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Behind the Fence: Forum Theatre on Lupus, Lead Poisoning & Environmental JusticeDocumentary photography and video by Bryan Parris/T.e.j.a.s.
Down East Ferry Street a light snow gradually covers some of the dirty secrets from Buffalo’s industrial past. The huge empty lot across from True Bethel Baptist Church once housed the Michael Heyman zinc and lead smelter, blast furnace and metal-casting operation. From 1917 to 1978 this eastside neighborhood was exposed to a barrage of particulates and heavy-metal residues as an unimaginably toxic industrial process put money in the pockets of this blue-collar neighborhood, but at great expense to public health. While neighborhood demographics gradually changed, and various heavy manufacturing businesses withered and died across the industrial east, no one in city or state government lifted a finger to inventory the burden of toxic waste, track movement patterns of industrial toxins or clean up the residues. So, for decades these toxins remained hidden, unremarked and conveniently forgotten while lead-laden dust blew offsite onto streets, into yards and was tracked into homes and PCBs leached into local waterways. This frustrating saga of neglect, struggle and ultimate triumph was the pretext for “Behind the Fence,” a Community Environmental Forum Theatre project hosted by Ujima Theatre, October 26-28, 2007, in Buffalo, N.Y. But before entering the world of Theatre of the Oppressed, image making, nonactors and spect-actors, we must turn to social science and toxicology for a few central concepts and important back-story. Environmental Justice The east side of Buffalo is predominantly African-American and environmental-justice advocates like David Baker Hahn point to this fact as a seldom mentioned explanation for long periods of environmental neglect. David described Environmental Justice during the Forum as concerned with a race-based pattern of disproportionate toxic exposures, with close neighborhood proximity to hazardous waste sites, waste transfer facilities and industrial processes with toxic outputs. It’s also concerned with a parallel pattern of delay and denial when it comes to addressing health effects and cleanup. As Buffalo toxics activist and Greg Brown put it:
It’s certainly a social truism that race significantly affects the diligence of U.S. and state government officials when it comes to timelines for environmental cleanups and fining polluters. The National Law Review observes “white communities see faster action, better results and stiffer penalties than communities where blacks, Hispanics and other minorities live. And this unequal protection often occurs whether the community is wealthy or poor.”[1] Toxicology, Exposure Pathways and Superfunds The 858 Ferry Street toxic site embodies many aspects of environmental injustice often seen in communities of color: disproportionate minority exposure; vulnerable populations such as children, elders and the chronically ill put at risk; and lack of speed and transparency in decision making. The site was permeated with large quantities of gray ash contaminated with polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs),[2] and a co-mingled, white-color ash classified as a Toxicity Characteristic Leeching Procedure lead hazardous waste. 858 Ferry is part of a cluster of similar toxic waste sites in east Buffalo — others include 318 Urban Street and Fillmore Avenue & East Ferry Street, both former General Electric facilities. Originally designated as a level 2 Superfund — which mandates expeditious cleanup — the Ferry site cleanup ground to a halt when the city failed to ante up a 25% share of remediation costs. The site went unfenced, untended and without adequate signage for a long stretch of the ‘90s while neighborhood residents used the field as a short-cut and fresh wastes from various sources accumulated on site. This stalemate left neighborhood children at risk for dangerous lead exposures, possibly leading to significant developmental complications and permanent cognitive impairment.[3] Inaction also left open the possible leaching of PCBs into Scajaquada Creek, a small waterway buried under 858 Ferry as part of a Depression-era WPA project; Scajaquada Creek empties into the Niagara River, which has tested positive in various locations for actionable levels of PCBs. The Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition Project focused on developing an inventory on toxic waste sites and types of pollution. They identified local exposure pathways, mapped specific clusters of lupus in affected neighborhoods and evaluated the methods used to clean up toxic sites in Buffalo. Pooling resources of the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition, the Minority Health Coalition, the University of Buffalo and the Systemic Autoimmune Disease Research Center, the project pinpointed additional clusters and developed a registry of citizens affected by autoimmune diseases. In tandem with this research-and-education campaign, the True Bethel Baptist Church received a Technical Assistant Grant (TAG) to serve as an interface between the technical expertise of university environmental scientists and a very concerned community. True Bethel conceived “Behind the Fence” as a capstone event that would give perspective to the past, reenergize lupus registry and environmental mitigation efforts in the present, and infuse the future of this site in this struggling neighborhood with positive vision. Building Skills & Framing the Forum
The efforts of the Toxic Waste/Lupus Coalition — from the early investigative stages to the research, political actions and finally the Forum production of “Behind the Fence” — coalesced under the rubric of Environmental Justice. During the workshop, community actors constantly explored the dichotomy between how little harm is possible vs. how much harm is allowable. They built images around themes of despair, rage and the power of research dollars vs. the power of an energized community seeking answers and justice, and reformatted their neighborhoods to mirror precautionary stewardship, health, safety and well-being rather than indifference and oppressive official neglect.
