The BP project in East Chicago has many ramifications not only for the health of local residents who live under the plumb of BP, but also upstream political cultures who trade on the investment of BP. The political elite are very much aware of the increase risk factors and the data that reveals local residents losing additional personal wealth due to this project. In a era that has become ever more sensitive to increased risk factors due to environmental pollution, the thought of increasing toxic releases will suppress even further the future assessed values of properties in this very poor community, leaving East Chicagoans in even weaker position to compete in the future economy.
In addition to the loss of health and personal wealth the residents of East Chicago, who pay the highest property taxes in the state, are expected to provide $165,000,000 in charity to BP for a tax abatement. The construction phase of the project has already begun, but for some reason East Chicago and whiting businesses and restaurants are not seeing new business from construction workers. It appears BP is staging workers in Lancing Illinois and frequenting their businesses and restaurants.
I am discussed in local environmentalist who speak on behalf of such projects because of job creation. What do they know about economic development. 40% of East Chicago’s Adult population are considered functionally illiterate, with less than 2% obtaining a collage degree required for one of the ~70 jobs at BP. I think my circle of friends skew this.
Nikiforuk called it comparable to “mountaintop” coal mining in the Appalachian region. Moreover, the industry has made ripples in America’s energy policy, he said. Canada’s tar sands have been touted as a sustainable alternative to oil fields in Saudi Arabia. Canada has become the No. 1 oil source for the U.S., a trend that likely will continue, he said.
“You’re trading bloody oil for dirty oil,” he said. “Which is like shifting your mortgage from Countrywide to Bear Stearns and hoping it’ll solve your problems.”
The expansion of refinery capacity at BP brings with it questions about future air quality and emissions, Nikiforuk said. So far, BP has not adopted the stringent standards in place at refineries in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.
Paul Lloyd Sargent’s installation comments on the waterway management policies and practices by the Army Corps of Engineers, the St. Lawrence Seaway Corporation, and other institutions regulating major American rivers. His engagement in this body of water parallels my interest in the Indiana harbor Shipping Canal (IHSC), which feeds into the Great Lakes - not only because of my particular involvement with the IHSC, but also because of the role of the artist and designer in this larger dialogue of the built environment.
This is a time when Artists and designers are exercising strengths in dialogues they were traditionally excluded from - such as in making decisions and designing the built environment. I touched on this topic when I asked about the Artist’s role in urban visualization in my post [ Drawing the Lines ]. Another aspect of the Artist’s role has been to bring into and from (reconfigure and re-equip) our visual culture what was either not seen or only seen peripherally at the margins. Much of this work is coming under a research designation of “Experimental Geography.”
We are at a moment of major change in how we address and prioritize voices in the decision making and design process when it comes to the built environment. We are beginning to see the authority traditionally given over to Architects folded under the the authority of “Landscape Urbanists” (often referred to as Landscape Architects, but I already think this is an arcane title). In this shift in roles we are opening up all sorts of new visual disciplines to re-orientate ourselves toward space and re-organize it in a re-development framework. You can see some of these changes in Urban Lab’s H2O project: [ Growing Water ], Valcent Product’s the [ vertical farming ], and William McDonough & Michael Braungart’s seminal book “Cradle to Cradle / Remaking the Way we Make Things.” Luckily there are so many examples springing up daily.
In November 2008, less than one week after winning the votes of city dwellers by a margin of 28 points, President-elect Barack Obama announced he would reward them by creating the first-ever “White House Office of Urban Policy.” Like other new aspects of Obama’s executive branch, appointing a city czar was intended to fast-track communications among city governments, federal agencies and the White House. With great fanfare, Obama dispatched his friend and fellow Chicagoan Valerie Jarrett to tell America that he was making good on his campaign pledge to “stop seeing cities as the problem and start seeing them as the solution.”
I would like to direct readers to series of lengthy posts by Aaron M. Renn at Urbanphile. I am curious how well his thoughts hold up from a marginalized point-of-view.
Despite differences in perspective and policy, there is a relatively strong consensus for High Speed Rail in the Midwest. Again, I am an advocate for high speed rail and an advocate for marginalized communities like Gary and East Chicago, which are often asked to carry the burden of negative externalities.
1) Midwest High Speed Rail Corridors
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about the idea of creating a Midwest high speed rail network. The federal government has already designated a system of Midwest rail corridors. There’s a lobbying organization pushing it called the Midwest High Speed Rail Association. A host of environmental groups support it. I even had a (successful) mini-effort to get Louisville included in the Midwest network.
This morning’s unfortunate announcement of layoffs at the Tribune dealt an especially hard blow to local art criticism. Veteran Tribune art critic Alan Artner was handed the pink slip.
Paul and I went to graduate school together in the early 1990s at Indiana University. “A Mark In The Sand” is documentary by Flynn Donovan about the art of Paul Charles Pallaro. Flynn Donovan does a fantastic job capturing Paul and his work.
