FRACK YOU: "Get used to it."

Jeff Dick is the Chair of Geological and Environmental Sciences at Youngstown State University, and a proponent of fracking. His past with the oil and gas industry has led him to trust them so much so that he has leased his own land to a company to frack for natural gas. He believes that the environmental regulatory agencies of Ohio are doing a good enough job to keep him safe from the potential ill effects of fracking. In fact, he believes that fracking causes little to no ecological harm or pollution. To those people who oppose fracking in rural Ohio, in what Dick has called his little "patch of paradise", he says, well, "Get used to it."

...[J]ust like in those other states [like Texas] where the culture of the people is very accepting of it, I believe with time, the culture of people here in Ohio is going to shift to where they say this is acceptable. Obviously to a lot of people it won't be acceptable, but probably...a good number of people, and I'd suggest probably...a majority of people, because that's where we're at right now, I believe, are accepting of this industry. You have to keep in mind, and this is very important, that eastern Ohio has been economically depressed for a very long time. And so, this is a big opportunity for new industry to come into this area and provide new jobs and all sorts of economic growth opportunities. And that's quite frankly why the majority of people throughout this region are behind this oil and gas development.

So, let us take sand from Leopold's Sand County in Wisconsin so that those in Ohio and North Dakota and Pennsylvania and New York can shove it, mixed with proprietary chemical blends, deep into the ground so that we can the energy we want today. Let us take so much sand away that sand no longer remains in Sand County. The lure of temporary jobs paying eighteen dollars an hour that result in nearly permanent geologic and ecological degradation can be too much for county boards to resist. And be sure to know that your wastewater treatment facility is doing all that it can to keep your drinking water safe from the chemicals.

You see, it just takes getting used to. Just like people in Delray eventually got used to noxious fumes from an incinerator in their backyard. Just like the people in the Maldives will get used to their country being submerged bit by bit into the ocean because of climate change. It'll be a few years before their country is entirely gone. By that time, they will have gotten used to it, because when it comes down to it, oil and gas is here to stay.

Where neoliberalism ends and community resiliency begins

You've heard the news from Detroit (or even from Cleveland, Hartford or the Bronx for that matter). People living in certain parts of the city continue to be subjugated to toxic living conditions. 48217 is the most polluted zipcode in the state of Michigan. Industrial complexes larger than neighbourhoods provide nothing but suffocating air and brownfield land to the people living in their vicinity.

The government--federal, state, or city--provides no favours to these people. It can seem that all the government cares about is tax breaks to the rich and preserving their elite status. That is why public school teachers are continually laid off, and funds for basic city services such as law enforcement and fire protection are hacked. The New International Trade Crossing, the publicly-owned bridge being proposed between Ontario and Detroit, will provide a handful of temporary construction jobs, and even fewer permanent jobs, while cementing the relationship of this culture on large-scale manufacturing and ecologically degrading industrialism. Money laundering, corrupt politicians, government kickbacks run rampant in the City of Detroit, where until recently, city council members were elected at large, thus holding them accountable to no one other than their colleagues and cronies. At the same time, as Ulrich Beck notes in Risk Society, industrial modernity makes it close to impossible to link long-term human health impacts to the slow violence of pollution. People do suffer, the environment does suffer, at the hands of this culture. Regardless of your position on these issues, people such as those in Delray, and our Earth are being continually oppressed and polluted.

In response to these issues, I have wondered whether it is possible to develop community resiliency, which I conjure as a reliance not on changing who is in office or expending energy on failed politics, but rather on dealing with issues at a more tractable level, a level at which community members can participate directly and are appreciated, while at the same time creating small institutions that directly address complicated problems. Recently, urban gardens in Detroit and other cities across the country have provided wonderful models of how community-based, community-scale projects can foster neighbourliness and provide healthful food opportunities for youthful engagement with the land. Are there other ways in which communities of oppressed people can address the problems they face themselves?

In some sense, such community resiliency may seem like a form of the libertarian and neoliberal agenda...People doing it for themselves. YEAH! Screw government. YEAH! Screw regulation. YEAH! (Followed closely by, Lower taxes. YEAH!) However, I see stark differences between the neoliberalism of industrial, corporate capitalism and the community resiliency I describe above. People that have bought into the neoliberal agenda believe that the government hinders their ability to earn money for themselves. They believe that only if the government got out of the way, they would create long-term employment for people and "economic growth", while changing global standards will in time address the massive ecological issues we face. (I haven't drunk that warped Kool-Aid.) On the other hand, community resiliency, like that fostered in the urban gardening movement, first and foremost recognises that the lines between government and the private sector are blurred, that indeed they rely on each other for stability, that they do not care about you or me, let alone oppressed peoples. A government guided by neoliberal principles is not interested in community development or neighbourliness or the capacity of people to endure changes themselves. Community resiliency is the antidote to such principles. Community resiliency is about what we can build for each other, not for our individual selves. Collective, small-scale action allows us to imagine and live new possibilities without reliance on misguided economic and social philosophies.