A few of the workshop images were included in the performance as scenes: an image portraying community reactions to disease outcomes beyond their control, and an image the group called “empty pockets” that morphed into “slightly better organized empty pockets” when a university researcher infuses NIEHS money into the effort, but the overwhelming bulk of funding always goes toward “the university agenda of corporate science.” Finally, a tableau image — called “push & pull of the present” — represented present-day tensions among different actors in the power dynamic overarching the cleanup. This image deconstructed the shifting roles, power imbalances and differing agendas within the Project coalition. Image making and subsequent discussion reinforced a cardinal observation from the world of Community-Based Participatory Research: University priorities often overwhelm community agendas because of differences in economic scale and social prestige, and the lack of culturally fluent communication channels between the rarified culture of science and a much broader, more inclusive culture at the grassroots.
The core of the show was the tale of how the coalition came to be, their struggles for knowledge and credibility, and the early meetings in Betty Jean Grant’s store sharing stories of the slow dawning awareness of a strange and painful autoimmune disease called lupus. Stories included Rhonda Dixon Lee going door-to-door in the dead of a Buffalo winter to spread the news and connect with other sufferers; Rev. Darius Pridgen, wearing his eponymous gas mask, with rolled-up sleeves and a wheelbarrow cleaning out the city’s mess on his own while flanked by reporters and television cameras; Judith Anderson’s early-stage outreach to activist Ausar Africa’s group with cutting-edge data on lupus and possible connections to university research resources; and Betty Jean Grant’s successful run for a Common Council seat in Buffalo city government, which initially leveraged change throughout the local/regional political hierarchy. The actors’ efforts received an added push toward craft and polish as Lorna Hill, founder and artistic director of Ujima Theatre, watched a run-through and gave the group detailed director’s notes. Robert Ball, Ujima’s resourceful technical director, provided thoughtful oversight of the house, keeping lights, sound and facility access flowing while asking numerous questions about Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal and “how exactly do you do this work with non-actors?” The spect-actor phase of the Forum — where audience members break the fourth wall to physically enter the action with new ideas to break an impasse of injustice — was structured as a town meeting to collect suggestions for using 858 in ways that increase neighborhood social capital and improve the quality of life. These suggestions ran the gamut of pressure for state action on comprehensive environmental health — recognizing the need to clean up additional eastside toxic sites — to specific suggestions for a community center, shopping and recreation development to repopulate the neighborhood with commercial energy, or a park to memorialize environmental-justice efforts of the late Greg Brown and Ausar Africa, a key figure in local antiracist organizing now living in Atlanta, Ga. So What Did We Give Our Audience?
This Forum came on the heels of a largely successful toxic-waste-mitigation project, so the usual purpose of activation into struggle, or early-stage strategizing was moot. “Behind the Fence” served more as an act of collective remembrance, a validation of community dedication and focus, a celebration of perseverance, independent ingenuity and raw guts. David Baker Hahn recalled his sense of amazement and the possibilities of true community empowerment when he visited Ausar Africa’s Harambee Bookstore and saw on the wall a homemade GIS-style map using push-pins to overlay Buffalo’s hazardous waste sources, cases of lupus and incidence figures for childhood lead poisoning — with most of these in eastside minority neighborhoods. “It all came together on that map,” he said during the performance, “all the facts of industrial decline, environmental racism and the tightly clustered geographical focus of serious disease in our communities.” Rhonda Lee revisited the early stages of her lonely effort to understand her own problem with lupus, get a handle on the related problems of lead poisoning and PCB contamination, and develop a neighborhood support network of people with autoimmune diseases. This network has since proved essential for many lupus sufferers worn down by the daily grind of coping with pain and mobility limitations. Like watching a miracle unfold, Betty Jean Grant, a politician genuinely embedded in her own grassroots and an acknowledged sage elder in this struggle, sat in the audience as community actors portrayed those first meetings and the birth of a movement in her own Ferry Street store. The struggle of Edith Williams to earn her doctorate in epidemiology through a community lupus identification-and-registry project she custom designed was especially poignant. With one foot in the world of research and the other in community, she shared her anger and frustration saying, “I was the only black woman to get a Ph.D. in my department, and they acted like they didn’t care, like what I was doing in the community wasn’t important, wasn’t worth their time.”
