Grid Magazine July 2020 [#134]

Rebuilding the Wissahickon’s canopy The injustice of I-676

p. 10 p. 8

COVID-19 flips the script on gender roles p. 4 JULY 2020 / ISSUE 134 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

FEEL THE POWER

A groundswell of support erupts for Black Lives Matter

A’Brianna Morgan, lead mass liberation organizer of Reclaim Philadelphia, speaks at the June 6th protest at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

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EDI TO R ’S NOTES

by

alex mulcahy

Long Overdue

publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Alexandra W. Jones associate editor Timothy Mulcahy copy editor David Jack Daniels art director Michael Wohlberg writers Bernard Brown Constance Garcia-Barrio Siobhan Gleason Ashley Gripper Alexandra Jones Alexandra W. Jones Randy LoBasso Lois Volta photographers Drew Dennis Milton Lindsay Rachael Warriner illustrators Sean Rykowitcz Lois Volta published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY. C O M

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modest middle class wealth has accrued over generations due to policies that intentionally and explicitly excluded Black people.

We are—at least I think we are—more ready to begin a full reckoning. In the words of journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, we live in this “terribly flawed but miraculous country.” These are the two crimes we must acknowledge and address: We eradicated Native Americans and took their land, and we achieved economic success by exploiting people of color.

Hannah-Jones’ most recent article in The New York Times is called “What Is Owed,” and it makes the case for reparations—paying Black people for what was taken from them. There is a profound gap in wealth between Black and white people, exemplified in a recent study that found that “the average Black family with children holds just one cent of wealth for every dollar that the average white family with children holds.”

Hannah-Jones explains why this matters.

“Wealth—assets and investments minus debt—is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute.”

The self-examination, and every subsequent effort made by businesses, is positive.

It’s important that the business world stops making excuses and starts making plans.

Doing so helps to change the present and the future. But first we need to face our past.

We have a 401-year-old debt, and it’s time we paid up.

alex mulcahy Editor-in-Chief alex@gridphilly.com

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

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f you can keep your cynicism in check, corporate displays of support for Black Lives Matter can seem admirable, sometimes even moving. When done authentically, companies are holding a mirror to themselves, deciding that they are not doing enough to address racial injustice, and committing to make change. Some of these vows are genuine and some are just public relations, but it’s a step in the right direction. A baby step.

When change feels possible, as it does right now, we can’t be satisfied with corporate responsibility. Before you know it, some savvy marketer will create a Black Lives Matter certification program for businesses. Then consumers will support the “good” businesses, the logic goes, and the “bad” ones will be punished.

Black Lives Matter must not be co-opted like “local” and “organic,” and sold to people who have the money and aligned beliefs. Change has to be much deeper than that. Counting on altruistic companies and enlightened consumers guarantees that this movement will be reduced to a marketing niche.

Our reporter, Constance Garcia-Barrio, writes in the cover story that she risked her health and marched during the protests on behalf of her long-deceased father, a college graduate who could only find work as an elevator operator, and for her son, who suffers from mental illness, who was punched repeatedly by a policeman.

I’m dismayed that, until recently, I did not know that the origins of policing in this country stemmed from capturing runaway slaves and enforcing segregation. (I also didn’t know that Wall Street was named after an actual wall that the Dutch erected to keep Native Americans, who were enraged by a colonial-led slaughter of their people that occurred in Hoboken, from attacking.)

There have been 401 years of oppression and dehumanizing of Black people—slavery, segregation and a denial of opportunity—in what is now the United States. All white people have benefited from this moral atrocity. Even if you don’t have a great fortune,

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by

lois volta

DEAR LOIS,

How must gender roles in the home shift in response to COVID-19?

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n a rapidly changing world, the work of the home has been revealed for how challenging it is. Gender inequality in housework has also been exposed more than ever. Does it make any sense to say, through action or words: “Dear woman, you have been living under the global threat of the patriarchy from before you were born. You grew up learning how to clean and serve men. Now we are under the threat of a global health crisis and you know how to clean things better than I, so, will you keep doing it? I also don’t like being told what to do, so please clean and don’t complain about my behavior.”

Gender equality can and should be something that people talk about more openly during the pandemic. Partners, hopefully, are feeling more respected because their work is recognized. For some, learning how to clean will be their only ticket out of this pandemic with their partners still by their side.

For those who already consider themselves clean and organized, using cleaning as a coping mechanism seems to be helpful.

There is a flip side to this. Because we care about the house being under control, we are confronted with the pressure to protect the overall health of the family by keeping things as normal and high functioning as possible.

I feel tempted to “womansplain” the importance of a clean home for our body, mind, and spirit, but I am going to assume that we are all on the same page. Everyone feels better when the house is tidy and clean, and if you disagree, you’re most 4

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likely unaware of how much people clean up after you.

I think a common misconception is that it is easy to be the person who has to address a gendered injustice. Women wear a sign (pulled rather tightly around the neck), that says “nag” every time we ask for equality in our domestic lives. I have been playing around loosening the rope and proudly using my voice to own the title. Nag, I resent the unfair term, but I will own my title until women’s true work is done.

It’s difficult and takes vulnerability to say,

“I can’t do this on my own anymore. I can try to hold it all together, but I need some support. If you could pull your weight and have a little energy to spare, that would mean the world to me.” Why is this so confrontational and difficult to say? In contrast, it is so easy to learn how to clean.

Now, some might say, “Well, Lois, my wife complains all the time, it doesn’t seem hard for her to speak her mind.” Imagine what the nag is losing because she feels injustice. She is losing respect for not complying and love for not fitting in the mold of a predetermined unfair expectation that was placed on her. If it isn’t hard for her to speak up, it is hard for her to lose the love, friendship and camaraderie that she was hoping she might have and knows that she deserves.

When we do get the strength to speak up for ourselves, counting what we might lose, we are bombarded with negativity or viewed as controlling.

This is patriarchal gaslighting.

Being subjected to patriarchal gaslighting from the time of birth seems a lot harder than getting out the vacuum. When we put these things in perspective it is easier to refrain from being defensive about the inequality.

When we can see something for what it is, we can control our anger and place it away from

P O R T R A I T BY J A M E S B O Y L E

TH E VO LTA WAY

IL LUSTRATIO N BY LO I S VOLTA

the person and onto the issue. I believe in the power of anger; I want to use it to liberate my husband from the patriarchal grip, not make him pay for it. If your partner respects you, he will understand this.

Everyone is experiencing some form of loss right now. Relationships are under an extraordinary amount of pressure.

An openness on our part to want to be there for our partners in a time when we need someone to be there for us too directly contributes to our healing. For instance, learning how to clean the kitchen well and changing negative domestic habits heals the way one might have exploited traditional female labor. Through learning the art of domesticity you respect the craft and ultimately evolve to be a higher functioning person who understands personal responsibility.

Meeting a need to help around the house goes deeper than appeasing the nag. The nag can see through disgruntled, frustrated energy. The nag wants to be on the same team. Having a good attitude will be the game-changer for the relationship.

Patriarchal gaslighting is unavoidable in even the most progressive relationships. It is woven into nearly every culture. It’s hard to be vulnerable, to change and admit where we have been wrong.

When we see each other hurting or struggling—no matter to what degree—we should make an effort to show up, listen and be a witness to the other’s pain. Healing energy is what we need right now.

No one can magically become a clean, thoughtful person overnight. No one can expect someone else to jump into our minds and understand how we are more than fair and perfectly reasonable. Although, we can express to our partners how they can be there for us during this time, and likewise, we can be there for our partners in ways where we will grow and evolve.

Try saying this to everyone you live with: “How can I be there for you right now?”

“You’re not alone and I want to show up for you.” “I’ve got your back.”

Now, become the best version of yourself.

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lois volta is a home consultant, musician and founder of Volta Naturals. loisvolta.com.

