What follows is an adapted, re-edited version of a Facebook post from today that seems to have struck a nerve, attracting dozens of likes, comments, and shares. As a result, I concluded that perhaps I should add it to this blog.
No pictures here, just observations:
We as a nation come from ancestors who nearly starved to death at Valley Forge but stuck it out to ensure the success of a revolution that created a new nation built on liberty, imperfectly at first, but expanding its range over centuries.
Some of the toughest Americans come from ancestors who endured slavery over centuries to help build upon that legacy of liberty when they finally won their freedom.
We come from ancestors who endured four grueling years of civil war to ensure that liberty and equality retained a fighting chance to become this nation’s hallmark.
We come from ancestors who endured long passages across sometimes rough seas to reach a land that promised them a better life, and when they arrived, many endured hard work and, often, discrimination to assert their role in building our democracy.
We come from ancestors who, toward the end of World War I, endured endless months of influenza pandemic, with shutdowns and deaths and illness comparable to those we are experiencing now, until the danger passed and lives could be rebuilt.
We come from ancestors who, just a decade later, underwent the grueling agony of the Great Depression. We elected a president who, riddled with polio, understood the virtues of patience and perseverance in solving problems that seemed daunting by any measure, then entered World War II to help save the world from some of its most vicious tyrannies in modern times.
I could go on. But . . . .
Someone forgot to teach these lessons to a narcissistic president with the attention span of a fruit fly, a spoiled upper-class brat who has never faced serious challenges in life until now, a man who never learned much history, judging from the evidence of his comments.
Someone forgot to teach those lessons to protesters who, after a single month of one of the greatest public health challenges in anyone’s lifetime, refuse to learn that life never promised them that everything would turn up roses at the flick of a finger, and who never learned to analyze and understand a problem to find out whether the reopening they say they want might produce more harm than good, that a temper tantrum never solved anything.
Millions of Americans, probably most, of course, despite everything, understand that sacrifice will be part of the solution. But others have never, apparently, been steeled by a personal Valley Forge and just want what they want. Isn’t it time for a little maturity to settle in? Thank God for some governors and mayors out there with common sense and fortitude.
This is America. We’re supposed to be tougher than just throwing temper tantrums. Let’s prove it, people.
In the mid-1960s, before the advent of the personal
computer, when a manual typewriter was the state of the art in original
document production, I took a high school typing course in which I learned the QWERTY
keyboard and how to manipulate my fingers to put words on paper more rapidly.
There were some curious practice exercises that people used to gain such mastery,
memorized phrases that one might type repeatedly in order to build digital
agility. One of them was this gem:
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of
their country.
Even as I wrote this now, I did not make it to the end of
the sentence without a stumble. Unlike my teenage days, however, I now can
simply back up and overwrite mistakes or even just rely on Microsoft Word’s
spell-correct functions to fix things for me. How the world has changed. In
those days, I had to laboriously apply White-Out
to the page. (Millennials can be excused for looking up that brand name.)
In the woke 2020s, of course, it is perfectly appropriate to
change the wording of that exercise to “all good men and women” or even “all
good people.” And indeed, many of the people I will call on in this essay are
women in positions of power in the United States Congress, most notably the
U.S. Senate. Of the 53 Republican Senators, nine are
women. That is more than enough to tip any vote in that body.
I mention this typing exercise because it always made me
wonder, “when is now?” What is the crisis that would trigger this aid from all
good people, and what would that aid be? In recent weeks, it has become very
clear to me that now is now, and the aid is that of people with enough
courage and conscience to develop a clear-eyed vision of the challenge posed by
the current President of the United States. The Senate trial of the impeachment
charges brought against him started
this afternoon.
As sometimes happens, one can see some of the ground
shifting beneath the feet of those who assumed they could respond from a
position of power without response to the evidence or the larger issues
surrounding the case. It has happened before, and the shifting of the ground
was the fundamental reason in 1974 for the resignation of
President Richard Nixon before his case ever came to trial. It is taking
longer in this case simply because President Trump has thrown
up one obstacle after another to prevent any witnesses from the Executive Branch,
and any documents, from reaching public view. Arguing that the House should
spend endless months challenging assertions of executive
privilege in order to bring its case, the President and all his henchmen
seem determined to run out the clock before the 2020 election. Wisely, Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not fall for this
travesty and insisted on moving forward before Trump’s campaign could summon interference
in another election.
The game now, in the Senate, is to claim that the House cannot
bring witnesses that it failed to summon during its impeachment investigation, even
though most could not be subpoenaed in a timely fashion because of White House
obstruction. Despite that, a parade of good men and women, mostly civil
servants and career diplomats, made
their way to the House of Representatives to testify both for closed-door
depositions and open hearings because now was their time to come to the aid of
their country. For that, most
were reviled publicly by the President himself. We have never seen such a shameful display of
executive arrogance before in American history.
The House impeachment managers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, in the
last two hours as I write this, did a masterful job, in my opinion, of
highlighting the hypocrisy of Trump’s allies claiming that the House should
have heard from witnesses whom Trump himself barred from testifying. As the public
begins to focus more closely on this point, the ground may shift some more—if not
in changing votes in the Senate on the rules of the trial, then quite possibly in
November when voters decide how much hypocrisy and unfairness they can stomach before
they rebel.
Look, I am not a lawyer, so I am not attempting to present
legal and constitutional arguments here, but as a very well-informed citizen, I
am more than entitled to introduce some moral and intellectual perspective. The
Republican approach in both houses of Congress has struck me as a competition
to produce the best imitation of Sgt. Schultz from the silly
1960s television show, Hogan’s
Heroes, which featured some ingenious Allied prisoners of war in a
German stalag during World War II. Schultz was known for turning a blind eye
when Col. Hogan engaged
in some forbidden antics, always using the stock line, “I see nothing,” enunciated
with a heavy German accent.
But it may also be a grand imitation of the three wise monkeys
of Japanese legend, See
No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil, each of whom participated in a charade
to avoid seeing the obvious. After all, if President Trump insists his phone call
with Ukrainian
President Zelenskiy was “perfect,” then there must be no reason to examine
the evidence, right? So, let’s hear the arguments first in the Senate trial,
and decide later whether we wish to view documents or hear from witnesses. If
it weren’t such tragic farce, it might make for good material for a Saturday
Night Liveskit. But sometimes, the truth is so baldly scary that any
potential humor associated with it fades into the shadows.
I say that because the evidence is mounting that Trump simply does not understand, or does not wish to understand, that presidential power is not and never has been unlimited under Article II of the U.S. Constitution. No previous president has assumed that he was entitled simply to do whatever he wanted. Respect for the U.S. Constitution, to which each swore an oath to “protect and defend,” and a sense of patriotic honor about protecting democracy itself, restrained their worst impulses. Until now.
