Drawdown Georgia is honored to share a special Georgia Climate Digest video interview with environmental justice pioneer Dr. Mildred McClain.
Dr. McClain is the founder and executive director emeritus for the Harambee House / Citizens for Environmental Justice and has spent the five decades of her career working in the fields of education, community empowerment, public health, environmental justice, and youth leadership development.
She recently sat down with Eriqah Vincent to talk about the beginnings of her environmental justice career, the radioactive disaster that led to the founding of Harambee House, current climate resiliency initiatives underway in Savannah, and what is giving her hope around climate.
You can watch the full 60-minute conversation on our YouTube channel. Keep reading to enjoy highlight clips with lightly edited transcripts from Eriqah’s interview with Dr. McClain.
Dr. Mildred McClain and Harambee House: A Lifetime Commitment to Environmental Justice
Eriqah Vincent: I can't even fully express how excited I am for this interview today. I am joined by someone who is an environmental justice icon and a movement mother of mine: Dr Mildred McClain. I'm so glad that you will get to see a snippet of the light she brings to this work.
I will hand it right over to you and ask you to tell us about the history of Harambee House, also known as Citizens for Environmental Justice, and a little bit about the work the organization is doing in the community.
Dr. Mildred McClain: I'm excited to be on stage with you. You are one of the up-and-coming young leaders in environmental justice and climate justice work.
I started off as a youngster in the Civil Rights Movement. When I was just 13, we were here in Savannah, marching to desegregate the lunch counters and the schools and all of that. It's always a pleasure to be in the company of folk who are just like me, folk who are ready to be on the front line for justice and who bring a sense of humility, a sense of love, and a sense of commitment.
It's not a job, it's not a career, it's not something that is fashionable that we just jump into. It's a lifetime commitment.
The Environmental Disaster That Led to the Founding of Harambee House
Dr. McClain: One morning after Christmas in 1991, we woke up to learn that there had been a spill from the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy nuclear weapons manufacturing facility located in Aiken, South Carolina. We read in the news that 20,000 picocuries of tritium had spilled into the river.
We're not scientists, nor do we know anything about tritium. Truth be told, we didn't know anything really about the Savannah River Site. So when this spill occurred, we jumped right into trying to do some research. We knew it must have been something big because this horrible accident that occurred 125 miles upriver from us was all over the news.
About six months prior to that, we had been in discussion with a young man out of Sparta, Georgia, who was doing work related to landfills and municipal dumps that were impacting the health of the people in Sparta. He challenged me: “What you gonna do, girl?” At that time I was a high school teacher in a public school. I thought I was doing quite a bit. But he challenged me and said that was not enough.
So after the spill, I decided that we needed to organize a group of people that could begin to look at the impact the nuclear weapons production site was having on communities of color. At that time, most of our communities were focused on landfills, petrochemical companies, and paper mills. No one was looking at this horrific source of poisoning in our community.
Our goal was to educate our communities, to identify exactly what the issues were, and to engage particularly the rural areas along that corridor because they were the ones who were being most impacted and yet did not have a seat at the table.
Those communities were hungry to come to the table and to try to do something about what was going on because so many people were dying from all forms of cancer. When you touch a community's health, that's like the pulse of the community. So we came in saying, let us educate ourselves.
We worked to bring science into the picture to support the claims of the people who were experiencing unusual amounts of various cancers, particularly the workers from the Savannah River Site. They were going home to their families and taking home some pretty dangerous stuff. So this fight was the beginning of Harambee House.
Climate Impacts Affecting Savannah and the South Georgia Coast
Eriqah: What climate impacts are facing your community in South Georgia, and more particularly, what solutions and resiliency efforts are you finding are the most meaningful and valuable to the communities you serve? How is Harambee House contributing to those solutions and resiliency efforts?
Dr. McClain: We're here on the coast. I moved to Savannah when I was three years old, and I'm 76 now. We have always had a problem with flooding, and we now experience a greater degree of horrific weather events.
Our hurricanes, tropical storms, rains, and our heat have all increased to a level where we say we're in danger. Flooding is a key issue. Our neighbors on Tybee Island talk about sea level rise, and we need to be concerned with that as well.
When you see that we still do not have in place a robust emergency preparedness and response apparatus to assist our elderly, our disabled, our sick people, and our young people, in particular, to evacuate in a safe manner--that is something that we have to change.
We are experiencing a hotter summer. Summer started in February this year, and we're still living in substandard housing made with substandard material. Our elders are in sweatboxes.
As a result, their utility bills are up. Bills are skyrocketing and many families have to make choices between paying for medicine or paying the electric bill. All of these issues are intertwined.
Savannah Resiliency Hubs Supporting the Local Community
Dr. McClain: In addition to the climate impacts and environmental justice, we are looking at building resiliency hubs. The Harambee House itself serves as a resiliency hub. This is the new kind of bold, sexy thing that everybody's engaged in. And so we, too, are trying to create a network of resiliency hubs in Savannah.
That network will include eight communities on the West Side, where the most egregious environmental justice and climate impacts occur. We are trying to garner the resources to use the community centers that are already in place, transforming them into resiliency hubs with solar, batteries to store energy, EV chargers, and all of those things because these communities have agreed that they want to be a part of advancing solutions.
We have identified the problems, we know we suffer from cumulative health impacts, and we know about legacy pollution and redlining. We can go on and on, but what are we doing about it?
Climate Justice, Workforce Development, and Resiliency
Dr. McClain: We cannot talk about justice without talking about jobs. A critical part of our work centers on workforce development. Our primary training at this time is focused on training disadvantaged workers and young people in the field of environmental remediation.
We hold trainings on remediation work to remove lead, asbestos, and other hazardous materials out of buildings. We have introduced solar training focused on manufacturing and installation so that we, too, can participate in the greening of America, renewable energy.
We've worked with the City of Savannah in passing 100% Savannah, an ambitious initiative to transition to 100% renewable, clean energy in the city. It took everybody being at the table to do that, and now we have a set of principles that are guiding Savannah in our efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of our city in collaboration with our community stakeholders.
Our resiliency hubs are slated to be able to function 24 hours a day because there's always an emergency. We’re also working to create certified emergency response teams in every community so that we can work together when a storm comes and know how to respond.
Our resiliency hubs were helpful in responding to COVID-19 by providing food, gift cards to deal with their utility bills, and other forms of support. These things are important because when you're building a base in the community, they respond to you based on how you have taken care of them on the regular, not just during an emergency.
Our resiliency hubs also promote entrepreneurship, helping residents to build renewable energy enterprises, or how to set up charging stations so that some monies and some resources come back to you. We're dealing with a multifaceted movement.
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