Environmental Justice and the Hungarian Roma

Stephanie McPherson for TEI

Krista Harper, Assistant Professor ofAnthropology, shuffles through large stiff printouts of photographs taken of Sajószentpèter, a predominantly Hungarian Roma village in northern Hungary. There is a lush river bank covered with plastic containers. A photo of a wood stove a Roma family uses for heat, despite its poor ventilation. A young boy stands in front of the family outhouse, used in lieu of an indoor bathroom. These photos were taken in a neighborhood that is a five minute walk from the mayor’s office. “Somehow, the town has never managed to install sewerage or indoor water,” said Harper.

As part of “Across the Bridge: Environment, Health and Individuality in a Hungarian Roma Community,” these photos portray what Harper has been studying for the past few years of her career – environmental injustices in the Roma community. “Environmental inequalities are rampant,” Harper says. “This research in many ways opens up a conversation.”

It’s a conversation that needs to take place. Since its transition in 1989 from state-socialism to a free market, Hungary has made advances in its environmental policies, but there have also been set-backs, Harper says. “One the one hand, there are new environmental laws and regulations that are up to the standards of the U.S. and many Western European countries,” she says. “The state does have more of an ability to regulate firms as an outside watchdog.”

The transformation from state-socialism also opened the door for a number of new environmental groups, from clean air to environmental education. However, the new free market economy has not been all positive. Rapid privatizing and clearing of land led to deforestation. The highly efficient recycling systems developed under state-socialism disappeared. Sajószentpèter was home to a glass packaging factory, which provided a number of jobs in addition to environmentally friendly food packaging. In the early ‘90s, after the fall of state-socialism, the factory was shut down. “One of the things that was incredibly hard for people in the neighborhood to see was pictures of their neighborhood drowning in plastic food packaging, right there in the shadow of what had been a factory that provided jobs and recyclable or reusable glass packaging,” says Harper.

The people most affected by the factory’s closing were the Hungarian Roma, the largest ethnic minority in the country. The Roma, formerly known as Gypsies, have been a settled part of Hungarian society for more than 100 years. During the 1970s and 80s, Roma had a high work force participation, but were the first to lose their jobs after 1989. “It was a truly humanitarian disaster,” Harper says.

Now, Harper has noticed that predominantly Roma neighborhoods are more likely to be located near landfills, flood plains and other environmentally unsound places. “Hundreds of neighborhoods that are comprised mostly of Roma residents do not have access to public sewerage infrastructure or water lines, when non-Roma neighborhoods across town have access to this public infrastructure,” she says. The Roma also have a ten year shorter life expectancy than other Hungarian citizens. While this is partly due to lifestyle and access to health care, biological factors environmental health plays a huge role.

The “Across the Bridge” project is working to catapult the Hungarian Roma’s situation into the public eye. The photo project, worked on by Harper in conjunction with the Sajó River Association for Environment and Community Development, was presented to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Geneva in 2007. The display opened on October 3 on the 10th floor of the UMass Campus Center.
“It’s exciting because it’s a visual way of putting environmental justice issues on the agenda,” Harper says. The photos don’t only focus on the environmental disasters of the area. “It’s a region with many natural wonders to conserve such as the Sajó River and the Aggtelek cave systems,” Harper says.

In a related effort, Harper’s 2006 book, “Wild Capitalism: Environmental Activists and Post-Socialist Political Ecology in Hungary” portrays the transformation of the environmental movement from state-socialism to democracy. She discusses one of the largest displays of Hungarian environmental activism: the plan to dam the Danube River. After decades of negotiations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary to dam the Danube River, the Hungarian National Water Conservancy Office ordered a report on the project in 1983. When word was released that the findings were less than favorable, a group of activists convened to form the Danube Circle and supported years of underground protesting, eventually leading a march of an estimated 40,000 people on the Parliament Building.

After the fall of state-socialism, the Danube movement was left by the wayside. “The Danube movement, already diversified by that time into a variety of camps, splintered as activists turned their attentions to forming political parties and NGOs geared to the new political system,” Harper writes in “Wild Capitalism.” “Its concern with democratic processes and public access to information, however, continues to characterize the contemporary Hungarian environmental movement.” The final chapter of “Wild Capitalism” hints at Harper’s later research, what now focuses on the Hungarian Roma. “A variety of different activists articulated suspicions that specific groups might suffer disproportionately from environmental pollution: low- and middle-income people living in cities, the rural poor, and Romani (Gypsy) communities in Hungary’s post-socialist Rust Belt,” she wrote. “Such suspicions rarely resulted, however, in organized political actions to address specific problems or to build new environmentalist constituencies and coalitions.” It is Harper’s hope that her work with Roma communities will open up a dialogue about these environmental injustices, and improve the quality of life for the people living in these all but forgotten neighborhoods. “I’ve wanted to see a society in change, and I’ve been able to do that,” Harper says.