It so happened that, over the recent holidays, I discovered
and read a short biography of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer (Radical
Integrity: The Story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer), the German Lutheran pastor
who in the 1930s and 1940s undertook to oppose the rise of Adolf Hitler. Ultimately,
he was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler in the waning days of the war. With
just a month left before Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Nazi authorities,
with an eye to avenging any opposition to Hitler, executed him at Flossenburg
prison. To this day, he is regarded as a religious and patriotic martyr for
standing up to tyranny under the Nazi regime. He knew the consequences he faced,
and he was not deterred. I have long known about Bonhoeffer but had not read
his story in depth. The short, popularized version by Michael Van Dyke resulted
in my tracking down (through colleague Allison Hardin as I was recovering from
surgery) the full 1,000-page biography from 1970 by close Bonhoeffer associate
and seminarian Eberhard
Bethge (Dietrich
Bonhoeffer: A Biography). I aim to read it in full in the coming
months.
I mention it because, in staring down the intimidation practiced
by Donald Trump, the relentless shredding of opponents’ reputations, the ignorance
of history accompanied by thirst for power that characterizes his presidency,
and the inability to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, error under any
circumstances, no one is asking anyone in Congress to put his or her life on the
line in the way that Bonhoeffer and similar principled critics of tyranny were
willing to do. They may fear losing a Republican primary as a result of Trump
ginning up his base, but there is life after politics, and certainly life after
a single defeat by the followers of a president who is likely to be a spent
force in American politics within five years. The question is one of having
sufficient courage and integrity to challenge this march toward authoritarianism
while it still matters. Political self-preservation in the short term is a very
myopic goal. Abraham Lincoln
lost re-election to the U.S. House because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War,
only to resurface a dozen years later as one of the greatest presidents in
American history.
But alas, it appears that when the time comes for someone to
write the story of the 53 Republican Senators in the 116th
Congress, they may need to reverse the title of President John F.
Kennedy’s famous book and call theirs Profiles in Cowardice. But we shall
see. There is always the opportunity for a miracle of conscience. Some good
people may yet come to the aid of their country.
That headline is a quote from Mayor Tommy Muska of the town of West, Texas, in the Dallas Morning News of November 21, regarding the Trump administration’s rescission of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for disaster prevention in chemical facilities, issued that day.
Aerial photo of the west explosion site taken several days after blast (4/22/2013). By Shane.torgerson – Aerial photo taken from my plane Previously published: Facebook and Flickr, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25727808
So much news passes under the bridge in one month these days
that readers can be forgiven if they do not immediately recall what happened in
West on April 17, 2013, but my guess is that many do. Or they may if I nudge
them by noting that the West
Fertilizer Company suffered an explosion in a storage facility at the edge
of this small city of 2,880. The explosion resulted from the combustion of
ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizer, which is notorious for its
chemical instability. Still, the facility had been there since the 1960s, but
West had over the years allowed a middle school, an apartment building (which
was destroyed), a nursing home, and other structures to be built nearby. When
the explosion occurred, 160 people were injured, 14 first responders (mostly
firefighters) were killed, and one elderly man died of a heart attack as the
nursing home was evacuated. All that triggered a bit of soul searching about loose
regulations at all levels of government regarding the operation of such facilities,
their disproportionate environmental impact on vulnerable populations, and how
better to prevent future disasters.
One year later, in May 2014, I
wrote in this blog about West following my own involvement on an expert
panel for the federal Chemical Safety Board,
which held a hearing in West on the anniversary of the disaster. I raised some
pertinent questions about Texas chemical and fire safety regulation that were
of interest to the board.
In the meantime, however, moves were afoot in the Obama
administration to respond to the larger questions of chemical facility accidents.
According to Earthjustice,
an environmental advocacy group, in the decade up to the West accident the U.S.
had experienced 2,200 chemical accidents at hazardous facilities, two-thirds of
which caused reported harm, including 59 deaths and more than 17,000 people
injured, hospitalized, or seeking medical care. As a result, President Obama
signed on August 1, 2013, Executive
Order 13650, “Improving Chemical Facility Safety and Security,” which set
in motion a
rule-making procedure at the U.S. EPA. By July 31, 2013, EPA issued a Risk
Management Program request for information in the Federal Register, proposed
new rules on March 14, 2016, and finalized the new rule, known for short as the
Chemical
Disaster Rule, on January 13, 2017, with one week remaining before
President Trump took office.
The final rule is a bit complex, using 112 pages of the Federal
Register, but among other items specifically required a “root cause
analysis” as part of an incident investigation to determine what “could have reasonably
resulted in a catastrophic release.” It would also require compliance audits
after reported incidents and required all facilities with certain processes to
conduct annual notification exercises to ensure that emergency contact information
was complete. The overall idea was to improve effective coordination with local
emergency responders. One problem that caused fatalities in West was a lack of
firefighter awareness of the precise contents and dangers of the facility that
exploded. Thus, the requirements in the rule for field and tabletop exercises.
Finally, the rule aimed to enhance the availability of information about chemical
hazards in these facilities including sharing such information with local
emergency planning committees.
The rest is almost entirely predictable. With little grasp
of public policy but considerable animus toward anything with Obama’s name on
it, Trump put his appointees to work undoing his legacy. That included action
by then EPA Administrator
Scott Pruitt on March 16, 2017, in response to an industry-sponsored
petition, to announce a 90-day stay of the Obama-era rules, followed by an
extension to 20 months shortly thereafter. In the meantime, Louisiana and 10
other states, including Texas, petitioned for reconsideration of the Obama
rules. The delay would last until February 19, 2019. However, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia, responding to a petition from environmental
groups, vacated
the Trump rulemaking. But now we have a final rule from the Trump EPA
officially rescinding the Chemical Disaster Rule.
The public information aspect of the rule became a target, with the Trump administration claiming it was responding to homeland security and emergency management experts who feared that such information would become a target for terrorists. However, it would seem to me that far more people have been affected by routine chemical accidents than by any terrorist incidents at such facilities. The U.S. EPA also noted that the rules would not have prevented the accident at West because it was ultimately determined to have been caused by arson. It is worth noting, however, that most of the first responder fatalities in that incident were more credibly the result of a lack of training and information on the potential explosiveness of the materials involved, which might have prompted greater caution and different tactics by firefighters. And none of this answers the questions I raised in my 2014 blog post about land-use practices and limitations on fire safety codes in Texas.
So, back to Mayor Muska, who is reportedly disappointed with
the outcome, and for good reason. His town has to live with the results of the
2013 explosion, which decimated the volunteer firefighter staff and obliterated
a local business (and employer). Muska was mayor when the disaster happened and
is now serving his fifth term. I think it is worth sharing the comments he made
in the final two paragraphs of the Dallas Morning News story:
“The American people and
American politicians, they have a short memory,” Muska said. “They’re going to
say everything is fine, and every few years something like this is going to
happen again, and ‘Oh, yeah, we need to look at this again.’
