Earlier this month the Alliance for the Great Lakes Ambassador program (of which I am a part), held a monthly “deep dive” session on environmental justice.

According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, environmental justice is: 

… the fair treatment of people of all races, income, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government.

The truth is that many people are not afforded access to safe and clean water from the Great Lakes and are not protected from the pollution that is a byproduct of the lake economies, or the adverse dynamics of the lakes and their waterways. Disproportionately affected are low-income communities and communities of color.  

Two storylines from Chicago starkly illustrate this reality.

The first is an opinion article on the Alliance’s website from 2019, “Flooding Hits Hardest in Chicago’s Communities of Color”. For a variety of reasons, many Great Lakes cities struggle with stormwater management. Flooding can bring any number of health or economic challenges to individuals already facing many. The article details flooding that occurs in the city’s Southeast neighborhoods during and after severe storms. Some of these neighborhoods are highly industrial and so floodwaters may bring toxic hazards as they run over Superfund and brownfields sites. 

For me, the statistics below speak for themselves: 

{In Chicago} Just thirteen zip codes represent nearly three-fourths of all flood insurance claims. Over three-quarters of a million residents live here – including 200,000 children and 100,000 elderly. Over a quarter of households are below the poverty line. And 93% are households headed by a person of color.

By contrast, seventeen Chicago zip codes had the fewest flood claim payments between 2007 and 2016 (less than one percent combined). Only 30 percent of residents in these areas are people of color.

The second storyline is one I heard though an interview on the Alliance’s podcast, Lakes Chat, in 2022. Oscar Sanchez is the Community Planning Manager with the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

In his role, Mr. Sanchez was part of a group of activists who fought the relocation of General Iron, a metal sheeting company in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago (General Iron has now rebranded as Southside Recycling). General Iron had a large number of violations including for air pollution and questionable operations. The local community (mostly white, more affluent) no longer wanted General Iron as a neighbor. Initially General Iron received support, including incentive funding, from the City of Chicago to relocate to the southeast part of the city (mostly Latino with surrounding Black neighborhoods, not affluent).

But the identified site for relocation was across from a park and a high school and down the street from an elementary school. The local community was a working one where it was hard for people to get involved as they managed day to day struggles. It was, as Mr. Sanchez said, hard for them to fight back, but people were scared. So a coalition of activists from across the community took on the cause. 

After the organized resistance, the city denied the original permit request from General Iron in 2021. This decision was a win for Mr. Sanchez and his local communities in their fight for environmental justice. The win remains a tenuous one; final decisions remain in limbo as General Iron moves their case through the courts (as of September 2023 news articles).

The heart of the matter sits with a question Mr. Sanchez poses in the interview regarding stark differences in city and regional planning and policy between the north side and south side of the city: 

Just because we are poor doesn’t mean we should be treated poorly…  If it’s not good for one community, why is it OK for a different community?    

It’s a worthy question that should be asked again… and again… and again.