Rural Justice: The Power of Coalitions
This season of Broken Ground we spend time in the rural South with the people who call it home. Often celebrated for the quiet life close to nature, and a region that defines many perceptions of the South, it’s also a place polluting industries target, betting what they do will be out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes these polluters are even invited to town by local officials eager for economic engines. But in each community we visited, we met small town neighbors who summoned their nerve and rallied together to become a powerful force. Coalitions built small wins into a mighty wave, shifting tides and determining their destiny.
Episode Transcript
Broken Ground Season 7
[THEME MUSIC IN HERE]
Host: This is Broken Ground. If you’ve been listening this season, you know we’ve been digging into environmental justice issues in rural corners of the South. Why? Because, increasingly, polluting industries are flocking to small towns, exploiting the need for economic development, and betting what they do there will be out of sight, and out of mind. But as we saw over and over this season, small town neighbors can be a powerful force when they join together to fight for a better environmental future. If you haven’t already listened to our first five episodes, I really hope you’ll go back and listen.
[THEME MUSIC OUT/NEW MUSIC IN]
Alease Kelly: Come on in.
Leanna First-Arai: Thank you so much for welcoming us into your home.
During the making of this season, our team has spent some glowing afternoons on front porches, in backyards and on boats across the rural South.
Justinn Overton: Welcome to Logan Martin Lake on the Coosa River.
But we’ve also visited less bucolic places, too. Like a rusty lumber mill slated to become a wood pellet facility …
Dr. Treva Gear: Was it what you imagined?
An abandoned town center awaiting the wrecking ball, and a landfill far larger than many of the towns we passed through.
Sherri White-Williamson: That’s trash. It was flat …
We walked away from our interviews with lots of takeaways.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Like how absolutely blessed we are to live among some remarkable ecosystems. In our episode “The Fisher’s Right to Know,” SELC attorney Sarah Stokes gushed about her own home state of Alabama.
Sarah Stokes: Our delta and our wetlands are called America’s Amazon, because we have this incredible biodiversity that’s really a secret to the world.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
But we’ve also seen how frustrating it can be for rural residents to realize that the dirty and sometimes dangerous businesses changing the nature of their communities were invited there by their own town officials. As Dr. Treva Gear told us in Adel, Georgia:
Dr. Treva Gear: We did an open records request for our industrial authority and our economic development commission, and what we found is that they had been seeking – seeking! – out wood pellet plants in years prior.
Over and over again, people we met – like Okefenokee advocate Reverend Antwon Nixon – told us how their environmental agencies have fallen down on the job.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Reverend Antwon Nixon: You’re the Environmental Protection Division. You know, you’re supposed to be defending the rights of the environment. You’re supposed to be protecting it.
Or how those agencies have failed to take into account the combined effect, or “cumulative impacts,” of multiple polluting sources when making permitting decisions intended to protect people living nearby. As EJCAN Director Sherri White-Williamson explained:
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Sherri White-Williamson: So, if you’ve got five facilities in an area emitting that pollutant at the federally acceptable level, and you’re only looking at one facility at the time, that community is getting exposed to maybe five times the federally accepted level of whatever that pollutant might be. So we are absolutely very concerned about cumulative impacts in everything.
With the help of Coosa Riverkeeper Justinn Overton, we’ve seen how easy it is for economic development concerns to take precedent over community health and the environment.
Justinn Overton: There is something incredibly wrong with that and I think that’s why so many people get so frustrated because we see the way that industry captures our state agencies.
And we learned from Fair Bluff town planner Al Leonard what an absolutely difficult job it can be to keep a small town afloat – especially after a disaster.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Al Leonard: I’ve always said a small town manager could manage a metropolis, but the manager of a metropolis could not manage a small town because they would not be able to grasp: you don’t have any resources. None.
[MUSIC IN HERE]
Then, in the middle of producing this season, two big events shook us. First, Hurricane Helene. The September storm brought raging floods deep inland, killing over 200 people and damaging or destroying more than 125,000 homes – not to mention thousands of roads, bridges, sewage treatment plants and drinking water systems across six southern states.
Second, the re-election of former President Donald Trump, whose first administration embraced climate denial and attempted to roll back more than 110 environmental laws and regulations.
To watch a thousand-year storm wreak havoc in places once thought of as “safe havens” from climate change, and to know that we’re entering a time when the federal government will likely seek to roll back more environmental regulations, gut the EPA, and cut funding to help communities tackle environmental injustices … it’s extraordinarily heavy.
And we realized that some of the conclusions we were initially leaning towards missed the gravity of this moment.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
So here’s where we’re at, at Broken Ground …
[MUSIC IN HERE]
If you think about what it takes to meaningfully challenge a polluter, like what it took for residents in Adel, Georgia to convince a pellet mill to reduce its harm to the community, or what it’s taken for a coalition to hold off mining so long near the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. Or even thinking a few seasons back in our podcast, what it took for a rural Black community on the outskirts of Memphis to stop the Byhalia oil pipeline, the reality is that none of this work would have happened without regular folks – people like you, or me, or maybe your neighbor two doors down – slogging to town council meetings, summoning up the nerve to knock on doors and tell their neighbors what’s happening, maybe even forming a grassroots group with its own t-shirt. That’s what attracted Ms. Celeste Hayes to the Concerned Citizens of Cook County, in Adel, Georgia.