“We’re yesterday’s news. It’s not on anybody’s minds
as it was in ’13 and ’14.”
Last week was for me an eventful time, including a four-hour trip to Dubuque, Iowa, on Thursday for the Growing Sustainable Communities conference, an event the city sponsors every year. I spoke in a session that afternoon, October 24, on community planning for drought, but mostly what I remember was the combination of keynote speeches that addressed the major issues of our time, notably including a luncheon talk on Friday by Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech University, on communication about climate change. It was impressive and inspiring but underscored how much work lies ahead to reverse damaging trends affecting our planet.
But the week started out differently, with smaller actions
that I think are extremely important in setting the tone for the way all of us
relate to our fellow human beings.
My wife and I are members of Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park,
in Chicago. Situated catacorner from the Lutheran
School of Theology in Chicago on E. 55 St., our church enjoys the benefit
of the knowledge that abounds among the LSTC faculty. I serve as coordinator of
the Adult Forum, an adult discussion group that meets during the Sunday School
hour. That makes me responsible for finding speakers, programming discussions,
and promoting the events. On Sunday, October 20, we discussed actions we could
take following a five-week series covering the World War II Nazi death camps,
visited by Dr.
Esther Menn and her husband, Bruce Tammen, in August
during a trip to Poland and Ukraine, which fed into considerations of how we
treat immigrants and minorities in our own time.
Our pastor, Rev. Nancy Goede, told me about an incident that occurred the prior Tuesday in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, at Lincoln United Methodist Church. Lincoln has chosen to become a sanctuary church out of concern for the safety of undocumented immigrants, but a man shouting Nazi slogans came to the building in an angry confrontation with church staff. It was not the first time the church had been targeted for its actions. The man proceeded to smash the front window.
There is little we can do directly about an incident that is already past, but we decided that we could establish a supportive relationship with the congregation in the face of this hate crime, so we composed the following letter, eventually signed that day by at least 25 members of Augustana:
To the Members and Staff of Lincoln United Methodist Church:
We are very sorry to hear about the incident on October 15, in which a man shouting Nazi slogans smashed the glass window on the front door of Lincoln United Methodist Church. We have learned that you have been targeted by right-wing groups for your stance in establishing Lincoln UMC as a sanctuary church. We support your efforts and pray for your safety as you continue to follow your consciences in doing the Lord’s work.
Your Brothers and Sisters in Christ at Augustana Lutheran Church
Indeed, part of the purpose of this letter is to reassure
Lincoln United Methodist Church that its members are not being left to handle
this attack in isolation from the rest of the Christian community. We had learned
a great deal about the high cost of silence during the Holocaust, as well as
the need to forcefully address racial equality as we commemorated the 100th
anniversary of Chicago’s
race riots in 1919, a story detailed well in Claire Hartfield’s recent book, A Few Red
Drops.
But that is not all we chose to do. Esther Menn then noted the American Jewish community on this past weekend would be commemorating the first anniversary of a violent anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which eleven members were killed, and seven others wounded, by a man apparently inspired by right-wing rhetoric. Robert Bowers, a truck driver from Baldwin, Pennsylvania, was arrested for the massacre, and authorities said he used social media beforehand to post criticism of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which has been supportive of the human rights of immigrants to the U.S.
In solidarity, Augustana announced that members of the congregation, as well as people from LSTC and McCormick Seminary, would gather last Friday evening to walk to nearby KAM Isaiah Israel congregation in Hyde Park to join its Friday evening shabbat service. Once again, Augustana would make a simple statement in opposition to hate crimes and violence against religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. Because traffic on the way back from Dubuque that afternoon obviated the possibility of my own participation, Esther related to me that 27 people from Augustana and the two seminaries joined the effort, plus others who met them at the synagogue, and that their presence was greatly appreciated.
Supportive visitors at the doors of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue. Photo provided by Esther Menn.
Sometimes, it is worth remembering that the simple act of reaching
out to say we care and stand behind others is enough to establish lasting and
meaningful bonds between otherwise disparate groups of human beings. It
certainly is a place to start.
In 2013, the board of education of the Chicago Public Schools succeeded in closing
50 neighborhood schools, an action fully supported by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Of
these, 90 percent had a majority of African American students, who comprised 80
percent of students in the closed schools. These, in turn, comprised fully
one-fourth of the city’s schools with a majority of both African American
students and African American faculty.
Chicago is not a city where people take abuse and discrimination lightly. Predictably, many parents in the affected neighborhoods rose up in civic rebellion. At Dyett High School, they launched a hunger strike to make their feelings known. Protesters succeeded in keeping Dyett open, but overall, little of this had any effect because Chicago has the only unelected school board in the state of Illinois. Instead, courtesy of special state legislation, the mayor appoints the members, who respond to the mayor, not the voters. Recent mayors have liked it that way.
If you imagine that this might be a political issue, you are exactly right. In the mayoral election that just last month culminated with the election of Lori Lightfoot, both she and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle vowed support for creating an elected school board. These two had emerged as the leading vote-getters from a mayoral field of 17 in the nonpartisan primary after Emanuel declined to seek reelection. As with many such things, the details will matter greatly in negotiations with legislators in Springfield, but Lightfoot’s 73 percent mandate unquestionably gives her considerable elbow room in the discussion. But such an outcome of the often harsh and certainly vigorous debate was hardly on the horizon when the closings occurred. So, too, was the explosive controversy over the police murder of Laquan MacDonald in 2014 until court-ordered release of the video exposed the official police explanation of the 17-year-old’s death as highly inaccurate. That set the stage for Emanuel’s exit from City Hall.
But back to the story of the school closings. This set of
events helped to poison relations between Emanuel and much of the black
community in Chicago even before the MacDonald shooting became the linchpin for
relations with the Chicago Police
Department. Lightfoot’s claim to fame—and she rose to challenge Emanuel
even before he decided not to run—was her role in police administrative reform.
With permission from University of Chicago Press
In her new book released last year, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side(University of Chicago Press), Eve L. Ewing, assistant professor in the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, tackles the 2013 events to share with us why this was not just a one-off mistake by some misguided board members and school administrators, but part of a long history of institutional racism in the Chicago system. The closings did not happen in a vacuum; there was no blank slate. There was, instead, a powerful legacy of devaluing black students and their neighborhoods that played a significant role in the clash of world views between the powerful and the disempowered.
History matters. Ewing takes time to elucidate the migrations
of southern blacks between the world wars to northern cities including Chicago.