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Dean Barbara Klinkhammer says concern about climate change has increased among her students and peers over the course of her career.

Closing the Gap

Jefferson dean encourages students to make an impact without leaving a trace

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arbara klinkhammer, dean of the College of Architecture & the Built Environment at Thomas Jefferson University, recognizes the urgency and passion of incoming students.

“I think we have a generation of students today that want to make an impact. They’re very focused on several items. One is social equity; the other is sustainability. They really care for the environment.”

Klinkhammer, whose father was an architect, was born in Germany. When her family went on vacation, she and her three siblings—all of whom became (and married) architects—would sit on city sidewalks and sketch buildings with their father. Klinkhammer studied architecture in France and Germany and is in the final stages of a book about Le Corbusier’s use of color in his post-World War II buildings.

After spending her formative years in a culture that was concerned about the use of fossil fuels and environmentalism, she was surprised when she arrived as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee in 1999, to see that the citizenry of the United States was not as aware of the perils of

climate change as her peers in Europe. But she has seen that gap close.

T h o m a s Je f f e r s o n University has helped to close it. The Sustainable Design program was founded by Rob Fleming over 10 years ago, and now the philosophy and viewpoints that imbue that program are just as prevalent in all of the programs housed within the College of Architecture & the Built Environment.

Klinkhammer explains that deep sustainability will be central to decision making “...whether this is an interior designer who’s using sustainable materials that are locally or regionally resourced that don’t produce large emissions, whether it’s the landscape architect who thinks about native plants and the well-being of human beings in green spaces and parks, or whether it’s an architect or construction manager who needs the knowledge of sustainable building materials or understanding of a building’s energy performance.”

This, of course, is driven by climate change.

“Climate change,” Klinkhammer says, “is

the biggest threat to humans, and not only to humans but animals, fauna and flora. It is initiated by humans. It didn’t come upon us as some kind of freak-of-nature situation.

And we have it in our hands to change this.”

Students enrolling in any of the programs within the college will be firmly rooted in the concept of net zero, where the renewable energy created on site is equal to what is used.

“We are really pushing to look at architecture, predominantly from the point of view of net zero energy outcomes,” says Klinkhammer.

After all, students know that the biggest impact they can make is to avoid making one at all.

THE MISSION OF Jefferson’s College of Architecture & the Built Environment is to educate the next generation of design and construction professionals to create an equitable and sustainable future.

Learn more at Jefferson.edu/Grid.

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bike talk

A City Divided Civil rights demonstrators draw attention to the role by randy lobasso Interstate 676 plays in systemic racism

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or many peaceful protesters in Philadelphia, June 2020 started off with a bang. Specifically, the bangs of flash grenades and tear gas canisters exploding below their feet as they attempted to escape from riot gear-clad police officers on Interstate 676. The murder of George Floyd by police had reignited the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, and Philadelphia showed up with large protests, one of which culminated in one of the largest showings of solidarity on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway the city

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had ever seen.

Over on I-676, though, civil rights protesters had “ignored orders to leave the road,” “began to throw objects” at police, and did not disperse after troopers deployed smoke devices, Pennsylvania State Police spokesperson Ryan Tarkowski told The Philadelphia Inquirer that week.

Soon after, Mayor Jim Kenney and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw defended the use of tear gas. Outlaw said it was necessary because a crowd of more than 100 people had surrounded a state trooper alone inside a

vehicle and began rocking it, even though there was no evidence of violence on the part of the protesters. An independent investigation of the incident was soon launched by City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart.

Taking over highways during protests is not new. Black Lives Matter rallies have been doing it consistently over the past several years—and not by accident.

Highways are more than just high-speed roads running through the middle of our cities. They have become prevalent staging areas for racial justice protests quite simply because these huge slabs of concrete exemplify the kinds of systemic racism protesters are challenging.

Highways like I-676 are the physical embodiment of middle-management racism that began accelerating during the New Deal era of the 1930s; their presence has continued to cut cities into sections, segregate communities, keep economic opportunities in the hands of the few and create a car-centric sprawl that makes our streets more dangerous.

In mid-20th-century America, state and local officials began pushing the idea that public highways through cities could become revitalization tools for struggling downtowns.

With the automobile age in full swing, car-ownership was rising, white flight to the suburbs was booming and expressways like I-76 and I-676, they said, would reduce commuting costs and improve accessibility, which would, in turn, make downtown inviting to businesses.

Around the same time, massive urban-renewal projects that razed so-called “blighted” neighborhoods were becoming the norm.

Many of these were low-income and Black neighborhoods in which discriminatory housing practices after the Great Depression discouraged investment. Affected communities often protested proposals that demolished or tore through their IL LUSTRATIO N BY S EAN RY NKEWI CZ

neighborhoods. In New York City, Jane Jacobs famously led the successful opposition of a highway through Greenwich Village.

In Philadelphia, after seeing how I-676 divided the city in two, community-led opposition was able to stop a project that would have created I-695: An extension of Interstate 95 that would have gone through South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia and Southwest Philadelphia. Construction on I-695 was projected to begin in 1964, the same year I-676 was completed. The funds that would have been used on that highway project eventually went toward public transportation.

But in many cities, protests couldn’t stop these projects. In fact, according to a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, economists Jeffrey Brinkman and Jeffrey Lin found that most urban freeway projects were built according to plan, despite opposition.

“In most cities, highways came anyway,” Linda Poon wrote in CityLab in 2019. “And when they did, they disproportionately

affected those living in communities of color and neighborhoods with lower education attainment: By the mid-1960s, white neighborhoods with more affluent, better-educated residents had more success putting new policies to use and keeping highways at bay.”

While neither Mayor Kenney nor Governor Tom Wolf mentioned the significance of protests on a highway during the immediate upheaval (they were meeting in City Hall during the chemical attack), Minnesota Governor Tim Walz spoke about it after protesters took over I-94 between St. Paul and Minneapolis that same week.

“It wasn’t just physical—it ripped a culture, it ripped who we were. It was an indiscriminate act that said ‘this community doesn’t matter, it’s invisible,’” Walz said of the highway. “This convenient place to put a highway so we can cross over ... and go from the city out to the suburbs.”

Today, we are still feeling the effects of highway planning on our neighborhoods. It is generally harder to develop housing near

Philadelphia’s highways, and the noise and pollution make the space alongside I-95 and I-676 less than desirable.

Of course, highways aren’t the only factor that led to increased segregation, income inequality and unfair policing practices in major cities like Philadelphia. Red-lining practices prefaced urban highway expansion and renewal, and banks were essentially barred from lending money to people in neighborhoods across major cities if they happened to live in a red-lined area.

But highways, and even pseudo-highways like Roosevelt Boulevard and Lincoln Drive, continue to divide communities; their poor planning has led to regular injurious and deadly crashes that we all pay for. And while the urban highway revolts of the ’50s and ’60s led to more community input on major projects, the damage has been done—and it’s something we might not be talking about without the heroic people protesting and speaking out on these highways that were once contested themselves.

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urban naturalist

Got You Covered Volunteer group rebuilds the canopy in the Wissahickon, one tree at a time by

bernard brown

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don’t think i would have noticed that the patch of forest off Livesey Lane had been restored if Steve Jones, president of Wissahickon Restoration Volunteers (WRV), hadn’t told me.

I visited the area on a humid morning in late May. The canopy was complete, shading out the sun completely. I heard the usual forest birds around me: the flute-like singing of a wood thrush, scolding chickadees.

The trees, though, mostly red maples and tulip trees, were small as forest trees go, with trunks about 8 to 12 inches in diameter.

WRV planted those trees starting about 20 years ago, according to Jones, when the ground had been covered by exotic plants, making it impossible for trees to grow. Indeed, further up Livesey Lane, I passed an impenetrable thicket of Japanese knotweed, this spring’s shoots already 10 feet tall, that could have served as the “before” photo for the restored forest downhill.

