Guest commentary from Rhea Suh of Natural Resources Defense Council.
The Southeast Environmental Task Force is grateful for its association with the NRDC, and for all they have done to help on the southeast side of Chicago.
Rhea Suh’s Blog
A Just Transition in Southeast Chicago
Posted November 18, 2015
Community activists are leading a shift from dirty fuels and heavy industry to clean energy and sustainable business.
On a warm day last August,
as family and friends gathered in Mari Barboza's backyard for a
birthday cookout, afternoon winds whipped up a toxic torrent of
jet-black dust that swept across her community on Chicago's Southeast
Side. Blown from a nearby mountain of grit called petroleum coke, or petcoke,the
vile fog choked the life out of the party. Mari scurried to cover food
she'd prepared while neighbors scrambled to herd children inside to flee
the pollution, which irritates throats and lungs and worsens asthma and
other respiratory ills.
"We
can't even be outdoors, we can't even open our windows," Mari explained
to me last week. "We're like prisoners in our own houses," she said, as
huge dump trucks rumbled past the piles of petcoke, a harmful by-product of oil refining. "We can't even have a good time in our own backyards."
For people living in southeast Chicago's aging industrial corridor between the Calumet River and Lake Michigan, toxic petcoke dust,
abandoned steel mills, blighted lots, and heavily polluted waterways
are all part of a sorry legacy that undercuts health, environmental
quality, and economic opportunity. What's needed now, for Mari's
community and many others like it across much of our industrial
heartland, is a deliberate shift from the heavy industry and dirty fuels
of the past to a new generation of economic growth based on the clean energy and sustainable business models of the future.
"We
are part of an old industrial economy and we're looking for a just
transition to a low-carbon economy, but we still have the burden of the
old high-carbon economy," says Thomas Frank, an activist with the Southeast Environmental Task Force,
standing up for communities along the Calumet industrial corridor.
"We're locked into the economic patterns and land-use patterns of the
old industries."
The community is
held hostage by its need for good jobs, while trapped by its history as
an aging industrial, waste disposal, and fossil fuel sacrifice zone.
"It's slowly dying," says Peggy Salazar, executive director of the Task
Force. "That's what happens when you don't invest in a community."
The community,
though, refuses to die, in part because of the heroic stand that people
like Mari, Thomas, and Peggy are taking to fight for a brighter
tomorrow. "We want job creation, but we want it to be correctly done
from the beginning and be sustainable for the environment and the
future," Peggy says. "We see the opportunity for us to change the
conversation and the potential for renewable energy sources, moving away
from fossil fuels to renewables."
The community is
determined to play its role in the shift to a clean energy future. For
most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Calumet industrial corridor was
a center of heavy industry that helped to define American enterprise
and might. The community made steel for the railroads and bridges that
formed the sinew and spine of American commerce. With access to the
river and Lake Michigan alongside junctions of highways and railroads,
the region provided an unparalleled transportation hub for shipping U.S.
products -- across the country and around the world. And it produced
basic materials for the automobiles that moved the nation and the tanks
that helped secure our freedom.
The region held a
central place in the organized-labor movement and hosted major ethnic
communities that brought their own sets of skills and cultural
contributions, while the area's natural lakes, rivers, and wetlands nourished a rich and vibrant web of wildlife.
The residents are
rightly proud of their heritage and eager to be partners in the new
economy that's remaking our country once again. They want to help build
the wind turbines, solar panels, and hybrid and all-electric cars that
can move the country forward.
"We make things in this neighborhood. We're union workers," says Olga Bautista, a mother of two who heads up the Chicago South East Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke. "We want this area to be a model for the rest of the world of what a sustainable and green economy can look like."
That's far more
than a pipe dream. Through a plan called the Calumet Area Vision, the
coalition has outlined a promising way to pull together the region's
natural, cultural, historical, and economic assets into a cohesive and
viable whole.
"This
is one of the oldest and largest industrial complexes in the world,"
says Frank. "To be able to reposition it in a new, greener economy would
be a great win."
It would be a win for all of us.
That's why NRDC
is standing with these community leaders, helping to provide such
expertise as we can, while learning from the experiences these community
leaders share and the example of assertive activism they set.
We're
working together to get rid of the mountains of petcoke that threaten
the health of residents and loom over the Calumet River like some toxic
omen of doom. We're challenging other misguided projects that seek to
perpetuate land uses that would sentence the future of the region to the
depredations of the past and reinforce its role as a sacrifice zone.
And we're working to advance the Calumet Area Vision as a way to
leverage the region's unique character and strengths to create a future
of promise and hope.
It
starts by recognizing the past glory and true potential of this special
corridor of people and place. As Thomas Frank puts it, "We have to get
this place labeled 'Too big to fail.'"
