Green days

Part 5

by Michael Crowley

You've seen "brownfields" all over the city and state, even if you don't know them by name. They are desolate abandoned lots, often fenced-off, often in impoverished urban neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester. And thanks to their previous industrial occupants, they are too polluted to be used safely for a new purpose.

But now, in Massachusetts and around the country, a movement is under way to reclaim dead zones in the middle of populated neighborhoods and use them for economic development. In tackling brownfields, environmental and community activists are reassessing the way we think about development in America's aging cities.

"Our attempts to clean up these sites and punish the polluters have largely failed," says William Shutkin, an attorney and cofounder of Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE), an innovative Roxbury-based legal and educational outfit devoted to a combination of environmentalism and community development.

This fall the state legislature will consider a range of proposals designed to stimulate private development of brownfields. It's a delicate balance: a new law must entice new developers without letting the original polluters off the hook.

But the efforts to decontaminate brownfields are symbolic of the approaches helping to define the new wave of American environmentalism. Brownfields are a key part of the "environmental justice" movement, which seeks to use the law to challenge the disproportionate burden of society's pollution that is dumped on minority communities. For instance, hospitalizations for asthma are six times more common in Roxbury than in the rest of the state.

"The bigger picture," says Shutkin, "is that part and parcel of the brownfields problem is the social and economic condition of many neighborhoods. That really has nothing to do with the environment. Until governments connect the environment to other issues, like poverty, joblessness, and education, I don't think we're going to see a lot of improvement."

The community-based approach of a group like ACE represents a growing belief that major top-down environmental initiatives don't work anymore -- that environmentalism must be brought down to a community level and made a part of ordinary life, of neighborhood development. ACE, for instance, has been working closely with Part of the Solution, a Boston-based minority-voter-registration group, to compile an environmental scorecard for city-council candidates before next month's election. The group is also urging Boston's bus fleet switch to cleaner-burning diesel, and challenging what ACE cofounder Charles Lord calls the "proliferation of parking lots in neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Newmarket."

The Conservation Law Foundation's Doug Foy is enthusiastic about this type of approach. "We've done a lot of the big federal legislative initiatives. We got the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and Superfund. It's been quite a heyday for environmental law over the past 25 years. The challenge is actually executing those laws," he says, noting it took more than two decades after the Clean Water Act for the state to install equipment in Boston Harbor that allowed it to meet federal pollution standards.

"I don't think there's a lot to be done in Congress these days," Foy says. "We need to be crafting solutions that feel relevant to people, that they can engage and feel part of, rather than just shipping it off to the Potomac." As an example, Foy cites CLF's participation in a new, community-oriented push for "traffic calming," which seeks to improve neighborhoods and reduce pollution by slowing and limiting automobile traffic.

"It's fascinating how engaging this is for folks who are not environmentalists," Foy says.

And it is on those people, it seems, that the environmental movement must stake its future.

Back to part 4

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.