WolfeNotes.com

“NJ schools are intensely segregated along racial and class lines. The concentration of poverty is extreme. In Abbott districts, racial minorities makeup 90-95% of enrollments and students classified as in poverty represent 90-93%“
David Sciarra, Education Law Center

Bill WolfeAvery Grant, Long Branch, moderated

The South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (SJEJA) held a statewide conference on “The Crisis of Building Schools on Contaminated Sites and Unhealthy Schools in New Jersey” last Saturday at Thomas Edison College in Trenton.
The event focused on huge disparities in educational opportunity and the disproportionate environmental health threats that urban and minority children face at school.
The Conference featured special guest speaker Lois Gibbs, the nationally recognized upstate NY “housewife” who founded the anti toxics movement based on her family experience at the notorious “Love Canal”.

Bill WolfeRoy Jones, Co-Chair, SJEJA

Remarkably, the NJ School Construction Corporation (abolished and reestablished as the School Development Authority) has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of educational funds intended to benefit disadvantaged black children on acquisition of contaminated land and construction of schools on toxic waste sites, including Superfund sites. Such a practice would not be tolerated and never happen in wealthy suburban white school districts. Here’s a link to the video of the presentation by SJEJA Co-Chair Roy Jones (thanks to Peter Montague for shooting and sharing video):
http://www.motionbox.com/video/player/a098dfb9121fe328/

Bill WolfeDavid Sciarra, Director, Education Law Center, legal champion of the “Abbott v. Burke” equitable school funding decision

David Sciarra spoke about the continuing challenges facing Abbott districts. He emphasized the need for additional $2.5 billion in school construction funding and the gross segregation and concentration of poverty in the Abbott school districts.
Lois Gibbs was astonished that – 30 years after the tragedy of Love Canal where a community was built on top of a toxic chemical waste dump – that she was speaking in NJ (of all places) to oppose construction of new schools on landfills and toxic waste sites. Gibbs explained how government policies based on cost benefit analysis and risk assessment decide who lives and who dies. “The system is set up to keep us from winning… The results of cost benefit analysis really mean that poor and working class people don’t matter. We are expendable.” she said.

Bill WolfeLois Gibbs, of “Love Canal” fame, Director of the Center for Health, Justice and Environment

Bill WolfeDr. Peter Montague, longtime anti-toxics activist, founder of Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News, and nationally recognized proponent of the Precautionary Principle

Peter Montague, longtime anti-toxics advocate, presented recent scientific findings about health effects of industrial chemicals, which have shown to mimic hormones and impact human growth and reproduction at extremely low levels. He highlighted the ned for a precautionary approach. This would put the burden on the chemical industry to show reasonable evidence of no harm before marketing and introducing chemicals into the environment.

Bill WolfeDr. A.S. Mahdi Ibn Ziyad, Congressional candidate in NJ’s First District, environmental justice activist, teacher and adjunct professor

Dr. Ziyad spoke of the need for social and economic change to promote justice – he is a candidate for Congress in NJ’s 1st Congressional District. He emphasized that one of his platform priorities in environmental justice.

Bill WolfeAlgernon Ward, chemist adn community activist, Trenton

Algernon Ward presented a case study of successful community organizing to block construction of the Martin Luther King Jr. school in Trenton. Toxic soils were imported to the site and used as “clean fill”. The outraged community organized and forced the SCC to demolish the partially built structure ($27 million loss) and cleanup the site before building a new school there.

Yalies embrace “Governator” over Nobel Laureate

Bill WolfeYale’s Woolsey Hall is packed to the rafters.

The Yale University community turned out for “The Governors Declaration on Climate Change” on Friday. The well promoted event was timed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of President Teddy Roosevelt’s landmark “Conference of Governors” in Washington DC.

Bill WolfePinchot is buried in Milford, Pennsylvania, along the Delaware River

That 1908 event helped launch the conservation movement (precursor to today’s environmental movement). Roosevelt’s close advisor, first Chief of the US Forest Service and conservationist Gifford Pinchot, worked to establish the National Parks System and inspire State programs to protect land. In an historic debate that still rages, Pinchot’s “conservationist” views clashed with the “preservationist” orientation advocated by John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club.

Bill WolfeNobel Laureate Dr. R.K. Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), welcomes the warm reception.

The event focused on the leadership of 18 Governor’s who signed the “federal partnership” declaration on global warming, but California Governor Schwarzenegger clearly won the hearts and minds of the Yale crowd. In remarks in which he took personal credit for forming the fitness “movement”, Schwarzennegger took the opportunity to ridicule environmentalists.

Bill WolfeSchwartzenegger speaks at Yale.

Schwarzenegger characterized environmentalists as effete (gay? feminine?) elite proponents of a failed movement based upon shame, guilt, pessimism, government solutions, and limits to growth (you think the Ahnold can say “Malthusian”?).
Analogizing to what he described as the takeoff in today’s hugely popular personal fitness “movement” (a “movement” he took credit for having started with “Pumping Iron”, back in the day when weightlifters were considered nerds), Schwarzenegger advocated his new muscular macho brand of the “environmental movement”.