Of course politics need to change. Of course we must fight corruption and get politicians at every level of government to care about the people they represent and the environment we live in. But who knows, maybe those oppressed know best about what is oppressing them, making them best people to address the problems head on.

On appropriateness

The forward march of "progress" is something most all of us hold on to very dearly. We constantly envision that the future will be a better place than the past. Human ingenuity and cunning, exemplified through our continual taming of nature--be it disease and death, damming rivers to provide us with energy, or seeding the oceans with iron to make algae grow and absorb carbon dioxide--we hope will liberate us from the current inevitability of scarcity, of mortality, of aging, of conflict over those things which sustain us.

Many times what is left out in our decisions is whether or not our choices are appropriate given time, place, and circumstance. What do I mean by appropriate? By appropriateness, I mean a sensitivity to factors other than personal ones. We tend to think solely of what we want when we make a choice, without really thinking about how those choices fit into larger patters of choices, of decisions, of outcomes. We tend not to think so much nowadays about history, about cultural context, about outcomes. Rather, the possibilities of instant gratification tend to out blinders on our purview, on what we consider as possible alternatives to the "best" choice, on the "cost-benefits" of our choices.

Vagaries, you might think. Let's make it a little more concrete. I was talking to Mrs. McRae a couple of nights ago about the bridge being built in Detroit. We talked about the social justice and sustainability issues raised by the bridge, and how with or without the bridge, the issues facing the residents of Delray will be difficult to address, given the vicious cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and ecological degradation. To build a bridge starts by first making the choice of building the bridge. The bridge, from an engineering perspective, must meet certain criteria of safety, no matter how it looks. Yes, over time, engineers have come up with more and more elegant ways of engineering, of building. But when if it came down to it, brute force engineering would be used to make the bridge. But what about how the people of Delray feel about the bridge? What about the context of the bridge in Detroit, in its history? How does the bridge further ingrain us in an oppressive and ecologically degrading culture, or how much does it liberate us from that culture?

On the same token, do we advocate for Western "solutions" to the "problems" of non-Westerners? How much do we push conventional medical procedures on the peoples of Africa and South America? How many computers do we give them? How many times do we tell ourselves that we are "right" and that they are "backward?" What about our own lives? Do we continue to buy into what this culture throws at us? Its continually more "functional" gizmos and objects? I think appropriateness dovetails nicely into appreciation, into saying, This is enough, I do not want or need more. Because in our continual want for more, we always tend to find deficiencies and limitations in the material objects we are ever reliant on.

Social justice and sustainability - the conflict of time

The way we've posed the problem of sustainability has had a huge impact on the outcomes we've deemed as feasible. As I've written previously, the world has basically defined three pillars of sustainability- environmental sustainability, social sustainability, and economic sustainability, all of which intersect with each other but can also be mutually exclusive. The way the problem of sustainability is currently set up is such that goals and targets must be met for all three pillars - environmental, social, and economic. A "sustainable" outcome is some sort of "optimisation" of the three pillars. What this means is that there are some compromises that need to be made, and one or two of the pillars will be compromised more so than the others; there are conflicts and tensions between these pillars. Add on to this the issue of time - injustice now vs. injustice in the future - and what you have is a full-blown case of complexity and politics.

So how does a contemporary environmental justice problem fit in this paradigm? Not well. We can all agree that what we need to strive for is a world of lasting peace within ourselves and with the Earth we live on. But there are injustices that are happening right now that are a result of massive systems of oppression and violence towards people; we've exposed people to horrific living conditions, and have gotten them mired in a cycle of poverty that they honestly cannot leave. We need to deal with these issues right now. Unfortunately, as we witnessed in Delray, a semi-"just" (I cringe to use this word here.) solution now means affording people the opportunity to leave Delray by buying them out, or by beautifying their streets by funneling some money from the New International Trade Crossing project to the neighbourhood. But the bridge itself is not something that is sustainable in the long term. Rather, it further imprints on us the need for cars and trucks and shipping, while the fourteen thousand trucks passing over the bridge daily will worsen air quality for the residents left behind.

We're stuck in this mindset of trade-offs. We can give people money, but only at the expense of the environment. Short-term social justice trumps long-term sustainability. If we try to do less harm on the environment by not building the bridge, Matty Maroun will continue his monopoly, and people will have no money to leave Delray. Long-term steps toward sustainability might keep oppressive systems in place today. What I've realised is that there is no way we can live in a sustainable world unless everything (except the environment) is on the table for radical change - economy, society, culture, international politics and diplomacy.