[MUSIC OUT HERE]
Ms. Celeste Hayes: You know, when I saw the shirts, I’m concerned, I’m a citizen. I’m in, I’m in.
Regular people who recruited other regular people, then often reached out to bigger organizations at the state, national, and even international levels for help. Remember the Okefenokee Protection Alliance that SELC Senior Attorney Bill Sapp helped start with just a few folks?
Bill Sapp: Now if you look at the coalition and you add up all the members from all the groups, it’s over five million people.
To go back to the classic film “It’s A Wonderful Life,” which we referred to in the same episode … can you imagine a world without these coalitions?
[MUSIC IN HERE]
It’s a world in which mining companies get to dig for what they want, where they want, as soon as they want it. A world in which polluters repeatedly violate air and water permits in rural areas that are “out of sight and out of mind.” A world in which a flood inundates a beloved town and there’s no hope of it ever bouncing back.
So at this difficult time, when our environmental future feels more precarious than ever, our takeaway from our season is this:
If there was EVER a time to reach out to a community group like the ones we’ve featured this season – like Concerned Citizens of Cook County, Coosa Riverkeeper or the Okefenokee Protection Alliance – this would be it. And that’s especially true because with environmental and climate action likely to halt at the federal level under the second Trump administration, it will be up to state and local governments to step up and protect us. Sure, they sometimes let us down, but they’re still in a position to drive climate and environmental action. Many states control our electricity grids, for instance. And as longtime environmental advocate Belinda Joyner implored us in our episode titled “The Wood Pellet Paradox”:
[MUSIC OUT HERE]
Belinda Joyner: Go to your economic development meetings. Because they’re the people that go out and bring whatever it is in your community. If you know about it, you have a chance to fight it.
[MUSIC IN HERE]
And knowing about it is half the battle. As we heard in our previous podcast season, the loss of local media outlets has made it easier for polluters to take advantage of lax environmental laws. Easier for town governments to prioritize possible jobs that may come with new industry, while ignoring environmental and health impacts. Easier for state agencies to issue weak air and water permits without any pushback.
[MUSIC OUT HERE]
In Folkston, Georgia, Reverend Antwon Nixon saw it this way:
Reverend Antwon Nixon: We need to educate the people here so that we don’t have to take the dangling apple in front of us because we’re a poverty stricken area.
[MUSIC IN HERE]
Of course, a single individual – whether they’re a preacher, a teacher, or anyone else – can only do so much alone. Building coalitions will often require preaching OUTSIDE the choir, rallying folks of all political and economic stripes around a few things we can agree we ALL want: fresh air, clean water, and good health for ourselves and our children.
In this way, we won’t just be ‘protecting the environment’ or ‘demanding environmental justice,’ we’ll also be safeguarding our homes, keeping our water drinkable, preserving the places where we hunt and fish and farm.
[MUSIC OUT HERE]
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and of Trump’s reelection, I’ve noticed some really heartening examples of people ready as ever to do the work that on some days can feel impossibly hard.
[MUSIC IN HERE]
Like one Broken Ground listener, Amy Brown, who wrote to us from Swannanoa, North Carolina, after Hurricane Helene swept away some nearby homes and killed two of her neighbors. “It’s been awful,” she wrote to us, “but I also know our story is one of hundreds, if not thousands more out there.”
Amy has been thinking a lot about how unfair it is that, in her area, so much more devastation was caused to low-income families living in mobile homes than to more affluent people, and how the mass destruction of those residences could have been prevented by local decisions – like requiring mobile homes to be cited outside of the floodplain.
Amy told us she’s determined, and I quote: “to make it so that future vulnerable homes cannot be built on this land.” “What might these actions entail?” she asked.
[MUSIC FADES OUT HERE]
That’s exactly the kind of question that we need to be tackling with our neighbors as we build ever-larger networks of people committed to standing up for each other.
[MUSIC IN HERE]
Before we let you go this season, I want to remind you of the advice of Sherri White-Williamson, who knows what it’s like to fight a seemingly endless environmental struggle.
Sherri White-Williamson: Small wins are important.
Small wins are important.
Sherri White-Williamson: For communities, oftentimes it’s the small successes that give them the belief that they can make change.
Leanna First-Arai:Mm-hmm.
Sherri White-Williamson: That they do have some power to determine their destiny to some extent.
[MUSIC UP FULL]
That idea, that working together we CAN create change, will be an important one to remember and embrace over the next few years – especially as we seek to protect our environment, our health, and the people and places we love.
[MUSIC FADES OUT/THEME MUSIC COMES IN]
That does it for this season of Broken Ground. Broken Ground is a podcast by the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted in the South. It’s produced by Emily Richardson-Lorente, Noa Greenspan, Paige Polk, Jennie Daley, and me, Leanna First-Arai with special thanks to Ko Bragg, Sam Lenga and Stu Maxey. Our theme music is by Erik Knutson. If you enjoyed this season, we’d love it if you’d write us a review on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.
[THEME MUSIC OUT]