By Chris Marchi with AIR, Inc.
The basic idea is that all Americans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right? So it follows that if families living in areas near power plants, chemical factories, or airports get asthma, COPD, or any number of other chronic health problems because of exposure to pollution that comes from those types of facilities, their constitutional rights are being violated. That’s what environmental justice, also known as “EJ”, is all about.
Very often, polluting facilities end up located away from where wealthy people live, and closer to where working class and lower income people live. Environmental justice laws strive to ensure that families who are living near polluting facilities get equal protection from environmental damage. These families are often non-English speaking people, people with lower educational attainment, and people of color.
Not everybody recognizes this, but living next to a major international airport comes with serious environmental consequences. Most of the East Boston, Chelsea, Winthrop, and Revere area has large environmental justice communities. As a volunteer for Airport Impact Relief, Incorporated (AIR, Inc.) I’ve worked to achieve environmental justice for 30 years. AIR, Inc.’s work to push for air filtration programs alongside Mothers Out Front and others, our work with the Mary Ellen Welch Greenway and others to extend the East Boston Greenway, etc., is all about achieving environmental justice.
The biggest problem we’ve faced over AIR, Inc.’s 60+ years of activism has been the lack of environmental accountability at the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) which owns and operates Logan Airport. One of the main reasons we’ve had so much trouble getting Massport to accept accountability for the impacts of Logan’s noise and pollution is that it has not been in Massport’s job description to worry about the negative environmental consequences of aviation. Massport was established by an act of the state legislature back in 1956, at a time when politicians and planners weren’t thinking about environmental damage and people’s environmental rights as much as they were trying to support and grow economic benefits of aviation, building highways, and bulldozing urban communities through urban renewal plans.
When our partners at Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom reached out about the effort to improve Massport’s enabling language, we saw that there was an opportunity to strengthen the language from just mentioning equity, to specifically requiring the Port Authority to consider environmental justice in their mission. This language became Amendment #105 to Bill H4876 (“The Climate Bill”), which was formed in the legislative session that closed on July 31.
With the help of Representative Adrian Madaro and many of his colleagues in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, we came up with much stronger language for “The Climate Bill” than what was originally proposed. The new language required that Massport consider “environmental resiliency and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and incorporating environmental justice principles”. After passing to the final stages of the legislative process with enormous support from advocates across Massachusetts, Bill H4876 was declined last week when conference committee negotiations broke down.
We thank Representatives Madaro, Peisch, Cataldo, Gordon, Gentile, Ciccolo, and the numerous other representatives who signed the Climate Bill for their advocacy. We were thrilled with the proposed new language, and we were disappointed to learn that the Climate Bill was abandoned at a late hour on the final legislative workday for the session. We are disappointed that Massport has not yet been given a legislative mandate to work collaboratively with the neighborhoods who support it to reduce environmental impacts. We are worried for our futures, and for our children’s futures.
Under the Port Authority’s current charter, Massport’s staff, board, and leadership has no explicit responsibility to reduce environmental impacts. They see their calling as boosting the economy. The unspoken paradigm is “It’s the economy versus the environment” and without the requirement to address environmental costs, Massport has routinely chosen the most environmentally destructive alternatives.
Over the past 65 years or so that Massport has been in existence, the “grow first at any and all environmental costs approach” which has prevailed at the Massachusetts Port Authority has resulted in massive and ongoing environmental damage. To grow Logan, Massport has consumed 1,500 acres of Boston Harbor, 3 harbor islands, and 2 urban parks. Massport and the state have taken hundreds of homes and businesses in East Boston by eminent domain, bulldozed 3 urban neighborhoods. Today, Massport’s Logan airport releases 35,000 LBS of EPA criteria air pollution into the air in East Boston every day. We experience hundreds of night time flights which destroy our sleep, and Logan’s traffic in the air and ground grows worse by the day. Hanscom residents deal with disproportionate burdens as well.
We cannot continue to ask residents in airport impacted communities to fight the Authority for every gain at every turn. With the language in Amendment 105, hopefully we would not have needed to. However, the Massachusetts’ legislature has decided yet again to prioritize profits and political posturing over the wellbeing of residents.
Chris Marchi is from Air inc that is an East Boston based environmental group focused on improving the quality of life of all people – especially the most vulnerable: children, elderly, the more susceptible and those with fewer means — living in communities surrounding New England’s Logan International Airport, by mitigating the noise, air quality and traffic impacts of our large and growing airport.