WRV started restoring forests in 1997, planting native trees and shrubs while removing exotic, invasive weeds. That year Jones spotted a volunteer recruiting brochure for the new organization on a bulletin board at the Andorra Free Library. “The WRV was founded by Joe Dlugach,” said Jones, “He asked me what kind of skills I had, and I said I didn’t have any skills; I’m an English teacher. So I started editing the newsletter for the group, and I learned more about what ecological restoration is.”

Now, the organization is taking advantage of more than two decades of work to assess what works and what doesn’t. Jones says the group has located approximately 4,000 10 GR ID P H IL LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 20

stems, trees or shrubs that WRV planted between 1997 and 2019 and is trying to get a handle on which species are surviving at which sites and how they are growing.

“It tells us what planting regime is giving us the best bang for our buck,” says Jones.

For example, early results of their analysis show that oak trees are particularly slow to grow, while red maples and tulip trees shoot up quickly and form a canopy that shades out the exotic plants.

“I would expect it to take a decade or so for the trees to be large enough to shade out the knotweed,” says Bill Keyes, who lives in the Blue Bell Hill neighborhood on the edge of the Wissahickon, where WRV started working with neighbors to plant trees and cut back Japanese knotweed four years ago. Today the saplings, protected by black plastic deer guards, stand surrounded

by Japanese knotweed that are only a foot or two tall, hacked back by Keyes and his P HOTO G RAP HY BY RACHAE L WARRI NER

Left: Steve Jones, president of WRV, at his One Tree at a Time planting shift. Right: A growing tree sports protective mesh.

neighbors. Keyes says they also protect the young trees from fast-growing vines that could easily overwhelm them.

Planting trees during the COVID-19 pandemic this spring has been a little tricky to organize, says Jones, given the need to stay 6 feet apart. Ordinarily, a tree planting involves several volunteers working together to dig holes and plant multiple trees in one event.

“So we came up with a program called One Tree at a Time,” explains Jones. “One of our leaders goes to established sites and stages tools and plants at the sites. Later, another one of our leaders comes along and installs the trees by himself or herself and then does some suppression of exotic invasives in the area.”

Volunteer Chris Richter describes his role in a One Tree at a Time planting.

“I went out with my daughter near Historic Rittenhouse town,” says Richter. “We cut a patch of weeds out and planted a tree there.”

This summer the WRV will be launching an oak experiment, planting the stubbornly slow-growing trees in pairs. One of each pair will be planted directly into the forest soil, as WRV has been doing it for more than 20 years. The other will be planted in a hole including biochar, a charcoal soil additive, as well as fungi that could benefit the growing trees by forming mycorrhizal networks, according to Jones.

Oaks, like most plants, grow best in symbiosis with soil fungi that penetrate the tree roots, helping them take up soil nutrients.

The question is whether this inoculation at planting will make up for poor soil at the sites.

It’s a waiting game, but in another 20 years, WRV should know the answer.

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We Don’t Farm Because It’s Trendy Farming is not new to Black people. We farm as resistance, by ashley gripper for healing and sovereignty

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or more than 150 years, from the rural South to northern cities, Black people have used farming to build self-determined communities and resist oppressive structures that tear them down.

My journey in food-and-land work began long before I was born. My ancestors were enslaved Africans forced to farm under abhorrent conditions in South Carolina, Texas and Georgia. In 2012, I started my first professional job working at a food justice and nutrition education non-profit in 12 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 20

Philadelphia, but I first developed a passion for food sovereignty and agriculture at the Black Farmers Conference in 2013.

There, I learned that farming is not new to Black people. While some dominant modern narratives talk about urban agriculture as an innovative way to fight food insecurity, Black folks in this country have been growing food in cities for as long as they have lived in cities. Before that, our ancestors lived in deep relationship with the land. For the first time, I understood growing food as a tool for dismantling systemic oppression.

I also realized that Black academics have a critical role to play in agricultural resistance and freedom movements.

As a PhD candidate, I am exploring and understanding the ways that urban agriculture impacts the mental health, spirituality and collective agency of Black communities.

Before we even begin to do this type of research, it is important for us to understand the roots of Black farming.

Black farmers across the South created cooperatives largely in response to the anti-Black sentiment of governments and society; in response to supermarkets not serving Black customers; in response to white people terrorizing Black folks when they tried to register to vote. These cooperatives were a means of providing economic autonomy, political education and collective agency to Black people in the South.

Despite migration patterns from the South to the North and Midwest, many

P H OTO G R A P H Y C R E D I T S O N I A GA L I B E R ( L E F T ) A N D K H A L I A H D. P I T T S ( R I G H T )

the blacker the berry

Author Ashley Gripper (right) with fellow farmers Errol Chichester (left) and Tahirah Chichester (center).

Black urban communities have kept in touch with their agricultural roots, establishing farms and gardens throughout the United States. Black people have ancestral ties to this land—to caring for it, nurturing it, loving it and allowing it to heal our communities. We have faced immeasurable discriminatory practices and policies as we have sought to reclaim and live in relationship with the land. We must not forget this history.

Danger lies in the face and narrative of urban agriculture being co-opted by white liberals and academics. It is presented as something new, trendy, and without sociopolitical and historical ties or influences.

This limited perspective views white community gardens and urban farming alone as acts of social justice, which is inadvertently attempts to erase the decades of urban agricultural practices, resistance and activism that Black communities have engaged in. It is why we see white-led urban agriculture projects receiving the majority of grant and institutio nal funding, further replicating the cycle of narrative dominance, white land ownership and the physical exclusion of Black folks from access to land, wealth and resources.

Resilience in the face of exploitation In the decades following the Civil War, Black folks sought to acquire land as a means to provide for themselves, their families and communities, and become independent of

previous slave and plantation owners. But they faced many obstacles. White landowners and merchants routinely denied Black farmers access to private credit.

They were instead offered exploitative sharecropping or rental agreements. This resulted in many Black farmers being unable to keep up with mortgage and debt payments, often forcing them to sell their land for far less than what it was worth.

Can we pause and talk about resilience?

Despite these many concerted efforts to thwart Black farmers, they still acquired more than 16 million acres of land at the height of Black farming in the U.S. in 1920.

There were more than 5.1 million Black farmers who made up 14 percent of the overall farming population.

In the proceeding decades, terrorism, Jim Crow laws and increased industrialization in Northern cities drove many Black people from the South to places like Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and Detroit. From 1920– 1997, the number of Black farmers declined by about 95 percent nationwide.

Today there are about 45,000 Black farmers in the U.S., making up only 1 percent of the farming population, and owning far fewer acres of land compared to 1920. This happened through a series of discriminatory USDA policies and procedures such as heir property, unjustified loan and crop insurance denials, blatant prejudice like forcing Black farmers off their land and terrorism from racist mobs in the South.

Surviving, thriving and self-determination Black farmers and gardeners continue to push for their community’s right to self-determination, to survive and to thrive. Here in Philly, food justice activists and urban growers protest to save their farms and gardens, although City Council control of land sales often make it hard for community members to contend with wealthy developers. These growers and activists understand that, in a city where 81 percent of food stores offer mostly unhealthy food choices, a major key to wellness and collective healing is having control over what goes into our bodies. Data have also shown that those unhealthful food stores are disproportionately located in Black neighborhoods. Unsurprisingly, heart disease is the leading cause of death in Philadelphia.

Heart disease is what the doctors listed on my father’s death certificate in April. They

ruled that as the cause of death, despite the neglect, negligence and implicit health-care bias that contributed to his passing.

Diet-related illnesses are often attributed to individual behavior and poor lifestyle choices, but the reality is that these illnesses and deaths are the results of systemic racism.

Black people in Philadelphia disproportionately experience targeted unhealthy food marketing, lack of access to health care and inadequate educational systems— all of which can lead to mental and physical health challenges.

