Community Voices in Environmental Justice

I used to think of nature as an escape—the metro park a twenty minute drive from my home or the national park we traveled to but never stayed too long in. But looking out the window of the Tri-Main building (in Buffalo), I still see nature. I see it in our human patterns of travel that have formed the patterns of growth in the grass and I see it when the trees we plant grow over homes and through the power lines. I see it when the gnats swarm you when you walk to get ice cream at Custard Corner in the evening. Basically you cannot escape to nature and you cannot escape nature.

Many people do not have the luxury to escape to a “natural haven.” Last Wednesday, my supervisor, Tom, Kate, who is Field and Fork’s office administrator, and I drove up to the City of Niagara Falls. I admired the waterfront homes looking over the Niagara River and the frighteningly large public library. We drove by Love Canal, the United States’ very first Superfund site. I was shocked by its close proximity to us—it is one of those things I always knew existed but I never really thought about how real it was. Its unassuming and sweet name contrasts its harsh reality as a toxic waste site. (It is also not even named after the people who caused the toxic waste site but this guy who wanted to build some sort of utopia and generate electricity from digging a canal). After he left, Hooker Chemical started to dump their chemical waste which seeped through the dirt and soil and out through the plants that grew up from the soil. Then they built a school there. Sometime in the 50’s, they started noticing strange liquids and burns and later on in the 70’s, cancer and birth defects started popping up. Tom tells the story of Lois Gibbs, who organized group protests around Love Canal. Eventually, the EPA came in with the Superfund program to clean up the site and hold Hooker Chemical liable for what they did. Though the Superfund program relocated the residents, many of Love Canal’s former residents could not and still cannot escape the impacts stemming from Hooker Chemical, the City of Niagara, and the US Army’s waste. To me, peering out the window as we drove through, the neighborhood of Love Canal seemed so normal—a quiet area with playgrounds, baseball fields, and homes dotting the streets,  with a few fences holding warning signs denoting the waste areas. Some people continue to inhabit the area, though there is not a super clear indication of whether the land is actually safe to live on. Is toxic waste cleaned up/ deemed negligible that easily? I read an article that someone recently purchased a home along Love Canal and there was no disclosure about the site’s history. I cannot imagine the shock of finding out.

When I think about the urban environmental movement, my mind immediately goes to buzzwords like green cities and smart transportation. A while ago, I learned about Masdar City, a green city in Abu Dhabi. It seemed like a city upon a hill for the future of sustainable urban areas and probably could use every single sustainability term—LEED platinum buildings, Clean public transportation + AVs, Solar panels! But Masdar City is spearheaded solely by the Abu Dhabi government and large corporations with virtually no input from residents and workers who build the city, brushing over the complexity of an urban area, despite its amazing technological feats. In the urban sustainability movement, it feels like communities like Love Canal are constantly being left behind as dumping grounds for the same large corporations who helped build these new green cities or were left behind by their governments. As much as low-income, marginalized communities are unable to escape the torrential floods and wildfires that climate change plagues upon us, it feels like they are also unable to escape the follies of governments  and “big tech” who dictate what the city looks like, especially in the era of climate change. When I envision the future of green cities, I think it is vital for the work to come from the ground up, adapting technology and innovation to the unique ecosystem of communities.

The Profit Isaiah House, photo by Laura Wang; house designed by Isaiah Henry Robertson.