The change in runoff inferred from streamflow records worldwide between 1948 and 2004, with bluish colors indicating more streamflow and reddish colors less. The white land areas indicate inland-draining basins or regions for which there are insufficient data to determine the runoff trends. (Graphic courtesy Journal of Climate, modified by UCAR.)
Rivers in some of the world’s most populous regions are losing water, according to a comprehensive study of global stream flows. The research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., suggests that the reduced flows in many cases are associated with climate change, and could potentially threaten future supplies of food and water.
It has been three decades since the enactment of the Clean Water Act and not a single project has been initiated to clean this country’s most polluted waterway - The Indiana Harbor Shipping Canal (IHSC).
The IHSC is the only body of water to fail all measurable beneficial uses. This human made waterway even impairs the industry that is both dependent on it and responsible for its condition. Yet, industry is not alone East Chicago carries some of the responsibility with its combine sewer overflow system. East Chicago is the single greatest violator of its NPDES permit in the State. Do to politics they haven’t been pursued. The same politics that recently approved BP’s water permit, despite the fact that it was in clear violation of the Clear Water Act. Today, it is not only about the pipe sticking into the waterway, but also surface runoff. Surface runoff is probably an even greater threat.
Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) likes to refer to data that indicates that non-point source pollution attributed to transportation is an even greater threat to the environment. This is true if you are measuring pollution levels from the concern of middle-class communities in the southern part of the Lake County or you decide to aggregate the data county wide. This does not do justice to those who live under the plumb of industry.
We can have discussions about whether it is save to drink water from the Chesapeake Bay - But we do know that it is NOT SAFE TO HAVE ANY CONTACT WITH THE WATER IN THE INDIANA HARBOR SHIPPING CANAL.
Perhaps the reason we can have a public discussion about the Chesapeake Bay is because it affects a large middle-class demographic. The IHSC does not. East Chicago is about 56% Hispanic and 38% Black with a medium income < $26,000. Is this an environmental justice issue - Yes. What is right ought to be enough to correct this, but economics of scale is in effect and I concede it needs to be. So why should middle-class midwesterns be concerned?
Because, if you draw any benefit from Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes it effects you. Because the IHSA flows into the world’s greatest fresh water resource - Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes. Because more than 6 million people in the Chicago Metropolitan region draw their drinking water from Lake Michigan (more than the entire population of Indiana which governs the releases). Because every time a barge goes into and out of the channel it scraps the bottom and resuspends contaminated sediments into the water column. Because $500,000,000 (half billion) of your tax dollars are going into maintaining this waterway as a navigation channel and $0 are going into maintaining it for environmental reasons. Because tens of millions of your tax dollars are being diverted into the pockets of a corrupt local political regime [ posted, here, here and here ]. It used to be, when it came to contamination “if you touch it you own it,” but under the Bush administration the constraints of commerce over-road environmental concerns.
Because of this.
The products produced in East Chicago factories are shipped across the country. The safety regime protecting consumers are far more stringent and protective than the environmental guidelines protecting residents from the by-products of these products. The IHSC and East Chicago is host to the Largest integrated Steel Mill in the country - Arcelor/Mittal, and the second largest oil refinery in the country - BP. Arcelor/Mittal supplies materials for appliances and vehicles. BP supplies gas to the more than 6 million residents who populate the Chicago Region.
Most of the photos above were taken in the late 1960s during an environmental campaign that eventually resulted in establishing the USEPA and the Clean Water Act. The only difference between then and now is the attenuation of time, where dilution became the solution. I don’t mean to disparage time, it is important. But:
we haven’t been proactive to severely stem discharges, and
we haven’t cleaned this body of water, and
we haven’t set up a sustaining environmental regime to ensure it will remain clean well into the future.
In the end, after 30 years of the Clean Water Act the problem persists, and still no clean-up project has ever been initiated.
There are those who think America is on the verge of a Gorbachev moment of peaceful change or revolution. If we remember correctly Gorbachev came decades after Kruschev exposed the horrific and hidden crimes of the Stalinist era. Now, America can not in any way be compared to the Stalin era, but there are systematic crimes that do need to be surfaced to allow America to make the necessary institutional changes and confront the challenges in the coming decades. Otherwise, these institutions will continue wasting public energies fortifying themselves against exposure - Cheney and covering up his role in the energy task force, an illegal war in Iraq, lies about WMDs and Saddam’s relationship to Al-Qaeda, torture, is just ONE example. These entities are clogging up our bureaucracy and not contributing to solutions as America addresses the present challenges. I can not say how this will occur, and yes, I am excited about the prospect of getting beyond a kind of perestroika towards achieving great things.
It still rankles me two decades after the fact that Bill Casey died before he could be held to account in the Iran-contra scandal. Here’s hoping that Rummy and Cheney live long enough for the wheels of justice to finish grinding.
I completely concur with David’s sentiment.
