Building A Progressive Future

Jon Davidow is the Co-founder and Director of Operations for the Back Porch Initiatives, a Southeastern non-profit dedicated to advancing community initiatives in developing and sustaining equitable solutions to local environmental issues.

Walking through the Cancer Alley, 80 miles of what was once pristine Mississippi Delta between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, you can’t help but grasp for the whole answers to the hard questions. In various stretches, it looks as though a nuclear bomb recently cleared the area of all life. Houses are in shambles, businesses appear to be boarded up, wetlands are filled with the remnants of vibrant life, and then, all of a sudden, a child bikes out into the street and quickly zips back from where she came.

Closer to the Gulf of Mexico, yes, hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the issues with the distribution of recovery money, are still partially to blame. But as you travel further upstream, you begin to see trends. Houses seem inhabitable, but folks are living inside. Businesses are shuttered, but mega-industry churns plumes of smoke into the horizon. The wetlands overflow with waste, but they’ve been filled as a dumping ground, not by a storm surge.

Seeking out the root of a problem has proved to be a stumbling block for much of Western Civilization over the past 2000 years, but it seems to me that it is becoming the singular goal of this generation. This generation isn’t choosing between Democratic and Republican candidates, we are voting on unified answers to our shared social problems. Our non-profits and social action groups are beginning to break down barriers between our various societal ailments, fusing poverty and corporate control, health care and international relations, the economy and our ecology.

At Back Porch, we focus on merging environmentalism and social justice. We see climate change not only as it affects our ecosystem but as it affects our lives and the lives of our neighbors. Energy efficiency measures don’t solely curb our national carbon emissions, they also have the potential to save people from asthma and chronic liver disease throughout the Appalachian region, where a majority of our energy is mined.

The cost of living in Cancer Alley, as the name would suggest, is high. Extreme amounts of pollution, 17,000 pounds of toxics per square mile compared to the national average of 576 pounds per square mile, are linked to the enormous concentration of industry. In an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi, more than 100 oil refineries and petrochemical plants dump toxins into the water and pump contaminants into the air. It just so happens that the same stretch of river is home to a 55% higher than national average percentage of people of color, and a 48% higher percentage of people living below the poverty line. And on top of all of this, it may be a region of the country suffering worst from the effects of climate change.

Back Porch’s experience in Cancer Alley made the correlations between Progressive Future’s campaigns unbearably obvious to me. The trillions of dollars being diverted from governmental aid, money with the potential to rebuild most of our nation’s infrastructure or provide healthcare to all of our country's citizens, funds a war to maintain a steady flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Gulf of Mexico, where it is processed in the midst of our communities most in need of that same government aid. And, of course, our fossil fuel-dependent, consumption-based system is what is keeping us from a clean energy future and may be at the root of this whole thing.

I like to call what we at Back Porch do “stakeholder activism.” Every American participates in the corporate energy system, not just by holding technical shares of the company, but by being the ones at stake. In my mind, the solutions to the issues faced by the communities living in Cancer Alley that are as holistic as the problems. If enough of us use our energy dollars to vote for clean energy, by buying wind power from your unbundled energy supplier, for instance, we make a statement to the corporate energy conglomerates that we care where our energy is coming from. If we begin to rally around healthcare reform not for ourselves but for our countrymen suffering the most from our national addictions, we take the opportunity to focus upon that renewed perspective on the human condition, how we hurt and how we heal, bestowed upon us by this war for oil.

Those of us living relatively comfortably in the United States have as much at stake in our current struggle for a healthy life as the little girl riding her bike in Cancer Alley. We’re in a moral crisis, in dire need to take back our country, fully represent our brothers and sisters whose voices are muffled, and reassert our independence from how the world has come to view us. And we can do that: simply, quickly, and in light of the whole picture.