Читать книгу Lessons in Environmental Justice - Группа авторов - Страница 24

My mother could outwork me two to one…. She went down weighing 98 pounds before her death…. She was telling it in church, and she was shouting to it on Sunday, she was telling them all, it’s poison over here that’s killing people, EPA is lying to us! When we had a march out here in the neighborhood, she was one of the first, and she marched all the way in every march. Once I lost her to the chemicals here—and I know that’s what it was, you know, no one has to second guess—I made her a promise that I would never let her down, and I would never stop the fight. The more involved I am, the more that part of her is living.

On a hot July day, Patsy Oliver drove me through the neighborhood, narrating a house-by-house story of economic and medical disasters. The catalogue of shattered dreams was disheartening. By then, some houses had been on the market for as little as $7,000, and worsening floods had invaded part of the neighborhood. Oliver herself had replaced the floor in her home for the third time and had lost her mother, Mattie Warren, to cancer in the previous year. It was one of many sudden deaths that shocked the community.

Loss came in so many forms that it would be easy to focus only on that part of the story. But the residents’ resolute fight for social and environmental justice is just as remarkable. Over a period of many months, during short, intense research trips scheduled between my work obligations, I interviewed residents, attended many types of meetings, pored over documents, and thought hard about what EJ means in practice. I continued to visit the community during the transition to a buyout, and afterward I located and reinterviewed a number of families in their new homes. Using qualitative research methods, I did my best to create a holistic case study that would offer comparisons to other communities and preserve some of the unique details of this one. Like many of my colleagues, I hoped that my research, teaching, and writing about EJ would make some positive difference.