Peace & Justice – Issue 2.1

The Environment:
The Time Is Now

“There are many [...] sites across the United States, entire landscapes that have been left to rot after they were no longer useful to frackers, miners, and drillers. It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s certainly how we have been trained to treat our stuff – use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more.” — Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

This issue of Peace & Justice is about the environment and environmental justice.

We hope you enjoy these articles, and that you will share them with your family and friends. Seattle Peace Chorus invites you to subscribe to this newsletter. Future issues will be full of interesting articles, photographs, and videos on themes that emphasize the desire that you share with us for a more just and peaceful world: Subscribe here.

City Planning: Hazardous to Communities of Color

Yvonne Brandon

GreenAction for Health and Environmental Justice is a decades old multiracial grassroots organization that fights for health and environmental justice for low-income and working class, urban, rural, and indigenous communities. They define environmental racism as:

Institutional rules, regulations, policies, or government and/or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based upon race.

The term “benign neglect” is defined as an urban planning process in which a municipal entity decides to abandon or neglect and area. Activists and environmentalist argue that discrimination in public planning is to blame.

There are thousands of examples of environmental racism throughout our nation, only a few of which I have the space to share here. As a native of Nashville, Tennessee and someone who grew up there toward the end of the Jim Crow era, I thought I would start with my own story.

As a child in the early 60’s, my parents started taking me to meetings with our adult neighbors. As I matured, I realized they were organizing against the City of Nashville, TN that was planning to take our property by eminent domain and run an interstate highway through our neighborhood. The opinions of Black residents during Jim Crow were summarily dismissed therefore they built the interstate anyway.

50 years later, the construction of Interstate 40 displaced more than a thousand black residents, destroyed a business and cultural district that was thriving, and slashed across our zip code, literally cutting our neighborhood in half!

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My family’s property survived but so many others were not as fortunate. To this day, the citizens of North Nashville whose homes were not taken, find themselves exposed to the health risks of the pollution that comes from the 210,000 vehicles that pass through the neighborhood every day.

Communities of color routinely face disproportionate rates of the effects natural disaster and environmental harms. As there are so many examples that I capture a few of the most egregious ones, starting with New Orleans, Louisiana.

You may recall what happened in 2005 when category five hurricane Katrina barreled through New Orleans, bring with it horrendous flood waters resulting in a breach of the levees protected the Lower 9th Ward.

When Mayor Negan warned the people of his city that a monster storm was coming and ordered a mandatory evacuation, neither city nor state leadership thought to evacuate those poor, mostly black New Orleanians in the 9th ward who could not evacuate because they did not have cars! Even if they did have transportation, they were unlikely to have the money to rent a hotel room.

After the levies were breached, the municipality’s solution was to move the 15,000 to 20,000 people from the 9th ward to the Superdome and convention center where they stayed for days with no food, no water, no air conditioning during intense heat, and with toilets that were overflowing.

Local and national television networks exposed the horror of the weeks long event and the missteps made in both local and federal response. The networks filmed people who had to chop holes in their roof, hoping to be rescued by helicopter. Video of bodies floating down streets and pictures elderly people who had died in their wheelchairs were stunning.

One reporter said about the response to Katrina: “This will surely go down as one of the most abandonments of Americans on American soil, ever in US History.” 1800 people died! Many thousands were bussed to other States where they became permanently displaced from their homes.

Katrina was a natural disaster. But the massive death, destruction, and misery that followed in its wake was entirely man-made, and preventable. It was the poor, the old, the sick – overwhelmingly African American – who had no means to flee the storm that bore the brunt of the suffering. Unfortunately, what Katrina exposed is merely the tip of a very sad and deliberate iceberg.

Take the case of another man-made crisis, Flint Michigan, where 41% of the population of are people of color. In 2014, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager to oversee Flint and cut the city’s costs.

This lead a tragic decision in 2013, to end the city’s five-decade practice of piping treated water for its residents from Detroit, in favor of a cheaper alternative by pumping water from the Flint River until a new water pipeline from Lake Huron could be built.

Although the river water was highly corrosive, Flint officials failed to treat it. As a result, the acidic water caused lead to leach out from aging pipes into thousands of homes.

