Patricia Redding considers herself a walking example of pollution. The Southwest Detroit resident lives in the highly industrialized 48217 zip code – the most polluted zip code in Michigan – and suffers from asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
She has lost 12 family members to environment-related diseases like lung and kidney cancer and is currently caring for her brother, who is suffering from stage 4 prostate cancer. She said these are just some of the losses she’s experienced in the years she worked as a mail carrier in Southwest Detroit and Dearborn.
“I have delivered mail to every one of those zip codes… and I’ve seen how many people that have died and have suffered from these companies,” she said.
Redding was among the dozens of people who came to Dearborn’s Salina Intermediate School Monday evening for “Pollution Has No Boundaries: Where Do We Go From Here?”, a panel discussion addressing the environmental injustices facing Southwest Detroit, Dearborn, River Rouge, Ecorse and surrounding communities.
The evening was about drawing awareness to the environmental problems and a call to action. The panel discussed the historical context of the pollution and how it disproportionately affects Black and brown families who settled in the area after the Great Migration and were forced to stay through systemic racism and redlining.
The event was titled after the name of an upcoming documentary and photo exhibit, from visual journalist and interdisciplinary artist Wesaam Al-Badry, who conducted over 70 interviews and collected more than 2000 photos to expose environmental injustices in Southwest Detroit, Dearborn and surrounding communities.
Audience members got a short preview of the project – expected to be released early next year – ahead of the discussion.
In addition to Al-Badry, the panel included community and social justice activists Theresa Landrum and Samraa Luqman; Bilal Hammoud, executive director of the American Arab Chamber of Commerce; and Halima Salah, a Wayne State University PhD student who studies air quality and human health.
A lifelong resident of 48217, Landrum said they never realized growing up how the environment impacted health and got into activism after watching people in the community as young as 17 develop cancer.
“Every day we saw orange skies, gray skies, soot on our homes, soot on our cars, soot on the snow, and we would actually write our name in it,” Landrum said, “not understanding that fallout from industries that put a roof over our heads, clothes on our back and food in our mouth was the cause for what we now know today as pollution that is really having a serious impact on our global warming… and our climate crisis.”
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Air pollution respects no boundaries and impacts those who live adjacent to or downwind of the emitting sources. Since the industrial revolution, socially constructed laws and systems created urban environments where the most vulnerable in our society, those of low income and disenfranchised minorities, bear the costs of air pollution in our modern society. Detroit…
Luqman had a similar story. The lifelong Dearborn resident remembers trucks dripping chemicals into the street and was exposed to activism early when her mother – a Yemeni immigrant – brought up the issue to the city council. To her, the issue is about the people, especially protecting her kids.
“It’s not the love for environmental justice; it’s the love for my children and the people that live next to me who are dying,” she said. “It’s the thought of having my children having some kind of cancer or having to remove another tumor or to wake up screaming in the middle of the night [not being able to breathe].”
“Every day we saw orange skies, gray skies, soot on our homes, soot on our cars, soot on the snow, and we would actually write our name in it, not understanding that fallout from industries that put a roof over our heads, clothes on our back and food in our mouth was the cause for what we now know today as pollution that is really having a serious impact on our global warming… and our climate crisis.”
Theresa Landrum
Solutions exist, but incentives for polluting companies to make changes – which are often costly – do not, especially without pressure or regulations from lawmakers.
Luqman said these factories could replace furnaces, clean up dust or embrace green industrial technology, like one steel company is doing in Middletown, Ohio.
“They’ve decided…that [Middletown] deserves clean air using federal funds,” she said, “and that community is primarily not Black and brown people.”
Hammoud said it was about leveraging political and economic will.
“[It’s about] how you can influence an election and how much you can influence their bank accounts,” he said. “If you can make either one of those hurt, collectively, that’s how you effectuate change.”
The panel discussed how corporations were able to perpetuate environmental injustice because racially diverse ethnic communities in the area – which include large Black, Latino and Middle Eastern populations – live separately from one other, weakening their collective power.
“In this room, we have about five different ethnicities,” Landrum said. “If we can join Dearborn with Ecorse with River Rouge with Melvindale and Southwest Detroit, that’s power.”
On a practical level, the panel discussed the importance of contacting elected representatives regularly and holding them accountable when they fail to keep their promises.
They encouraged community members to attend meetings where decisions are being made to express their concerns, including private board meetings where purchasing just one share of stock can grant access.
They also encouraged public shaming of irresponsible companies and representatives, which could include protesting at meetings or placing full-page ads in newspapers.
Following the meeting, audience members said they felt understood and motivated by the discussion and were eager to see and share Al-Badry’s full project when it comes out next year.
Ann Arbor resident Stephen Brown, who is active in statewide environmental organizations, said he wants to organize film screenings and panel discussions with the activism groups he’s involved in and share them with university students.
Lifelong River Rouge resident Ebony Elmore lost her father – a nonsmoker – to lung cancer shortly after he retired from working in the factories and said she is excited to fight back.
“Coming out here just to hear the connected stories and see how everybody works together from different cities to kind of like solve the problem…,” she said, “I’m very energized.”