– Jeff Conant
If Detroit has come to represent post-industrial devastation and the efforts of grassroots communities to build and rebuild with hope and dignity, then Detroit’s waste incinerator, one of the largest in the world, is profoundly symbolic of the city’s plight, and serves as a crucible for the climate justice movement. This is why its been chosen as a target for action on Saturday, the last day of the U.S. Social Forum.
http://www.cleanairgoodjobsjustice.org
The fight over Detroit’s waste incinerator is one of the most iconic environmental and social justice fights in the U.S. today. The incinerator began operating in the late 1980s over strong community opposition; over it’s 20 years of operation, the incinerator has cost Detroit taxpayers over $1.1 billion and plagued the city with toxic pollution leading to asthma rates three times the national average.
Rhonda Anderson of the Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program says, “The BP oil disaster has focused public attention on our unhealthy energy choices. In Detroit, hundreds of local BP-style disasters occur every day. The impact is immense, and entirely avoidable.”
Incinerators have long been a key target of environmental justice struggles, and with great success: massive public opposition and community advocacy have prevented any new incinerators from being built in the U.S. since 1997, in favor of alternative waste reduction practices such as recycling and composting. In recent years, the incinerator industry has tried to expand by marketing their facilities as “Waste to Energy” (WTE), using misleading claims of “reducing climate pollution,” and being a “clean energy source.” In fact, the opposite is true.
More than 90% of materials disposed of in incinerators and landfills can be reused, recycled and composted, creating both jobs and community resilience. Incinerators emit more CO2 per unit of electricity than coal-fired power plants. Incineration drives a climate-changing cycle of new resources pulled out of the earth, processed in factories, shipped around the world, and then wasted, buried, and burned. As a statement released by the Teamsters Union says, “The facts are clear. Recycling creates six to ten times more jobs than incinerating or land-filling. By recycling waste we can recover valuable materials and limit hazardous pollution.”
Similarly, the practice of zero waste – designing products and processes to minimize toxicity and waste and to conserve and recover all resources in a closed loop cycle – can conserve three to five times more energy than is produced by waste incineration.
It’s the same old story: industry maintains its costly and damaging technical solution – burn it all! – despite the existence of better, safer, cheaper, smarter options.
The word here in Detroit is that it’s time to stop burning. Ananda Tan of GAIA, the Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance, pointed out, “To stabilize the climate we need to stop burning oil, coal, forests, crops and waste. For most eco-system conscious cultures, fire is sacred – only to be used for life-support functions like cooking food, and carefully maintaining certain ecosystems with controlled burns. We need to reconsider the use of fire in destructive processes like burning for energy.” Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network concurred: “They’ve used fire the wrong way for too long,” he said.
That’s why hundreds of us will march to the incinerator this Saturday: to support Detroit’s frontline communities as the first front of the climate justice struggle, to stop the burning, and to build a new world from the ashes of the old.
(While Jeff Conant is here at the USSF working with Global Justice Ecology Project, his new book, A Poetics of Resistance: The Revolutionary Public Relations of the Zapatista Insurgency, has just been published by AK Press. There will be a joint book launch for this and other books at the Spirit of Hope Church in Detroit on Friday June 25 at 7 p.m.)
Great piece, Jeff. That’s a very powerful call–to restore the sacred and restorative power of fire, and end its misguided use on our struggling planet. Hope the march went well on Saturday. Que viva a new Detriot and new future rising from the ashes!