Recently, I’ve been discussing presidential politics, as all of us have. Even if you try to avoid the conversations and the different opinions, they are everywhere on the news, in the paper, among your colleagues and friends. Such conversations are important, and often even helpful, to educate people on issues. Hands down educated voters are best.
Lately, I’ve really been listening to what is being said about various candidates. Listening to how the message, words are conveyed. Clearly, our country is more polarized than I’ve ever seen in my decades of voting. Unfortunately, most of these conversations have become rude, insulting, and/or dismissive. We are screaming at each other, criticizing or dismissing entire segments of society, and not hearing one another’s views.
I was in a meeting and someone said out loud, with no hesitation, that the Christian Coalition is a huge problem and working against us. A visibly angry young mother from Texas explained that she belonged to the Christian Coalition and doesn’t believe the Coalition supports poisoning school children with toxic chemicals. “People like you are the problem, not people like me.”
In another meeting, someone accused the workers of being the barrier to moving an issue forward, saying therefore, we needed to organize around the workers instead including them in our fight.
I’ve heard people use the words stupid, ignorant or other nasty descriptions of a candidate or a person who supports a different candidate. This is not limited to a single political party and it’s turning off people on all sides.
It’s time to stop the fever pitched screams and begin talking and listening to each other. When we listen and we share, it is amazing what can happen. Let me share a story.
CHEJ was invited to help an organization stop an incinerator in New York. The group we were working with expressed disappointment about how apathetic people in their community are. One member of the core leadership told me, “In this community people are self-focused, lazy and not too bright. I can not understand why they want to allow all this pollution.” I suggested that everyone may not care about health and inquired if she had asked people what they care about? She answered, “No, because this is the most important and frightening thing that’s happen now.”
Yikes, another scream, and narrow focus to the problems of winning real, deep seeded justice. What if you stopped yelling and trying to prove your point, and listened instead?
We were in a bar and I decided that instead of explaining the importance of listening and having a conversation to connect with people, I’d demonstrate the importance. I got up and moved to sit next to a worker who was having a beer. He was watching the football game on TV and when I caught his attention, I asked what he thought about the plan for the new incinerator.
He replied, “I don’t care.” Showing him the flyer the group published, I followed up with, “What about cancer and other diseases that this flyer says may increase because of pollution?”
“Lady I don’t care . . . I’m watching the game” he replied a bit annoyed.
Waiting for a commercial break, I ask, “What do you care about? What bothers you?” He thought for a moment and said, “potholes.” He explained, he’s an independent trucker and the potholes cause all sorts of damage to his truck which he must pay out-of-his own pocket to repair. Secondly, he added, that traffic signal from hell on the corner. “There is no left turn light and so it takes forever, sometimes two cycles, for me to turn that corner.”
When the next commercial came around I suggested that what he cares about and what the group cares about are the same – – disruption of a beautiful rural community. There will be over 200 trucks driving down that same road making more potholes and a longer line of vehicles that need to turn left at that corner. You may not care about the pollution but there will be plenty of other disruption to the community if this incinerator is built. He agreed and we had a much longer conversation about community power and corporate greed.
My message to the group, then and to us all now, is to stop screaming about how right you are and how wrong others are. Instead, try listening and maybe, just maybe, you’ll see that you aren’t that far apart, and together you can create a better tomorrow.
Month: September 2020
The dust and stench of rotten eggs and chemicals are so nauseating that Pamela McWilliams often dons a mask and shuts the windows of her home on Detroit’s east side.
The asthmatic 57-year-old has trouble sleeping at night because of heavy truck traffic coming to and from nearby industrial plants. She and other neighbors say they’re sometimes aroused awake by explosions and vibrations that have shaken the shingles off McWilliams’ roof and cracked her windows. The value of her home has plummeted, and her brother moved away because “he couldn’t take it anymore,” she tells Metro Times.
Read more…
Photo credit: Steve Neavling | Metro Times
Millions will be displaced. Where will they go?
August besieged California with a heat unseen in generations. A surge in air-conditioning broke the state’s electrical grid, leaving a population already ravaged by the coronavirus to work remotely by the dim light of their cellphones. By mid month, the state had recorded possibly the hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth – 130 degrees in Death Valley – and an otherworldly storm of lightning had cracked open the sky.
Read more…
Photo credit: Meridith Kohut | The New York Times
This summer was the hottest ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, according to US government scientists.
The new record surpassed the summers of 2016 and 2019. Last month was also the second-hottest August ever recorded for the globe. The numbers put 2020 on track to be one of the five warmest years, according to Noaa.
