Fenceline Communities
How Grassroots Environmental Justice groups lead the movement
By Lilli Y. Garza
I’ve never been a city person. Something about the tall buildings, and cars that love to honk, and the pace that’s always been a little bit too fast for me. I grew up in Milwaukee, so I’ve lived in a city for most of my life, but I have always had the opportunity to leave when it became too much. Almost all of my favorite childhood memories are in outdoor spaces, whether it was my family friend’s farm or my Grandpa’s house in Northern Wisconsin. For me, fresh air has always been grounding--cleansing almost. I went to college in rural Maine and connected with that need even more. Now I live in Chicago, one of the largest cities in the country. I was initially scared to live in such a loud and overwhelming place, but I’ve found lots of spaces here that allow me to breathe. These opportunities to escape refuel my ability to not only do my work, but exist in general as a good friend, partner, or family member.
Even though I have come around to city living, I still don’t think of myself as a city person. When I think about why, I don’t really have an answer. It is the same earth, the same water, and the same air. But is it? When I stepped outside in Maine, I saw green space and a forest that seemingly went on forever. There is only one major highway in the state, and a lot of the land is preserved. Here in Chicago, access to open space is more limited, but I have the privilege of living in an apartment near a park, and on a boulevard full of outdoor opportunities. In other neighborhoods, there are less trees, more buildings, and more environmental hazards. When I step outside of my apartment building I don’t see factories, or clouds of black smoke leaving stacks that shake and shudder as they cough their contaminants into our air and water. But whose air is it really? Who lives in these communities that share a fence line with these destructive polluters?
We have heard about Flint, Michigan’s crisis with high lead contaminants in their water, and we stood with the Standing Rock Water Protectors as they fought against the Dakota Access Pipeline, but what stories aren’t we hearing? Every single day people are impacted by the toxic environmental contaminants in their neighborhoods. Children breathe in air that is not safe under EPA regulations. People, just like you and me, drink water that has unsafe levels of lead and other toxins. Not just in Flint, but all across the country.
There is no shortage of environmental crises across the globe, and there are incredible activists, scientists and passionate citizens working to push back. Unfortunately environmental activism is dominated by large nonprofits fraught with problems. The Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy may be able to use their large platforms at times to quickly rally support and pull the public eye to an important issue, but organizations at this scale often have problematic donors and strong corporate ties. In addition, these organizations have received harsh criticisms in the last few years due to their lack of equity not only in their actions, but also their offices. In contrast, grassroots organizations on the ground often led by people of color, never get the recognition or the funding and support. Despite the fact that they are the ones fighting everyday battles while relying on small donations and the time of community members to achieve justice. These are the organizations that we need to center and amplify when we support the climate justice movement, not only because they are the activists who are directly impacted by the outcomes, but because these grassroots groups have often been the ones most capable to effect change.
In order to spotlight how these groups are leading the way in climate resistance, I interviewed leaders from two organizations, each from different parts of the country--Chelsea, Massachusetts and Chicago, Illinois.
***
GreenRoots - Chelsea, Ma
Chelsea, MA shares a creek bed with East Boston and has 43,000 residents, 73% of which are racial minorities. Chelsea is a breeding ground for environmental injustice. 100% of the jet fuel used at Boston’s main airport is stored on the banks of Chelsea creek, as well as 400,000 tons of road salt. The presence of these toxins has severely impacted the health of this predominantly minority and immigrant community. GreenRoots is a community led grassroots organization working to decrease the toxic impacts of pollution and its burden on Chelsea’s communities of color. With 20 employees and a youth group made up of high school students who work part-time until they graduate, GreenRoots consists of incredibly passionate community members. I spoke with GreenRoots’ Associate Executive Director Maria Belen Powers to learn more about their work.
Image Credit: GreenRoots Chelsea
Lilli Y. Garza: How did GreenRoots begin?
Maria Belen Powers: We started in ‘94 as a residents committee, we were originally called the Green Space Committee as a multi-issue organization. In the ‘90s, Chelsea had gone into receivership*, it was the first city in Massachusetts to go into receivership since the Great Depression and led to a lot of the city’s mayors being taken away for corruption, etc. During this time, Boston University took over the public school system in Chelsea. They were planning to build schools in the open spaces of Chelsea. The residents were conflicted because they wanted more schools, but they also wanted access to open space. Out of this conflict, the committee was formed as a friends of the park group, but soon after, the group started tackling deep environmental racism issues out of sheer necessity.
