I received the globe from Chris Guldi from the Dallas Sierra Club at the beginning of November 2019.

On November 26th I organized an Ecological Devastation Tour of the Southern Sector of Dallas, TX together with the Poor People’s Campaign, Climate Reality Project, Commissary is Very Necessary, and the Dallas Sierra Club. We invited community members as well as politicians and public officials to join us for a bus tour of 5 polluted locations in Southern Dallas: Lane Plating Works, Joppee Freedmen’s Community, RSR lead smelting plant, Shingle Mountain, and Sandbranch. Lane Plating Works is a former chrome plating facility currently classified as a Superfund site, with cleanup underway. The RSR lead smelting plant was closed in the 1980s, declared a Superfund site and cleaned up in the 1990s. Shingle Mountain is a giant pile of ground up shingles, some containing asbestos, at a recycling plant run by Blue Star Recycling and located right in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Joppee Freedmen’s Community has been fighting pollution from concrete batch plants located in their area. The town of Sandbranch has no running water and polluted ground water and has to sustain itself on donations of bottled water.

We toured these five sites in two buses, and heard a presentation at each site. At RSR lead smelting we heard from a man who was poisoned by the lead smelting plant as a child and has gotten no restitution for the damage to his health, like many other West Dallas residents. We concluded the tour with a teach-in on environmental justice at the Pan African Connection bookshop.

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