If anyone has any doubt of the importance of what Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential victory contained for the local level, just direct him or her to Naugatuck. Conn. For 13 years, a land struggle there for passive open space, that is land with no impervious surfaces, ebbed and flowed with national, state and local politics. The 2008 election of our first African American president set the stage for a decisive people's victory.
In the mid-1990s, an educator, a pipe fitter and a high school student met under a tree on 39.3 acres of town-owned land in the Gunntown neighborhood. They discussed how to save one of the last bits of undeveloped land in this sprawled, Connecticut town. This uncontrolled growth due to speculation and profit happened big time in this former manufacturing town (rubber) of 30,000 people. The Gunntown land contained a variety of important wetlands and attendant wildlife. Democratic, Independent and Republican administrations all wanted to plow and pave this environmentally important land, mostly for a sports complex.
The Soviets had the slogan Peace, Bread, Land on their banners when they stormed the heavens during the October revolution. Of course that was land for food crops. We decided to test the waters for defending this land as a nature preserve and for passive recreation. Little did we know then that passive open space would be one of the important keys to mitigating climate change, generating green jobs and free outdoor recreation.
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A quick side trip: 1. Climate Change - Alterations in the prevailing temperature, H2O cycle, humidity and happening at an accelerating rate. We are coming out of the last ice age but the industrial revolution, producing mega-amounts of CO2 that prevents radiant energy from dissipating in space, is accelerating climate changes. Before the industrial revolution, there was 280 parts CO2/Million of atmosphere by volume. Where did that CO2 come from? - living organisms. As of 2007 and the industrial revolution of the last two hundred years, it's 384 parts CO2/Million of atmosphere by volume. Utilities, coal, oil are the main culprits. CO2, H2O vapor, and Methane (CH4) trap heat in the atmosphere. In fact CH4 has 21X the heat trapping power of CO2. Another example, 1 cow = 600 L CH4/day. There are 1.3 billion cows in the world. So our numbers and demands of our species make a substantial impact in numerous ways. In Hanoi, 1997, I interviewed Dr. Phan Nguyen Hong, world expert on mangrove forests and an environmental activist. He stated that the sea level, rising there at 0.19 cm per year, was generating storm surges that negatively impacted villages along the lengthy shoreline of Vietnam. 2. Green Jobs - Are blue and white-collar employment that has been upgraded to better respect the environment. Examples: Union construction workers, electricians, plumbers, engineers who build energy-efficient green buildings, wind power farms, solar farms, wave energy farms. Workers engaged in sustainable agriculture e.g. Half of Havana's vegetables are grown in urban gardens, and passive open space. Let's go to the opposite. The dirty fuel industry has taken an enormous toll on our class and the environment in 2010. The killing of workers in the natural gas explosion in Middletown, CT, coal miners in West Virginia, Siberia and the oil workers in the Gulf Coast explosion are examples. With the latter, jobs lost, particularly among fisher people, will be considerable. There are over 3,000 oil platform rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone. |
By the spring of 2009 the Obama victory inspired a forward-looking candidate for Mayor, Bob Mezzo (D), to embrace the issue of passive open space for the 39.3 acres of town-owned land in the Gunntown neighborhood of Naugatuck. For the first time in our 14 years of the grassroots environmental group, we had a candidate who recognized the ecological importance of this land that is 40% wetlands. He saw the need to expand recreation in town beyond active organized team sports to include passive open space with low-impact recreational activities. He forth-rightly debated, blogged and embraced these points on his campaign literature.
Of course support for passive open space in the Gunntown neighborhood didn't arrive in this candidate's head on a passing cloud. In the early part of the millennia, Bob Mezzo originally supported sports fields for Gunntown along with other Democratic and Republican politicians. It took continuous political work, especially at town meetings, with constant pressure, constantly applied by greens and bringing a crowd of family and friends along - always bring a crowd. Into the new millennia these meetings were televised. We were always surprised at the number of T.V. viewers who acknowledged are presentations at town meetings.
Some background. In 1995, I gave a presentation to the local high school ecology club. In that club were some girl scouts who became very interested. They saw a possibility to win scout awards via this effort to save the land and develop trails there for people to enjoy the natural area. They brought many family members and friends. They brought imagination and energy. So what developed among greens was a composition of youth/older folks in leadership and membership. Unity included a multiracial/multinational dimension which we, the Party, nurtured. It was Portuguese, Panamanian, African American, Mexican, and white male/female. A PWW route was initiated.