* In law, receivership is a situation in which an institution or enterprise is held by a receiver—a person "placed in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights"—especially in cases where a company cannot meet its financial obligations and is said to be insolvent. - Wikipedia
LG: What was one of the first large issues the organization tackled?
MBP: One of the first campaigns involved a higher-income area in Chelsea that has a higher population of white residents than any other neighborhood in Chelsea. The kids from the city in Chelsea came to use the parks in this neighborhood and the residents claimed that the kids were bringing in drugs and violence, so they organized to put in boulders on the field so the kids couldn’t play soccer there anymore. The more conscious residents recognized that this was environmental racism, and organized to get the boulders out. While they were successful, it cost $64,000 to put the builders in and $60,000 to get them out. That is a lot of tax dollars.
LG: What is one of GreenRoots largest successes?
MBP: In 2006, Chelsea’s diesel exhaust level exceeded the EPA’s threshold by 20% and their cancer rate was higher than anywhere else in the state. GreenRoots fought to retrofit the diesel tanks and eliminated 2000 tons of the air pollutant. Cape Wind, the very same company that was proposing clean air for Cape Cod was proposing a diesel power plant in Chelsea, so the predominantly wealthy and white communities on Cape Cod got clean energy and the predominantly Latino area got diesel. The plant was proposed to go on the Chelsea creek bed and on the same land as their only elementary school. GreenRoots mobilized In every way and eventually stopped that proposal. Now kids can actually play on their playgrounds and not fear the contamination from a diesel plant.
LG: How do the politics of your state impact your ability to succeed?
MBP: I think it provides opportunities that more conservative states don’t have, but it also gives a false sense of progressiveness which creates a lot of complacency. Like a lot of people think because we are progressive and blue and already exceeding in many ways, there is no room for growth. For example, Massachusetts has been leading the country in Energy Efficiency for many years, but there are so many barriers for low-income people. Leading, but for who? Typically white, wealthy people.
LG: What is GreenRoots currently working on?
MBP: We are currently fighting an electrical substation proposed to go on a parcel of land that has flooded many times. If it is built, they would be putting 8 million tons of jet fuel right next to a playground and in a neighborhood that is primarily immigrant, Latino, non-english speakers, and low-income. At the hearing for the community, the developer only provided a translator to translate the questions asked by community members, they did not translate the english answers back. Therefore, the residents understood nothing about the situation. This infrastructure is the opposite of building for resiliency. We will continue to organize until we defeat this proposal which is a ticking bomb in our communities.
In addition to this work, we have ongoing projects in many sectors. We are pushing for the electrification of public transit, building a microgrid to increase our energy independence, working with the EPA to install air monitors, we run an urban garden, and we are currently building Chelsea’s first community land trust to buy land and build affordable housing as part of the antidisplacement strategy.*
*These are just a few of GreenRoots’ current projects. Visit their website to learn more.
LG: What advice do you have for other POC/Immigrant communities in the United States fighting for equal access to clean air and water? How do you persevere?
MBP: A large part of it is creating allies that are cross-sector, so the intersectionality of our work at GreenRoots has given us strength. Our partnership with housing justice and immigrant justice for example has opened many doors. Also, extending past the local level -our work is hyper local in our community, but the alliances we’ve made across the country have been really powerful. They have given us hope in learning from what folks are doing across the country ie. The Climate Justice Alliance is one of our strongest allies doing the same work as us, but on a national level. So we need local, regional, and national alliances because we can’t do this work alone.
To support Maria and the GreenRoots team, consider donating here.
***
Chicago South East Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke - Chicago, IL
The majority of the south side of Chicago is composed of communities of color that are frequently exposed to environmental hazards and neglected by city officials and legislation. The coalition was formed in the last five years by passionate community members to target the petcoke pollution that has hazardous impacts on the residents of the South East side of Chicago. As the needs of the community progress, the coalition continues to tackle large environmental justice issues in their fight for clean air and water. The coalition consists of about ten community members and three chairs who all volunteer their time to run the organization. With a very low annual budget and limited funding, the coalition is grassroots organizing at its core, with a reliance on community engagement to achieve justice. To learn more about their work, I spoke with Gina Ramirez, one of the chairs at the Coalition.
LG: How did the South East Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke begin?
Gina Ramirez: So the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETASK) was started 31 years ago by Marian Byrns who was an environmentalist in the neighborhood. It was founded as a conservation organization and has progressed into an environmental justice organization just in the past five years. The Coalition to Ban Petcoke formed in 2014 by a group of moms and concerned community residents when large seven story piles of petcoke emerged in the neighborhood across the street from residential homes. So the Southeast Environmental Task Force was kind of working on that issue but the Coalition formed to really hyper focus on defeating the petcoke piles in the neighborhood. I have been involved with the coalition for the past five years.