This was the origin of what has become known as the Bronzeville
neighborhood on the South Side. Ewing notes that the black population in Chicago
grew 360 percent in just two decades. However, while many other ethnic groups
immigrating to Chicago developed enclaves by choice, blacks were forced to do so
through a segregation enforced not by law, but by bombings and violence. Blacks
attempting to move into white neighborhoods faced serious retribution. From
1917 to 1921, she notes, 58 bombs “struck the homes of black residents, of
bankers who gave the mortgages, or of real estate agents who sold them
property.” This was an average of one bombing every 20 days. It is not hard to imagine
how this produced an intimidating effect for all concerned. The result was a
ghetto in which blacks were confined in increasingly dense concentrations,
eventually culminating in the infamous housing projects that lined the major
corridors of the South Side. But we get ahead of ourselves here. In order to squeeze
growing numbers of the southern arrivals into the same housing stock in a
geographically confined area, landlords began to carve up existing units into
ever smaller ones that came to be known as “kitchenettes,” often violating
building codes and safety standards. Gwendolyn Brooks, the famous African-American
poet laureate of Illinois, memorialized these housing atrocities in her poem, “Kitchenette
Building.”
Ewing discusses her book in an April lecture at DePaul University.
That, in turn, led to overcrowded schools in the affected neighborhoods, accompanied by the morally constipated unwillingness of powerful school officials to consider integrating schools or allocating substantial resources to those neighborhoods to allow their schools to work. Instead, Superintendent Benjamin Willis took over in 1953, in an era when schools did not systematically collect racial data and he could somewhat disingenuously proclaim himself color-blind. As Ewing observes, “Local black leaders were not convinced.” This was, after all, also the time of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the United States Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools and overturned the philosophy of “separate but equal.” In time, Willis implemented a policy that placed black students in overcrowded schools in temporary aluminum auxiliary trailers that were soon derided as “Willis wagons,” while students attended for half-days while the affected schools ran double shifts.
By 1961, Ewing states, “tensions were flaring,” and a coalition
of civil rights groups undertook efforts to enroll black students in white
schools, where they were turned away despite vacancies. Operation Transfer
served to expose the inherent discrimination in the system. Other forms of
direct action followed, including black mothers visiting white schools to document
open spaces (they were arrested for trespassing), and lying down in front of
bulldozers preparing the ground for more trailers. Finally, the stage was set
for a mass walkout on October 22, 1963, “Freedom Day,”
in which more than 220,000 students boycotted school.
In short, the protests of 2013 had plenty of precedent, and the closings struck black parents not as an attempt to improve the education of their children—in areas losing population largely as a result of the demolition of the same public housing that once confined them—but as the destruction of families and networks that had grown in those neighborhoods over time. The full story is more complex and richly textured, but you begin to get the idea. Yet, the denial of this impact of history, and the insistence that new policies under Emanuel were somehow part of a clean slate to give disadvantaged students a fresh start, even as many had to cross gang lines and lost their lives to gun violence as they attended newly assigned schools, persisted.
That brings us to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, a black school superintendent chosen by Emanuel, who led the school closings. The fact that she was later convicted and imprisoned for taking kickbacks from a former employer and CPS contractor, escapes only those who suffer from a deprived sense of irony. Confronted at a public meeting with accusations of racism that touched a raw nerve, she reacted: “What I cannot understand, and will not accept, is that the proposals I am offering are racist. That is an affront to me as a woman of color.”
Ewing goes on, after quoting Byrd-Bennett at greater length, not only to examine the personal umbrage that Byrd-Bennett expressed, but the larger context of institutional racism, and the underlying question of why the schools in question were “underutilized” and “under-resourced” in the first place. After all, someone had made critical decisions to reallocate resources to charter schools and away from the very schools that were now being criticized for underperforming despite the clear history of policies that had helped make them so. The feeling of betrayal among parents and students in the schools facing closure was palpable, and the emotional commitment that led to a hunger strike was real. The fact that, yet again, the system found a way to turn a deaf ear to those who pleaded with the board to reconsider its approach spoke volumes about where power resided. There were numerous factors that led to this year’s election outcome, which also produced a growing progressive caucus in the City Council, but these battles over schools were surely among them.
The richness of Ewing’s book is much deeper than I can portray here, so I urge those interested in the topic to read it. Chicago is not alone in facing serious issues concerning the future of its public schools and fairness in the distribution of educational resources, so this book is not just for Chicago. It is for America.
Now, time for full disclosure: First, I was on a panel of three judges for the Society of Midland Authors that chose this book for honorable mention in adult nonfiction in our annual book awards context. That award will be bestowed at a banquet on May 14. Second, my wife is a retired Chicago Public Schools teacher and Chicago Teachers Union activist who wrote about the Dyett hunger strike and other actions against the school closings at the time they were happening. Her concern for students is not abstract and policy-driven but visceral and personal after decades in the classroom. There are many opinions about education policy in Chicago, but after three decades in the classroom, she has earned a right to hers.
The size of the American Planning Association‘s loss when Stuart Meck departed can be measured easily by the size of Rutgers University‘s gain when he joined their staff, a fact immortalized by the Rutgers decision to name a lecture series after him. Marya Morris, who probably worked most closely with him at APA, got the opportunity recently to present the eulogy at the opening of that series. She shared some memorable stories, including his near death in the early 2000s when he was struck with an intestinal infection while they both were in Prague. It seems the Czech government felt it could learn a great deal about planning law reform by having Stuart Meck lead a 12-session workshop on the subject for high government officials. Pretty heady stuff.
I also worked with Stuart, though not as much as Marya. But we teamed up on hazard mitigation content for his pet project, funded by seven federal agencies and a few foundations, on statutory reform of state planning laws, known as Growing Smart. We also teamed up on a PAS Report, Planning for Wildfires. That may have been more in my wheelhouse, but trust me, Stuart was no slouch in mastering new topics and contributed very substantially to the final product.
Between all these major efforts, he found time incessantly to mentor the younger research staff at APA and was an indefatigable cheerleader for his profession. Did I mention he also co-authored a tome on Ohio Planning and Zoning Law? His productivity was a miracle to behold, as was his willingness to defend what he believed in. He died sooner than most of us who knew him would have liked, but he still deserves his day in the sun. The photos below, of various phases of his life, were provided by his daughter, Lindsay Meck. Thanks, Lindsay, for your help in this regard.
Stuart was also a jazz fan.
Posted to Facebook 2/10/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade It’s been a couple of weeks, and I’ve been busy, but I have a great one today. I visited with Eugene Henry last Thursday and Friday while in Florida. On Friday, February 22, Gene’s dedication drove him across the state to West Palm Beach to hear my lecture for Florida Atlantic University on “Recovery and Resilience,” followed by a panel discussion and reception. Mind you, it’s a four-hour drive from Tampa.
