"As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it."

Photo credit goes to J. Tyler Franklin, at WFPL's 2019 series on toxic air pollution in Louisville.

You can almost hear the rejoinder: "Well, if it's dangerous, move ... but not into OUR neighborhood, of course."

Pollution in Black neighborhoods part of Louisville's systemic racism, by John Hans Gilderbloom, Gregory D. Squires, Robert P. Friedland and Dwan Turner (Courier Journal)

Thousands of Black and white protesters got a taste recently of what it is like to feel the agony of being gassed by the police. It was painful, sickening and scary.

But citizens in western Louisville are regularly “gassed,” causing long-term health problems. The mayor’s own office admits this truth, with people dying an average of 10 years earlier in western Louisville compared to the rest of the city. In some neighborhoods, the life span is less than in war-torn Iraq according to Louisville’s Health Department.

In other words, 60,000 folks (enough to fill Cardinal Stadium) are dying prematurely and most of them are African Americans. As you address “systemic racism” in Louisville look at pollution in Black neighborhoods and the institutions that profit from it. Western Louisville’s air, water and soil are so toxic and rank among the worst of any American city. It is unlivable for a modern American neighborhood ...

snip

The calls for greater equity also means cleaning up the air, water and soil. Poor people needlessly suffer more here than the same low-income people in West Coast cites. If we adopted the same tough, environmental regulations as our West Coast counterparts, western Louisville would surely bloom.

The unfairness between black and white neighborhoods is stark and vivid. As the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs, once said: "everyone hungers for a first class neighborhood for both pride and dignity ... nobody wants a second class neighborhood." First class neighborhoods are safe, healthy, sustainable, and prosperous. It is a human right, an American right.

9.3 million tons of dangerous coal ash right here in Anchor City? Good thing it's not a campaign issue.

The president said something stupid about wind power, which prompted Deaf Gahan to tweet.

Google divulges little about this situation. There's this from the Indy Star last July: 'Disastrous consequences': EPA changes to toxic coal ash rules could hurt Hoosiers.

What's the plan for our ultimate neighborhood brownfield? What does it mean for us? All I'm hearing are pins dropping and crickets chirping.

Previously on July 4, 2018:

Dan Coffey wasn't making it up: 500,000 truck trips would be necessary to remove Duke's toxic coal ash from the Gallagher plant's ponds.

Coffey warned against Duke shirking the clean-up of highly toxic coal ash, and also mentioned that removing the coal ash might require 500,000 truck trips over a period of years.

There were guffaws and the rolling of eyes, but Coffey was right. Here's the source from May, 2017. Did you read it? I didn't.

And May 15, 2017:

Tonight is the public meeting about Duke Energy's coal ash disposal. Gahan to send summer intern with information about the Bicentennial Park Concert Series.

C'mon, you know exactly what Team Gahan is thinking: just get on with the power plant decommissioning, and those outlawed public housing residents can be placed there, safely out of view.

Autocentrism: Isn't it time to free ourselves from the chokehold of the car?

The underlined passage might as well refer directly to the colossal missed opportunity of New Albany's Downtown Grid Modernization Project. What Jeff Gahan has chosen to do constitutes the barest of minimums to (a) achieve paving on someone else's dime, and (b) declare victory.

$3 million (or more) later, we'll have climbed painfully into the 1980s. Just imagine what might have been, because if you can imagine it, that's considerably more than the suburban auto-centric mayor can conjure.

The car has a chokehold on Britain. It’s time to free ourselves, by George Monbiot (The Guardian)

Our insanely inefficient transport system is in thrall to the metal god. Electric vehicles are not the answer

We tell ourselves that we cherish efficiency. Yet we have created a transport system whose design principle is profligacy. Metal carriages (that increase in size every year), each carrying one or two people, travel in parallel to the same places. Lorries shifting identical goods in opposite directions pass each other on 2,000-mile journeys. Competing parcel companies ply the same routes, in largely empty vans. We could, perhaps, reduce our current vehicle movements by 90% with no loss of utility, and a major gain in our quality of life.