Unity within the environmental movement was essential. The Naugatuck River Keepers, Naugatuck River Revival, the Sierra Club, Girl Scouts, Naugatuck Garden Club, the Pollution Extermination Group (PEG) and the Naugatuck Land Trust were crucial to success. Unity included other organizations like, at times, the local Taxpayers group. Just like the Tea Party, we should not paint these groups, especially rank and file members, as all hopelessly reactionary. Individual leaders and members can be reached. We were able to present data that passive open space was a buffer against tax increases and won some taxpayer leader's support.
The Western Connecticut Labor Council deserves special note. The Labor Council participated on a number of levels. The President of the Labor Council met with a number of environmental leaders in the early 1990s and came to a number of grassroots environmental meetings and helped out. The Labor Council Vice-President came to a town meeting and spoke as a Labor representative about the importance of recreational areas for working people. State Parks at this time were moving toward usage fees. We agitated around this as a double tax. (This also appealed to the taxpayer group.) When a children's play on the land was proposed, another Labor Council member also participated on the play's subcommittee. The community outreach director of the environmental group was a Labor Council member. All this and ultimately with the developing progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which emerged with the Obama victory, were decisive. Differences were put aside and greens focused like a laser beam on preserving the Gunntown neighborhood land.
The grassroots environmental group was led by three chairpeople, all young people and most recent by a progressive who was respectful of our work. Greens participated in registering voters for the Presidential campaign and directly on the Mayoral campaign committee. Environmentalists took electoral responsibility for a west side neighborhood of the town going door-to-door with electoral literature. We raised the importance of the preserving Gunntown land and recruited people in this turf to help distribute electoral literature. The Gunntown passive open space issue was the first question to be considered by mayoral candidates in the press. Letters to the editor clearly favored passive open space, which is land with no impervious surfaces, no hard surfaces. Greens seeded some letters to the press. This encouraged other citizens to write supportive letters. This latter development was another indication that we represented a majority sentiment for passive recreation at Gunntown. We learned quickly that sentiment and spontaneity alone wins nothing. It was an organized movement representing that sentiment, including the electoral arena, that won a victory.
The forward-looking mayoral candidate skillfully put forward a holistic plan of development that included green jobs construction on brown fields in the downtown area (Renaissance Place), synthetic turf for athletic fields and a passive park in the Gunntown neighborhood. While not endorsed by the Democratic Party, he won the primary. He won the Mayoral race by a 20 percent plurality, beating an incumbent, William Bronko (R), who favored plowing and paving his way to athletic fields there. The incumbent was in a long line of politicians who attempted to use sports as a reactionary tool and feed disunity in the town. People rejected this and voted for change with a clear message. The environment was important, especially land preservation; so let's start with the land at Gunntown.
Debunking the ideological fog of "The land must be used" has to be persistent. This fog seems to roll in on two different feet. One is a spin off of the old manifest destiny racist concept. "Look the Native Americans aren't using the land. We can use it better." The other is to have greens appear to be elitists. "The land must be used for all the people, not just a few greens." Explaining that these passive green areas are a carbon sink where CO2 is absorbed thus helping to mitigate global warming, should be a part of every conservation/preservation thrust. We are part of the environment, not functioning in some other dimension. Katrina victims found this out as that hurricane picked up extra velocity over the extra warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Also, there is much more opportunity from toddlers to retirees to enjoy and learn about the environment from passive open space.
There were many lessons along the way to victory. Environmental victories are like union victories. Using picketing of town hall, demonstrations on the town green, press and editorial conferences, and packing/speaking at town meetings, we won a vote for a Passive Park And Nature Preserve in the Gunntown neighborhood. It was an expansion of democracy at the grassroots. It took many years. This is similar to long battles for union recognition at a work place. We then entered seven months of intense negotiations with the Parks Commission to work out the details of the Passive Park And Nature Preserve. In other words, we negotiated and won our first plan for the Passive Park just as a union negotiates its first contract.
Secondly, political power at the Mayoral level put us over the top. Loss of political power could potentially lead to a different approach to the town-owned land at Gunntown down the road and the environment generally. We cannot afford to become cynical about electoral politics. It is never a question of smaller government or no government but whose government to do what. We will need to do constant political/educational/cultural work around the importance of wetlands and passive open space. We need to help people make ecological connections and demand the same of candidates and elected officials. We need to continue to help citizens take their environmental sentiments and connect them to green groups, green jobs, and electoral politics. Just as in union struggles, what is won in one contract battle can be taken away in the next. This victory was possible as an expansion of democracy at the grassroots. The price of this democratic, environmental victory is vigilance, activism and constant recruiting to peoples' movements.
Photo by Senor Codo, courtesy Flickr, cc by 2.0
