22+September+-+Environmental+Justice

The environmental justice group got an overview of global warming issues and actions from Brian Granahan of Environment Illinois (http://www.environmentillinois.org/) in the morning, and spent the afternoon going to Little Village for the toxic tour. We also read the article "Black, Brown, Red, and Poisoned -- environmental racism" (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_/ai_15493640). Brian gave us a ton of information -- talked a mile a minute, and the students listened well and asked great questions. For example, as Brian was talking about the clean cars campaign, a student asked about the accuracy of an article he had recently read asserting that the environmental impact of a hybrid car was worse than that of a Hummer because there isn't yet a system in place for recycling old (toxic) lithium batteries. This kind of question enabled us to discuss the balance of costs and benefits and exploring the realm of unintended/unforeseen consequences in policy making. One thing that I was really struck by was his emphasis on Illinois as a bellweather state -- though we aim for impact at a national level, federal legislation often waits on state-level implementation, to see if it will work, so working on policy here potentially has even wider implications. It took us a while to get to Little Village; we found a good Mexican diner there to eat lunch but we were running horribly late, so we kind of ran through the toxic tour, saw the steel drum plant and the recycling plant that had been relocated from Lincoln Park to LV (did you see the Trib front page article of 9/29/08 "TOXIC AIR" -- it mentions the steel drum factory in Lincoln Park which is one of the top polluters and -- surprise, surprise-- is slated to be moved to an area on the South Side that is already heavily polluted) and the Crawford Coal-fired power plant. At the Fair on Weds., we found out about LVEJO's current campaigns -- using the Mayor's interest in hosting the Olympics to pressure him to remove the blot of the coal power plants from the "green city" of Chicago. We may try to hook into some of these campaigns. More later. Shanti