NO MEANS NO: Tanisha Arena, executive director of Arise for Social Justice, talks about the decade-plus fight to stop a polluting biomass plant in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Position | COMMUNITY |
CLF: Now that a key permit the plant needed has been revoked, it seems this biomass plant project may finally be on its last legs. Why has this fight taken so many years?
Arena: [The siting of the Palmer Renewable Energy biomass plant] is what environmental racism looks like. Is it about money? Yes. Is it about this community that is primarily Black and Brown? Yes. And it's about how this country has historically treated Black and Brown people. So it's no big deal to put this plant here and violate your rights, which this country hasn't really felt that we [Black and Brown people] had legitimate rights, anyway.
Springfield is also a designated environmental justice community, which means that there have already been systemic and institutional harms. There are people here who can't go out of the house because the air is not good, so why were they [Palmer Biomass] going to intentionally make the air quality worse by putting a biomass plant here?
CLF: How did you talk about the plant to people outside of Springfield to mobilize opposition?
Arena: [We needed people] to connect the dots between colonial values, white supremacy, and abuse, because colonization is rooted in abusive values. At the last biomass rally, I said that someone not respecting your "no" is the first step in abuse. And this community had said "no" how many times? And yet, here we were, on and on and on.
[Palmer] tried to explain it away by saying that [biomass] is clean energy and it's renewable, but you can't burn anything and have it be clean. That's an elementary school science lesson.
We had to shift the narrative to get people to think about what this is actually doing to people and how we're all connected to it. We needed people to connect the dots and say, "Wait a minute, this is not going to be okay, and not just for the people here." Springfield is ground...
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