{"id":2113,"date":"2014-07-11T06:39:13","date_gmt":"2014-07-11T06:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/?p=2113"},"modified":"2014-07-11T06:39:13","modified_gmt":"2014-07-11T06:39:13","slug":"why-scientists-arent-necessarily-the-best-science-explainers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalrealism.info\/?p=2113","title":{"rendered":"Kimberly Wasserman of LVEJO on \u201cKilling a Midwest Generation\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"4538083341_25b565fe3b_o-1038x576\"<\/a>
Unknown power station<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Talk:<\/b><\/p>\n

Killing a Midwest Generation<\/p>\n

In Plain English:<\/b><\/p>\n

How a Chicago non-profit from a low-income neighborhood got an asthma-inducing coal plant shut down<\/p>\n

The Speaker<\/b>:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Kimberly Wasserman <\/a>of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization<\/a> (LVEJO)<\/p>\n

The Sponsor:<\/b><\/p>\n

Fossil Free MIT<\/a><\/p>\n

What it covered:<\/b><\/p>\n

When Kimberly Wasserman<\/a> of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) took the podium at MIT\u2019s Sloan School of Business and Management,<\/a> she didn\u2019t fawn; she was direct: \u201cWe never stop our community members from asking questions during our presentations,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd this isn\u2019t that different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bold move from someone who was just introduced to an MIT audience as \u201ca community college graduate\u201d and \u201can example of how you don\u2019t need a degree to make a difference.\u201d Wasserman is a community organizer with LVEJO, a community-based organization out of Little Village, a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last census said 70,000 people were living in Little Village. But Wasserman believes the actual number of residents is closer to 95,000. It\u2019s impossible to be sure about the numbers, she explained, because there are so many undocumented immigrants living in the neighborhood. Plus, a lot of people with legal authorization to be here are still afraid to fill out the census, because it\u2019s not unusual for two or three families to be living in the same apartment. They\u2019re afraid they\u2019ll lose their homes if the government finds out they\u2019re crowing 8-10 people into a 2-room apartment.<\/p>\n

The neighborhood is full of kids; half of the residents in Little Village are under 25. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of need for k-12, pre-K, daycare, but we don\u2019t have it. The median household income is 30k,\u201d Wasserman said.<\/p>\n

Wasserman never set out to be an environmentalist. After high school, she went to a community college and started working at an after-hours program at a Boys & Girls Club.<\/a> Her job was to supervise a computer lab that was open until 9:00 pm, where kids could work on homework and things. But when the budget got tight, the late hours in the computer lab was one of the first things on the chopping block. They didn\u2019t want the extra expenses of keeping the lights on until 9 and paying the lab monitor to stay that late. However, the workers at The Boys\u2019 & Girls\u2019 Club thought that was a bad idea.<\/p>\n

Teens needs places to study after school hours, and lots of teens don\u2019t have stable homes. That\u2019s when they end up wandering around on the streets and getting into trouble.<\/p>\n

The leaders of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization<\/a> (LVEJO) were based out of an office just down the hall from the computer lab and offered to help teach the Boys & Girls club people how to use social organizing to help preserve the program. Long story short, it worked out. The Boys & Girls Club is still open until 9 pm.<\/p>\n

But around this time Wasserman, who was 21, was pregnant with her first kid and not sure if she wanted to keep working long hours at a computer lab. Fortunately, one of the LVEJO leaders was impressed with her and offered her a job with them. She\u2019d be home earlier, and she would even be allowed to bring the kid to work sometimes. So Wasserman became an environmental justice organizer.<\/p>\n

LVEJO is a grassroots organization, so every cause they champion comes out of conversations with community members. They spend a lot of time asking around about \u201cWhat do you like about living in Little Village? What don\u2019t you like about living in Little Village?\u201d One thing that came up a lot was asthma.<\/p>\n

When you look at national averages for asthma rates, Mexican Americans (who make up the bulk of the Little Village population) are less likely to develop asthma than people from most other countries of origin.<\/a> But the asthma rate in Little Village was 20 times the national average<\/b>. That\u2019s the national average, multiplied by 20. That\u2019s insane.<\/p>\n

So what was so different about Little Village compared to the rest of the country?<\/p>\n

One candidate was \u201cAss River\u201d, a smelly sanitation canal that runs through Little Village. But \u201cThe Cloud Factories\u201d, a set of coal-powered plants owned by Midwest Power Generation, were also a suspect. They sent puffy white plumes of smoke into the air every single day. The smoke looked pretty non-threatening, but how could you tell?<\/p>\n