One month after the city began supplying residents with Flint River water, people began complaining that the water from their taps looked, smelled, and tasted foul. Despite protests by residents lugging jugs of discolored water into town hall meetings, officials maintained that the water was safe. However, water samples collected from 252 homes, through a resident-organized effort, indicated that citywide lead levels had indeed spiked.

An even more disturbing fact was revealed by an early whistleblower, who happened to be a pediatrician. In 2015, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha began seeing elevated led levels in children’s blood tests across the city, levels that had nearly doubled since 2014 and tripled in some neighborhoods. It was later revealed that nearly 9,000 children in Flint had been drinking lead-contaminated water for 18 months.

Flint’s water supply was plagued by more than lead. The switch coincided with an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease that killed 12, and sickened at least 87 people between June 2014 and October 2015. This is said to be the third largest outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease recorded in U.S. history.

Unfortunately, the Flint crisis has not ended. Today, more than seven years later, the residents are still using bottled water to cook, drink, brush their teeth and even wash their bodies. Residents filed a class-action lawsuit, and finally, in at the end of 2020, Michigan residents reached a $641 million dollar settlement to aid those affected. Also, a program by the mayor that began in 2016 is working to replace the thousands of lead pipes and galvanized steel service lines that connect Flint water mains to city home.

12 State officials were indited, and in January of 2021, the former Governor, Rick Snyder, who put those wheels in motion, was charged for his role in Flint’s environmental disaster with two counts of Willful Neglect of Duty. If convicted, Snyder could face up to a year in prison and as much as a $1,000 fine. Not enough, but a good start toward accountability!

Let’s move on to the Southside of Chicago which has the second-highest black population in the United States, with the Southside being the most concentrated region of black Americans in the entire country.

Chicago’s south side had been home to a thriving black community for decades yet according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the City of Chicago has allowed for dangerous and toxic industries to set up near parks, schools, and homes on the Southside for decades, affecting the area’s air, land, and water.

They are forced to endure sewage treatment, refuse and garbage plants, incinerators, landfills, chemical and food processing facilities, industrial chemicals processing, asphalt and natural gas production, trucking and shipping yards . . . to name just a few!

The skies over South-east Chicago can darken with the heavy semitruck exhaust, and it is said that the skies shimmer from the toxic releases from nearby refineries. Frequent drivers along the Bishop Ford Freeway know to roll up their windows before the pungent sewage smell from the adjacent treatment plant wafts into their vehicles.

According to a first-of-its-kind analysis that community groups are using to fight the city’s industrial planning practices, Chicagoans in minority neighborhoods on the West and South Sides have the greatest exposure to toxic air pollution and other environmental health hazards in the city. They also report that the Calumet area had higher rates of coronary heart disease, asthma, and some cancers than in any other part of the city. The health problems happen to persist in an area that is underserved by medical facilities.

The residents of the Southeast Side are fiercely proud of their home. And they say they are tired of being the city’s dumping ground, so they are fighting back. In one high-profile case, a former scrap shredder is embroiled in a controversial proposal to move from the affluent North Side and reopen in the East Side neighborhood…across from an elementary school!

Our final example of environmental racial inequality takes us back to Louisiana, to the City of New Orleans where, if the President’s two trillion-dollar infrastructure plan passes, will bring this area and minority communities in many other cities outstanding news!

As had happened in Nashville, America’s most celebrated “prior” infrastructure project, the interstate highway system, rammed an elevated freeway right through the center of Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans. Residents fought in vain to stop the construction, but Amy Stelly, a designer and activist has waged a decades-long campaign to take it down! People laughed and told her: “You can’t just remove a highway?” She said: “Oh yes, I most certainly can!”

Amy might indeed get the last laugh because President Biden singled out REMOVAL of the Clayborne Expressway as one of 10 priority projects in his infrastructure plan which includes $20 billion to “reconnect” communities of color to economic opportunity. Provisions intended to address longstanding racial inequities.

If anything in this post has opened your eyes and heart to something you may not have realized was happening, I would ask you be deliberate to remain aware and get involved. Here are some things that you can do?

