by Linda Noonan

In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

In the second annual “Single Garment of Destiny” sermon on the intersection of race, environment, and faith sponsored by the Environmental Justice Center of Chestnut Hill United Church, Dr. Aaron Mair, the 57th national president of the Sierra Club and its first African American president, issued the challenge for all of us to be partisan – “partisan for the earth and all its people.”

Mair, a spatial epidemiologist, entered the nascent environmental justice movement out of concern for his children. He shared the story of the early years in his career, when he and his family moved to Arbor Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood in Albany, N.Y. The state had recently built a trash incinerator in Arbor Hill to dispose of the refuse from eight wealthy counties in the area.

Two of Mair’s daughters had developed asthma. About this same time, Mair came across a seminal study published in 1987 by the United Church of Christ denomination called “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.” This study predated any such publications by the Environmental Protection Agency or the government by almost a decade.

The report raised national attention, perhaps for the first time, that hazardous waste and toxic industrial sites have often been intentionally placed in the neighborhoods of people who are least able to fight back, while parks and trails are built in more affluent neighborhoods. As Mair recounted, “The United Church of Christ connected the dots between race and waste in a way no one else had.”

Mair was part of a landmark court case, Arbor Hill Concerned Citizens Neighborhood Association v. the State of New York, which succeeded in having the incinerator shut down. This work catapulted him to the fore of the growing environmental movement that works to recognize and address the disproportionate burdens imposed on people of color and low income, bringing justice to communities throughout the country that have been unfairly harmed by private and public decisions to be the target of air, water, and soil pollution.

Here in Philadelphia, the largest poor city in America, we are facing the disastrous juncture of extreme inequality and climate crisis. Our communities of color and low-income neighborhoods are overrun with toxic fossil fuel sites such as oil refineries, chemical plants and garages, exposing our most vulnerable residents to dangerous levels of chemical and other toxins. This in turn leads to limited economic development, lower property values, and bad health outcomes, including dramatically reduced life expectancy.

In Nicetown, just five miles from Chestnut Hill, SEPTA is proposing to build a new natural gas plant. Instead of looking to a healthy, just future by using clean energy in the form of wind and solar power, SEPTA is insisting on continued backward-facing reliance on fossil fuels. Gas plants like these are shown to release air pollution that increases and worsens asthma and heart disease in nearby residents.

Thirty-seven thousand people live within one mile of the proposed plant.. Nearly one in three children in Nicetown have asthma, far higher than the 21 percent rate for Philadelphia as a whole, and four times the national average. As Mair says about this plan, “This is absurd – the working class, black community of Nicetown will be burdened with this facility, following this same pattern we see repeatedly across the country.”

We should be weaning ourselves off fossil fuels as quickly as possible, not planning to increase our dependence on them.

Chestnut Hill United Church, a member of POWER Interfaith and in coalition with POWER Local Green Jobs Campaign, is committed to education and action to increase the purchase of local solar power, spur solar installation and community ownership in high unemployment areas, and prioritize local wealth building by calling for energy produced by local workers, paid living wages, and by supporting low-income ownership of solar energy production. We invite you to join us in that work.

The Rev. Linda Noonan is senior pastor at Chestnut Hill United Church, a United Church of Christ and United Methodist community, and home to the Environmental Justice Center at 8812 Germantown Avenue. All are welcome to worship on Sunday mornings at 11 a.m.