These challenges are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as healthcare practitioners make choices, often rooted in racism, about who lives and who dies, whose life is valuable and whose life can be discarded. The global health crisis highlights that community control of food systems and land are not just important but are quite literally our means of surviving, healing and thriving.

Through grassroots organizing, policy advocacy and urban planning, we are pushing for access to land for emotional, spiritual, physical and collective healing because our communities’ health and livelihoods depend on it.

Gardens and farms provide people with exposure to greenness, opportunities for physical activity and potential benefits to the microbiome, as exposure to soil and its many microorganisms can boost our gut health.

They offer spaces to connect and engage with our neighbors. They provide reclamation and renewal of our spiritual and ancestral relationships to the land. Community-led urban agriculture projects are a means of sharing education and information, strengthening social capital and support.

Agriculture can offer Black people opportunities for economic autonomy while providing safe spaces for community members to gather and celebrate without fear of criminalization or state-sanctioned brutality.

Black agriculture provides a way to engage with the disturbing history of this country, that we live in a place built on stolen Indigenous land and the brutal enslavement and stolen labor of my ancestors. It opens the door to understanding how this all shapes our collective journey toward liberation.

An expanded version of this article was originally published in Environmental Health News.

The longer version is available at EHN.org.

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food

Rich and Creamy Meet the creamery owner molding plant-based cheese from by alexandra w. jones cashews and coconut milk

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egan cheesemonger steve Babaki knows the secret to making plant-based cheese taste like the real thing.

Time.

“If you just give it the time, it can taste so similar,” he says.

The Conscious Cultures Creamery owner describes himself as 99.9% vegan (he occasionally nibbles at dairy cheese to research flavor profiles) and says he’s had a lifelong relationship with the kitchen. He was raised by his grandmother in Washington, D.C., and grew up cooking with her.

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After she passed away, when he was 13 years old, he moved in with his brother, who was 15 years older and hard at work in nursing school at the time.

“From there on, I actually prepared most of my own meals,” he says. “I got really, really used to being in the kitchen all the time and I loved it, so of course that took me into restaurants.”

He spent about 20 years in the industry, Babaki says. His first job that required a social security card was with a bagel bakery.

He worked at several well-known restaurants in California before arriving in Phila-

delphia in 2017 and snagging a job at Center City’s high-end vegan restaurant Vedge.

While working as a front-of-house employee there, Babaki started making vegan cheese as a fun experiment for his partner Becky, who he said was a “borderline vegan” at that point.

“I would bring stuff into my job and people would try it and would say how good it was,” he says, “and Becky loved it too,” so last March he decided to do a small pop-up shop at a yoga studio in his Chestnut Hill neighborhood to gauge public interest. The first cheese he started making to sell he called The Bloomy White, a blooming rind cheese comparable to camembert and brie.

It went well, and the event led him to meeting Carmella Lanni and Carlo Giardina, owners of Philly’s vegan convenience store V Marks the Shop. Lanni reached out to offer their vegan store as a location for future P HOTO G RAP HY BY M ILTO N LI NDSAY

My hope is that this cheese makes a lot of people happy.”

— steve babaki, owner of Conscious Cultures Creamery Medlinsky, co-owner of the Kensington restaurant Martha, first brought the cheese to his attention.

“All the vegan cheeses that I’ve had before—and I will not say it’s a huge amount—they didn’t look particularly appetizing Steve Babaki shows off a cheese or like a handmade prodboard featuring Conscious uct,” LaBan says. “They Cultures Creamery’s Maverick. either looked very industrial or they looked like a pop-ups. Less than a week later, she says he lump of Playdoh, and this looked like it was had his cheese spread out for them to taste like a triple-cream brie. It had the look, the feel and even the smell of a bloomy rind.” alongside a batch of homemade fennel jam and a shiitake mushroom-Beyond Meat pâté.

To make a wheel of The Bloomy White, “The way that he presents food is very which Babaki has since renamed Maverick, takes about three weeks from start to finish, much in line with the presentation in a Babaki says. restaurant,” Lanni says, noting this tendency is likely a result of his work experiHe describes a little of the magic. It beence. She and Giardina collaborated with gins with cashews that are soaked in water for eight hours before being drained and him during the summer of 2019, allowing Babaki to host pop-ups in the back room of blended with coconut milk, which Babaki their store. He started to gain some traction says gives the cheese “a deeper, more fatty with these events—but what really put his richness.” Once it’s blended, he adds trabusiness on the map was an article by Craig ditional cheese-making bacteria cultures.

LaBan, who has served as The Philadelphia That’s what gives the cashews and coconut Inquirer’s food critic for 22 years, wrote the traditional cheese flavor, he says.

“I add that into the base and I let them about him that August, titled “The best vegan cheese Craig LaBan has ever tasted.” ferment at room temperature, covered in a Once that article was published, V could muslin cloth,” Babaki explains, “so that it can still breathe and so that excess moisture not keep his cheese in stock, Giardina says.

“People literally were coming here with will evaporate.”

During that process, the curd thickens the newspaper clipping that they cut out to show me. ‘This is the cheese, right?’ ” Giardiup. Once the pH drops, he puts it in the rena recalls, saying LaBan’s readers were calling frigerator “to stop that hard fermentation him and Lanni at night to ask if they had any that happened at room temperature, and for sale and beating down the door of Vedge, also to get the curd to firm up a little bit trying to track down Babaki. more,” he says. That way it’s easier to maThe texture, the look and the complexity nipulate into any shape he wants. of flavors is what made Babaki’s cheese stand Then he uses a 6-ounce scoop, which he out, according to LaBan, who says Jonny says looks similar to an ice cream scooper,

and plops the globs of future cheese onto pieces of plastic mesh. From there, he puts them into household refrigerators that he’s converted into “caves.”

“It’s what I call them because I have them hooked up to a gadget that regulates the temperature, so if the temperature begins to get too cold, the refrigerator stalls, and if it gets too warm, the refrigerator comes back on,” he explains. Adding to Babaki’s cave analogy, he also puts rocks in the fridges—an idea borrowed from Fishtown cheesemaker Yoav Perry, who Babaki calls a “cheese whisperer”—to hold moisture and keep humidity high in the vessels. Each cave can hold around 100 pounds of cheese.

Over the course of three weeks, “the cheese gets flipped daily,” Babaki says, “when the mold starts to grow.”

“You actually have to kind of pat it down a little bit and try and, like, make it grow evenly,” he explains, and after they’ve done their time, the cheeses get pulled out and wrapped up and refrigerated normally.

Lately, Babaki’s also focused his efforts on making mozzarella-style cheese balls and vegan cream cheese products that he can turn around in few days. He’s looking forward to expanding his business and hiring employees to help him along with his venture after he finishes moving his operation into BOK, a South Philly operation that leases space to small-business owners.

Once he gets a large walk-in cooler, he’ll be able to make significantly more cheese, Babaki says, and experiment with other varieties, like Gouda, which can require up to 12 months to develop the right flavors and textures.

“I’m just looking forward to making as much cheese as possible for all the people that want it,” he says. “My hope is that this cheese makes a lot of people happy.”

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waterway protection

Troubled Waters Pennsylvania residents say Mariner East 2 pipeline project is by siobhan gleason contaminating their drinking water Association and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, Sunoco was required to notify all residents within 450 feet of the drill site that the aquifer had been hit during horizontal directional drilling (HDD) activity, a method of installing a pipeline underground.

Any resident within 450 feet of the drill site who believed their water might have been contaminated during HDD was urged to contact their local Sunoco representative.

In return, Sunoco offered to provide bottled water and a water buffalo (or transportable water tank) to residents as an alternative water source during the rest of the HDD construction.

“They’ll say, ‘We’re having a problem with groundwater’ and suck trucks come and suck out all the water, which is really our aquifer,” Edgmont resident Lora Snyder says. Suck trucks, otherwise known as

Construction at a horizontal directional drilling site in Edgmont Township.