It turns out that a group of environmental epidemiologists at Harvard were interested in the same problem. They did some calculations and estimated that each \u201ccloud factory\u201d caused 1500 ER visits, 300 deaths, and 1300 asthma attacks per year. <\/a>Those are the numbers for one individual plant; Little Village had two of them.<\/p>\n

LVEJO tried to figure out if Midwest Generation had any connections to Little Village by asking around to see if anyone knew anyone who worked there. \u201cWe found a girl who dated a guy who knew a girl who knew a guy who worked at the power plant. That was the closest we got,\u201d Wasserman said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t get any economic benefits but it\u2019s literally killing us,\u201d Wasserman said. So LVEJO organized a protest at city hall, where young people from Little Village camped out in the lobby, lying in body bags, holding inhalers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you think happened next? Do you think we got attention or a push for an ordinance?\u201d Wasserman asked. \u201cNo. We got a phone call from mayor\u2019s office saying that we were to never, ever embarrass the mayor that way again. And we were in fact, banned from city hall\u2026So we went back the next day and did it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so began a 12-year-long battle against the \u201cDaley Machine<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

The winds of the Windy City didn\u2019t push the coal smoke up to the North Side, which is where the rich people live, and in the pre-An Inconvenient Truth-<\/i>era people were much less aware of how far air pollution could percolate from its original source.<\/p>\n

LVEJO organized a project where they had young people doing GIS analyses in order to estimate how many school children went to school within a 1-2 mile radius of the power plants, hoping that if they could show people outside of Little Village were also affected, something would change.<\/p>\n

When Chicago made a bid for the 2002 Olympics, they put together a campaign about the air quality called \u201cMidwest Killing Generations\u201d. They actually got to meet with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Oprah (\u201cThat was cool!\u201d) about the air quality issues.<\/p>\n

But it was still a struggle to reach the mayor\u2019s office. They were often dismissed \u201cWe had to make it clear: this is not just because we\u2019re crazy and we don\u2019t have anything better to do with our time. We definitely do.\u201d<\/p>\n

The power generated by the lung-damaging coal-plants wasn\u2019t even being used in the state of Illinois. It was being sold to the highest bidders out of state. \u201cOur community is being sacrificed to make a profit for a company\u2026People are angered by this,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cIt is our role to channel that anger in a positive way.\u201d<\/p>\n

They kept at it. They organized group trips to coal-mining country so they could learn more where coal comes from and how the working-class people in those regions are also paying a heavy toll in terms of their health. \u201cThis is really about how poor people from across the country come together when they\u2019re getting screwed economically,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

In 2011, they teamed up with Greenpeace to organize an \u201cOccupy the Coal Mound\u201d event, where a group of protesters would camp out on top of the coal mound and demand that something be done. To prep, the Greenpeace people taught them how to hop chickenwire fences (like the one surrounding the mound) and what to do if they were arrested.<\/p>\n

It turned out to be really underwhelming, because the coal company was repairing the fence, and there was a nice hole they could walk through and up to the top of the mound (which is a tough climb that takes a while.<\/p>\n

The coal company people were livid. They called the police and demanded that the officers climb the mound and arrest the protesters immediately. But the cop had family down the block and completely understood why they were on the mound, Wasserman explained with a grin.<\/p>\n

The cops told the coal company to call them when the protesters when they started coming back down the mound, and then they\u2019d arrest them<\/i>. The protesters ended up getting off the hook with tickets.<\/p>\n

LVEJO kept pushing for a Clean Power Ordinance, but most of the deals at city hall are made behind closed doors that LVEJO didn\u2019t have access to. The only way they could get things done was by teaming with more established organizations like The Sierra Club and Greenpeace. \u201cWe kept getting sold out,\u201d Wasserman explained. \u201cWe didn\u2019t like them, but they have access and money that we don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, at one point the city government proposed a \u201cChicago Climate Action Plan\u201d that only included 8 words about air pollution being a problem. \u201cThe lady who was in charge of it said that if they didn\u2019t like living in Little Village, they should move,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cBut to where? And who is going to pay off first and last month\u2019s rent?!\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, in the early 2010s, they ended up sitting down with the leaders of Sierra Club and Greenpeace and having \u201ca serious conversation about privilege\u201d. All three organizations agreed that if one group managed to snag a meeting at City Hall, everybody had to go, not just the well-connected environmentalists. \u201cIt was a very difficult conversation, but it was a very good conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

