Abstract
On 13 February 2020, the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability held the Michigan Environmental Justice Summit 2020: Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of Michigan’s 1990 Conference on Race and the Environment and Looking Toward the Future. The Summit hosted a dynamic panel of community environmental justice leaders throughout the region who have “boots on the ground” in the progress and pursuit of environmental justice. The panelists included Donele Wilkins, the President/CEO of the Green Door Initiative in Detroit, MI; Andrea Pierce, Chair and Founder of the Anishinaabek Caucus, Idle No More Michigan, MI; and Theresa Landrum, co-founder of the 48217 Community and Environmental Health Organization, Detroit, MI. This article includes an edited transcript of the panel discussion. The panelists detail multiple grassroots efforts to remedy environmental injustice in Michigan.
Introduction
On 13 February 2020, the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) held the Michigan Environmental Justice Summit 2020: Commemorating the Thirtieth Anniversary of Michigan’s 1990 Conference on Race and the Environment and Looking Toward the Future. The summit hosted a dynamic panel of community environmental justice (EJ) leaders throughout the region who have “boots on the ground” in the progress and pursuit of EJ today. Moderated by SEAS Professor Paul Mohai, this action-oriented panel featured founder and CEO of the Detroit-based Green Door Initiative, Donele Wilkins; co-founder of the 48217 Community and Environmental Health organization, Theresa Landrum; and chair and co-founder of the Anishinaabek Caucus Idle No More Michigan, Andrea Pierce. The panel discussion is presented here. A video recording is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFFWaHRqz5k&feature=youtu.be. This issue of New Solutions (Volume 30, Issue 3, 2020) also includes the discussion from a panel of National Environmental Justice Game Changers as well as an introduction of the conference and the two panels.
How Did You Get Into This Work, and Who Most Influenced You?
We worked hard with all kinds of people I had never sat down with: people from native lands, people from Hawaii, people from Chicago and Savannah, Georgia, and others who are sick and tired of being sick and tired in their communities. And they wanted to make a change and they wanted to redefine the environment that would respect and honor our lives, our children’s lives, our communities. And I found my place in that room and in that space. I contributed to the defining of the seventeen principles of EJ. And I knew at that moment this was what I was going to do with the rest of my life—was to work for people in my community. And it had me actually take another look at my community. While I was on the side of labor, working for healthier workplaces and fighting for black workers in particular, who were disproportionately exposed to bad working conditions, unhealthy conditions, and all that comes with that. It didn't occur to me that in the shadows of all these factories and polluting situations where I lived and my family lived and my community lived, and I was just grateful at that moment to know that I could make a difference. I didn't know how it was going to happen.
I just saw Tracy Easthope and some Ecology Center people come in here and I remember back at that moment. The organization I was working for, we were also connected to the Ecology Center and they just pretty much said, “Hey, have free reign. Whatever we can do to support you to make this work matter, you go on and you do it.” And then we just organized. We organized Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice. I was the founding director of that organization and we did the work there. And today, I’m pleased to continue that work under the umbrella of the Green Door initiative. But I don’t know what the exact question was.
So we started that. And then I started bringing out more information, because I’m from Ypsilanti now, down here. We light up the water tower in Ypsilanti and have protests in Detroit. Dakota Access Pipeline came up, and that was even more, so we were fighting against that here. Everybody else left, but I couldn’t leave. We had Nexus (Global) coming in in Ypsilanti, my hometown. We were fighting that. I couldn’t leave. We fought and there’s a whole community. There was Deisha Myles with Nexus and it’s just so many people that we’re fighting and they built it. Thankfully, Ohio, I think, is still fighting it. Nexus has not started pumping through there. That’s like less than a mile from my house. That’s kind of scary. Now I’m in the eminent blast zone. We’ve been fighting that and it’s just been fight, fight, fight, and everything's going so far and stops. Nothing’s changing. What’s missing? Why isn’t this changing? Why are we still fighting, fighting, fighting, and not getting results? Why, we're bringing awareness—we’re educating people, we have town halls, we have people come and talk everywhere about the issues, I start making homework sheets. If you came to any of my protests, you got a homework sheet that said, “Call this person, call that person, do this, do that.” We put it up on the web site and still everything went just so far and stopped. You could just feel the energy going.” And then it would just whew, all right, now what?