But the day before, he hosted my wife and me on a personal day-long tour of Hillsborough County to show me the work they have done on hazard mitigation to reduce risks from hurricanes and floods. In a day or two, I plan to post a blog article on this subject, but Gene for some time has been the hazard mitigation program manager for Hillsborough County, a large urban area that includes Tampa. Gene is, as my friend Lincoln Walther, one of the panelists in West Palm Beach, said, “one of the best.” He has pushed the program forward, and he was a force behind the development of a very progressive Post-Disaster Redevelopment Plan that Hillsborough County pioneered several years ago. Gene is looking forward to retirement in a few years, but his contributions have been outstanding and deserve serious recognition. He is a true leader in the mitigation field. Let this tribute be a beginning, followed by the upcoming blog post.
Posted to Facebook 2/26/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade Today, I’d like to thank my long-time friend and high school classmate, David Taylor, and his wife, Linda, for their hospitality in sharing their home and time with us during our recent visit to Florida. David is the person who spurred me to come to Sarasota in the first place. He is also a photographer who used his resources, time, and energy, to film the entire two-hour program that I keynoted in West Palm Beach for Florida Atlantic University on February 22.
A Purple Heart Vietnam veteran, Dave is passionate about some subjects, including respect for veterans, and shared his stories with me and others about fighting his way back from serious injuries. He’s generous to the core but wise in his years. He was the emcee for our 50-year reunion last June in Brecksville, Ohio, for the Class of 1968. There is a lot I can say. He is currently taking film and history classes at State College of Florida with both students and professors younger than us, and enjoying it thoroughly because he has so much to share.
Most importantly, perhaps, he has gotten so
excited about what he heard from listening to me that he wants to take all that
talent and use it to help document disasters photographically, even as he
gorges his brain on all that I have produced. Here’s to a good friend still
finding his energy and a new mission in life as he nears 70.
The photo below? I cropped it to show him and Linda more closely, but the larger version, well, they’re standing under the Kissing Sailor statue in downtown Sarasota, which replicates that iconic photo from the end of WWII.
Posted to Facebook 2/27/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade In the year after Hurricane Katrina, I met a young professor at University of New Orleans who was teaching transportation planning–John Renne. Soon, he had invited me to provide a closing keynote at a conference with a distinct theme: Carless Evacuation. Using a federal DOT grant, John was focusing attention on the central question of emergency management in the Big Easy: How do we move those people to safety who are the most vulnerable and lack independent transportation to just get out of town?
John has continued to raise vital questions like that ever since, even after moving in recent years to Florida Atlantic University. Florida faces plenty of its own questions concerning hurricane safety, and at 44, it would seem we can expect his contributions to keep coming. Recently, he and FAU hosted me to keynote a program on “Resilience and Recovery: Facing Disasters of the Future,” and I appreciated the chance to interact with planning professionals on what is known in Florida as the Treasure Coast. Bringing a hazards focus to transportation planning has been John’s unique and valuable asset not only regionally but nationally. FAU should be, and probably is, glad to have him.
In the photo below: Hank Savitch, Alka Sapat, myself, Lincoln Walther, John Renne. Hank, Alka, and Link joined me on the discussion panel that followed my talk in West Palm Beach a week ago. John was the moderator.
It is hard to know where to start in describing why the privatization
of prisons is a terrible idea. The effective abandonment of public responsibility
for the fate and welfare of people sentenced to incarceration after being convicted
of various crimes—some of whom, in recent years, have been exonerated because of
revelations of sloppy or corrupt police work—should speak deeply to the
conscience. Apparently, in some legislative circles, however, money counts for more.
The lobby for private prisons has made headway over time at both the federal
and state levels.
To find out whether and how private prisons are particularly
dysfunctional, Shane Bauer, a senior
reporter for Mother Jones, went undercover at Winn
Prison in Louisiana, an operation of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)
under contract with the state. Not totally undercover, mind you. He used his own
name, and had CCA checked him out as he applied for a $9-per-hour job as a
corrections officer, they might have wondered why someone with his background would
want to work there. But CCA has a problem. Guards working just above minimum
wage tend not to last long, and CCA needs bodies in uniforms, so the hiring process
appears less than diligent. He was hired easily and worked at Winn for four
months before it was time to leave. But more on that later.
For the record: Guards at public prisons in Louisiana, Bauer
reports, started at $12.50 an hour. Not a lot, but almost 40 percent more than
CCA was paying. Undoubtedly with better benefits.
Let me state at the outset that the resulting book, American Prison (Penguin Press, 2018), which follows his reporting in Mother Jones, is not my normal reading. Regular followers of this blog can figure out what I like to read, for the most part. But I am currently a judge in adult nonfiction for a book awards contest for the Society of Midland Authors, so this and many others arrived at my doorstep, day after day, until the deadline arrived earlier this month. Prisons, correctional policy, and the business of punishment are well outside my areas of expertise, and I am glad of that, but I know a book that demands public attention when I see one. This one will be an eye-opening experience even for some cynics. It will also be heart-wrenching for anyone with a moral core or a sense of human decency.
Before I delve into the details, I must express my admiration
for Bauer’s courage in even undertaking this project. For one thing, he had
prior experience with prisons—as an inmate. Several years ago, while Bauer was covering
the Middle East, he and two friends, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd, went hiking and wandered
too close to the Iranian border in Kurdish Iraq. All
three were arrested. He was taken to the notorious Evin
prison, where he spent considerable time in isolation before his eventual
release. Shourd was released after about a year in a separate prison. That
experience might very justifiably have kept most other people from even considering
working in a prison, but Bauer has instead developed a commitment to prison
reform. Meanwhile, the CEO of CCA, Damon
Hininger, earned $4 million in 2018, according to Bauer, 20 times the
salary of the director of the Federal Bureau of
Prisons. Just sayin’.
Bauer does not simply relate his experiences at Winn Prison.
He has done his homework on the history of making money from prisons and prison
labor. He points out that many immigrants to the American colonies were convicts
exported from England as indentured servants.
Many fortunes in the United States, sometimes vast fortunes, have been built on
free (meaning forced) labor from slaves and convicts. But the business of
prison labor being used for profit took wing mostly after the Civil War, when
the 13th
Amendment abolished slavery with one loophole: “except as punishment for a
crime.” The opportunity to convict multitudes of African-Americans, as well as
a fair number of hapless poor whites, for even minor crimes, opened the door
for leasing convict labor. That, in turn, led to horrific conditions as
legislatures, especially in the South, sought ways to reduce the costs of penitentiaries
by making them profitable—thus, the institution of the prison farm, and later,
chain gangs.
That conditions were often horrid on plantations and chain
gangs is beyond dispute. Bauer provides ample statistics and documentation including
large percentages of deaths in places like Alabama. But individual stories sometimes
often serve better to illustrate the moral degradation of prisons for profit.