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P H OTO G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y LO R A S N Y D E R

O

n february 12, 2018, Delaware County residents along the Mariner East 2 pipeline route received a letter from Sunoco Pipeline LP, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Operating LP, about a groundwater problem. Sunoco had punctured a local aquifer that residents of Edgmont Township relied on for well water. Due to a settlement with Clean Air Council, Mountain Watershed

vacuum trucks are used for removing water or slurries from different locations.

Though Sunoco offered to provide water to residents within 450 feet of the pipeline, it did not extend that offer to residents further away. Before the settlement, “they weren’t even checking anyone’s water,” Snyder says.

Sunoco may have been legally forced to provide water supplies to some residents, but oil spills and water contamination are still ongoing problems for residents in Edgmont and beyond. Since the beginning of the Mariner East 2 construction in 2017, residents have been pushing back.

The Mariner East 2 pipeline travels for 350 miles across Pennsylvania. The pipeline carries natural gas liquids extracted from the fracking sites in the Marcellus and Utica Shale regions in Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Eastern Ohio to the Marcus Hook Industrial Complex in Philadelphia’s neighboring Delaware County.

The pipeline will have an initial capacity of 275,000 barrels of natural gas liquids per day. These natural gas liquids are intended to be distributed and exported for plastic manufacturing in the United Kingdom. Natural gas liquids are hydrocarbons, which are composed of carbon and hydrogen. The Mariner East 2 pipeline will be carrying three natural gas liquids: butane, propane and ethane.

When natural gas liquids are not pressurized at a low temperature, they become gases. Because of this, they must be kept highly pressurized at low temperatures to maintain a liquid state, which is necessary for shipment and travel.

Since its initial construction in 2017, the Mariner East 2 pipeline has been plagued with countless environmental issues, including water contamination and sinkhole openings across Pennsylvania. The Mariner East 2 has been issued 98 violations since 2017.

Just a few incidents involving the Mariner East 2 pipeline in 2018 included the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection suspending all construction on the pipeline, vandals damaging pipeline equipment in Chester County and a Chester County district attorney opening a criminal investigation into the construction.

The Mariner East 2 pipeline currently faces an FBI corruption investigation and two criminal probes.

They wanted me to sign a waiver saying it wasn’t their fault for the water loss. Since I wouldn’t do that, they hung me out to dry.”

— patrick robins on, resident of Indiana County The most recent criminal probe into the pipeline was announced in March 2019. Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Delaware County District Attorney Katayoun Copeland opened a joint criminal investigation into Energy Transfer and Sunoco involving alleged criminal activity during the building of the Mariner East 2, 1 and 2x pipelines.

Before Shapiro and Copeland opened their investigation in 2019, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan opened an investigation into construction methods used for all three pipelines.

In addition to this criminal probe, the FBI also launched an investigation in November 2019 to determine if Governor Tom Wolf had forced environmental protection staff to approve construction permits for the pipeline.

Snyder and her neighbors have been dealing with countless environmental problems ever since Sunoco began building the Mariner East 2 pipeline in Edgmont Township. Many of the issues can be traced back to horizontal directional drilling. This method is generally considered to be less environmentally impactful than open cut trench excavation, which involves digging a trench for the pipe. When open cuts are used to cross a pipeline through waterways, the water may be temporarily diverted. Because HDD is done underground, it does not divert water flow, which may seem superior to open cut trench excavation. However, HDD can be detrimental to the environment when done improperly.

During HDD, the tunnel for the pipeline and the drill bit must be kept lubricated with a slurry of water and bentonite clay (a fine absorbent clay that forms a paste when mixed with water). When the clay and water are mixed together, they are referred to as “drilling fluid.” Drilling fluid can flow through cracks or fissures in rocks and soil. It can also return to the surface and enter a waterway, where it can

harm wildlife. When drilling fluid accidentally rises to the surface, it is known as an inadvertent return.

The combination of bentonite clay and water may sound nontoxic, but drilling fluid is not harmless.

“The bentonite they say is natural, nontoxic,” Snyder says, “but it’s a commercial bentonite, which if it gets in fish and amphibians, it will plug their gills and kill them.”

Sunoco has had hundreds of reported spills of drilling fluid since 2017, which have been tracked by the FracTracker Alliance, a nonprofit that uses maps and other visual tools to address the risks that oil and gas development pose to community health and the environment. The FracTracker Alliance often partners with other environmental groups to provide them with data analysis.

“As construction continued and there were incidents and inadvertent returns that were made publicly available by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, we were able to map out those spills and keep a record of it,” Erica Jackson, community outreach and communications specialist at the FracTracker Alliance, says.

The excess sediment in drilling fluid has the potential to “adversely impact an ecosystem because there’s excess dissolved solids and sedimentation in a body of water,” Jackson says.

According to the FracTracker Alliance, the Mariner East 2 pipeline crosses 1,222 streams, 34 ponds and 708 wetlands crossings, so the environmental impact of drilling fluid can be enormous.

Drilling fluid has a similar effect on groundwater. The excess solids make water impossible to drink or use for cleaning.

Drilling fluid can also contain unknown chemicals. One of Snyder’s neighbors found acetone in her water, which can be used to clean up oil spills.

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“We have had three past Sunoco pipeline leaks in our township—oil and gas leaks,” Snyder says. “They’ve been doing drilling through the same areas where the leaks have occurred, probably spreading petrochemicals throughout the township.”

The continuous environmental hazards to the environment and to Pennsylvanians were what spurred groups like Mountain Watershed Association to legally challenge Sunoco. Mountain Watershed Association, Clean Air Council and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network filed three supersedeas petitions in 2018 to put a temporary halt on the Mariner East 2 pipeline construction. Two of the supersedeas were successful, and led to Sunoco, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the environmental organizations entering into settlements to strengthen permit conditions. Part of the settlement requires Sunoco to identify all water sources within a certain radius of a drill site by contacting all landowners near the site. This way, Sunoco would know how many wells could be impacted during HDD. The supersedeas and the settlement were necessary because, as Melissa Marshall, community advocate at Mountain Watershed Association explains, there are no state regulations that specifically address natural gas liquids pipelines.

“It fell through the cracks of regulation.

Because of the contents of this pipeline, it fell out of the oil and gas regulation frame18 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 20

work,” Marshall says. “The only permitting schemes that were covering it were essentially basic construction permits that don’t anticipate volatile chemical impacts or major drilling projects, which this was.”

Before the settlement, the only permits that Sunoco needed were earth-moving permits and waterways- and wetlands-crossing permits, which were the same permits “you would get if you wanted to build a big back patio,” Marshall says.

In addition to the permit issues, workers for Mountain Watershed Association, Clean Air Council and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network also learned that due to a lack of regulations, rebuttable presumption does not apply to the Mariner East 2 pipeline construction.

Rebuttable presumption means that if a well or water source near an area of construction becomes contaminated, the operator doing the construction is presumed responsible for the contamination, though they may attempt to prove they are not responsible.

Because rebuttable presumption does not apply to the Mariner East 2 pipeline, if Sunoco does not claim responsibility for contamination, residents may have no way of proving Sunoco was responsible, especially if they do not have water samples from their wells before construction began.

The lack of rebuttable presumption “means no one has the right to water-re-

placement supplies or compensation,” Marshall says. “The only way they could get that would be through an enormously expensive legal process.”

According to Marshall, any residents attempting to prove Sunoco’s responsibility for contamination would need to hire hydrogeologists, engineers and other experts to testify on their behalf. She estimates this would cost “around a half a million dollars to start with.”

Since most people cannot afford that legal pathway, they often do not have the power to take on the company. “A lot of community members have been left with whatever Sunoco will offer them,” Marshall says.

Through her work with residents impacted by the pipeline, Marshall has noticed that what Sunoco offers a landowner varies widely. In some instances, residents have been offered a water buffalo if they agree to sign a liability waiver.

Other times, Sunoco has offered nothing at all.