  1. Whether your specific community is suffering from environmental injustice or not, it is important to do what you can to educate yourself and others on how this form of racism happens, then become involved in changing it. Here are some ways to get involved:
  2. Attend local city council meetings to find out about new developments before they are put into place,
  3. Join a local environmental justice organization.
  4. Call your state or local representatives to inform them of the environmental hazards in your community or others.

Fighting environmental racism is a dirty job (no pun intended) but is so necessary for the betterment of all our communities. Let’s get to work!

How Can an Arts Organization Deal with the Climate Crisis?

Steve Ernst

Stephen Jenkinson is a teacher, a student of life, a philosopher, and the founder of the Wisdom School in Ontario Canada. This story, about an experience he had while on a speaking tour to New Zealand two years ago, seems eerily prescient for these times.

The flight to Christchurch, a marathon at best, was an ordeal due to delays and the need to fly around a major thunderstorm. Our plane arrived just ahead of the storm and by the time I went through customs and got to my hotel, it was almost midnight, and the storm was raging. I closed the drapes on my windows, noting that my room looked right out over the beach, and fell exhausted into bed.

Several hours later, I was jolted out of bed by the sound of what had to be a steam locomotive about to run right through my room with the light of its headlamp blasting through the window’s curtains. I stumbled to the window, drew aside the curtain, and saw a large, two-rotor helicopter slowly sweeping its searchlight over the raging surf below. After several minutes, finding no one in need of rescue on this section of beach, it very slowly started working its way down the beach, continuing its search. I went back to bed, and, despite my rude awakening, fell instantly back to sleep. About 6 in the morning the helicopter returned. The storm was abating and as dawn broke, it turned its searchlight off and flew away.

It occurred to me that this may well describe our role in the coming storm—even as the storm is raging around us—to search, with no guarantee of success, for those that may need our help.

Now some may find this a depressing metaphor, but I find it strangely liberating. Acknowledging our inability to stop the coming storm or even to steer its path, can free us from an impossible burden, letting us focus on mitigations that are within our grasp:

  • Sounding the storm-warning sirens,
  • Dramatically increasing the importance of preparing for the storm,
  • Exploding the false choice between hope or despair,
  • Recognizing our desire to get back to normal as a delusion and a fool’s errand,
  • Resisting the urge to hunker down until the crisis runs its course—because this crisis ends us before it runs its course.
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But what kind of help can a chorus offer to those in need, you might ask. I suggest that a society’s response to danger depends a lot on its collective world view. A society with a deeply embedded sense that we’re all in this together is much more resilient in the face of disaster than one that celebrates the cult of the individual. And surely, transforming a culture’s point of view is squarely in the wheelhouse of an arts organization such as the Peace Chorus. Like the cellist of Sarajevo, we can offer a weary audience a shared experience of beauty, an experience that flows from the efforts of many individuals blending and harmonizing.

Perhaps, such a shared experience can help us all to, “rededicate ourselves to redoubling our efforts, again and again, with ever greater effort as we continue. The alternative of giving up is guaranteed not to be more enjoyable than working well together on a crisis that could bring out the best in us. The alternative of pretending everything is normal, scorning radical activism, and contenting ourselves with voting in yet another ‘most important election of our lifetime’ every two years is guaranteed to create a crisis of faith and a crisis of guilt. Let’s not go there. Or rather, let’s not stay there.”1

As conditions continue to deteriorate,2,3,4 perhaps the Chorus can help each member of our audience ask, “Is it essential to my continued efforts in this crisis that I believe I’m on the winning side?” If I come to realize that I’m in a struggle I cannot win, can I get back in the helicopter and offer what help I can to those caught in the storm, dedicating myself to ending with dignity and kindness, with the closest thing I can manage to the grace and wisdom that could have saved us?

1 From David Swanson’s review of Dahr Jamail’s “The End of Ice”

2 By 2040, large areas of India could experience 5 consecutive days with temperatures topping 125 degrees F. The human body cannot survive for more than a few hours in such an environment. Unlike a famine that can be mitigated by importing food, or a hurricane where the damage can be repaired, there would be no way to escape the heat, no safe place to go, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people literally being cooked to death. IPCC report 2021.

3 None of [the] places, which today supply much of the world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study predicted, but worse than any droughts in a thousand years—and that includes those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for the death of the Anasazi civilization.

