It was the summer of 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina. The asphalt burned their skin through their clothes as they lay in the street waiting for the trucks to arrive. All of the protests from that summer had led to this moment, residents and activists, black and white, laying their lives down to protect their environment. The trucks were arriving to dump the PCB-laden soil into the backyard of...
In the aftermath of WWII, Detroit followed national urban planning trends in seeking to enhance high-speed transportation between the growing suburbs and the city center. Plans began for an extension to the I-75 highway to rectify the problem. The route recommended by the Fisher Freeway Planning Committee began at the southwest limits of the city, in the neighborhood of Delray. There, it would connect...
Coal-fired power plants have long been one of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases. There are various kinds of inputs that a power plant can use in the process of creating electricity, and one of these is petroleum coke. An important factor that makes pet coke desirable is the fact that it can produce fuel efficiencies in integrated steel mills. The company that first discovered this...
In the early 1970s, representatives of the United Automobile Workers' union presented a picture of deprivation to the City of Detroit. The influential Motor City workers union had created a map which literally illustrated the isolation of urban residents; isolation from any large city-facilitated parks. For residents of the City of Detroit, there are no parks or open spaces within a 30 minute drive...
In 1858, Dr. Hennery Baker, the head of the Michigan Board of Health, diagnosed a large number of deaths in the Delray settlement as the results of an outbreak of typhoid fever. Typhoid, transmitted by drinking water contaminated with the feces of an infected person, was commonly found in the unsanitary conditions of urban centers across the industrialized world in the nineteenth century. Delray, a...