Bauer supplies us with the once infamous case of Martin Tabert, a white,
22-year-old middle-class kid from North Dakota who in 1921 set out to tour the
country as a personal adventure. He ran out of money in Florida, between odd
jobs along the way, and was arrested and pulled off a train by the sheriff for
not having a ticket. Tabert wired his family for money, but before it arrived,
he was sold off to the Putnam Lumber Company for three months of work in a
turpentine camp. He worked all day in swamp water in “tattered shoes that didn’t
fit.” When he had an aching groin and lagged behind other convicts, the “whipping
boss” made him lie on the ground for thirty lashes in front of the other
convicts. After additional beating and being hit over the head with a strap, he
died the following night. The company sent a note to his family saying he died
of fever. Not satisfied with the explanation, the family convinced the North
Dakota state attorney to go to Florida to investigate. His findings, including the
company’s agreement to pay the sheriff $20 for each prisoner he sent to them,
produced a major scandal, a lawsuit, and an investigation by the Florida
legislature.
All of that highlights the fact that, for decades, some
states wavered between episodes of investigation and reform and a desire to limit
the prison budget and make the penal system earn money. One might think that,
in more enlightened times, we might get past that sort of moral cowardice and
come to terms with public responsibilities to provide opportunities for at
least the less violent or nonviolent prisoners to make amends, acquire skills,
and rehabilitate themselves for participation in what we might hope would
become a less dangerous society.
But private prisons, and major problems even at public
prisons, persist because America has not yet moved beyond moral indifference
and hard-nosed, but short-sighted notions like “throw away the key.” I do not
say that to minimize the very real challenges involved in incarcerating felons
in the first place. Bauer himself, as he details his experiences as a
corrections officer at Winn, confronts much of the moral ambivalence of handling
such responsibilities, including the head games and manipulation in which prisoners
often engaged at his expense. The moral turmoil of maintaining control of a
potentially violent setting is significant, but it also serves to underscore
the moral turpitude of trying to do so in a private prison staffed by guards
who are earning barely above the minimum wage. That, of course, cuts costs, as
does minimizing medical care for inmates and many other short cuts. Bauer plies
us with statistics including comparisons of suicide rates between public and
private prisons. But again, a personal story highlights a major problem. Bauer
tells of one inmate, Damien Coestly, who hangs himself. His suicide is not
reported by CCA, he tells us, because he died in the hospital, not at the
prison. Never mind that the scenario played out at the prison. Just get the guy out of our prison before he
dies on our watch. Good grief.
Now, at some point, you know this whole undercover operation
must end. I will not spoil the story for you, nor even share how he got so much
information out of the prison on a daily basis. But the epilogue details how and
when he decided the time had come to pack up and leave, reporting his resignation
by phone from the safety of neighboring Texas. Just read it. It is high drama, making
Bauer’s subsequent arrival at the annual shareholders meeting of CCA in
Nashville almost anticlimactic, but revealing, nonetheless. If this book does
not affect your outlook on the whole subject of incarceration for profit, I
swear, there is something wrong with you.
Today’s late-night
entry has no photo because I have none from so long ago, certainly not
digitized, anyway–or easily found. That makes Lynn Saunders’s contribution to
my career no less seminal or memorable. An English teacher at Brecksville High
School, she was the willing and required faculty member who became the adviser
to our budding Writers Club, a new entity in 1967 that was the brainchild of a
handful of aspiring student writers, including me as I entered my senior year.
With her encouragement, we produced our own literary journal, “The Tenth
Muse Recently Discovered in Brecksville.” We young literati were probably
not the most popular types in our Ohio school, but we may have been among the
most visionary. I have spent the last half-century refining those writing
skills, and for this foundation I express today’s moment of gratitude.
Posted on Facebook 1/6/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
Shhh. I’m waiting
until she goes upstairs so she doesn’t see this now and can be surprised in the
morning.
It is hard to find a
more devoted mother and grandmother than my wife, so here’s to Jean Schwab. Whatever parenting mistakes we
made, individually or combination, like every human being out there, Jean
nonetheless remains committed wholeheartedly to the welfare of her family. Over
time, she has learned how to make the tough decisions and say the tough things
to say when we needed to, all while making clear she is doing it out of love.
Most people who know
us know that we adopted children out of foster care. This was mostly because
Jean expressed early in our marriage the feeling that we had too much to share
not to reach out to children who needed a home. I am not sure either of us
envisioned that future when we married, but it became a big part of what we will
leave behind. And we have learned so much along the way. We have embraced the
challenge. Here’s to the future, and a salute to my life partner.
Jean with grandson Emanuel James, aka EJ Schwab
Posted on Facebook 1/7/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE
#gratitudeonparade
Tonight I was in downtown Chicago at the Harold Washington Public Library for a Society of Midland Authors presentation of women authors writing about the Vietnam war. Their interesting perspectives caused me to think about my own experiences during that time. I attended Cleveland State University from 1968-1973, the heart of one of the most tumultuous periods in U.S. history.
I started college with a student deferment just before President Richard Nixon introduced the draft lottery. My number was 135, but the year I gave up my student deferment they went to 125, and so I was out of the draft forever. Fighting a war I did not respect was not part of my future. But it does not mean the events did not affect me.
Tonight’s tribute is to someone I have not seen in 45 years. I have no idea if he is alive or dead, or where he is living, but I would not mind hearing from Peter Damok. By 1970, I think, I had founded the first student environmental group at CSU, right after the first Earth Day. Peter, a Vietnam veteran attending college on the GI Bill, joined us at some later point. This was during a time when Vietnam veterans often returned to an uncertain welcome. Peter, I think, was drawn in part to my lack of judgment, open mind, and willingness to listen and learn. He had much to share.
One thing I distinctly remember made a permanent impression on
me. There were often anti-war marches down Euclid Avenue, past the CSU campus,
in downtown Cleveland. I joined more than a few (though I seldom shared that
information with my more conservative parents). Peter, who hoped to become a
journalist, had some friends in the news media and joined some in watching one
of the demonstrations from the upper stories of one of the buildings along the
march route. Later he told me that one of his reporter friends scoffed at the
protesters and asked, “How many of them have ever been to Vietnam?”
Peter stopped him cold in his tracks. “How many more do you
want to send over there before you listen to them?” he asked.
I learned to separate service in the military from the automatic
assumption that a veteran supported the war. Many came home embittered by what
they saw and determined to end the madness. And I learned it straight from the
mouth of one veteran–Pete Damok.
Posted on Facebook 1/8/19
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade There are those who quietly do the less glamorous tasks that make things run. Being the secretary/treasurer of a member division of the American Planning Association is among those tasks. As the chair-elect of the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, thrust into an acting chair position because of Chair Allison Hardin’s unfortunate accident, I have come to appreciate the value of Jennifer Ellison, a Polk County, Iowa, planner who is also our secretary/treasurer. We have responsibilities to hundreds of members who work at making our communities safer and helping them recover from disasters, but Jennie makes sure the bills are paid, the dollars add up, and the proper reports are filed, all without asking for any special attention or credit. But I couldn’t do it without her, and so she is tonight’s focus of gratitude.
