommended that they vote against it. In its recommendations to shareholders, which were published ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, the board said it “believes that our existing initiatives… demonstrate that we are already responsibly managing the environmental impact of our operations on the communities in which we operate, including communities of color, and recommends that shareholders vote against this proposal.”

One Amazon employee, who has worked for three years in one of the company’s Inland Empire fulfillment centers and was granted anonymity to protect their job, tells OneZero they weren’t “surprised” that the shareholders voted against the proposal. The employee says they have seen how powerful the company can be in lobbying local governments to support its growth in the region and that the company’s takeover of the Inland Empire in spite of resident protests is “intimidating.”

#environment #racism #pollution #color-of-climate #amazon #amazon web services