Justice for All

Sandra Svoboda visited WDET this week and spoke with Craig Fahle about this story. Listen here

Standing on her front porch, Bettie Simmons can plainly point out why an environmental justice movement is so necessary. 

"Look, I just cleaned this last week," the 71-year-old says as she points to the black dust that collects in clumps on window frames of her southwest Detroit home. "It didn't use to be like that here."

At his home nearby, Roland Wahl has mysterious gluey silver particles stuck on his backyard grill cover. "Some of the particles are so fine, they're like powdered sugar. And you breathe them," he says. He's also annoyed by the roar of the trucks that carry supplies, equipment and more workers to nearby industrial sites that weren't there when he moved in 40 years ago.

Up the street from Wahl, Linda Chernowas often finds a black, oily film on the pool in her yard. She describes it in a raspy voice. She's been diagnosed with reflex laryngitis, and her doctor told her to move out of her neighborhood, believing the pollution is exacerbating her condition.

The three are longtime residents of the area near where I-75 crosses the Rouge River. It's within ZIP code 48217.

Simmons, Chernowas and Wahl insist it was nothing like this when they and other long-time residents moved to the area. Now they say the continued industrial development — the Marathon Petroleum oil refinery expansion, new sewage treatment facilities, asphalt yards and other heavy industry — has diminished their quality of life and is damaging their health. 

They'd sell their homes and move, but what can they get for them? The recent real estate downturn is bad enough, but the area's continued industrialization leaves them little hope. Who would buy a house and move to a street with trucks roaring by, the smell of sewage treatment in the air and the smoky glow of the oil refinery dominating the skyline?

The Detroit City Council has refused residents requests for a moratorium on industrial development in the area. That would cost the city much-needed jobs. And residents protested in 2007 before the council approved Marathon's $2.2 billion expansion in a deal that included about $176 million over 20 years in property tax exemptions.

These residents are on the frontline of the environmental justice movement, the roughly 35-year-old effort to ensure that minority and low-income communities aren't disproportionately paying the high price of industrialization with their health, quality of life and property values.

Environmental justice advocates — largely local community organizations but a growing number of government bureaucrats — seek to draw attention to the human costs of "progress" and protect the residents who live near pollution sources. 

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