Bill WolfeSchwarzenegger and Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell sign Governor’s Declaration at Yale.

This new “movement” he is leading is optimistic, exciting, cool, sexy, and most importantly, macho. It relies on capitalist market investment and trusts technological solutions, and is NOT antiquated government command and control driven.
The contrast with the humble Nobel Laureate scientist, Dr. Pachauri could not have been more stark.
But the Yale community absolutely ate Schwarzenegger up – his remarks were punctuated with applause and laughter. The crowd gave him a spontaneous standing ovation, which was far in excess of the response to Nobel Laureate and IPCC Chair Dr. Pachauri.
Frankly, I was embarrased for Yale – an elite University supposedly dedicated to the life of the mind and pursuit of Truth, not the promotion of political propaganda.
In my view, Schwarzenegger is a bully who blends certain retrograde cultural myths and machismo with uninformed market fundamentalist rhetoric. His public policy views may be informed by good speech writers, but he clearly is overly optimistic – bordering on utopian – in his advocacy of capitalism, private markets, and technology to provide a magic bullet to solve our environmental problems.
This is a very dangerous combination of attributes in a politician. But I’m sure the California folks who elected him are beginning to understand this “Hybrid Hummer environmentalism”.

Bill WolfeIn a wonderful historic gesture, grandsons of Gifford Pinchot and Teddy Roosevelt are special guests at Yale (from left).

*** Apologies – NJ.Com took down the photos, which were originally published on my “NJ Voices” column at NJ.Com. I was able to save the text, but not the photos. What assholes.

I had a press pass for the Obama rally in Harrisburg on Saturday night and was able to take these excellent photographs – click on this link to view the pictures:
http://128.2.8.237/bw/photos/obama/selects/
This is my favorite:
http://128.2.8.237/bw/photos/obama/selects/IMG_4226.jpg
The 12+ MB original RAW files have been reduced for posting. Originals are far higher quality and suitable for copying, up to poster size. Shoot me an email if you are interested in making copies:
bill_wolfe@comcast.net

Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
*Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

Read more…

“Long ago it was said that “one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.” That was true then. It did not know because it did not care.” Jacob Riis [1890]

*** Apologies – NJ.Com took down the photos, which were originally published on my “NJ Voices” column at NJ.Com. I was able to save the text, but not the photos. What assholes.
Jacob Riis’ 1890 classic book – a landmark in photojournalism – “How the Other Half Lives” illustrated the outrageous conditions in the lower east side slums of New York – his expose had an immediate impact, inspiring reforms that changed New York. I often wonder: where has that same sense of outrage at injustice gone? Lets take a look.
Street Scenes in Passaic City, NJ
In the tradition and spirit of Riis (I don’t remotely pretend to the competence or quality of Riis’ work), I went to North Jersey yesterday to document conditions at some urban schools located on toxic waste sites. What I found both appalled and pleased me.
I was overwhelmed by this scene – the people of Passaic City have created beauty on the streets of their neighborhoods.

Bill Wolfe

It is outrageous that City and State officials have not been nearly as creative or committed as the people who live there, and instead have abandoned them – abandoned industrial sites and signs of neglect and disinvestment were everywhere.

Bill Wolfetoxic industrial rubble strewn site – owned by City – is directly across the street from religious shrine and in front of Public School #9

Bill Wolfetoxic site across street – 100 feet – from PS #9. Owned by City

Bill WolfeToxic site next door to PS #9

Bill Wolfe

The SCC sign says “Health and Safety Project for School #9″ – the cruel irony is that this did not include a cleanup of the abandoned toxic site across the street, literally just feet from school doors.

Bill Wolfe

Pre-schoolers – our most sensitive and special ones – were similarly at risk. These pre-school trailers were located at the perimeter of a brownfields project. Take a look and ask if you would want to send your young child here.

Bill WolfePre-school trailers can be seen in background. This brownfield site is a SDA construction site known as the “Dr. Robert Holster Education Complex”. A school was supposed to have been built there over 4 years ago but the site still sits vacant. A community hospital was torn down by SCA to build the school.

Bill Wolfe

Bill Wolfe

Bill WolfeIn foreground, a discarded tire (at edge of brownfield site) is used as planter – lets hope that the soil kids plant and play in has been tested and is safe.

Discarded shipping crates are used for storage – when I was a kid going to school in an upscale suburban town in Westchester County, my favorite reading was a series titled “The Box Car Kids”. This scene added new meaning to that phrase from my youth.

Bill Wolfe

Problems also included over-crowding. Lack of funding and delays in school construction forced kids to learn in trailers for an unacceptable extended period of time

Bill Wolfe

We can do better than this
(Note: while taking these pictures, I was confronted by school and day care officials. I explained my purposes and had very good conversations with them. But shame of Passaic City officials for sending police to my home tonight to investigate me for shooting these photo’s).

Bill Wolfe