4 Since 2011, about one million Syrian refugees, fleeing a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought, destabilized many countries in eastern Europe and fueled a wave of authoritarian, “populist” regimes. The World Bank estimates that in the next 30 years, the number of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the rest of South Asia will swell to 140 million. The U.N. projections are bleaker: “a billion or more vulnerable poor people dispossessed of their home and turned outward to wander through hostile territories in search of a new one, with little choice but to fight or flee.” David Wallice Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth

Reports from the Environment Washington Research & Policy Center

Environment Washington Research & Policy Center has just released “Trouble In The Air: Millions of Americans breathed polluted air in 2020,” a report by Bryn Huxley-Reicher, Morgan Folger, and Matt Casale.

Despite much progress in reducing levels of air pollution in the U.S., millions of Americans are exposed to unhealthy levels of pollution every year. Ozone and small particulate matter less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), among other pollutants, are widespread in the U.S. and have serious health effects.

Currently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe and acceptable levels of air pollution that many American public health groups and international agencies consider unhealthy. This report examines EPA air quality data from 2020 and shows how often Americans living in large urban areas, small urban areas and rural counties were exposed to air pollution that could damage their health.

The phenomenon of “white flight” has left non-white populations living in areas of our country that are the least healthy. But this reports outlines what our country must do:

  • Electrify buildings, equipment and transportation.
  • Reform the way we move by enabling people to drive less and walk, bike and use transit more.

Have a look at this and other great reports available at the Environment Washington Research & Policy Center: https://environmentwashingtoncenter.org/reports.

Resources on Environmental Justice

Web pages
Also, books and documentaries . . .
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Books
Documentaries
  • An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
  • An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017)
  • The 11th Hour (2007)
  • David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
  • This changes everything (based on, or inspired by Naomi Klein’s book)
  • Before the Flood
  • Brave Blue World: Racing to solve our water crisis
  • The True Cost 2015 (about the business of fast fashion)
  • Cowspiracy
  • Mission Blue (2014)
  • Chasing Coral (2017)
  • Seaspiracy (2021)
  • Kiss the Ground (2020)
  • The Soil Solution to Climate Change (2013)

Organizations Working on This Issue

  • GreenAction for Health and Environmental Justice, mobilizing community power to win victories that change government and corporate policies and practices to protect health and to promote environmental, social, economic and climate justice.
  • Environment Washington Research & Policy Center, dedicated to protecting our air, water and open spaces. They investigate problems, craft solutions, educate the public and decision-makers, and help the public make their voices heard in local, state and national debates over the quality of our environment and our lives.
  • Global Citizen, taking action to defeat poverty, demand equity, and defend the planet, globally.
  • NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, fighting for racial justice. Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans.
  • Drawdown Project, to help the world reach the point when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing and start to steadily decline, thereby stopping catastrophic climate change — as quickly, safely, and equitably as possible. Look for their how-to guide and their new online course.
  • 350.org, an international movement of ordinary people working to end the age of fossil fuels and build a world of community-led renewable energy for all.
  • Greenpeace, a global network of independent campaigning organizations that use peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
  • Sierra Club, a grassroots environmental organization that defends everyone’s right to a healthy world and fights for Earth’s natural resources.

Quotes about environmental justice

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?” — Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), Christmas Eve sermon, 1967

“We live in very dark times in many different ways and it feels like the situation in our society is getting worse at the same time as the planet is getting worse. Everything is moving in the wrong direction and we cannot fix the climate without fixing all these other issues—they have to be combined. Environmental racism is a thing that’s happening everywhere.” — Greta Thunberg, interview with Naomi Klein, September 2019

“Sustainable development—development that does not destroy or undermine the ecological, economic, or social basis on which continued development depends—is the only viable pathway to a more secure and hopeful future for rich and poor alike.” — Maurice Strong (1925-2015), Opening Statement to the Rio Summit, 1992

“A new report from the Environmental Protection Agency finds that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air—even as the agency seeks to roll back regulations on pollution.” — Vann R. Newkirk II, The Atlantic, 28 February 2018

“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in, and day-out.” — Robert Collier

Announcements

Mark your calendars! We are thrilled to announce that we will be holding our Give for Peace (formally known as Feast for Peace) fundraising event on Wednesday 6 April 2022 at 6 PM PST. This will be an incredible time for us to join together, in our own homes, in support of peace and justice! There is much in store! Our engaging virtual program will include several performances and people in our community who stand behind our desire for a just and peaceful world. Stay tuned for more information!

