For many years, Black environmentalists and residents of Eagle Harbor, Maryland, have been combating to guard the city from land, air and water air pollution.
The waterfront neighborhood shaped within the late Nineteen Twenties as a haven for Black Individuals to flee a bustling Washington, D.C., and summer season warmth. At a time of segregated seashores, Eagle Harbor on the Patuxent River grew to become a well-liked Black oasis for swimming, boating, fishing and different types of recreation.
Through the years, nevertheless, shoreline erosion, water contamination and different environmental situations—some allegedly stemming from a close-by power-generating plant—have threatened the city’s livelihood in addition to the townspeople’s high quality of outside life.
In Our Land, a brief documentary produced by REI Co-op Studios, filmmaker Emmanuel Afolabi introduces the people who find themselves combating to maintain the story and neighborhood of Eagle Harbor alive. Black environmentalists and townspeople, together with the Patuxent Riverkeeper alliance, a neighborhood advocacy and restoration group, have been monitoring air pollution and looking for regulatory reforms to scrub up the water and land so individuals can drink from their faucets, swim and fish within the river and far more.
It is a acquainted battle for Black communities and different communities of shade in the US. Black communities have traditionally skilled the best ranges of nature deprivation in 26 states, and Latino and Hispanic communities in 8 states, based on a report by the nonpartisan coverage institute the Heart for American Progress. Power era and extraction are a few of the main causes of that lack, the Heart says. Clearing the land to construct services and infrastructure can eradicate vital inexperienced house, and the elevated danger of spills, improper waste disposal and water and air air pollution threaten native residents’ potential to securely benefit from the outdoor.
Help the TREES Act, Shield Our Land
At REI Co-op, we consider everybody has the correct to benefit from the energy of the outside and time in nature. Eliminating the disparities to having fun with nature is a big a part of that imaginative and prescient. That’s why we invite you to hitch the REI Cooperative Motion Community in supporting the bipartisan TREES Act, launched to Congress final 12 months. This invoice would create a cost-share grant program to plant not less than 300,000 timber yearly and try to handle environmental, financial and social inequalities in communities throughout the U.S. Importantly, this invoice is devoted to reducing residential power prices and, in the end, decreasing our reliance on extractive power sources, like these abutting Eagle Harbor.
Neighborhoods with no or low tree canopies can have decrease house values, elevated air pollution and fewer accessible greenspace for recreation. Planting timber does greater than make a neighborhood stunning: Tree canopies can present shade to assist decrease power prices and cool avenue temperatures, act as a protecting windbreak and enhance air high quality.
The TREES Act would create a cost-share grant program on the Division of Power to plant a minimal of 300,000 timber yearly via 2026, prioritizing low-wealth communities, neighborhoods with giant populations of senior residents and/or kids, areas with low tree cover and warmth islands in city areas.
Eagle Harbor—and communities prefer it—have a deep connection to each the land and one another. The residents have fought lengthy and onerous to have the help, safety and entry to secure out of doors areas which have contributed to their city’s wealthy historical past. Initiatives just like the TREES Act can present tangible enhancements to out of doors entry, higher fairness and the advantages that nature can provide.
“The connection Black individuals need to the American land is sacred,” Afolabi says. “Accessing nature, experiencing and being current inside the pure setting is greater than a proper. It’s a basic inheritance for Black individuals.”