But to contest this peculiar form of insanity is, as I know to my cost, to be widely declared insane. Look at how advertising is dominated by car companies, and you begin to understand the drive to ensure that this counter-ergonomic system persists. Look at the lobbying power of the motor industry and its support in the media, and you see why successive plans to address pollution seemed designed to fail.

Suggest a neater system, and you will be shouted down by people insisting that they don’t want to live in a planned economy. But in this respect (and others) we do live in a planned economy. These days transport planners make a few concessions to cyclists, pedestrians and buses, but their overriding aim is still to maximise the flow of private vehicles. Rather than encouraging the more efficient use of existing infrastructure, they keep increasing the space into which inefficiency can expand ...

Dr. John Gilderbloom's video about pollution in Louisville, Kentucky: "Think Locally, Act Globally: Neighbourhood pollution and the future of the earth."

Earlier today I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. John Gilderbloom. Regular readers will know him as the two-way streets researcher from the University of Louisville, who came to New Albany in August of 2015 and gave a marvelous presentation.

Watch the video of Dr. John Gilderbloom's two-way streets presentation last night.

Gilderbloom: Proving what Gahan can't seem to fathom, tonight at the library.

Perhaps the most memorable event in the time of our association with Dr. Gilderbloom occurred when Irv Stumler staged a meltdown at U of L over the professor's street grid research.

Irv wanted it squelched, and right now!

Irv still nutzoid, and Gilderbloom's research wasted on New Albany -- and Greg Fischer, for that matter.

A few weeks back, when Dr. Gilderbloom's most recent streets research project started being picked up by national media, Irv Stumler apparently visited the University of Louisville to demand that Gilderbloom be silenced, because how dare peer-reviewed academic research be allowed to deny the sanctity of New Albany's 18-wheeled Luddite exceptionalism?

Depending on the report, Stumler either was laughed off campus or curtly told that if he didn't take a chill pill, he would be forcibly removed.

How I wish someone would have filmed that episode.

I digress, because John closed today's conversation by recommending a video at YouTube about pollution and health by neighborhood in Louisville. It won't improve your mood, but you should watch it.

Think Locally, Act Globally: Neighbourhood pollution and the future of the earth

Dr John I. Gilderbloom

Dr John I. Gilderbloom discusses his work in Louisville, KY, researching the link between environmental toxins and the health of a neighborhood. His research pushes back against the power elite, industry chiefs, local foundations and a recent contribution of $6 million dollars from the Koch Brothers. He discusses the cause of early death rates in Louisville, whose residents live five years less than people in California due to air pollution and other toxins. He also explains the reasons that west end Louisville residents live 13 years less than east end Louisville residents. For more information visit Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods to learn more and to make a non-profit donations.

Brief memo to candidates.

Pick up your idiotic fucking yard signs -- now.

The Open Air Museum thanks you.

Open thread: Dan Coffey, CCE, shredded tires and barbecued bologna.

Coffey done with New Albany plan, redevelopment commission; City official at odds with boards over business relocation, by Daniel Suddeath (News and Tribune).

In the past two weeks, New Albany City Council President Dan Coffey resigned from two posts on city boards mainly over the relocation of a tire shredding business.

CCE Inc. could soon be moving to 1706 Ind. 111, if the New Albany Plan Commission approves a zone change for the business, which has been in property negotiations with the city’s redevelopment commission.

There are two separate issues here.

First, the merits and demerits of CCE, both at its Silver Street location and the projected new site on Ind. 111. We're fully accustomed to there being two sides of a story, but when it comes to CCE's environmental record on Silver, the stories are nowhere close to reconcilable.

Second, the circumstances that result in an utterly unqualified political personage like Dan Coffey ever coming to serve on boards or commissions that have to do with planning and redevelopment.

CM Coffey says that it's a result of a conspiracy -- Redevelopment's role in CCE's move, not his deleterious presence on planning and redevelopment. I believe it's a boost for the city that he's removed himself from those entities. Meanwhile, very little of a positive nature has been offered to support CCE as a good neighbor. In the best tradition of New Albany's stopped clock, might Coffey be right, though for the usual wrong reasons?

Any clues?