That’s when I met Dana Nessel, she was running for the attorney general, she was saying, “Well, I’m going to shut down Line 5. We need to do this. We need to enforce these laws. We need to work on this.” And I was like, “Yay Dana.”
Went to the convention and found out that the Anishinaabek people in this state, the Native Americans, who are here in these occupied territories of Michigan did not have a caucus. We had no representation at all. None whatsoever. I questioned, “Could that be where it stops?” And I'm finding out, yes, that could be. So, my boyfriend says, “Well you know the rule of the house!” And he says, “If it makes you mad, you gotta go fix it.” So that’s what we did. We built the Caucus of Anishinaabek People in the state (Crowd applauds). We just had our first-year anniversary last week. It was a big Omigosh. We sat back and thought up everything we’ve been a part of, we have a lot of bills that are coming through and moving, getting introduced, hopefully will get passed. We need people to still call your house reps and call your senator, call your governor. Dana Nessel says she has arrived and the laws are not there. We do not have the laws for her to enforce. Now we have to make these laws. Otherwise, nothing will change; environmentally, socially, anyway—because we have to have the laws in place.
That is what we’re working on. Go up to Lansing when House reps invite us, or the senators, “Hey, can you come and help us?” Sure. Give a press release and try to get the native people, all of our people, involved because it’s affecting everybody. My goal is set that we’ll have the Anishinaabek people, the Native Americans, environmentalists, grassroots. If you like water, you should be part of this. If you like clean water or clean land, yes. If you would like to breathe. We should be a part of something. We have a lot of caucuses now that are banding together.
I really think that research is part of this. We get the information from the researchers. The activists get all excited and get everything moving where we need to go and what we need to do. We need the political part to make it happen. We make the laws so that we can enforce these and say, “No, no, no, we don’t want this in our water. Get it out. We have this law here.” And then they have to remove it. That is where we’re at.
There has been a whole community helping me. We have the Ann Arbor Light Brigade now, out of the work that we’ve done with Detroit Light Brigade and Idle No More Michigan. We light up signs bringing awareness, and Ann Arbor Light Brigade came out of that. We have two light brigades down here, and I hear there’s another one up in Ingham County. We are growing and building and that’s what we need to keep doing. Get involved. Join in. Don’t sit back and say, “Oh, I went to this talk.” Say, “OK, I learned this. How can I implement it? Where can I go? What difference can I make? Who can I go talk to?” And go do it. If you can’t think of anybody, contact me. I have a whole bunch of people you can talk to, because I totally believe with all my heart; we are stronger together—and one person will not do anything. It’s a community—and we have to bring our communities together to make the changes.
So I went to the city council and I heard that our council was considering allowing this to happen. So I went back and I met up with a couple of the older seniors who had been in this fight and said, “What can we do?” They said, “Well, when you go down as a single person, it doesn't work.” So we came together as a group and went down. And I was chosen as one of three people to speak because everybody else was too afraid. And I said, “We can't be afraid when they're talking about poisoning something that we all need.” So I went back and we were successful and that ended that.
However, in 1999, the salt company was sold. Our city council gave the salt company a twenty-year lease to blast and excavate salt right underneath our homes. And when that happened, we started to experience many earthquakes. We started to see sinkholes form in our property. We started seeing cracks in our windows and our foundations. And when we went to speak about it on an individual basis, they said, “Aw, that could've happened because your house settled,” and no one was really paying attention to what was happening. And how I discovered it is I went out. My family owned several properties and we had renters. So the renters were calling my parents who were elderly and said my furnace exploded, my chimney caved in. And we were like, “What?” So we sent the maintenance person over there. He said, “No, their furnace is fine, their chimney is fine.” They said “Well, every day something's exploding in my house.” And so I went to the neighborhood organization, the Original United Citizens (of Southwest Detroit), as Dr. Mohai mentioned. And I said, “You guys, do you know where this is coming from?” They said, “No.” I said, “Has anybody questioned it?” They said, “No.” I said, “Why haven't you questioned it?” And they said, “Because it won't do any good.”
