Landfill mixed media
GraceKatonaDanielle Koonce in an Opinion piece in the Fayetteville Observer, states...
"And it’s not just household garbage coming in — chemical waste and coal ash has also been disposed of in the Sampson County landfill."
"We listened to community members share how they can no longer garden or enjoy the outdoors due to the thick odor and fumes from the landfill."
"We learned that the landfill receives trash from around the state, from as far away as New York City, and even trash that comes in on ship-barges through Wilmington."
While Bryan Wuester, manager for the Sampson County Landfill states in the Sampson Independent...
"The Sampson landfill accepts waste from North Carolina only, about 5,450 tons from 16 different counties a day."
"The landfill accepts three kinds of waste: construction and demolition materials, solid waste and special waste, which are byproducts of industry. No coal ash comes into the Sampson facility..."
These are two different stories of the landfill coming from two different stakeholders, one in which needs the landfill to be in operation for a job and the other a concerned citizen worried about the disproportional impacts her community faces. While Danielle Koonce listens to the realities of the community members located around the landfill who express concern and worry, the landfill manager denies these realities and insists they are not true. This is not only invaliding to the community members who are fighting to get their voices heard but further embeds environmental injustice into the community.
Grace Katona
GraceKatonaEarly local organizing that uses conflict and difference as a way to generate transformative solutions. Solutions that serve more then one worldview instead of growing otherness, separateness, and hierarchy. In the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, brown states...
At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world. We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist.
An example of success using this strategy is the Dogwood Alliance in joint with other partners who put a stop to a wood pellet mill in Lumberton, NC. The article located on the Dogwood Alliance webpage about this victory states the following.
THE CLOSURE OF THIS FACILITY IS ALSO A WIN FOR OUR CLIMATE. THE BURNING OF THESE PELLETS WOULD HAVE ADDED THOUSANDS OF TONS OF CARBON DIOXIDE TO THE ATMOSPHERE, THE EQUIVALENT OF 155,580 CARS ON THE ROAD.
Link to this webpage: https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2022/04/statement-wood-pellet-mill-stop…
second thoughts on willowick
mikefortunKatie Cox Shrader10:44 AM Today@kimfortun@uci.edu I know what you mean about that anxiety. Two thoughts:
- Re working with urban planners and others on gentrification: Santa Ana has a long, rich history of anti-gentrification organizing, and many of the groups involved in those have worked with UCI including planners. I recall from my time working with Montoya that some of the politics there are sensitive. I think an important next step is to be researching/documenting some of that history and reaching out to groups like el Centro Cultural de México and the Kennedy Commission. Maybe the OC library archive too. It seems really important to include gentrification as a central part of our analysis of EiJ in SA and I think we have a lot to learn from them. Those conversations may give us some insight into how outside planners might help or support, and how they might already be doing so.
- This kind of discursive risk does seem really important to track... AB 617 certainly comes to mind here. I also wonder how we might discern the difference between instances where well-intentioned interventions are captured or coopted in implementation, and those where legislation is compromised from the outset. Not to be cynical, but I am very curious about what developers supported the Surplus Land Act. Is the kind of development that Rise Up Willowick is fighting a "detour from intent" or is it a predictable/anticipated outcome of incentivizing the auction of public land for (private) redevelopment? In other words, is the Surplus Land Act a mechanism for progressive redistribution (golf courses become affordable housing), or neoliberal privatization of public assets (city-owned green space becomes a Jamba Juice)? Such a very California question.Show lessReassigned to kimfortun@uci.eduKatie Cox Shrader10:46 AM Today@mike.fortun@uci.edu ... Now am thinking we need to have a workflow for moving these side-bar conversations into PECE as analysis of field notes. Maybe we could be in the habit of having these conversations in the text of the document, rather than the comments?