We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction 'If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable'.
~ Petra Kelly

Cities have often been the focus of our wars. One only needs to think of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to know that population centers have often taken the brunt of the destruction that modern warfare wreaks.

But for Ben Manski, the executive director of Liberty Tree that organized the Future Cities 2009 conference held November 5-8 in Madison, our cities are also our hope.

"When you look at American cities, our cities are our most progressive communities,” Manski said.

 

“There are progressive people in rural parts of America. But when you look at city government and our major cities, that is where progressive politics, peace politics and sustainable politics have been most successful. The other reality of cities is they are where most of the economic activity takes place and also, in the case of the coast, major ports. So it is inevitable that what is going to happen is that wherever the federal government is promoting the policy of militarism or a policy that is unsustainable and potentially dangerous to the environment and human health, they will be doing that through cities. This is where the American people have the greatest opportunity for change. The federal government relies on the cities. And in the case of Oakland, they found that they were not able to rely on the people of Oakland or, for that matter, the people of San Francisco or Berkeley and other communities in the Bay Area and many cities across the U.S.”

 

Wilson Riles, a former alder for the city of Oakland, knows what it’s like to have one’s community treated as an environmental dumping ground. “Oakland, in one way or another, has been one of the centers for environmental racism,” Riles said during Future Cities 2009. “Oakland was constructed with a certain amount of separation between the various ethnicities within the city. There are a lot of the people of color living in the flatlands.

 

So after World War II with the GI Bill, a number of those people, Caucasians and more affluent folks, moved out of Oakland, but kept their jobs in Oakland and San Francisco. Using their political power from the suburbs, they had freeways built through Oakland and those freeways were built through the communities that had the least political power. And so, they were built through the flatland community. As a consequence of that, we had a lot of lead from the tailpipes coming out of cars traveling those freeways. One of those freeways is the most heavily truck-traveled freeways through any urban area. A lot of the pollutants ended up on the playgrounds and in the streets next to the freeways. So we have communities that have been heavily impacted in terms of the lead. There are also a lot of very old houses with lead paint. That’s the kind of environmental struggle in Oakland over a long period of time that I have been a part of.”
 

The question of nuclear power also impacted Oakland. “Oakland is the fifth largest containerized port in the world,” Riles said. “Part of our nuclear power deals with Korea and other countries is that the spent nuclear fuel rods will be brought back to the United States for storage. So they come through the Port of Oakland and they go through the streets of Oakland. So we did have a campaign to try and stop the port from accepting those materials and rerouting them — if it has to happen — away from city streets. We were just extremely lucky when we had our earthquake not too many years ago because a lot of those containerized trucks were coming down the double-deck freeway which collapsed from the earthquake. And no matter what they say about those containers and their safety, it would have burst those containers open and we would have had a real tragedy here in the community. Part of our Nuclear Free Zone work in Oakland was about trying to get control of that kind of situation within our community.”

The Port of Oakland also posed another environmental danger. “There is a large segment of young people in our community who have asthma,” Riles said.

 

“We’re trying to deal with that. In addition to the manufacturing plants that are still polluting the air, we are also organizing the other ethnic communities in opposition to what is happening at the port because you have big ships that come into the port. They essentially idle their engines which are basically using some of the worst oil, bunker fuel, for running those ships and are affecting the flatlands of our community. You have trucks there to off-load the containers. They sit there and idle in our community. They park in our community and have a very negative effect in terms of polluting our community. So we have been successful at this point in getting the port to require a lot of those truckers to put the kind of controls on their truck engines in order to reduce the pollution from the truck engines. And we’re going to take the next step in terms of the ships so that there will be power stations at the port to run what needs to be on those ships and they don’t have to continue to burn that bunker fuel within our community.”
 

For Riles, urban environmentalism is about saving our cities. “Communities of color have been the dumping ground for a lot of the toxins and environmental problems that are going on,” Riles emphasized.

 

“And we also find that the clean-up of that and the movement towards alternative energy sources and so forth is probably the last opportunity for a lot of our communities to get a spurt of new jobs that are clean jobs and are stable and well-paying that can make a difference to the ultimate economic life of our communities. There aren’t a lot of those opportunities that will come in the future when we’re talking about a community that has clearly been uneducated and has been depressed in so many ways. Getting more of our folks to become entrepreneurs increases our chances of getting opportunities in terms of jobs that are going to be long-lasting and are going to add to the benefit of the community. We have to get involved in this fight.”

While community groups are engaged in the good fight to clean up environmental problems, create sustainable jobs and make a more livable urban landscape, they also need to be aware that others may reap the fruits of their hard labor. “The people and their descendants who moved out to the suburbs and have been commuting and stuck on the freeways for hours trying to get to work in Oakland and San Francisco and with the cost of gasoline is going up, they now want to move back into the community,” Riles said.

 

“The politics of Oakland has been such that up until very recently, they’ve been welcomed back and so you have gentrification happening, forcing a lot of people of color and low-income folks out to the suburbs. Gentrification is becoming a crucial fight that we are involved with in terms of dealing with this question about livability and preserving our parks and our libraries. A lot of those things are crucially important to the quality of life within our community and how we are going to be able to raise our kids and raise our families in order to do better."

 

"Oakland is pretty well organized in terms of its different community groups and they are now learning from past efforts. They are doing their research and looking at what is out there now and are beginning to work together more. I think there is a type of renaissance of progressive organizing that is happening. We are going to see some changes in Oakland. I hope it is a renaissance as powerful as the Black Panther movement was in terms of the politics of our city.”
 

Manski hopes that a similar effort to organize around urban environmental issues will happen. “It is a responsibility of every person to contact their alderperson and the mayor to let them know they want to have a voice in moving the region to not only just a more sustainable but also a more economically fair future,” Manski said. “We have the opportunity to do that right now. The more that people speak up, the better off we will all be.”