So I realized that my community was feeling helpless and hopeless and they felt they didn’t have a voice. So I said, “We got to do something.” So we got a group of about ten people and we went down and we really found out that in actuality we were experiencing earthquakes. We were able to get a grant and hire a seismologist, and he told us that we were (experiencing quake activity) from the blast. They were using the same materials that Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the federal building to excavate salt. And our city council allowed them to do it. And they were only paying the city council of Detroit, fifty-two cents a ton that they excavated. Then they were leasing the acreage underneath our homes for three dollars an acre. That’s what the city was getting. So they were selling us for peanuts and we were experiencing this destruction to our homes and impeding on our quality of life. So I and Doctor Leonard (a leading advocate who has been fighting for clean air in her Southwest Detroit community for years), who’s not here today, said we can go down as a collective voice. And we did. And we were successful in getting the salt mine to stop blasting underneath our homes. But this was, unlike Miss Wilkins, this was not my life’s choice. In actuality, I didn’t like it. I was fearful, too. I didn’t want to be the voice for the community. But somebody had to step up and somebody had to do it.
So I went back to my happy little life. And then in 2003, the power grid failed and North America and part of Canada suffered a blackout. And unbeknown to us that when our power went out, the more than twenty-six industries that surround our community, their power went out. So all pollution controls were out of order and poison was being emitted into the air. People were getting sick and didn’t know why. And then we found out that the company, as Dr. Mohai mentioned earlier, the only oil refinery in the state of Michigan, Marathon Petroleum Corporation, was emitting poisons to the heavens. Out of that came a lawsuit because the surrounding communities, suburban communities of Dearborn and Lincoln Park and Melvindale, and Allen Park, during that blackout, they did a mandatory evacuation. But the city of Detroit did not evacuate my community in which Marathon sits. So the African-American community was not evacuated when poisons were being emitted to the heavens. And when we found out a lawsuit had been filed by the white suburban areas, the African community was not included in the lawsuit.
So one African-American young lady went down and asked the judge to stop the lawsuit. The African-American community was not included in this class action lawsuit and Marathon sits in 48217. The judge did. And so therefore, we were able to sue. And the judge would not allow us to sue on health. He only allowed us to sue on property damage. And mind you, my area is an area that has a high rate of cancer, asthma. We have been deemed the epicenter of the pediatric burden in lower Wayne County. And we have a growing rate of asthma in our adults. And so that was just a slap in the face.
So, again, that was not my life’s purpose. I went back to my happy little life and then we learned that Marathon wanted to do an expansion, 2.2 billion-dollar expansion in an area that was already overburdened with industry. And they wanted to go from refining what they called the sweet clean oil to processing the dirty tar sands oil, and they would have to change the process. So that meant different types of chemicals that would be emitted into our atmosphere. Now, mind you, in that time, I learned that our area was in non-attainment for SO2—sulfur dioxide. And then it would be in non-attainment for ozone. But just a little history. Growing up in my community, we often saw brown air, we often saw dusty air, we often saw metallic air. And I’m saying that because we were having a lot of fallout back then. It was Great Lakes Steel and Ford Rouge, from Detroit Edison (DTE), from Marathon. We thought it was normal, not knowing it was having an adverse effect on our health.
But in early 2000, Dr. Leonard introduced us to a young lady by the name of Rhonda Anderson. And she came to our community and asked, could she be invited in? I was like, invited in? Nobody asked us could they come in. Get invited in? People just come and do what they want to us. And she asked, could she come? And she told us about the EJ principles that Miss Wilkins talked about. And she taught us how to organize and to have a voice. She taught us how to log the trucks that were coming from all of these industries. She taught us how to take photos. She taught us how to identify different types of smoke: the brown, the orange, the black, the gray smoke to teach us if it was harmful or not. And so we went to the then MDEQ, that’s the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, c to ask for help.And that was like going to a dog, asking a dog to show us how to farm. They were no help. So we were failed on all levels. We were failed from the federal government to the state government, to the city government, to the county government. And we had to learn to speak up and have a voice.
So I just learned—just last week—this is my life’s purpose. Because I’ve been doing this since 1985. So who inspires me? I have to say in meeting Miss Anderson through Dr. Leonard, who inspires me. Miss Donele Wilkins inspires me.