We must act now in the best interests of those that have borne the brunt of our actions, and that means allowing these people a nicer place to live in. We must care for the abused, and welcome them into our neighbourhoods and circles, and break down the barriers that have held them back. This means that we, the privileged, need to change. Posing sustainability as a win-win problem ("sustainable development"), a problem in which we can alleviate ecological burdens on some while enjoying the lifestyles and privileges that others currently do, will only continue ecological degradation. We must therefore simultaneously envision a more holistic world - a world in which our human choices (say, of building a bridge or a dam) are tempered by an understanding that the long-term consequences of these choices lead to situations in which future short-term decisions will not be in conflict with future long-term actions needed.

The American Dream?

This is a picture from outside the Delray Community House in southwest Detroit. In the foreground you see a new playground. In the near background, you see the incinerator at the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant. Notice the brown coloured effluent coming out from the smoke stacks. That effluent made the entire neighbourhood smell noxious, so much so that many residents leave the neighbourhood for a few days every year because the heat mixed with the smell are just too much to handle. Add to this the pollution of thousands of semi-trucks, an oil refinery, a cement factory, a steel factory, and what you have is a full-blown environmental disaster.

This is Detroit, the very definition, the soul, the beginning of The American Dream.

The people of Delray (see posts under the theme "Sustainable neighbourhoods in Detroit"), and many of those still residing in Detroit and other parts of the Rust Belt, have borne the brunt, the downside of The American Dream. The American Dream - of convenience, luxury, independence (as expressed through the automobile), and disposability - was envisioned when the world was thought to be abundant and plentiful for all. As has been explored throughout this blog, however, this dream was founded most fundamentally on a materialism that has required, and continues to require, a violent disturbance of nature. And as has been reiterated again and again, any violence towards nature is automatically translated into a degraded place for life. What follows are the very worst sorts of injustices and behaviour - of discrimination, of abandonment, of negligence.

The people that haven't been able to escape the so called "decline" of the Rust Belt have been those least able to leave, because of that invisible yet profoundly tangible hand holding one back - oppression. The people of Delray know this all too well. My students and I witnessed this first-hand. It is these people (and of course, the environment) that have borne the costs of the benefits we so glibly accept as our natural rights; they continue to do so day after day. They deal with corrupt government officials, they deal with inhumane corporate officials, and most sadly, they deal with our negligence of them. Think about it. This isn't some "Third World, developing country", this is Detroit, the heart of the US, thirty-five miles from Ann Arbor, the elite college city. This is happening right under our noses, within biking distance of our homes. And we are contributing to this situation.

We like to think that it is the "developing" world that needs "sustainable development", but first, let's look in our backyards. Let's see what we are a part of that is causing such injustice towards the world, in our backyards. If we all strive to make where we live a better place by not taking advantage of other places, I believe we will be on a path towards sustainability.

Guest blog #21: Matthew Mejia on the power of shared experience

Matthew is a student who accompanied me and others to Detroit in May for the class that was focusing on sustainability and social justice issues in Detroit. I have written at length about this experience - see the posts under the thene "Sustainable Neighbourhoods in Detroit."

"I have been thinking a lot lately about the power of shared experience. There is beauty in solitude but comfort in company. In my mind, the greatest experience is a shared experience, where all involved are of the same mind, all experiencing as a single entity. The example that comes to mind is a concert experience. All go in knowing what the music is, how they will act (to a degree), and have a general outline of expectations for the event. Because of this, the audience can experience the surprises and let downs and emotions invoked by the music together, as one – a shared experience. What it means to be there at that concert requires no explanation to fellow concert-goers. That is what our time in Detroit felt like: two weeks of inexplicable shared experience.

When I am asked what my time in Detroit entailed, I just smile, laugh lightly, and say, “I did some community work and checked out the bar scene.” In reality, that is all most care to hear about the trip, and to try to explain beyond that is futile. I blame either my lack of poetry and vocabulary or the limits of the English language. I do not know how to convey what it meant to spend every moment with these thirty people for two weeks in a totally different environment. And the fact that the different environment was Detroit makes it all the more difficult. It is not an East Asian spiritual journey or an escape to nature, but rather a trip to urban sprawl and failed industry.

People often already have their minds made up on what “Detroit” means, and they don’t always care to hear me tell them of the city’s character and the citizen’s spirit. Those two weeks changed me, fundamentally, for the better. Since being back in Ann Arbor, I enjoy its luxuries and hidden treasures more than ever – something I did not think to be possible. I am suddenly dissatisfied with my custodial job in South Quad. I want to be back in Detroit, out helping people. I know I am not doing all that I can to that end right now. I could be doing so much more. Perhaps that is okay for the time being.