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Photo credit: Kimimasa Mayama | EPA
By: Leija Helling, Communications Intern
This summer, community organizers in Birmingham, Alabama, coordinated a series of caravan protests calling for racial and environmental justice at the 35th Avenue Superfund site in North Birmingham.
Communities living in and around the 35th Avenue site are facing decades of unabated industrial pollution, and after years of fighting for the EPA to intervene, people are tired of waiting. The contaminated area, encompassing three predominantly Black North Birmingham neighborhoods, was designated a Superfund site almost a decade ago due to high levels of lead and carcinogens such as BaP and arsenic, yet the community has seen little response from officials since. Meanwhile, coke oven plants, steel production facilities, asphalt plants and quarries continue to pollute the land, water and air, exacerbating health disparities.
“We are just going to have to start taking to the streets like everybody else,” said Charlie Powell, founder and president of the advocacy group People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination (PANIC). On July 11, members of the Right to Breathe Caravan gathered for a socially distanced rally where speakers shared stories and enumerated demands, most importantly calling for officials to move the site to the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List. Afterwards, the group drove dozens of cars decorated with signs and posers through neighborhoods in North Birmingham to raise awareness about the problem and galvanize the community into action. The events were live-streamed via Facebook and Zoom.
PANIC coordinated the protests alongside the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP) and other local partners including the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter. According to GASP executive director Michael Hanson, the caravan was largely inspired by protests and calls for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. Hanson says the global movement provided an opportunity to “highlight the way that environmental issues intersect with systemic racism and oppression.”
On Aug. 27, a second Right to Breathe Caravan traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery, the state capital, seeking a response from Governor Kay Ivey to their demands for justice for those living in and near the Superfund site. PANIC and GASP have been requesting a meeting with Gov. Ivey for months with no response, and she has yet to take a public stand on the issue. So, organizers, residents and their allies took matters into their own hands and drove to the Governor’s Mansion, seeking her support. With racial disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighting the need for racial health equity, the community needs remediation more than ever. “This is an environmental injustice, and we want relief,” Powell said.
To learn more about the environmental crisis in Birmingham, Alabama, check out parts one, two, and three of a series published by Scalawag Magazine and the Huffington Post in 2019.
Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face.
The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other.
Photo credit: Jim Wilson | The New York Times
The Center for American Progress, or CAP, a progressive think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., released the report, “Building a Just Climate Future for North Carolina,” Wednesday. It also looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has “highlighted the interconnection between systemic racism and injustice and environmental, public health, and economic disparities.”
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Story by Jennifer Allen
The Trump administration weakened a 2015 regulation that would have forced coal plants to treat wastewater with more modern, effective methods in order to curb toxic metals such as arsenic and mercury from contaminating lakes, rivers and streams near their facilities.
“The Trump administration is once again jeopardizing people’s health to give coal power industry lobbyists what they want,” Thom Cmar, an attorney with the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, said in a statement.
Read more here.
Photo credit: J. David Ake | AP
By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
St. Louis, Missouri families are feeling hopeful following the commencement of the EPA’s long-awaited clean-up at the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site at Bridgeton. Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel, community activists and co-founders of Just Moms STL, a non-profit organization aiming to educate the St. Louis community about the negative health impacts of radioactive waste at West Lake, have been campaigning for the clean-up since 2013.
“To see this positive result”, said Chapman, “I guess I can say makes the bruises hurt less”.
In 1973, radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project, a secret U.S. military project created in 1942 to produce the first nuclear weapon, was illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill and remained there quietly until 2010, when a fire at the site emitted a foul odor, exposing the waste. In 2018, the EPA proposed a partial removal plan following years of campaigning by Just Moms STL and St. Louis community members. In the proposed plan, the EPA promised at least 70% of the radioactivity would be removed over a 5 year period. Last month, the EPA set foot on the site and officially began the clean-up process. The sight offered relief for St. Louis’ community members like mothers Chapman and Nickel.
In response to the clean-up, Chapman said, “Seeing EPA workers working on the landfill is proof of what moms can really do”. The success at West Lake is proof that small communities working together can accomplish big things. Now that tangible progress has been made at West Lake, Just Moms STL is expanding their outreach by helping other leaders combat environmental injustices in their communities.
Please visit http://www.stlradwastelegacy.com to learn more about Just Moms STL’s work and get involved with their campaigns.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Just Moms STL and their campaigning journey, click here to watch a Zoom recording of CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Event from July 8, 2020: a conversation with Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel.
A report commissioned by federal regulators overseeing the nation’s commodities markets has concluded that climate change threatens U.S. financial markets, as the costs of wildfires, storms, droughts and floods spread through insurance and mortgage markets, pension funds and other financial institutions.
Photo credit: Cindy Yamanaka | The Orange County Register