What followed was \u201cone of the best run campaigns I\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d They put together ads featuring real -life kids from Little Village (including Wasserman\u2019s oldest son) about the asthma, and The Sierra Club paid to have the ads placed on Chicago Transit.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Greenpeace organized more dare-devilish events including one stunt where they \u201coccupied\u201d the smoke stacks and one where they bungee-jumped off the side of a freeway to hang a banner.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur contribution was to be outside across the street, with snacks, playing music and cheering them on,\u201d Wasserman said. Her volunteers certainly weren\u2019t willing to jump off the side of the freeway.<\/p>\n

When word came down that Mayor Daley would not be seeking re-election, the campaign kicked into high-gear. \u201cWith Sierra Club, we were able to get into every debate, making it one of the top three issues for the mayoral election,\u201d Wasserman said.<\/p>\n

In February 2012, Rahm Emanuel won the election and gave the coal company an ultimatum: Shut down or clean up. <\/i>They chose shut down. Originally, they were going to shut down the first plant in 2012 and the second one in 2014, but the environmental campaign was able to exert enough pressure to get both plants shut down by the end of 2012<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It was a huge achievement. Wasserman said her one regret was that she wished they could have worked with the power plant workers more, because they, too, are working-class people who get screwed over by power companies. About 1\/3 of the workers got transferred to new plants, and the remaining 2\/3 either retired or got laid off. \u201cBut they were too scared of Midwest Generation,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cTheir strikes ended with contracts that left them worse off than when they started.\u201d<\/p>\n

And then the city was left with a question: What are we going to do with the land occupied by these abandoned power plants?<\/i><\/p>\n

Wasserman was recruited to a mayoral task force that would decide what to do with the plant buildings. She was the only woman on a task-force that included everyone from city hall staffers to the executives of Midwest Generation. (\u201cAs a woman, that was\u2026great.<\/i>\u201d)<\/p>\n

For Wasserman and LVEJO the goal was to figure out: How do we assert what we want in our community? How can we be proactive about land development instead of reactive?<\/i><\/p>\n

The bottom line was: \u201cIf community cannot get behind it, then it cannot happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

The people of Little Village have been told so many times that businesses are good for job creation and tax benefits that they just don\u2019t believe it anymore; when the task-force asked, they said they wanted genuine green projects.<\/p>\n

They decided to build a park. A big one<\/a>. This was also a huge victory, because now the tens of thousands of kids who live in Little Village will finally have a green place to play outside.<\/p>\n

Emboldened by their progress with the coal plants, LVEJO decided to lobby the Chicago Transit Authority and get a bus route that goes directly from Little Village to downtown. Without that busline, it could take Little Village residents an hour-and-a-half to get to work. They got that, too.<\/a><\/p>\n

After three major successes in one year, LVEJO isn\u2019t slowing down at all. They\u2019re thinking about trying to get the Chinese water taxis that go from downtown to Chinatown to come a little further down the river and add Little Village to their route. They\u2019re also trying to convince the city government to rebuild the sewer system, which flooded badly during this year\u2019s snow melt.<\/p>\n

And, of course, they\u2019re hoping over the long term that their work will encourage more young people of color to go into science, engineering, and environmental policy.<\/p>\n

Very few of the contractors who manage these building projects speak Spanish, and they sometimes ignore where the community is coming from. One contractor was hired to pull a defunct underground oil tank out of a patch of land where LVEJO was hoping to build a community garden and decided that it would be easier to just dump the oil out all over the ground than to transport the tank with oil still inside. The problem is, it\u2019s hard to get things to grow in petroleum-drenched soil.<\/p>\n

They still have a long way to go. There are still a lot of people who don\u2019t get it, but these first victories are major first steps for the community. Getting more people involved in the policy conversation can still be a challenge. \u201cThey already have a lot of problems & don\u2019t respond well when people say (in chipper white girl voice<\/i>) \u2018Hey! Here\u2019s another problem you need to work with us on!\u2019 Change needs to be connected to the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

My Personal Take:<\/b><\/p>\n

Wasserman\u2019s not a scientist, but I learned a ton just from hearing her talk for an hour. (Also, if this recap seems like it\u2019s running long, it\u2019s partly because she talks fast <\/i>and tells a lot of stories.)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s scary to think about how easily governments and companies can sweep the effects their actions have on under-served communities under the rug. There are lots of people from all over, not just Little Village, who would have been outraged by Midwest Generation\u2019s attitude toward the people living next door to their coal plants, but a lot of people just don\u2019t pay attention to local communities. (Especially local communities that are predominantly made up of working-class families and people of color.)<\/p>\n