And I’ve got to say, I’m getting emotional (choking up). Because this is a wonderful thing. Because we’re getting people to pay attention. And who inspires me is Dr. Leonard and Miss Rhonda Anderson. And I’m happy because I sat in here today on the students’ presentations, and they were wonderful. So thank you.
The Critical Role That Activists and Community Residents Play in the EJ Movement
How can you all have helped in that regard? Like, let’s take this information to the city council. So as they’re talking about making decisions about whether or not it’s OK to have a salt mine blow up under . . . Do we have something to prove? Empirical data or something to show that this is just not a good decision to make. Shame folks with research if we can. But having sort of this collaborative effort while we’re organizing on the ground, we’re also holding up and trying to bring in to this conversation reliable information that helps us defend our case, if you will.
So for me just to see and listen to some of the students’ projects and to be able to witness the growth, because in the early days, there wasn’t much information that helped us make our cases. And now I’m looking at, you know, how grand it is that young people are choosing to pursue this academically. Folks in our communities are like PhDs and experts in being able to discuss this stuff, you know—PhDs in their own community, their own lives, but also being able to translate technical information in a way that helps us make our case. Those partnerships and realities are key with folks like you, Paul, and Dr. Bullard and Dr. Wright, and Dr. Bunyan Bryant, and of course, Barbara and that whole team of folks. This is this how we come together and we work together. We’re not used and abused, but we are valued in this process and everybody is valued in the process. That’s how you can help.
Important Successes and Accomplishments
So what am I most proud of? Let’s see. I think we still have a lot of work to do, but we have had moments where, as I think about the different administrations, the state of Michigan, gubernatorial administrations. We started out with the most egregious, John Engler, when I started this war. And he was the devil—his administration was the devil. Right? And as a movement, there was this sort of false attempt to get us engaged in the work of getting some policies in the state. Right? And we know that was a farce, and we know that was fake, remember? And so we walked away from that. You know, it’s like, “We're not going to waste our time with this. We have better things to do.” This administration (Governor Whitmer) has established an EJ working group, or task force, interagency or whatever it is, and some marvelous, strong voices are on this. Like we’re still moving. We’re still moving. Right? We’ve had some incremental changes that keep us in, you know, shutting down the incinerators and whatever. We see some of those things. And so, yeah, we can be a force and we just can’t give up.
Lessons to Be Shared With the Younger Generation of EJ Activists
I think that’s an important thing for us to remember as adults, that we need to let the children and the young people lead. We need to bring them in and listen, let them speak. We support them. I try to do that a lot. My grandson is a lot of times at protests with us since he was a munchkin, and I listen to him and he'll say, “What about this grandma?” He has actually told House Rep. Yousef Rabhi, “Do you know we're at a water event?” and he looks at him, and he says, “Why do you have a Nestle Bottle?” Yousef is like, “Oh my God. I forget whose grandkid this is.” We have to listen. We shouldn’t be using Nestle bottles. We should not be using any water bottles as far as I’m concerned. Somebody somewhere is fighting for their water because of some corporation that’s providing bottles. We have to listen to our children and the young people. Let them lead. Let them guide. Give them a seat at the table. Bring them in. That is how the Anishinaabek Caucus is here. Because we weren’t invited to the table. We weren’t there. And I said, “Oh, no. We are going to be at the table, even if we got to knock down doors and bring chairs.” And that’s where we’re at with it. Make room. Right, Everybody?
I have to say, one of the representatives in Michigan has made a big mistake. He has supported a bill that will take twenty-one million dollars away from the bottle deposits, away from moneys that will clean up contaminated sites. We just heard about the green ooze (discovered 20 December 2019, leaking onto Interstate highway I-696 in Madison Heights), and hundreds of other sites that need clean-up. They’re going to de-fund that if this passes. Call them up. Isaac Robertson is one of our representatives. Tell him he’s wrong. And the guy that sponsored it is (Brandt) Iden. Call his office and say, don’t do that. Because Michigan has a pollution problem and they’re not admitting it. PFOS to SO2 to hexavalent chromium, lead. Flint should not have happened. So in Michigan, everything is Flint in Michigan.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