When I first met Richard Roths, he was a planner working for FEMA. As I recall, he was detailed to southern Ohio for flood recovery sometime in the late 1990s, and I was completing work with my team on Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, a path-breaking FEMA-supported guide published by the American Planning Association in 1998 as a PAS Report. I learned that Rich was among dozens of FEMA personnel asked to review it, many of whom were similarly on duty away from home and living out of a suitcase in a hotel room. Rich was doing his reviews, he told me, while washing his clothes in the laundromat each week. Other people might have idled the time with a good book, watching television, but not Rich.
It did not take long with further encounters back in Chicago for us to team up teaching a graduate course on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery in the spring semesters of 1997 and 1999 at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s urban planning program, part of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. Over subsequent years, Rich attended a number of my infamous backyard barbecue parties, usually bringing some beer to help out. It is amazing to think we have known each other now for well over 20 years. During that time, Rich moved on to URS Corp. as a consultant and then retired. He is now active as a volunteer with the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division, of which I am Chair-Elect. In that role, I recruited and organized the division’s Professional Development Committee.
Sure enough, Rich has become a leading player in the committee’s endeavors. When Kehla West was unable to take on the role of interviewer for a series of podcasts on recovery in major recent disasters, Rich stepped up and did a fabulous job. He has completed three since last fall and is not done yet. These are all now on the APA website as part of APA’s Resilience Roundtable series. Rich is also heading up an effort to develop a program of outreach from the division to university planning schools. In his semi-retirement, he has carved out a meaningful role that has made the rest of us proud. He is a model of productive volunteerism in retirement.
Richard Roths in the APA broadcast booth recording his first podcast.
Posted on Facebook 1/11/2019
GRATITUDE ON PARADE #gratitudeonparade
I have lost the name of my sixth-grade teacher in the mists of time and do not
wish to ask anyone to search the archives of the elementary school to find it.
Her name is beside the point. What matters is what I and others learned.
The school year was 1961-1962. Unlike other teachers at that level at that time, she believed that young people our age could understand and digest more than her contemporaries thought. During reading time each day, she introduced us to the works of Dr. Tom Dooley about Vietnam and Indochina. I am well aware of the mixed and ambiguous history of Dooley before his untimely death of cancer. He may well have exaggerated descriptions of Viet Minh atrocities and fed intelligence to the CIA. But when one student questioned whether some of Dooley’s stories were propaganda, our teacher concede the possibility.
Still, we gained a vivid mental image of a
part of the world that soon would dominate the news of the 1960s, yet of which
most Americans had only minimal awareness. The moral ambiguity of the mess that
became the Vietnam War was illuminated in my teenage and then college-age mind
by the memory of what she had read to us. It took some courage and imagination
to think we could digest all this and that somehow, within a few years, it might
deepen our perspectives on the world. Her own views may have been equally
ambiguous, for all I know, and I will probably never know. But I can be
grateful that her audacity at the time left an indelible impression of the
importance of learning about faraway places and the moral and developmental
challenges they face–and which we face along with them.
Ask Anchorage after last Friday’s 7.0 earthquake. Admittedly, this is not the biggest earthquake the area could have suffered. The famous 1964 earthquake registered at 9.2, triggered a tsunami, and killed an estimated 130 people. Still, by and large, things seemed to work as planned.
Ask the mayor. And the governor. Mayor Ethan Berkowitz says building codes and good preparation minimized structural damages. No one died. Berkowitz even stated to PBS that other cities would want to emulate Anchorage “because Anchorage did this right.” Alaska Governor Bill Walker admitted to sometimes grousing about strict building codes but conceded, “Building codes mean something,” stating that his own home suffered only minor water damage.
What worked? According to the same PBS report, “Sterling Strait, a member of the Alaska Seismic Hazards Safety Commission, said the states [Alaska and California] use the International Building Code,” which he deemed the “best available standard for seismic safety.”
This good news comes while some states and jurisdictions, in some parts of the country, still resist more stringent building codes, and when some voters still resent what they view as an imposition, sometimes even after the damage from a hurricane, flood, wildfire, or earthquake. But the higher standards matter in saving lives and preventing building collapse, which also prevents injuries. Tellingly, Anchorage hospitals reported a normal day, with no dramatic upsurge in injuries from the earthquake.
Collapse of Fourth Avenue near C Street in 1964 earthquake in Anchorage. USGS photo.
One factor working in Anchorage’s favor is its relative newness as a big city, now about 300,000 population. A city of only 3,000 as late as 1940, Anchorage grew rapidly during and after World War II, still claiming only about 100,000 at the time of the 1964 earthquake. The salient result is that, between its late start as an urban center and the destruction of many older buildings in 1964, Anchorage has far fewer legacy buildings predating modern seismic construction standards than some other cities in states like California. Many California cities, including Los Angeles and Berkeley, have spent considerable sums to subsidize seismic retrofits for older structures including highly vulnerable unreinforced masonry buildings.
As an urban planner, my own expertise lies with land use and not structural engineering, so I will not elaborate on the details of building codes as if I were an expert, but the evidence is compelling. I will note one handout I found on the Anchorage city website, however, on geotechnical investigations. It concerns a requirement for a report from a geotechnical expert and inspection requirements for structures in what are known as Hazard Zones 4 and 5, which define high levels of geological susceptibility to ground failure as result of seismic shaking. The applicable handout dates to 2006, and references a June 1989 report by Shannon & Wilson, a Seattle-based engineering firm. Those dates indicate that Anchorage has been steadily at work on this problem ever since the 1964 earthquake, not wishing to repeat or continue the vulnerabilities exposed by that event.
Without delving into technical details, the bottom line is that, in the designated areas, a civil engineer with experience in geotechnical engineering must perform an investigation of the potential extent of ground movements and soil loadings on the structure proposed, and must prepare and sign a written report showing calculations, conclusions, and recommendations for how the building will be able to withstand seismic displacements without collapsing. The work must then be performed in accordance with those recommendations, and the engineer must ensure compliance through special inspections and a signed statement that his design was followed.
Alaska did experience problems, but not primarily with buildings. It is still far too early for a complete survey of the damage suffered by the transportation system, and the city and state need to assess the losses due to highway collapses, structural stresses on bridges, and the like. Currently, a railroad between Anchorage and Fairbanks is not functioning. There are always challenges, and every disaster is an opportunity for reassessments and lessons learned. But one clear lesson has already emerged: Building codes matter.
Flooding in Rosewood in Horry County, SC, September 24, 2018 (All photos by Allison Hardin with exceptions of FEMA photo from Hurricane Floyd and Charlotte image.)