But the good news in Ms. Wasserman\u2019s talk was: If you\u2019re persistent and respectful about getting up in people\u2019s faces, build alliances with people who have more access, and make a compelling case for yourself, you can get people to listen to you. It takes a lot of time and work, but it\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n

My favorite part of the talk was when she talked about going to the Appalachians to learn about where coal comes from. At first, I was really confused, because there she was, a lady from the southwest side of Chicago, pronouncing Appalachians the way I do: Apple-LATCH-ins<\/i>. That\u2019s the way we say it in the Smokies (the southern end of the Appalachians in East Tennessee, West Virginia, and the western Carolinas\u2026in other words, the coal-mining country.)<\/p>\n

Almost no one else in the country does. When I first got to college, I got into so many arguments about how the word \u201cAppalachian<\/a>\u201d was pronounced. People say all kinds of weird things: \u201cAPPle-lash-un\u201d, \u201cApple-AESH (with a long a)-ee-uh\u201d, and I don\u2019t know what else. It\u2019s really annoying. (Even the people who were with me on the goofy way people from upstate NY say \u201cyuman\u201d instead of \u201chuman\u201d were against me on \u201cAppalachia\u201d\u2026Traitors.)<\/p>\n

So hearing \u201cApple-LATCH-in\u201d coming from a Chicago person was a pleasant shock. But it make sense when she explained that LVEJO hosted a program called \u201cFrom the Holler to the Hood<\/a>\u201d, where people from Appalachia visited them and then the Chicago natives traveled to my neck-of-the-woods,The Smoky Mountains<\/a> in East Tennessee\/West North Carolina.<\/p>\n

(For a while, there was also a radio initiative called \u201cFrom the Holler to the Hood<\/a>\u201d that was doing mashups and collaborations between bluegrass and hip-hop artists. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s still going, but some of the stuff they put together is pretty cool.)<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a young woman of color, going out to Appalachia and learning where the term \u2018hillbilly\u2019 came from and being able to meet their families was really empowering for me,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cBecause as an inner city girl, I heard the term, but I didn\u2019t really know what it meant.\u201d<\/p>\n

That made me really happy to hear. As someone with a mostly-New-England-ish accent (lived in Rhode Island until I was 6), who grew up in East Tennessee, I am constantly getting reactions like, \u201cBut you\u2019re a liberal. How could you live there?\u201d and \u201cNo, you can\u2019t be. You\u2019re actually smart.\u201d and, of course, \u201cBut you\u2019re not a real Southerner.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t really think of myself as \u201ca Southerner\u201d, (Between having parents from Texas and Missouri, being born in Rhode Island, living in a physics company town, and then going to school in upstate New York, I\u2019m probably more Northeast than not\u2026) but when people go around talking about \u201cThe South\u201d like its only defining features are racism, obesity, Confederate nostalgia, and copious numbers of Sonic Drive-Ins, a little voice in the back of my head is like, \u201cI\u2019ma start knockin\u2019 all-a\u2019-y\u2019all\u2019s heads together if y\u2019all don\u2019t stop over-generalizin.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The South is a complicated and diverse place. Just like everywhere else.<\/p>\n

But I think what will stick with me most is the idea that for people in low-income communities, in neighborhoods where they have direct \u201cpipelines\u201d from school to prison, taking part in a non-violent protest is a huge risk. Being arrested at a Greenpeace sit-in is probably going to do a lot more damage to the reputation\/employability of a person-of-color from a poor, immigrant family than it would for a white, wealthy, educated, cis-gendered, strawberry-blonde kid with a Rhode Island accent.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easier for people like me to become environmental justice activists, because even if we have an arrest record, it\u2019s much easier for us to sell the, \u201cOh, I was doing something that technically illegal but I was doing it to save the planet\/my family and it was non-violent, so I\u2019m not really a criminal\u201d argument than it is for the average resident of Little Village.<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s something we all need to remember when we\u2019re worried about underserved communities \u201cnot caring about science\u201d or \u201cnot wanting to take action about environmental issues\u201d.<\/p>\n

Biggest Misconception to Avoid:<\/b><\/p>\n

LVEJO is not an organization of environmental crusaders who want to \u201csave Nature\u201d; they are a community-based organization that are doing what they need to do to ensure their kids\u2019 health. During the Q&A, Wasserman told us the story of how LVEJO was founded:<\/p>\n

One of the local elementary schools decided, as a \u201ccost-saving measure\u201d, to re-tile the roof while school was in session without<\/i> taking any precautions about lead and asbestos exposure. \u201cWell, people in our community work in construction. They know that there are some things you do, and some things that you just don\u2019t do.\u201d<\/p>\n