If my time in Detroit was my experience alone, I would not have lasted through twelve-hour days, bar hopping most nights, and averaging four hours of sleep per night. I made life-long friends. I met an amazing girl. I discovered a land known as Detroit. For two weeks, the world was ours, and the world consisted of a city; our new home town, the Wayne State dorms; our houses, shared quads. To no one else can I relate the greatness of lilacs in my face, of giving other people’s food to the homeless and hungry, of assessing the entire DIA in a French accent, of taking Avalon bread from an alleyway dumpster full of freshly tossed loaves. I miss rotating people through the kitchen and trying whatever the next person was cooking that night. I went days without needing to cook or find food because my friends took care of me. And when I had food, it was everyone’s food. It was a shared experience, through and through. I grew accustomed to the lifestyle, sights, and sounds (and smells) of Detroit.

As we drove in to Ann Arbor upon our return, we were shocked to see the extravagance and wonder that we left just two weeks earlier. Everyone just kept saying, “Who lives here? This is ridiculous.” It is ridiculous that such different worlds are only a short drive apart. Life in The D is real living. You gotta make it. It is the “everyday struggle” that Biggie talks about. And although I haven't truly lived the struggle day in and day out, my classmates and I did struggle.

I miss the struggle."

$2/day - Expectations

I have realised that empathy is a difficult emotion, particularly when it comes to expressing it verbally to other people. While working with Professor Larsen on our class in Detroit, it was extremely important that we heard what the people of Delray felt about their situation, and the recommendations that they had for what Delray should look like. But even though we were from thirty miles away, we were outsiders. Of course, I do know we were sincerely trying to empower the residents of Delray. Yet it is easy to talk down to these people, to tell them that we know what is good for them, to tell them that they are not doing enough to ameliorate their situation. We may not feel as if we are being condescending or intentional in that way, but just like sexual harassment, many times it is not what you intend that is important, it is what they feel that matters.

From tomorrow, I shall try to live on two dollars per day, for a week. I am doing so out of my own volition, on the invitation of my friends Lisa and Ingrid, who maintain a blog called Half Of The World, which I wrote about previously. Now I know that I won't even come close to living on fourteen dollars for the week, because one day's rent is more than that. Yet, I will do what I can, with food, electricity, energy and such. I will write about the logistics over the next few days, and I am sure Lisa and Ingrid would love if you wanted to try doing it for a week and write about it.

I expect it will be easy for me to live on two dollars a day. I have a solid home to come sleep in, and have a nice work environment to go to. I will not be straining myself manually, and even if I have to in the laboratory, which is sometimes the case, I know all well that I am being paid, that I am not living in the fear of crop failing, that I will be able to come back to living on more than fourteen dollars per week. Some of you may feel that it is arrogant for me, or for us, to undertake a project like so, because we have the support and the knowledge that we can just decide not to live the project. We are therefore still outsiders, and we do not know what it is like to actually live in poverty. Outsiders yes, arrogant I hope not. Yet I do expect to learn a lot through the experience, and I am positive that this will add more layers of thoughts that I have not thought yet, and draw evermore parallels between the problems that face the environment and the humanity that inhabits it. As is my intention, Lisa and Ingrid hope for us to be more mindful of our choices, to see how our choices impact the environment, and consequently human relationships. I hope to be more empathetic to the struggles of living in poverty, and see things from the side of those we depend on to live the way we do.

On inequality, poverty, and ecological degradation

I have written just a little bit about the issues of poverty and inequality. My first foray into this issue was inspired by Vanessa Baird's piece Trash: Inside The Heap. Today, I would like to revisit these issues and promote a very interesting project. A couple of my friends, Lisa and Ingrid have started a blog called Half of The World. The blog is about how poverty and inequality are driven and perpetuated by neocolonialism and transnational organisations, but more fundamentally the way we in the most powerful nations on the Earth, each and every one of us, choose to behave. Our behaviour is deeply ingrained and self-serving, and results in calamities such as the dumping of petrochemical wastes in Africa, or the shipping of electronic wastes to Asia, or the degradation of environment in Delray, Africa, and Asia being far less financially and politically fortunate.  

The blog challenges people to live on $2/day for a week, and the purpose is threefold - 

• Highlight the disparity between the disparities between standards of living in industralised nations and unindustrialised nations - By forcing ourselves to make the sorts of calculations and sacrifices that are common for most people in the world, they wish to gain some understanding of how the Majority World lives, and how radically different our own lives are.

• By forcing ourselves to live with less, they hope to question our own taken-for-granted habits and think about the types of choices we have been making. They want to discover what we have become dependent upon, what we can actually live without, and what viable alternatives exist to reduce our daily consumption patterns. When making routine purchases, they desire to more frequently ask ourselves, “Do I really need this?”

• Most importantly, they wish to use this project as a springboard to share information and increase awareness about the nature of global poverty. They believe that one of the most decisive needs in the struggle against global poverty is a critical mass of people who are willing to substantially alter their lifestyle and work together to challenge the systems of inequality that both sustain their way of life and simultaneously produce mass starvation among the rest of the world.