Patrick Robinson, a resident of Indiana County, was not offered a water buffalo because he would not agree to signing a liability waiver. His well lost 37 gallons of water and went dry during Mariner East 2 construction.

“They wanted me to sign a waiver saying it wasn’t their fault for the water loss. Since I wouldn’t do that, they hung me out to dry,” Robinson says.

Robinson believes his choice not to sign the waiver was the correct one because he can communicate with the media and groups like Mountain Watershed Association.

A major concern for environmental groups and residents alike is that the Mariner East 2 pipeline is only the first in a wave of new natural gas liquids pipelines, which will continue to contaminate water across Pennsylvania.

As Marshall says, “there were no anticipatory laws” for the Mariner East 2 pipeline.

However, pushing back against it has given groups like Mountain Watershed Association the legal tools they need to challenge future pipelines as they begin construction in the near future. It is never too soon to prepare for the next pipeline that will snake across the state.

Energy Transfer Partners did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

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Entrepreneur and farm owner team up to kickstart fiber supply chain in Pennsylvania story by alexandra jones

W

hen costume designer heidi Barr looks out the window of her Wissahickon home, she doesn’t see rowhouses, paved streets, parked cars and tidy front yards.

Instead, she envisions the Northwest Philly neighborhood as it would have looked 200 years ago, when lush fields dotted with farmhouses sloped toward the banks of the Schuylkill River.

Back then, the immigrant families who settled in the area would have grown much of their own food, a practice Barr engages in today as a volunteer for Henry Got Crops urban farm in Roxborough. But they also 20 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 20

would have grown something else: fiber to make their own clothes. “Historically, a family of four would grow two acres of flax, and widows and hired help were given a quarter-acre of flax each to grow for their own needs,” Barr says. Flax is the plant used to make linen, an ancient textile that’s been produced by humans for anywhere from 10,000 to 36,000 years. It’s similar to the plant that grows the flaxseeds in your granola. For millennia, people grew plants like flax and wool from sheep to make their clothing, often harvesting and processing the material from field to fiber to frock themselves. Because of this costly and

P H OTO G R A P H Y C O U R T E S Y ZO E S C H A E F F E R ( L E F T ) A N D E M M A C U N N I F F ( R I G H T )

THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY

labor-intensive process, the average person would have had just one or two sets of clothes—until the 19th century, when the combination of cheap cotton subsidized by the labor of enslaved Africans in the South and innovations in large-scale textile production combined to make clothing much cheaper.

Today, our clothes are more affordable— and more disposable—than ever, but the true cost of fast fashion is paid along the supply chain. Synthetic fabrics, made from petroleum products like oil and coal, create pollution, take up space in landfills and can shed microplastics with each wash, contaminating oceans and poisoning sea life. Cotton, though a biodegradable natural fiber, is incredibly water-intensive to grow. And that’s before the fabric is cut and sewn by exploited workers—often women and children—in developing countries. The clothes are shipped to stores and sold, until something new comes along a few weeks later. Excess stock is often dumped in landfills because it’s not cost-effective to donate it to people in need.

That’s the textile industry Barr is pushing back against with the Kitchen Garden Series, her line of household linens made

Left: Heidi Barr (left) and Emma Cuniff spread flaxseed across prepared soil at Kneehigh Farm. Right: A growing flax plant.

The more people who are thinking about sustainable fiber farming and where their clothes come from, the more impact we can have on the industry.”

—heidi barr, owner of Kitchen Garden Series

from upcycled fabrics like men’s dress shirts and vintage flour sacks. Her work at Henry Got Crops inspired the project as she sought ways to support the urban farm and keep her harvest fresh and crisp without using plastic produce bags.

Barr donates a quarter of sales to Henry Got Crops. Her oatmeal-toned and pastel-striped linen napkins, market bags, produce pouches and kitchen aprons are used by some of Philly’s top chefs and eco-conscious farmers’ market shoppers across the city. But she didn’t want to stop at simply reclaiming textiles.

“The further I got into it, the more I started looking at the textile industry and what an environmental catastrophe it is,” she says. “Instead of turning my back on that, I kept thinking about how I could participate without being part of that catastrophe.”

She had fallen in love with working with linen, but no farmers were growing flax in Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, in Pottstown, Kneehigh Farm owner Emma Cuniff was thinking about textiles, too. She’d trialed a small crop of indigo, a plant long used to dye fabrics (responsible for the classic color of blue

jeans), along with the farm’s usual crops in 2019. A mutual friend involved in her indigo project introduced Cuniff and Barr, and by the end of their first meeting, they’d agreed to collaborate on a flax crop.

“I’ve been really motivated by people paying more attention to where their clothes come from as well as what they put on their bodies,” says Cuniff. “But our skin is also an organ, and it’s taking in the chemicals and chemical processes used to make your clothes.

It’s a good opportunity for people to learn and expand consciousness around that.”

While most of the country’s flax for seed and oil is produced in North Dakota, organic trials have been successful in Vermont.

In Pennsylvania, Camphill Soltane, which provides jobs and volunteer opportunities to adults with disabilities in Chester County, is looking to grow a flax crop as part of its Entwine textile program, and the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum in Lancaster—where Barr and Cuniff purchased seed for their trial—grows a demonstration crop every year.

On an April day, the duo filled Kitchen Garden Series linen aprons with flaxseed and broadcast it by hand over an eighth of one of Kneehigh’s 4 acres—the same way Barr’s Germantown forbears would have planted it a few centuries ago. It’s a very small-scale project—Barr’s back-of-thenapkin projections estimate that they’ll end up with around 2 yards of linen cloth if the harvest is good—but at this point, they’re simply hoping to learn.

“Heidi always jokes that we’re growing enough to make a $1,000 napkin,” Cuniff says. “This season is very much about, ‘How does it grow here?’ ” If the weather is too wet, for example, the rain could topple the long stalks of flax, making it impossible to harvest and degrading the quality, since long, intact fibers will make the best linen. Weeds might

overpower the flax plants, which don’t have large leaves to shade invading species competing for the same space.

During the harvesting process, flax is pulled up by the root and retted, or left in the field to let rain and dew free up the valuable fibers in the stalk. It’s then dried, cured and scutched—scraped with a wooden knife to pull the woody bits of stem away from the valuable fiber inside. Finally, the fibers are spun into thread and woven into light, breathable cloth that gets softer and more absorbent with each wash.

To help them execute what’s essentially a volunteer project, Cuniff and Barr are taking donations to cover the costs of raising their first crop, with thank-you gifts like a packet of flaxseed to plant in your own garden.

They’ve also invited supporters to socially distanced weeding sessions, farm dinners when the flax field is full of pale blue blooms and harvest parties to keep the plants growing tall and true.

“The best way to get people interested is to get them directly involved. And because this is a long-term project, it’s not like either of us are going to get paid for this any time soon without community support,” Barr says. “The payoff is way down the road, when we have a local fiber economy, and the payoff will be for the whole community.”

For Barr, the flax collaboration with Kneehigh is simply an extension of her educational mission around sustainability in our kitchens and in our closets.

“The more people who are thinking about sustainable fiber farming and where their clothes come from, the more impact we can have on the industry,” she says.

She’s betting that when offered the option to purchase a shirt that comes from a plant with beautiful blue flowers or one that comes from an oil well, the garment—local, sustainable, and built to last—will win out.

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BLACK LIVES

MATTER

Marching for myself, my loved ones and justice story by

constance garcia-barrio

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photos by

drew dennis

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ON

on saturday, june 6, I donned eleke beads, which represent different angels in the Yoruba religion, a sister tradition to Vodun, and prayed for protection before I left home for the George Floyd protest at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With my 73 years and two prosthetic hips, I would run hindmost if things went wrong. ¶ I had to risk attending the march because of all the Black and Brown men in my life, including my dad, long deceased, who, when he graduated from Lincoln University in the 1930s, could only find work as an elevator operator because of his African ancestry.