(I can vouch for this. While I was in high school, our school district decided to rebuild the entire school by tearing down and rebuilding a couple of buildings at a time and relocating classes to trailers outside the main buildings as needed. So we spent two-and-a-half years listening to jackhammers while we did our trig quizzes. But we were never in any of the buildings when they were re-doing the roofs and taking out the older walls.<\/i>)<\/p>\n

But the principal insisted that re-tiling while school was in session was the cheapest (and therefore best) way to do it. LVEJO got started as a way to fight back against that, and they did succeed in putting a stop to it. One of the kids who was in kindergarten at the time ended up volunteering with LVEJO as a teen, and now she\u2019s doing a PhD in public policy at Ohio State\u2026So what goes around comes around, I guess?<\/p>\n

But LVEJO is about community health, and people doing what they need to do in order to live their lives. Not trees. (Although, they do like trees.)<\/p>\n

Best One-Liner:<\/b><\/p>\n

(Not a joke, but this is important:)<\/i><\/p>\n

On the decision to build a playground directly across the river from Cooke County Prison: <\/i><\/b>\u201cThat\u2019s the reality of living in our neighborhood. I kind of like the idea of being able to stand with my sixteen-year-old and say to him, \u2018Look, if you don\u2019t behave yourself out here, you gonna wind up in there.\u2019 For us, the school to jail pipeline is very real. The young people already know it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Best Audience Question (tie):<\/b><\/p>\n

Audience member (probably like a senior in MIT undergrad): <\/i><\/b>Can you say more about the task force? Because we\u2019ve been looking into doing task forces for Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

Ms. Wasserman:<\/i><\/b> I was leery of the task force, but it was good to be able to voice our ideas, our reactions to the reports we were reading, and to be able to show that we can read the jargon. In industry, they always want to have an end use for the waste before the remediation happens. If we say the remediation needs to happen first, then that\u2019s what actually has to happen, and we can make that understood.<\/p>\n

People say, \u201cBut you\u2019re being anti-business!\u201d I say, \u201cIf the business that wants to come is the kind that\u2019s gonna leave a cess pool behind when they leave, then I don\u2019t want them coming in to my community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Being able to sit across the table from the guy I\u2019ve been yelling at for twelve years and having a civilized conversation, with a mediator there, is actually really helpful. We could never have gotten the credibility that the task force gave us by ourselves. And the guidelines are not legally binding, but they are morally binding. It gives us a level of negotiation that we didn\u2019t have previously.<\/p>\n

Best Audience Question (tie):<\/b><\/p>\n

Another audience member: <\/i><\/b>How do you get people who don\u2019t know anything about environmental issues on board? I mean, I study these issues a lot but not everyone I talk to is going to know as much as me.<\/p>\n

Ms. Wasserman:<\/i><\/b> It\u2019s a process. You have to find a way to make it personal for them, and you have to talk to people 3 or 4 times before you find the thing that makes it real for them. You have to listen to him talking about his kids, his dog, whatever. I hear a lot of stories about kids with asthma. But you can take that and tell them that for every day they have to say home with a kid who\u2019s sick with asthma, they missed out on much of their paycheck. And then it\u2019s like Holy Crap! Then it\u2019s personal.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a process. If someone comes up to and says, \u201cHey, how\u2019re you doing?\u201d, you probably don\u2019t talk to that weirdo. I probably wouldn\u2019t talk to that weirdo.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been working for years, and people doubted us, but we never promised anything we couldn\u2019t deliver. We told them, \u201cWe\u2019ll work work with you.\u201d We can\u2019t promise we\u2019ll get the park, but we know we won\u2019t get the park without doing the work. In Spanish it\u2019s \u201cmi palabra<\/i>\u201d, and as an organizer, you never go back on your word.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the community has really surprised me. We were building a play ground over a former land fill, and we had two options: Put a cap over the landfill and build on top of that (which is cheaper), or pay money to have all the garbage taken out of the ground.<\/p>\n

I thought they would go for the expensive one, but they said, \u201cNo. We do not want the expensive extraction unless we can follow each garbage struck that leaves Little Village and make sure that it takes the trash to a facility where it\u2019s going to be disposed of properly. We don\u2019t want it leaving out community if you can\u2019t guarantee that it won\u2019t end up in someone else\u2019s backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

At that point, I think our organizing has reached the next level, because now people are thinking about how other communities will be affected as well as ours.<\/p>\n

Key Terms:<\/b><\/p>\n