Posted May 11, 2021, 10:22 AM
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A gruff individual.
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Join Date: Aug 2003
Location: Greenville, SC - "Birthplace of the light switch rave"
Posts: 13,427
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“This Is Slow Murder”: I love my city. I love my neighborhood. It may be killing me.
“This Is Slow Murder”: I love my city. I love my neighborhood. It may be killing me.
By Aymann Ismail for slate.com
Quote:
I always thought it was a little cruel to call New Jersey the Garden State. We’re famous for our pollution. The state has more Superfund sites than another other, 114, and I grew up near four of them in Newark, a particular nexus for toxic filth. The tap water is often poisonous. Our industrial zone has several waste management and processing plants. Soon, just under 2 miles from my front door here, another plant may rise, where “biosolids”—or treated waste, aka poop—would be funneled in, heated to 1,500 degrees, and sold as concrete thickener. What the plant, from Aries Clean Technologies, will leave behind in our neighborhood is now the subject of fierce debate.
I live in the Ironbound, the neighborhood where the plant is expected to be built. We are already sandwiched between a handful of different polluters. Covanta Essex, a trash-to-energy incinerator, sits on the north side. We’ve got Newark Liberty International Airport to the south. We’ve got the Port Newark–Elizabeth Marine Terminal to the east, which is serviced by dozens of diesel trucks a day, and then we have the cars spewing fumes as they sit in traffic on U.S. Route 1-9, Interstate 78, and the New Jersey Turnpike, which converge in our area. Exposure to the pollution here, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, has been “linked to increased rates of asthma, cancers, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological problems in children.”
Cynthia Mellon, chair of Newark’s Environmental Commission, told me environmental justice advocates have been calling to recognize that communities of color here have been heavily overburdened by pollution in the city since the ’80s: “For us, the key word is cumulative impact. Because when you have so many kinds of pollution gathered together in one place, it creates a very overburdened, toxic, and dangerous situation.”
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
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