The time for me to write my blog about my experience of the GreenFaith Fellowship Economic Justice Retreat is here. Many blogs will be required for me to say all I have to say. My heart is heavy with all I have seen and heard this past week, and as of today this blog is the only tangible action I believe I can take to make a difference. So if I write from an intense and intensely politicized position, and if this is unpolished and incomplete, please bear with me. If you find yourself swimming in a morass of negative emotion afterwards, please use that as a bell of mindfulness waking you up to your deepest love and hope for the world.
Our group toured the ports of Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey, the second busiest port in the nation. On our way to the site Fletcher Harper told us that gun violence in New Jersey gets a lot of attention, causing four hundred deaths per year. But according to NJ EPA, air pollution kills two thousand people a year and barely gets mentioned. The port is largely responsible because seven thousand trucks idle there each and every day emitting diesel waste and the cranes used to move container boxes from ship to truck also emit diesel waste. The ships burn even dirtier fuel, so their emissions create even more smog.
Alongside the port is a heavy industrial area featuring a fat rendering plant where animal carcasses are boiled to produce soaps and lotions. Yeah, I wanna smear that all over my body! And a chemical food and dye factory, featured in the book Fast Food Nation for its toxic emissions—mmm, tasty! All located near a huge incinerator, so that when we’re bored with the cheap plastic crap transported in on the smoke-belching ships inside the myriad container trucks driven from port to store by underpaid truckers in their fuel-inefficient outdated trucks we can burn it, emitting even more toxins into the air and leaving us with poisonous ash to bury.
There’s a prison in the middle of this charming piece real estate, too, with plans for a youth detention center in the works. Oh, and lest we forget, all of this poison is emitted less than a quarter mile—less than 3 city blocks—from a densely populated low income neighborhood known as the Ironbound, where children who will never get to play with the contents of the container boxes nonetheless bear the health costs in terms of a 25% rate of asthma.
What does all of this have to do with me? Or with you? I don’t live in New Jersey and neither do most of you. But the reality is that this is just one of many ports, all with similar environmental impacts. There is a mirror image in the developing countries that send the container boxes here and they don’t have any environmental protections so the situation may be even worse. We are all connected to this process, whether we want to be or not by virtue of our economic system.
My guess is that we don’t want to be connected. We want things to be fairer. We want to know when we buy a product that it didn’t poison a child somewhere else in the world. But we don’t have any say so about how this all takes place because we are not the power elite.
Rabbi Larry Troster, one of the founders of GreenFaith, spoke to us later that evening about tzedek, which means most literally “equity” but gets translated as “justice” in translations of Hebrew Bible. He emphasized two types of equity: distributive equity, where goods are evenly distributed; and participatory equity, where all stakeholders are equally involved in decision-making. Our nation does not have either type of equity at present. The reason you feel so helpless to change our environmental or economic system is because your voice has been silenced by the power elite.
The message of Occupy Wall Street is very clear, says Rabbi Troster. It’s about tzedek: it is a demand for both distributive and participatory equity. There is no single message other than that, because we all have different needs within the system. But Occupy Wall Street, at its best, is an effort to broaden and deepen participation in a democratic process and help us reclaim our personal power to act on our own behalf.
I will, of course have more to say in coming days. This is a start. It is the something I can do, and I encourage you to find the one small thing you can do. Maybe keep reading, maybe writing. Maybe stop at an Occupy movement in your area and talk to people about why they’re there, and share your vision for the world with them, too. But please, find the one small thing and do it. As Edward Everett Hale writes:
“I am only one
But still I am one
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something.
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”
p.s. if you would like photos of the port and industrial area please email me at 4shelleyldennis@gmail.com and I'll forward you some. I am unable to post them to the blog at this time.
