23+October+2008+Environmental+Justice

We drove REALLY far south, past Pullman to the banks of the Calumet River, and arrived at Altgeld Gardens, where we drove around looking for the People for Community Recovery office, which we eventually found tucked behind a boarded-up grocery store. I was very excited about this trip -- PCR ( [|www.pcr-**chicago**.org]) is one of the most significant EJ groups in the world. It was founded by Hazel Johnson, who realized after her husband died of cancer that there was an extremely high rate of cancer in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing project originally built (on industrial waste landfill) as housing for African-American veterans after WWII. Hazel's daughter Cheryl now leads the organization, and she is extremely knowledgeable about the scientific, health, and economic fields relating to pollution. It was a striking scene -- she sat on a desk in a tiny dingy office, made of the usual cinderblock public housing construction; we all crowded around and listened as she described the decades -long fight with CHA the residents of public housing has been engaged in over the issue of toxic contaminants in the public housing projects, from lead poisoning to PCBs in the ground due to CHA allowing industries to dump their waste on public housing property. Cheryl told us about how CHA had allotted $350 million to fight the residents in court rather than agreeing to clean up the pollution, and many other stories of silencing the residents' voices. She raised questions about the renovations of the housing projects, which don't seem like they actually cost the many millions that the city has awarded to construction companies. She took us on a tour of the area, surrounded by industry and industrial landfills and the heavily polluted Calumet River, and showed us the gardens people grow although the soil is toxic -- she attributes this to a habit of fatalism, people assuming something is going to kill them sooner or later, they can't really prevent it. Talking about it on the way back, students voiced disappointment in our legislators for fighting environmental activism (which can target campaign-contributing industries) instead of supporting it.