I marched for my enslaved but indomitable greatgreat-grandfather, Robert Ware, sold away from his family in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, probably in the 1840s, and never heard from again.

Above all, I marched for my son, whose mental illness adds another layer of vulnerability to his life. On one occasion, when he was off his medications, he got into a fight at Independence Mall. Once subdued and handcuffed, he taunted a police officer, who punched him in his left eye. My son kept taunting the cop, who kept punching him in the eye. Five days in the hospital under the care of an ophthalmologist resulted in little permanent damage.

We’re lucky. At age 45, my son is still alive, but the police have shot many Black men for less.

I also marched for myself at several demonstrations during the week to swell the turnout by one more body and to take the pulse of protests: in talking with people and seeing the movement firsthand, I found grounds for hope.

Coming upon a demonstration in posh Chestnut Hill shocked me.

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“I’m here as an ally,” said Ethan Snyder, 22, a museum professional and one of the protesters. “As a Jew, I feel I have to stand up against fascism. Many people in this part of the city prefer peace over justice,” said Snyder, who carried a sign saying, ‘No justice, no peace.’ “They need a disruption to make them think.” Going forward, Snyder said he will continue “…to bring conversations about race into the various communities of which I am a part.”

Snyder’s comments put the ball in my court. I have to keep cleaning up my anti-Semitism—rooted in my mom’s experiences as a domestic and caterer in some Jewish households—to strengthen my bond with Jewish allies.

Juliete Salako, 23, carried a Black Lives Matter placard that Wednesday in Chestnut Hill.

“I came to Mount Airy from Nigeria with my parents when I was 12,” said Salako, a

behavior analyst with Public Health Management Corporation. “I’m demonstrating so this country can be a place where everyone is welcome. I hope to raise a family here one day.”

I noted that a big demonstration Friday at the Upsal Street train station included children.

“We brought our 4-year-old [son] because … it was important to show him that injustice exists,” said professional cellist Timothy Knipper, 37, of Mt. Airy, “…and that addressing it is something that he can participate in ... to show him why we say Black lives matter.”

Mount Airy teacher Felicia Atwell, 48, attended the march with her 17-year-old

niece Kyra Adams Smith—“I’m tired of police brutality,” Kyra said—but Atwell had also hit the streets for her sons’ sake. “I’m the mother of two boys, ages 20 and 18,” said Atwell, who teaches third grade in The School District of Philadelphia. “My sons have already experienced incidents with the police. It’s important to show support for the men in our lives, to let them see that we know their lives are difficult.”

Resolve and Reeboks saw me through the huge march on Saturday. The sign on the 23 bus I caught to Center City said “11th and Market,” but the driver turned around at 12th and Girard instead. “Not my choice, folks,” he said. “The orders came down to me.”

I grew uneasy on the walk from the bus

I had to risk attending the march because of all the Black and Brown men in my life, including my dad, long deceased, who, when he graduated from Lincoln University in the 1930s, could only find work as an elevator operator because of his African ancestry. stop to 24th and the Parkway. The police blockades, armed National Guard soldiers, and detoured public transportation sealed off the area. Helicopters thumped overhead.

No one could leave the locale on wheels. In case of trouble, I’d have to haul, or more

realistically drag, ass.

On the other hand, the walk rewarded me. I met Natalie, 31, a Latina educator, and three of her friends were running a comfort-and-safety station. They were offering marchers free bottled water and J ULY 20 20

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healthy snacks.

“You need energy and fluids to march in this heat,” she said. “Two Black women came up with the idea of this comfort station. Credit where it’s due.” Natalie’s attitude was another instance where people of other races honored Black leadership. “I’m out here to protest systems that support racism, like the school-to-prison pipeline,” she added. She summed up her hours on the street by saying, “It’s the first time I’ve seen so many young white people protest.

It makes me extremely happy.”

The march wasn’t the endgame, but a step, for Natalie. “I’m going to keep speaking up for a changed role for the police,” she said. “For example, they shouldn’t be in schools. You need more social services in schools to help the children.”

Family members, friends and I had burned up phone connections and the Internet during the week, messaging each other about George Floyd and making sure we were all safe in spite of the unrest. Truth to tell, I hadn’t felt ready to talk with white friends about the situation because they don’t live in fear for their men. But I took the

opportunity at Saturday’s march to listen to people of other ethnicities. As Ethan Synder pointed out earlier in the week, Black and Brown people need allies. But were white people in the struggle to stay?

Near 23rd and Fairmount, I buttonholed a middle-aged white woman at random.

Born in Ireland but now a U.S. citizen, she lives in Philly. “I’m at this march because racism has to stop,” she said. “As white people, we need to educate ourselves.”

“How will you work on racism after today?” I asked her.

“What should I do?” she said, flipping the script on me.

“Join the NAACP, the ACLU or the American Friends Service Committee,” I said.

“Okay,” She looked sincere.

“Put your talents to work for a Black or Brown child,” I added. “Could you tutor a child in reading or math?” It never occurred to me to print up cards with suggestions.

We parted with an air-hug.

Patrick, 27, a white teacher in a Philly middle school attended the march because “I really want to fight for my students,” he

My sons have already experienced incidents with the police. It’s important to show support for the men in our lives, to let them see that we know their lives are difficult.

—felicia atwell , protester

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said. “As to the future, I’ll talk with my fellow teachers, help to get them involved. I’ll advocate from the inside.”

I came upon Joshua M. Baker, 32, a lawyer of Ashkenazi Jewish and Mediterranean ancestry and an associate with Greenblatt, Pierce, Funt, and Flores LLC, a Center City firm. Baker wove through the crowd, giving out his card and offering pro bono legal services to anyone arrested for protesting.

“I haven’t heard of arrests today,” he said, “but I’ll be taking on civil rights cases against police officers who assaulted protesters [at other marches].” Baker’s professional life will keep him on the frontlines of the struggle against racism.

“My practice is 90 percent plaintiffs’ civil rights and employment discrimination,” he told me. “The civil rights cases are practically all on behalf of young Black and Brown people … arrested [or] assaulted by the police for no good reason.”

Geri, 57, a white woman, had also come to assist with difficulties that might arise.

“I’m here as a witness,” she said. “I’m with Up Against the Law,” she said, speaking of a Philadelphia-based collective of volunteers who support activists by helping them know their rights. “It’s useful to have observers on hand when there’s an incident,” she said. “And I’ve learned to shut up and listen [to Black people], and I’ll go on doing that.”

Marchers urged each other to speak up about racial justice—some white protesters with signs saying “white silence is violence”—but represented a range of ideas about how to achieve it. Len, 35, handed out flyers that said, “white people, take a stand for reparations for the African community.”

“We have to do more than unlearn racism,” said Len, attending under the auspices of the African People’s Socialist Party.

“White people profited from slavery. Black people are due reparations. I’ll keep on working towards that.”

In the end, my fear of a riot came to nothing, but I did become angry over one incident. A white 50-ish couple stalked along the Parkway, the man looking irate and perplexed at the demonstration. In walking, he banged into me on purpose. I wasn’t frightened—this crowd would have rushed to the aid of a gray-haired Black woman— but I got mad. I wanted to slam him with an epithet that involved the word mother, but I stopped short of doing so. Maybe the man wanted to ignite an incident, and I wanted

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We have to do more than unlearn racism. White people profited from slavery. Black people are due reparations. I’ll keep on working towards that.

—len, protester

no part of that. Besides, he served as a reminder of the opposition that lay ahead.

I had reason to rejoice as I trekked back to the 23. After the weeklong protests, especially Saturday’s march, I know that the nation can seize this chance to undo racism, thanks to unique circumstances. The protests and willingness may reflect a silver lining of COVID-19, the woman from Ireland suggested. The virus has brought upheaval to our lives, softened us with illness and deaths and maybe left us more open to change.

