...educating the humankind, two ears at a time
Voices from Sacrifice Zones
Brandywine, MD (www.btbcoalition.org)
In Sacrifice Zone, author, Brandywine TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition tells the stories of a 72% Black Community, local unwanted land-use causing disproportionately high levels of industrial chemical air pollution.
Another neighborhood disproportionate land-use causes another "sacrifice zone." Residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical air pollutants, need regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and needs to empower individuals and communities, to advance local residents causes, educate the public, and influence local policymakers by voices of the residents giving them the power to decide, and empower grassroots leaders in the struggle to develop actionable strategic plans for environmental equality within the fence line community disproportionate affected with heavy industry pollutants.
Steve Lerner
In Sacrifice Zone, author, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones." And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones; tainted with chemical pollutants need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fence line with heavy industry. https://percolate.blogtalkradio.com/theorganicview/2015/06/10/are-you-living-in-a-sacrifice-zone.
Locally "affected" Communities
Your Choice, Your Voice, Your Community Lifestyle & Wellness
Bluefield was once prosperous. It simultaneously served the commercial, banking, and medical needs of the mining towns of Southwestern Virginia and Southern West Virginia. My hometown’s heyday coincided with the Second World War. In Bluefield’s oversized rail yards, the Norfolk & Western linked up hundred-car coal trains and rolled them downhill from the mountains into the Piedmont, bound for Norfolk, where Appalachian anthracite found its way into the bellies of the ships whose men and materiel would turn the tide of war. (So strategic was Bluefield to the Allied effort, that Hitler placed it on his target list.) Since then, Bluefield’s been in slow decline, in the last seventy years having lost half its population and much of its spirit.
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There are twin Bluefields, one in WV, the other next door in VA. Along the border, Virginia’s orderly ridges give way to West Virginia’s amorphous mountains — like convolutions of the brain — with their dead-end hollows. In 1902, in one such hollow in adjacent McDowell County, US Steel established a company town, Gary, which produced high-grade metallurgical coal for seven decades, employing hundreds. By the early 1980s though, Gary’s fourteen mines were tapped out, and US Steel pulled the plug. Gary’s unemployment rate soared, eventually topping 90%, the highest in the nation. McDowell County has never recovered. Alcoholism and drug addiction are rampant.