communities | Environment.org

The vision

The tarp shade snaps and flutters in the breeze above the harvest volunteers. The CSA is bountiful this spring — crunchy lettuce, sweet strawberries, and even some cherries from the new windbreak. Stores around here sell produce this tasty, organic, and local for a fortune, but our volunteers feed families on it for just an hour of work a week and some dirty fingernails. The model is spreading. Vacant lots and brownfield sites all over the city have started sprouting biodigesters and sunflower fields, compost vessels and prairie plantings, communities of care: the phytoremediating foot soldiers of food sovereignty in recovery.

— a drabble by Looking Forward reader Betsy Ruckman

The spotlight

There are more than 450,000 brownfield sites across the U.S. — previously developed parcels of land that have been left abandoned, with some form of contamination. …

New EPA rules tell polluters in Great Lakes communities to clean up legacy coal waste

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| Pollution

When Dulce Ortiz wants to enjoy the beauty of Lake Michigan, walk in a green space, or see and touch the water, she has to leave her neighborhood, even though the second-largest of the Great Lakes is in her backyard.

Ortiz lives in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb about an hour north of Chicago that has a lurid history of toxic waste. With a population of only 88,000, the city has five Superfund sites, many of them found along the Lake Michigan shoreline.

And that’s not even counting the large pools of toxic materials leftover from decades of burning coal in Waukegan. Deep pits of hazardous sludge sit along the shores of Lake Michigan, the watershed for roughly 12 million people.

Ortiz, co-chair of the local environmental justice organization Clean Power Lake County, calls these coal waste sites a …

Farmers, Communities and Congressional Leaders Seek Full Funding for Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production

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| Sustainability

This week the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, together with over seventy organizations and farm businesses, delivered a letter to Congressional Appropriators to urge them to fully fund the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) and the urban agriculture data collection initiative. This request echoed one made by over 50 Senate and House leaders in a separate letter to agriculture appropriators.

The 2018 Farm Bill authorized OUAIP and its various relevant initiatives in an effort to encourage and promote urban, indoor, and other innovative agricultural practices as a tool to provide healthy, fresh food in low-access areas, workforce and community development opportunities, and promote soil health and reduce food waste.

Since the Office received its first appropriation in 2020, it has already invested over $ 50 million to increase the capacity of urban agriculture, innovative producers, and municipal composting …

As rising seas swamp South Carolina’s shores, some coastal communities are left unprotected

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| Pollution

Bordered by a freeway and flanked by former industrial sites, the coastal community of Rosemont in Charleston, South Carolina, is home to generations of Black families. But as climate change raises sea levels and surrounding natural protections from storms have been removed for infrastructure projects, flooding has become a regular problem for the community.

It’s not surprising that flooding is on the rise here—infrastructure in Rosemont has been neglected for decades. When storm drains and sidewalks were put in throughout the city of Charleston, Rosemont was bypassed. Decades of heavy industry left a legacy of pollution—two superfund cleanup sites lie within roughly half a mile of the community. A hurricane in 1989 destroyed the long dock that gave Rosemont residents access to the marsh and the water beyond—it still hasn’t been replaced. And despite Rosemont’s vulnerability to the impacts of …