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Seattle Peace Chorus has continued to sing for peace & justice:

Seattle Peace Chorus receives support from:

Thank You for Supporting Seattle Peace Chorus!

We thank everyone who chose to support Seattle Peace Chorus on GivingTuesday on 30 November 2021. GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world.

We are asking our supporters to hold the date for our virtual fundraiser, “Give for Peace,” Wednesday 6 April 2022 at 6:30 PM PST.

The work we do for peace through music runs in, through, and around everything. With peace there is a better chance to meet the climate crisis. With peace, there is a better chance to meet all the human needs of the planet. The ripple effect is endless. Peace through music increases the chances of this happening exponentially. Music sings to the very heart of everything we want and hold dear.

Donating to the Seattle Peace chorus not only helps bring the messages of peace and understanding to our communities and world, it’s also easy to do! We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, so donations are tax-deductible. Our identification number is 91-1380540.

Words from our Director: Jubilation in My Soul

Frederick N. West

During the tumultuous times following the killing of George Floyd, I had many conversations with the Seattle Peace Chorus repertoire and board members about what creative effort we could make that would be an artistic contribution to the dialogue sweeping the nation.

Reaching out to my long-time colleague and musical brother Kent Stevenson, who is a great gospel director, composer, and pianist, we developed an idea for him to create a new work for Seattle Peace Chorus.

This new work celebrates the lives of six dynamic Black geniuses that might not be in the general awareness of the average person. The styles of these pieces vary from jazz, to gospel, to blues, showing Kent’s wide command of musical language.

  • “Elegant, Cool” is for Billy Strayhorn, the musical partner of Duke Ellington.
  • “Float Like a Butterfly; Sting Like a Bee,” features the wisdom of Muhammad Ali, the world champion boxer who spoke out against the Vietnam War.
  • “Unbowed, Unbossed, and Unbought,” describes the career of Shirley Chisholm, who paved the way for numerous women of all backgrounds into congressional and other high ranking government positions.
  • “We,” contains the poetic lines of Mona Lisa Saloy, and is dedicated to Mary McCleod Bethune, an educator who had the ear of ELeanor Roosevelt and even F.D.R.
  • “Freedom Land” is dedicated to Bayard Rustin, the political strategist and unsung right hand to MLK, Jr.
  • “'Fantastique' Josephine!” is a homage to Josephine Baker, whose career as a singer was just a part of her extraordinary life.

Then Kent decided he would create a work called “Making Something New” honoring Black inventors who are abundant and have greatly contributed to the life of this country.

Kent concludes with a sketch about the Tulsa Massacre 101 years ago, a story that has been swept under the rug for many years and is hard to hear.

Kent has now applied all of his genius to this project, and each new movement is another gem in “Jubilation in My Soul: A Song Gallery of Dynamic Black Lives.”

What is even more valuable than Kent’s music is his ability to teach us about what the world feels like as a black musician reflecting on the long road of progress that Black people have been on even through so many appalling and discouraging, and outrageous expressions of racism and prejudice in our time.

Kent is generally encouraged, especially after seeing so many white folks in the rallies and marches in the last two years supporting the worth and dignity of Black lives.

Kent as a teacher is something you cannot transcribe but only be fortunate enough to witness.

The movements have now become part of the choir’s language and we hope to be able to come out in March with a full, live, in-person concert. The choir has endeavored to learn these works through masks and with air filters and through zoom rehearsals. We are dedicated to bringing this new work to life even as we all struggle with the Covid virus and variants and these great limitations. Stay tuned for more details on our Spring concert.

Gospel music is often learned by ear and there is not often written music available. However, Seattle Peace Chorus has made a point to have all of Kent’s pieces transcribed so that there will be a collection of written music that can be universally learned and appreciated.

We are grateful to Kent for his great creative work, to Charlie Hiestand and Doug Balcom for transcribing the music, and to the indomitable singers who have been learning each inspiring movement.

We hope this music will have a long life!