If memory does not fail me, Casey suffered a seizure while being examined by a CIA physician the day before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. He died of a minor surgical procedure not Brain Cancer as stated at wikipedia.
Didn’t Casey’s surgeon also die a few weeks later?
I’m doing an advocacy Ad mockup for an Elected School Board in East Chicago, using my daughter as a model. Besides the blurred picture, the need for young models that reflect East Chicago’s population and a little word smith-ing, I think this could be pretty cool. I can graph any data into the hands of our children, including graduation rates and pollution levels - etc. If necessary, I can also do comparisons with other communities.
On the issue of Elected School Boards:
It appears to me what we are seeking is a system that locates accountability better and more efficiently. Currently, just seven major cities have full mayoral control of education. There has been a nation wide trend toward more centralized control into the hands of chief elected officials e.g., President, Governors and Mayors. This places a greater interest in these central figures making it more difficult to remove them for poor performance or abuses of power in any single sector of their concentrated power. When you keep multiplying areas of responsibility under a single figure you diffuse accountability in any one area and increase opportunities for patronage. Sure this my make for a more stable system, and mitigate against dead-locked disputes, but it also insulates these figures from accountability and removal from office.
We can look at the Bush administration as a recent example of concentrating power in a chief executive and the problem of seeking accountability, but lets instead look at a smaller example. East Chicago has had a Strong Mayor system with all of its abuses clearly expressed since the beginning of time. With an unemployment rate well above 20%, 28% of its households, or nearly 40% of the electorate, receive a paycheck from the Mayor. This single fact makes it impossible to remove the Mayor from office using the electoral process - too many workers with their jobs on-the-line will not risk voting against the Mayor no matter how tyrannical his behavior is perceived.
The only other alternative for removal would be for prosecution of abuses. And yet, with a justice system so fully politicized as we have in the U.S., the Federal prosecutors office has become a barter system between up-stream political cultures. At the local level Federal prosecutors seem to have been relegated to identifying discontent and collecting whistle blower information on behalf of public executives. Instead of being an arm of the peoples justice they have become an arm of entrenched power. Instead of investigating improprieties rumors have it that they share this information with these executives and only offer mere verbal slaps on the wrist. Unless you have a reach into the oval office this alternative does not appear very realistic.
Based on my fatalistic example of East Chicago, it appears to me that locating accountability in a strong chief executive is not the way to go.
“Schools Can’t Be ‘Patronage Mills Or ‘Run For The Benefit Of The People Who Work In Them… And when you have these school boards that are fundamentally controlled by special interests, the truth of the matter is the students come last, if at all.”
<wtf>
The irony in this argument is that it is machine politics that is known for taking advantage of patronage. Such as in East Chicago. </wtf>
“I think this is part of a larger issue about getting democracy right in the United States. There was an assumption, at one time, that you could make government more democratic and accountable by, in essence, multiplying the number of elected officials.
In retrospect, I think this was based on flawed logic and faulty assumptions that forgot to account for the fact that people have a limited amount of time they’re realistically going to spend monitoring public officials. If you live in New York City you’re voting for the President of the United States, two United States Senators, one member of congress, the Governor, the state Attorney-General, the state Lieutenant Governor, the state Comptroller, a mayor, a District Attorney, a city Comptroller, a Borough President, and a city council member in addition to a variety of state and local judges. And that’s entirely typical for the United States. Add a school board member into the mix and the situation gets even more out of control.
The result of this sort of process is the absence of meaningful accountability rather than its presence. The result is that special interests—the people with strong self-interested motives to pay attention—wind up exerting wildly disproportionate influence.
Needless to say, special interests get a lot of influence one way or another. But when it comes to a President or a Governor or a Mayor it is realistic to expect the broad mass of people to form a meaningful opinion and register it at the polls. When you keep multiplying offices and diffusing responsibility, you play into the hands of folks looking to game the system and make it hard for voters to understand what’s happening. I think part of the answer is that states should probably adopt unicameral legislatures and consider cutting down on the number of independently elected statewide officials. But cutting down on the quantity and influence of hyper-local electeds and putting responsibility in the hands of visible figures like the mayor and city council is crucial.”
Although I would generally agree with Matt about the difficulty for citizens to actually participate in the democratic process in any meaningful and informed way, I think the actual loss of accountability in any single area and the potential for abuses of power far outweigh information overload on the part of the citizen. Granted America lacks a good education system and thus a well informed citizenry, but to propose that America needs structural changes that concentrates more power in a few leaders as the answer is beyond me.
We went to Graduate School at Indiana University together. I had a bit of a crisis with my work during Graduate School. Bengt apparently had one after Graduate School. I found him on facebook. I guess I do like facebook. Anyhow, bengt is truly a nice guy.
As someone who is beginning to show their work again, I feel very fortunate to have met Dan Addington. Dan is first and foremost an Artist. You realize this the moment you talk with him about art. Here are a few of his pieces.