LG: What is petcoke and what successes have you had in fighting petcoke pollution thus far?
GR: Petcoke is a byproduct of the oil refining process, it is a black, soot-like substance. My neighborhood is located along the Indiana border and there is a BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana where they don’t have enough storage for the petcoke, so all of the garbage that comes from the refining process in Whiting is shipped across the border to my neighborhood where there is a lot of vacant land. It used to be a thriving steel industry, but now all that is gone so there is a lot of space where BP has shipped their product over. Petcoke is used in China and India to heat homes but not in the US because it is too dirty and The EPA doesn’t allow/regulate it. But BP is going to make money off of everything, even their garbage, petcoke. My neighborhood has the Calumet river that runs right through so BP has a win-win with cheap vacant land and access to a waterway to ship this off to China and India to make even more money. When it was just being stored in open piles in the neighborhood it was blowing all through the neighborhood at little league fields and family barbecues as well as going into the calumet river. It is really hazardous to our health so we were protesting, getting arrested and fighting to ban the open storage of Petcoke piles. We were victorious, Rahm Emanuel put forth an ordinance. Beamsterboller was one of the companies illegally storing it and they are out of business. The Koch brothers were the other owners of the land where they were storing it and they had to put in a multi-million dollar sprinkler system in order to clean the land and move their system from the neighborhood. Petcoke still goes through the neighborhood through barge and rail. It still gets dropped off in my neighborhood. They say it gets processed within 24 hours and goes on to a railcar or a barge, so they say, but I don’t see it so I don’t really know how long petcoke still sits in my neighborhood. It is definitely an improvement but not eliminated.
LG: What is the Coalition currently working on?
GR: SH Bell is another facility in the neighborhood that has been cited by the EPA for emitting high levels of Manganese which is a neurotoxin if inhaled. It’s been found in high levels on air monitors and in the soil right across the street from their facility. We were victorious in getting a ban on any new manganese handlers in the city. So any new company that wants to come in and handle manganese, they can’t do it. Any existing company that handles manganese in Chicago cannot expand. But we wanted a complete ban on manganese because SH Bell is still handling manganese in our neighborhood, their air monitor levels are like a roller coaster, some months are high, some months are normal. We just feel it shouldn’t be in any residential neighborhood. It is hard because there is not that much data on the health impacts of manganese, as opposed to lead in children, so it’s really hard to argue when you are with city officials who ask for the data, you know, but there are only a few experts who say it is hazardous to our health. It really falls on the community’s shoulders to bring forth this data to advocate for our health when it really should be the other way around. The city should be like, oh this facility is a bad actor, what damage has been done and what can we do to prevent it? But the city does not do that. The coalition is working with the University of Kentucky on a health study of 7-9 year old children because manganese when inhaled can cause developmental disabilities in children. That study is on hold because of COVID but hopefully once COVID is over we can start up the health study again.
Another issue is I meet every two months with the Chicago department of Public Health where we bring forth all of the issues going on in the neighborhood. There are two little league fields sandwiched between a superfund site and a manganese handling facility. We expressed concern about the land because of its proximity to two really toxic locations, so after our insistence for a year, the EPA tested the soil and found high levels of lead and arsenic in the soils of one of the little league fields, and high levels of manganese in the other field. The EPA actually excavated the soil of the first field this past summer. The other field, that had high levels of manganese, we are still trying to get remedied. The city knew the toxic levels this summer and didn’t let us know, and there were adults playing on the field over the summer.
Then there is a superfund site (Schroud Site--Michael Hawthorne just wrote about it) we worked really hard to get it classified as one because it is very difficult to classify those. The land looks really inviting so people RV on it frequently so we had to advocate really hard for the city to put barriers up and they didn’t want to do it because they didn’t want to be held liable. We are trying to get more little league fields tested too. Last is our General Iron campaign so we are trying to prevent General Iron’s move to the south side because it is a clear example of environmental racism.
LG: How do you stay connected to the community while taking on such big issues? Is it difficult to balance smaller community needs and larger staked issues?