There are striking parallels between what I have been writing about for the past year, and the motivations that have guided Lisa and Ingrid. Trash had provided a wonderful, although not fully adequate, lens through which to view the impacts of our choices. Although poverty may be a little more difficult to grasp, images of poverty surround us, even here in Ann Arbor, or just forty miles away, and this poverty results from the exact same choices that we make that result in trash, and ecological degradation more broadly. Rather than frame the issues through trash, they choose the lens of consumption, the differences I have written about here. This further reinforces to me that issues such as poverty, inequality, greenhouse gas emission, toxins in water, fracking, and trash are just different manifestations of more fundamental problems plaguing our societies. We cannot, and should not, think that we can address one without addressing them all; this is something we all need to accept.

---
Gap Between Rich And Poor Named 8th Wonder Of The World

Traveling at home: It's in your backyard

I have not written about traveling for the past few weeks, and that is because I have been involved in helping a group of students understand the complexities of urban planning, justice, and sustainability. I am back in Ann Arbor now after having spent an incredible two weeks in Delray and Detroit, away from the privilege of this town. How the experiences of these past two weeks have changed me I am unsure of. What I do know is that I have changed. In-depth conversations with the residents of Delray and animated discussions with the students in the class have provided me much to ponder about, much to mull over.

Travel is about time and space, just like trash. I feel as if I have come back from a long voyage of two months, not a two week trip to a neighbourhood forty miles away. Caleb had a reason why. He told me, "Time is a measure of change." It seems that a much longer time has passed because much has happened in my life (and the lives of the students taking the class - I can attest to that...I've been reading their journals) and I have learned much in these two weeks...all of this in our backyard, our backyard of Southeast Michigan. 

When we think of traveling, we think of faraway places, we think of exoticism, and we think of new people. Fundamentally it seems then that most traveling comes down to new experiences. Traveling takes you away from the routines many of us have become used to; traveling provides us a fresh look at the world and our neighbourhoods. What we learn on our travels impacts the choices we make and the way we live. What these past two weeks have further reinforced to me is that traveling can happen right here, right now. A new destination is in your backyard, on your street, and possibly in your own room. It is just a matter of perception.

This may be quite obvious to say, but the difference we can make in the world depends on how we choose to be affected by and respond to what surrounds us. It is possible to walk down the streets of Ann Arbor, or wherever you live, go on the same walk you've been on many times before, and have it change your world view, or at least modify it slightly. As I have mentioned before, reality is what we make of what surrounds us.  Now while I am not saying that people should not go to faraway places, what I am saying is that despite all the pressures of being "upwardly mobile" and gaining "social capital," traveling, and learning and action more broadly, consists solely of opening up ourselves to the possibilities that constantly surround us. Such a mindfulness will hopefully make us consider the ecological impacts of our choices.

Trying to buy back what we've lost

I had trouble deciding on what the title of this post should be. I will try to articulate why.

There is a model of environmental thought (of course, Western) which basically says that in the "development" of countries or communities, ecological harm necessarily grows, up to a point at which they have "developed enough" that they are somehow "satisfied" and can now start "caring" for the environment. What this explicitly means is that no matter where in the world you may be, ecological harm is necessary for you to be "prosperous," and for the citizens of that place to have a "high standard of living."

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a prevailing ethic that something is valuable only if it is assigned a dollar value. Something can be cared for only if we can quantify to ourselves what it is worth. Of course, such quantification is impossible and reckless in nature. Such quantification leaves in its wake uncountable losses to the wholesomeness of nature and the spirits of the people living there. What we do is the following - we convert the most important thing, our environment, into something expendable and movable (money), through degradation, and then use that expendable thing we've created to buy back the most important thing. Or at least we expect to. Speaking of entropy, there are losses here. There is something so profound about this second law of thermodynamics. In most every physical act, we can never fully realise a full potential, but rather a potential less than full. What this consequently means is that there is no way to fully recover the original conditions of a state by investing the same amount of effort we used in disturbing it. We have to invest more, and more, and more, and more.

Now, the people of Delray have been struggling with this very issue for a very long time - they have been surrounded by industry which has propelled the US as a leading superpower. This means that they have been surrounded by the effects of that industry - pollution and a degraded environment. As counter-intuitive as the second paragraph actually is, you might think that the people of Delray were then pretty well off...industry = money = clean environment. You would be sorely wrong for thinking so. The people of Delray have no other choice but to bear the consequences of such careless thought, and to be exploited by heretofore not being provided any sort of remediation, reparation or compensation, money, or anything else.

Now, I wondered about what the title of this post should be. Should it have been 'Trying to buy back what we've given away,' or 'Trying to buy back what has been taken from us'? Of course, it is a matter of perspective and of introspection. Maybe we haven't done enough to protect nature, and maybe we've faltered and disagreed, and we've just given it away, or in some sense allowed that. Or, on the other hand, maybe we've been oppressed into being subservient, into having absolutely no power in opposing the powerful forces of capitalism and economy from taking pristine nature away from under our feet, around our skin, and in our lungs. I would speculate that people from the past allowed it to happen, and that the people of today, say of Delray, feel that it was taken from them a long time ago, that this is a legacy that cannot be moved away from, that it is a legacy that will influence all decisions now and into the future. They might feel that there is no other choice but to live in a degraded environment.