It has been a few weeks of drought on this blog, but just the opposite in North Carolina, where Hurricane Florence dropped up to 30 inches of rain in some locations, and floods migrated downstream via numerous rivers to swamp cities both inland and near the coast. Now, Hurricane Michael threatens to compound the damage as it migrates northeast from its powerful Category 4 assault on the Florida Panhandle, with storm surges up to 14 feet in areas just east of the eye, which made landfall near Panama City.
The blog drought was the result of both a bit of writer’s block, mostly induced by a busy schedule that included two conference trips over the past three weeks, combined with a bit of fatigue and a few significant diversions of my personal time. But that may be okay. My intent was to write about the recent hurricane along the East Coast, and sometimes letting the subject ferment in the mind results in a more thorough and insightful perspective. I hope that is the result here.
Storms never happen in a vacuum. In a world with relatively few uninhabited places, their impact is the result more of patterns of human development and the legacy of past choices in land use and building practices than of the storm itself, which is, after all, simply a natural and very predictable event. Hurricanes were part of the natural cycle on this earth long before humans took over the planet (or thought they did).
Hurricane wind warning at bridge in Socastee, South Carolina
But they appear to be getting worse, and climate change, most of it almost surely attributable to human activity, is an increasingly evident factor. Meteorologist Ken Kunkel, affiliated both with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and North Carolina State University, stated that Florence produced more rain than any other storm in the last 70 years except for Hurricane Harvey last year. According to Kunkel, five weather stations over an area of 14,000 square miles in the Carolinas recorded an average of 17.5 inches. Harvey’s average was 25.6 inches. By comparison, Chicago averages about 37 inches for an entire year. Such heightened precipitation levels are in line with expected impacts of climate change.
What became obvious to me early on was that Florence would rehash a certain amount of unfortunate North Carolina history regarding feedlot agriculture. I am familiar with that history because 20 years ago I authored a Planning Advisory Service Report (#482) for the American Planning Association, titled Planning and Zoning for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. (In that same year, APA also published PAS 483/484, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction, for which I was the lead author and project manager.) I want to emphasize that what happened in North Carolina was not unusual. Nationwide, many states have laws dating to the 1950s that exempt all or most agricultural operations from county zoning ordinances. Most of these were intended to create a friendly regulatory environment for family farms, and they were often followed by other “right-to-farm” laws designed to shield farmers using conventional farming methods from nuisance lawsuits. Only later, as the large feedlots known also by the acronym “CAFO” became widespread, did it become clear that such exemptions, by then fiercely defended by industry groups, became giant loopholes for the detrimental environmental impacts of such operations. This story has been repeated in Iowa, Missouri, Utah, and numerous other states.
In North Carolina in 1991, State Senator Wendell Murphy, who owned a direct interest in the growing Murphy Family Farms, engineered passage of a law widening the state’s exemptions to include CAFOs. Within two years, as I noted in the report, North Carolina’s hog population shot up from 2.8 million to 4.6 million. Today, the number is at least 9 million. A public backlash at the impacts of CAFOs resulted in a new law in 1997 that included a moratorium on new waste lagoons, but by then, although the hogs were firmly ensconced in a growing number of feedlots, the figurative horse was out of the barn. Many counties in eastern North Carolina, where the industry was concentrated, were slow or reluctant to use their newly regained powers. In any case, various large operators were effectively already grandfathered into continued existence. Today, consolidation within the industry has left Smithfield Foods in possession of most of the business in North Carolina, yet Smithfield itself was acquired by the Chinese-owned WH Group several years ago.
Grenville, NC, September 24, 1999 — The livestock loss and potential health hazard to Eastern North Carolina is huge. Here volunteers have towed in dead and floating cattle from a nearby ranch at Pactolus, NC (just North of Greenville), trying to remove them as fast as possible to lower the potential health hazards associated. Photo by Dave Gatley/ FEMA News Photo
Fast forward to this year and Hurricane Florence, presuming a surfeit of lessons to be learned from the 1999 disaster as well as later storms. As Emily Moon notes in the Pacific Standard, North Carolina has had opportunities over the past 20 years to introduce serious regulatory change, but various factors foiled those chances, and North Carolina remains the nation’s second-largest hog producer, having pushed aside every state but Iowa. The industry has evolved, but the problem remains. The state has bought out 46 operations since 1999 and shut down their lagoons, but the vast majority remain in operation. The numbers changed in Florence—more than 3 million chickens and 5,500 hogs dead and afloat in the flood waters—but the devastation rooted in CAFO practices continued. Coal ash landfills associated with power stations added to the environmental impacts. And the beat goes on, in a part of the state heavily populated by African-Americans, many too poor and powerless to challenge the system effectively without outside help.
Flooding at Arrowhead Development in Myrtle Beach, SC, September 26, 2018
Still, there are significant lessons available from Hurricane Florence outside the realm of mass production of poultry and hogs, and I want to offer a positive note. One is that, while only about 35 percent of properties at risk of flooding in North Carolina have flood insurance, which is available from the National Flood Insurance Program, neighboring South Carolina ranked second in the nation with 65 percent coverage. While I do not know all the details behind that sizable difference, it seems to me there is surely something to be learned from a comparison of these results and how they were achieved. They come in the context of a “moonshot” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to double flood insurance coverage nationally by 2022. That will happen when South Carolina becomes the norm rather than the exception. Sometimes we can use these events to push in the right direction. Texas, for instance, has added 145,000 new flood insurance policies in effect since Hurricane Harvey; the question will be whether the new awareness wears off as memory of Harvey fades, or whether the state can solidify those gains. For that matter, can the states in the Southeast—the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida—leverage the lessons of Florence and Michael to push in the same direction?
Hidden Valley drainage restoration project, Charlotte, NC. Image courtesy of Tim Trautman.
Recently, Bloomberg Business Newsoffered an example within North Carolina of how differently floodplains could be managed by highlighting the case of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. I worked for several years in a series of training workshops on flood resilience with Tim Trautman, the manager for the engineering and mitigation program for Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, so I am familiar with their intriguing story. The county for many years has used a stormwater utility fee on property owners to fund its own hazard mitigation program, using the money to buy out flood-prone properties and increase open space in its floodplains. The result has been a significant reduction in flood-prone land and buildings. The question is not whether Charlotte is successful, but what state and federal programs and authorities can do to encourage and support such efforts and make them more commonplace.
Every serious disaster offers lessons and opportunities, and I am not attempting here to pick on North Carolina alone. Other states face their own challenges; Iowa, for one, is undergoing a somewhat muted debate about the impact of its own farm practices on downstream flooding and water quality, in part as an outgrowth of the 2008 floods. What is important is that we use these windows of opportunity, the “teachable moments,” as they are sometimes known, to initiate the changes that are surely needed for the long term in creating more resilient, environmentally healthy communities. What we do not need is a natural disaster version of Groundhog Day.