Technology also mid-wifed this moment.

Countless Black people have been killed here since 1619, when slavery in British North America began, but today smartphones captured the words and images of George 28

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Floyd begging for his life. Technology leaves no room for denial.

Our country has a fighting chance for change, judging by the marchers of all ages and colors, but especially the many white young adults.

Their outrage promises partnership for Black and Brown people in dismantling racist systems: poorer education, deficient health care, a skewed legal system, tainted air and water, nutrition deserts and all the other systems that shackle people of color. These young people seem ready to take on perhaps painful introspection.

“We have to ask ourselves how we feel about ourselves when we can’t fall back on whiteness to give ourselves value,” one

young white man said. I also took heart because the people I talked with didn’t see Saturday as a one-and-done event. Most of them had concrete plans for keeping the momentum of the march in their lives.

Atwell, a Black woman from Mount Airy, made another key point.

“I’m so proud of how other cities, not just Philadelphia, are holding marches,” she said.

“It shows the strength of the movement.”

Moreover, George Floyd protests have jumped the Atlantic. Protesters in England toppled the statue of famed slave trader Edward Colston (1636–1721), and threw it into Bristol Harbor. The city of Antwerp, Belgium, removed the statue of King Leopold II (1835–1909), said to have ordered the slaughter of upwards of 10 million people in the Congo, after anti-racist protesters defaced it.

In Philadelphia, during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers botched matters of race by allowing slavery and deciding that an enslaved Black person should count as three-fifths of a man for purposes of representation in Congress.

Now, more than 230 years later, George Floyd and the marchers have given the nation a second chance for racial justice.

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CUTTING EDGE Woodworker turns trees that fall in Awbury Arboretum into furniture

story by siobhan gleason — photography by milton lindsay

W

hen greg fuguet looks at a piece of storm-damaged lumber, he can already picture what shape it will take in its next life as a piece of art.

After years of woodworking, Fuguet has developed his observational skills. He can determine how a tree will need to be milled as well as how it will be displayed all before he breaks out the band sawmill.

But what is underneath the bark of a fallen tree is not obvious to the untrained eye.

30 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JU LY 2 0 20

All wood is not created equal. Tree species, age and level of damage are variables that put restrictions on what a piece of lumber can become. Since founding Fuugs Woodworking in 2016 with his business and life partner Kristen Snow, Fuguet has learned how to collaborate with trees to determine their best uses after their lives come to an end.

Unlike some woodworkers, Fuguet only works with fallen and damaged trees. In doing so, he sequesters carbon from re-entering the atmosphere.

When trees are chopped down, the carbon stored inside them is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. According to the Rainforest Trust, tropical deforestation accounts for 15 percent of global carbon emissions each year. While this statistic may seem low, it is equivalent to the amount of carbon released by all transportation on Earth.

Fuguet combats this problem by making long-lasting pieces from trees that have come to the natural ends of their lives.

“In a market where planned obsolescence is the name of the game, that plan is not in harmony with our local watershed. Making durable things from our local ecology puts us more in harmony with the watershed,” Fuguet says.

Finding fallen trees, however, proved to be a challenge early on. Fuguet bought salvaged lumber, found trees through friends and occasionally reached out to strangers.

“If I drove by and saw a fallen tree, I would contact the property owner and see if they were interested in getting rid of it,” Fuguet says.

This method of acquiring lumber was not ideal. Fuguet needed a more reliable and convenient source of wood. He found it at Awbury Arboretum, a 55-acre botanical garden open to the public in Germantown.

In 2017, Fuguet reached out arboretum landscape manager Karen Flick. He milled his first log at Awbury that same year and became an official partner with them in 2019.

Fuguet mills his logs in the Agricultural Village section of the arboretum.

“The majority of the property is a preserved historic landscape. We maintain it based on how it was originally designed. A portion of the property is the Agricultural Village. This is a space where we have several partner organizations, companies and individuals who use it for various types of agriculture,” Flick says.

Awbury Arboretum has roughly 3,000 trees and is home to an aging population of paper birches, black gums and ashes.

Part of Flick’s job includes adhering to Awbury’s stewardship plan. The stewardship plan identifies the top 10 projects that will be completed at the arboretum in the coming years. One of these projects is tree maintenance and care.

Teams of arboretum workers have been tracking the health of each tree species on the property since 2012 using GPS and geographic information system (GIS) technology.

“We are working on getting the GIS data up and running so that it is more user friendly for our in-house landscape maintenance,” Flick says. Her goal is “having the GIS work done so that I can click on a tree, check if it’s deceased and add it to my list for removal.”

This data helps Flick identify which trees are hazardous and must be removed from the land. She has identified 10 trees that need to be removed in 2020 alone.

Removing dead trees from Awbury used to be a challenge before the partnership with Fuguet was formed. “In many parts of the land we were just leaving the logs, so it’s really helping to clean up the landscape,” Flick says. “Taking it to a lumber mill, we’d have to pay—and while we still do that for larger logs, it’s travel time, it’s expensive. These logs weigh thousands of pounds. So it makes it a little more doable to have him right there.”

Fuguet has also benefited by learning from Flick.

“Karen has helped teach me a lot about how the tree grows and responds to stimuli in the environment,” Fuguet says. These lessons “inform my process as a furniture maker,” he says.

Fuguet brings his own milling equipment to the arboretum, which he has upgraded over time. Early on, he used a chainsaw to mill, which was inefficient. He now uses a band sawmill and tinkers with his tools to make working with heavy logs easier. Fuguet also emphasizes the environmental impact of his work through social media. The local ecology of the arboretum is always in flux, and environmental changes affect what wood Fuguet uses.

The emerald ash borer, native to Northeastern Asia, has been decimating ash trees in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Dying ash trees are becoming one of Fuguet’s main sources of lumber. Though these trees are edging toward extinction, Fuguet has been able to preserve them as art. They are becoming a piece of history.

Flick describes Fuguet’s work as a form of preservation that can be shared. “We think if a tree dies it’s gone, but it’s really not,” she says. “How cool is that to continue

Opposite: Greg Fuguet in his studio.

Above: Fuguet and his wife and business partner Kristen Snow mill a tree at Awbury Arboretum.

Left: This Spanish Cedar Stool is for sale at fuugs.com

it on in a piece of furniture and pass it down in a family?”

Fuguet embraces the natural shape of wood, including cracks, holes and jagged edges. He often uses a bow-tie inlay to stabilize a crack in a piece of wood. The inlay stops a crack from deepening further and warping the wood.

Fuguet often uses black walnut for his bow ties to add visual interest without drastically changing the natural shape the tree took.

Fuguet’s use of the bow tie was inspired by George Nakashima, a leading innovator of 20th-century furniture design.

“I like to look at other woodworkers who have been doing this for a long time and learn and respond to their pieces of history,” he says.

Fuguet’s unique, sustainable designs in-

terested Natalie Jesionka, who discovered Fuguet’s work through local makers in Fishtown and followed him on Instagram.

Jesionka commissioned Fuguet to design two shelves in her home. Her shelves are decorated with bow ties made from black walnut and ambrosia beetle trails.

“I shared my vision,” she says. “I wanted the piece to feel alive. There is so much vibrancy in Greg’s work.” Jesionka now uses one shelf for her speakers and the other for her international cookbook collection.

Fuguet plans to continue his work as best he can in this uncertain time. Fuugs now has a Patreon account, which lets customers show their support by giving monthly to Fuugs in exchange for a few wooden gifts, such as bowls and candlesticks. This support can help Fuugs stay afloat during COVID-19.

For now, Fuguet is continuing to share his work on his Instagram page @FuugsWoodworking, where he also displays the techniques he uses in demonstration videos.

According to Fuguet, the videos are quite popular.

“It’s uncommon to see a tree turn into a table,” he says. “I think that is why people are mesmerized by it.”

J ULY 20 20 G R I DP HILLY.COM 31

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