There is a "community benefits agreement" (CBA) that is being proposed to compensate the people of Delray for the massive new bridge that is likely going to be built there. (...a joke, to me. "Benefits" is a cozy term to hide all of the costs of such violent behaviour.) They are contracts between citizens and those proposing to change their environment to ensure that some of the "positive" outcomes of change be passed along to the citizens. CBAs have only been a recent phenomenon, as Caleb told me last night. Yet in no way does the list of benefits, which I went over over the last week, fully address the dire state of affairs in Delray.

It is a matter of perspective. We can focus our attentions on the "state" or "country" as a whole and see that it is doing "well," or we can zoom in and focus our attention on the little parcels of the country and see that some of them are fine, while some of them are being exploited at the benefit of the "country." What we forget is that people, yes people, live in these small parcels, and they are the ones breathing in the noxious air, living on toxic soil, and cutting their limbs off for the "benefit" of the "state" and "country."

Specific concerns about the bridge in Detroit

This post is a continuation of yesterday's post, which was inspired by comments from Matthew. I will address some specific concerns he had about another post from a few days ago. But before that, I want to mention the specific reasons why the bridge is being built.

Many of you probably know that the Ambassador Bridge, owned by Matty Maroun, is the largest trade crossing in the US. This bridge is privately owned, and the monies from the crossings go directly to Maroun's Detroit International Bridge Company. The State has basically been missing out on money for the longest time; the Ambassador Bridge is basically a monopoly. Therefore, they've decided to have their own bridge. On looking at the environmental impact statement (EIS) made by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), the reasons for the new bridge are to:

• provide safe, efficient, and secure movement of people and goods across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Detroit River area to support the economies of Michigan, Ontario, Canada and the United States
• support the mobility needs of national and civil defense to protect the homeland
• provide new border-crossing capacity to meet increased long-term demand
• improve system connectivity to enhance the seamless flow of people and goods
• improve operations and processing capability in accommodating the flow of people and goods 
• provide reasonable and secure crossing options in the event of incidents, maintenance, congestion, or other disruptions

Given these reasons, I will address Matthew's specific concerns...

Yes, the bridge will undoubtedly cause more local air pollution, this is true of all development not just the bridge. 
This is an interesting point of contention. There are various perspectives. One is that Delray has been a heavily industrial area - cement, paper, steel, coal, waste water, oil refining, etc. - for many decades, and zoning laws have allowed industry to move in right next to residences. Now, the bridge can do one of two things for industry - by taking up a one hundred and sixty acre footprint, there are that many fewer acres left to fill industry in. This is the position taken by MDOT. So maybe some air pollution is being mitigated? Whoe knows. On the other hand, industry may want to be closer to the bridge, given that there will be easier access to Canada. This is the position of Southwest Detroit Business Association. This may increase air pollution in the area. My position is that people should not be living in Delray at all, and while localised air pollution many be diffused because of the bridge, the cumulative and global impacts of the pollution cannot be neglected.


You suggest, but have not shown, that not building the bridge will be better for the environment overall. Not building the bridge may mean that the net number of miles that goods are transported is increased, which would mean each of your concerns would be amplified not reduced (i.e. it seems unlikely that the alternative is mostly local production of goods). 
I looked into this, and MDOT does a wonderful job at skirting these issues. In the detailed EIS statement, MDOT says, 


"...With respect to global warming, to date no national standards have been established regarding greenhouse gases, nor has EPA established criteria or thresholds for greenhouse gas emissions. But, on April 2, 2007, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Massachusetts et al. v. Environmental Protection Agency et al. that the USEPA does have authority under the Clean Air Act to establish motor vehicle emissions standards for carbon dioxide CO2 emissions. However, the Court’s decision did not have any direct implications on requirements for evaluating transportation projects. Further, because of the interactions among elements of the transportation system as a whole, project-level emissions analyses for greenhouse gases are less informative than those conducted at the regional, state, or national level. Because of these concerns, FHWA concludes that CO2 emissions cannot be usefully evaluated in this EIS in the same way as other vehicle emissions. With With respect to health impacts, the “Interim Guidance on Air Toxics in NEPA Documents” indicates that presently there is not adequate science to reliably include exposure modeling or risk assessment in the air quality analysis. The Interim Guidance explains that modeling tools to generate air pollution emissions cannot be properly used at the project level because they are based on certain assumptions with regard to trip length and amounts of congestion and were based on a limited number of tests of mostly older vehicles. Dispersion models that would indicate how much particulate matter and air toxics are in the air were developed to deal with carbon monoxide, which is relatively non-reactive, and their intent was to determine maximum, not more typical levels. Further, little is known about background pollution levels in many areas. Even if emission levels and concentrations could be estimated, exposure assessment and risk analysis have their own shortcomings, due to extrapolation to annual levels, for example, let alone multiple years."