The longest and loudest round of applause came in response to Derrick M. Byrd’s account of how the community successfully renegotiated the Record of Decision (ROD) with the N.Y. Department of Environmental Conservation. As the community educator and information specialist designated in the TAG grant, Byrd was directly engaged every step of the way as TW/L Coalition entities, community activists and university researchers successfully made their point that a precautionary approach justified mitigation to a safer level, making 858 suitable for future unrestricted use. The new ROD also increased the mitigated soil target from 3,750 cubic yards to 87,200 cubic yards, and implemented a plan to prevent contaminated soil and dust from blowing into the neighborhood during off-site transport to a hazardous waste facility. It isn’t often that such negotiations work so clearly to a community’s advantage, but this was undeniably a triumph of tenacity, educational outreach, coalition building and skillful arbitration.[4] Brandon Williamson, a spoken-word artist as well as Forum performer, gave the audience two mesmerizing hybrid pieces combining the immediacy of spoken word with the story structure of a theatrical monologue. The TAG also planned for an outgrowth of the TW/L Project Environmental Forum. “Behind the Fence: an Eco-Documentary” will hugely expand the reach of that original performance and provide other communities with a potential model for similar efforts. While facilitating the workshop and producing the original Forum event, a team from the Sealy Center for Environmental Health & Medicine/UTMB @ Galveston, Texas, and Houston-based T.e.j.a.s. (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services) filmed the proceedings, as well as series of extended interviews with a wide spectrum of real-life actors in this drama. Major political figures like Betty Jean Grant, now the Erie County District 7 Legislator; Antoine Thompson, N.Y. State Senator, 60th Senate District; Crystal Peoples, N.Y. State Assembly Representative, 141st District; Rev. Darius Pridgen, pastor of True Bethel Baptist Church; David Hahn-Baker, director of the Western N.Y. Center for Environmental Justice; and many other grassroots, nonprofit and faith-based community advocates provided detailed accounts of their role in the 858 Ferry Street cleanup, and expanded the environmental-justice framework to include new sites in Buffalo and the surrounding counties, and more precautionary policies. “Behind the Fence: an Eco-Documentary”[5] is slated for first release in April 2008. John Sullivan co-directs the Public Forum & Toxics Assistance division of the NIEHS Community Outreach and Education Core at the University of Texas Medical Branch @ Galveston, Texas. He uses Theatre of the Oppressed, photo/video voice and documentary video in collaborative environmental-justice projects. He just returned from a video shoot documenting the mission and impact of the Maria Luisa Ortiz Cooperative & Women’s Center in Mulukuku, Nicaragua. Bryan Parras is a co-producer of “Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say” (KPFT / Pacifica FM 90.1), and the Media /Youth Empowerment Coordinator for T.e.j.a.s. (Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services) in Houston Texas. He uses still photography and video production to document environmental racism and empower communities engaged in struggle for environmental justice. Parras serves as director of photography/videography and chief editor for the Maria Luisa Ortiz Cooperative project in Mulukuku, Nicaragua. Sources & Clarification [1] Bullard, Robert D. “Environmental Justice in the Twenty-First Century;” in “The Quest for Environmental Justice” (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005) [2] “Lead can affect almost every organ and system in your body. The main target for [3] ATSDR ToxFAQs PCBs. Exposure to PCBs may cause changes in the immune system, behavioral alterations and impaired reproduction. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has concluded that PCBs may reasonably be anticipated to be human carcinogens. (http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/tfacts17.pdf) [4] The final mitigation target levels were fixed at 400 parts per million (on site) and 1000 parts per million (adjacent offsite locations). 400 ppm is suitable for unrestricted use while 1000 ppm is designated as commercial/industrial. Community representatives and the NYSDEC also entered into agreements on dust and traffic control, and extensive air monitoring, both down and upwind of the site. [5] “Behind the Fence: an Eco-Documentary” is the current working title. Background “A Message from Assemblywoman Crystal D. Peoples,” December 2003, mentions the groundwork for a state campaign to leverage funding for the cleanup of 858 Ferry Street. (http://www.assembly.state.ny.us/member_files/141/20031112/) The NYSDEC’s information flier on possible changes in the ROD based on new findings of more extensive pollution, both on and off-site:“NYSDEC 1999 Record of Decision for the 858 East Ferry Street site called for the excavation and off-site disposal of the lead-contaminated hazardous waste, at a cost of approximately $1.3 million. The recent investigation has determined that the volume of hazardous waste is much larger than previously suspected.” Coalition activist Greg Brown (deceased) published an article, “Environmental Racism,” in Vol. 41, #11 of The Challenger. Brown was instrumental in the earliest stages of the Ferry Street campaign and his perspective accurately reflects the commitment of grassroots Buffalo social activists confronting both the outcomes of environmental racism and the institutions that perpetuate them. Greg Brown died of cancer before the 858 Ferry Street cleanup was completed. Contacts: John Sullivan (text) Bryan Parras (still photography/videography/editing) Behind the Fence: An Introduction
Living Together or Dying Together
Future Man
Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Original CAN/API publication: February 2008 CommentsPost a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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