GR: Yeah it definitely is hard to balance. It is so wonky talking about these terms like manganese. Like who wants to know about these, I mean I didn’t want to know about manganese. It is really hard to connect--we are in a pandemic, we live in a food desert, people can’t pay their rent, we have multi-generational families. We have grandmothers and fathers and mothers who lived in this neighborhood throughout the booming steel period, so they view industry as an opportunity and not as a hindrance, which is really hard to navigate in the neighborhood. We need to do more capacity building so when people show interest we really need to invest in them because you know I get burned out. There are all these new leaders emerging so I have been investing in those relationships because they are our next generation of leaders, you know I am tired of telling my story and there are other stories to be told. I want people to think about how they can advocate for this neighborhood, but also what proactive things they can do to bring solar farms to the neighborhood, or clean energy to the neighborhood. We have to just start being proactive to bring opportunity to our neighborhood.
LG: Do you interact with the Chicago or Illinois government at all? If so, how does your relationship with them impact your work?
GR: Just because the mayor and my alderman are democrats doesn’t mean they are progressive. My alderwoman is on the progressive caucus but has voted 100% in line with Mayor Lightfoot. I think it is important that we have a seat at a table as community groups. We are not in a place where we see eye-to-eye with Chicago and the Department of Public Health. The constant neglect from the mayor is not reassuring, ya know actions speak louder than words. The fact that General Iron had the red carpet rolled out by the city to move to the south side just confirms that the south east side is viewed as a sacrificial zone and a dumping ground. I think it is important to keep having these conversations, as difficult as they are. It is an okay relationship, definitely not the best, but I think it is important as community activists to hold our elected officials accountable.
LG: What advice do you have for other POC/Immigrant communities in the United States fighting for equal access to clean air and water? How do you persevere?
GR: People power. The more people you have as allies from the ground and grassroots organizations, the more you can get these people to vote these elected officials out who aren’t being progressive and who aren’t voting with our health in mind. It is up to us on the ground to find people in our own neighborhood who would represent us in a way that would give us access to clean air, water, and soil. Finding that person, nurturing them, giving them training. In my neighborhood, we had a Midwest Academy Campaign Training and a voter registration drive. We are thinking about doing a lobbying training so when legislative bills that protect our health are up we can take a busload of people down to have facetime with their senators and build a relationship. I didn’t realize how political this work is, but it is essential. It is uncomfortable as a person of color when it is just another thing you have to do on top of navigating your life as a person of color but I think it is super important and I think it is one of the only ways we can create change, being really politically involved.
Learn more about the coalition and get involved here.
Read Gina’s op-ed Stopping Environmental Racism Can Start by Denying General Iron a Permit.
***
Whose air is it really? Who deserves to have clean water, and open spaces? The communities highlighted here are made up of mothers, children, grandparents, and friends. What I hoped to show by amplifying the stories of Maria and Gina is that these aren’t just issues, or data and statistics, they are people. People who deserve our solidarity and commitment. These are just two stories of the environmental injustice that happens every single day in the United States. While corporations like BP and Logan Airport are faceless, the citizens on the South East side of Chicago and along the Chelsea Creek are not. These are real people with real problems.
As the Biden administration steps in, I ask you to think critically before acknowledging any environmental action as good. Both of the grassroots groups I interviewed here are in “blue” states with democratic leadership, and yet they have repeatedly been ignored by local and state governments. Though the Democratic party at least recognizes the existence of climate change, they also have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, and corporate interests that dictate environmental policy. As Gina said, it is our responsibility to hold our elected officials accountable and push to prioritize environmental issues. When you see climate legislation on the table, call your senators and representatives and amplify the stories of these grassroots organizations. Better yet, get involved with your local community efforts, get informed about local issues, and offer your support. The issue of climate injustice will not be solved overnight, but we can make incremental change every day by how we live our lives.
Maria from GreenRoots said it best: “Environmental justice is when all people regardless of race, language, immigration status, etc. can live healthy, thriving lives and have access to clean air, clean water, and healthy environments.” We can no longer pretend that fenceline communities are a distant issue, the reality is that these cases of systemic environmental racism are happening right in front of us and the time to act is now. We must join in their fight to ensure that clean air and water is not a privilege reserved for the few. Everyone should have the right to breathe and enjoy outdoor spaces--no race, ethnicity, or other checked box should threaten that right.
Below I have listed a few organizations in major U.S. cities that are working to dismantle environmental injustice through grassroots community organizing.
Boston
Alternatives for Community and Environment
Chicago
LVEJO: Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
PERRO: Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization
Southeast Environmental Taskforce
Detroit
Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
East Michigan Environmental Action Council
Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition
Houston
Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services
Milwaukee
New York City
New York City Environmental Justice Alliance
Seattle
ECOSS: Environmental Coalition of South Seattle
Black Farmers Collective/Yes Farm
For more community based environmental justice organizations, check out the members list of the Climate Justice Alliance or search for environmental justice organizations in your city!