There are a few things I'd like to mention regarding this. First, and the most obvious, is that the environmental impacts have not been addressed at all with this study - I will save you the pain of having to go through this terrible assessment. I don't understand why it is called an environmental impact statement at all. Second, even if the assessment was conducted, the reasons why the bridge is being built would still completely supersede the environmental impacts. MDOT would say, "Deal with the impacts." Third, such life-cycle assessments can be tailored to give you the answer you want, based on the variables you choose to include in the assessment. My stance is this, the impacts are debatable, what is not debatable is that these impacts are negative.


Having more local revenue could increase peoples salaries which may be more positive than the air pollution is negative. It is not reasonable to assume that people’s lives won’t be dramatically improved by having additional money (e.g. better healthcare, education, healthier food, more money for environmental remediation, etc.). 
I don't think that there should be a tradeoff between salaries and pollution. As I have written about before the choices we've made so far have always pit one important thing against another. What such behaviour connotes is that a degraded environment is necessary for people's lives to be "better." What this also means is that we convert the most important thing, our environment, into something expendable and movable (money), through degradation, and then use that expendable thing we've created to buy back the most important thing. Speaking of entropy, I think there are losses here...

What does it mean to be a "pragmatist"?

I apologise for not having posted for the past few days; time with a computer has been minimal (awesome!) over these past few days.

We have been in Detroit for around a week now, and we have had a wonderful time exploring Delray, Boynton, Hubbard-Richard, Southwest Detroit/Mexicantown, and Springwells, all neighbourhoods in southwest Detroit. The neighbourhoods range from burgeoning, cohesive and lively (Hubbard-Richard and Mexicantown) to fragmented, downtrodden and terribly polluted (Delray).

During this time, we have also been able to listen to and learn from people that live in Delray and the surrounding neighbourhoods through two community meetings. The community meetings have been powerful experiences for the students and I; the rawness of people’s emotions is evident, and the love of their neighbourhood nuanced by their understanding of history is plain to see. What we have tried to do is get these people’s input on what they would like to see happen after the new trade bridge between the US and Canada goes through (which more likely than not will). As I mentioned in my last post, this new bridge will not only displace people living in the one hundred and sixty acre footprint of the bridge plaza and onramps, but will also significantly degrade the already degraded environment in Delray, and southwest Detroit in general. This bridge will carry tens of thousands of trucks per day, and (who knows?) may increase trade of unsustainability. As reparations, the State of Michigan would like to “help” the residents by planting a few trees here and there, and “minimise” the pollution breathed in by people by placing filters on trucks and homes.

We have time to reflect on our experiences every day, in a group, and what has been on my mind, and the minds of some of the students, is that the bridge should not be built. Reasons in my mind are of course that fundamentally, it represents, legitmises, and propagates the current ethic of dominance of nature and consequently less-than-fortunate people. However, some people feel that the time to oppose the building of the bridge has passed, and that it is our job now to empower the people affected with information that will allow them to mitigate the impacts of the bridge. This job is the job of the “pragmatist.”

This argument, “the time has passed,” seems to be the hegemonic mindset of elites that will of course, make money off of a project like the bridge. With everything related to the environment, as evinced by the action around climate change, society has chosen to skirt the issues by saying that “we’ve invested too much in our structure to let it go.” And the ways we’ve invested in the way we’ve modified nature necessitates the continued investment of nature, time and energy in the maintenance of these structures. The book I am reading, The World Without Us, speaks to just this.

What I have felt is that the position of our students and instructors is a difficult one, but a position that other people find themselves in, too. It seems to me that our role is kind of the role of the disinterested scientist - we find out information people, come up with some neat theory, and then leave it to them to make the choice of how to use that information. Of course, information about pollution and injustice is empowering. But what is truly sad is that it is only the people that are benefitting most from the bridge that have the power to tell people to leave (i.e. the people who live within the proposed footprint of the bridge plaza). Yet us, who sincerely care for the wellness of those people, and the people who will be left behind, do not have the authority or the position to tell people to leave.

So “pragmatism” as many interpret it means at times bowing to pressure that continues to demand the violent destruction of nature, and consequently continued injustice towards people. Yet to me, the “pragmatic” thing to do is to nurture what nurtures us. In no way does degrading air quality sound like a “pragmatic” thing to do, particularly because it is difficult to trust any change in how these people have been treated for the past five decades. Of course, as Professor Larsen has mentioned, we mustn’t trample on some people’s choice to live in Delray, given its history and their ties to it. Yet there is absolutely no evidence to me that the government will “think” of the people it has neglected to far. I hope I am wrong, I really do, but I do feel terribly conflicted in my role right now; rather than empowering citizens to take a stand against the bridge, I am empowering them to accept the bridge under certain conditions.

I met Mary Szawala the other day, an eighty-four year-old activist, who has lived in southwest Detroit for her whole life. She has run for city council (losing by just six-hundred votes to I. Henderson), and has constantly advocated for the people affected by projects like rail lines and bridges. She said to me that the stress of moving because of the bridge is too much for senior citizens to take. She said, “Rather than building them homes, might as well get their grave plots all lined up. The importance of one life is greater than any bridge.”

The results of arrogance - our first days in Detroit

There is a disconnect between those that profess and work towards the "greatness" of this country, and those who are truly affected by these words and policies. After having driven around southwest Detroit for a couple of days now, it is clear that there is a spectrum of issues we have allowed to grow over time, through insensitivity, carelessness and arrogance towards nature, and consequently people.

Yesterday, the class conducted a fairly thorough plot and housing inventory in Delray. We saw the results of years of neglect in blighted neighbourhoods and downtrodden people. Here are some examples.

Yet these pictures are not representative of the energy, vigour and thoughtfulness of the people that reside in these neighbourhoods. What we have noticed, though, is a disenchantment and powerlessness in these peoples' thoughts and emotions. What Delray represents, as Lydia mentioned, is the failure of "The American Dream." This dream has resulted in people being forcefully surrounded by factories and toxic industry that the privileged choose not to have in their backyards, yet choose to patronise because of their arrogance and willing ignorance.

Now how might we be able to address this unsustainable state of being? Well, what is being proposed is no cause for hope. As you may know, there is a second, publicly-owned, bridge between the US and Canada that is being proposed, the landing plaza of which is going to be in the heart of Delray. Of course, the people that are being displaced by this are in no position to leave, especially because of the insignificant amount of money that is being offered to the people. For those that do want to continue to live in Delray, well, twenty-six new "energy efficient" homes are going to be built. But these people, and those not being displaced, will have to deal with the more than fourteen thousand trucks that will pass over the bridge every day.

So these people have been continuously mistreated and trampled on for decades, they have degraded health, and will now be exposed to even more air pollution. On top of that, a bridge is in no way a short-term investment. In every way I can think of, this bridge is the hallmark of unsustainability, and a continued arrogance on the part of politicians and corporations and governments by having faith in the very frameworks that have led people, living, breathing people, and trees, living, breathing trees, to be surrounded by violent and degrading industry. 

On a lighter note, Wayne State University has a quite unique campus in the heart of Midtown Detroit, with 1960s style modern buildings with beautiful triangular windows and lighting. There is this beautiful modern Gothic building and sculpture garden in the middle of campus, too.

To more sustainable neighbourhoods in Detroit

Some of you know that I have been involved in teaching and coordinating a class on Detroit this semester. It all started last year when Laura Sherman and Krista, two other wonderful graduate students that are in the same fellowship cohort as I, decided that it would be fun to put together a place-based class on sustainability together. There are a couple of such classes that already exist, but the places are foreign - one teaches and takes students to Kenya, the other Chile. We decided to focus on some place close to home, a place to me that is home - southeast Michigan. What better place than Detroit? An awesomely fascinating place with a huge cultural history and an increasingly vibrant collection of individuals wanting to turn the corner on a not-so-pleasant past.

We got a bunch of extremely talented undergraduates to sign up for the class, which began in January. After teaching in Ann Arbor for eight weeks, and taking three trips to Detroit, the whole class is now fully prepared to spend two entire weeks in Detroit. We will be living at Wayne State University, and focusing our studies and energy on southwest Detroit, particularly the neighbourhood of Delray and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Hubbar-Richard, Springwells, Mexicantown, and Boynton. We are fortunate enough to be working with Professor Larissa Larsen, who has long-standing connections to Delray and its residents. She has been actively involved in helping the residents face the challenges of living in Delray. In this place live people much less fortunate than most, particularly because of discrimination, segregation and zoning laws.

Fortunately enough, the residents of Delray want us there (nothing is worse than going to a place and telling people what they should do, especially if they don't want you there. This has been a struggle facing many places like Detroit.), and want us to help them re-envision their neighbourhood in the light of the New International Trade Crossing, a publicly-owned bridge that is being planned in competition to the privately-owned Ambassador Bridge, which spans the Detroit River to Windsor, Canada. The landing for the new bridge is proposed to be in Delray. What this means though, is that there will now be several thousand trucks passing through Delray now, worsening an already degraded environment. It will be the supreme responsibility of our students and us to come up with culturally- and historically-sensitive plans, based on neighbourhood input, that will hopefully serve as templates for a new Delray.

Over the next couple of weeks, from 8 to 21 May, I will be writing about our experiences in Delray. This will be one of the most challenging things I have participated in, particularly because of the present tensions between culture, race, history and environment. The challenges of sustainability will be front and centre.