Purdue Northwest students hosted a panel on climate change as part of their final exam. Isabelle Sebastian had a segment on water pollution. Staff photo by John J. Watkins
HAMMOND — Joshua Becerra remembered the day it "rained glitter" outside the steel mill stacks in his hometown of East Chicago.
Becerra's older brother quickly told him to get inside — the glitter was actually mill dust containing harmful metals.
Treshanda Watkins grew up in Gary, six blocks away from the city dump.
"I can recall going out for recess and being met with these noxious aromas. ... Then you would look to the south where you would see a lot of cloudiness. That is where the dump was located," recalled Watkins. "I had little classmates that couldn't come outside to play unless they had an inhaler. I had a best friend that had migraine headaches that were so bad she couldn't keep anything in her stomach."
An Ivanhoe Elementary alum, Watkins didn't realize the air pollution was impacting her classmates' health until she took Purdue University Northwest's Environment and Social Justice class.
Most of the 20 some students in Professor Emeritus Kim Scipes' Sociology 404 course were raised in the Region. They are familiar with the mills along the lakeshore, the heavy truck traffic that fills the highways and the corn and soybeans produced further south. However, many were unaware of just how much contamination these enterprises have created throughout the decades.
"I had no idea how big the problem was," remarked Isabelle Sebastian, a criminal justice and behavioral science major.
Scipes, who has taught in PNW's sociology department since 2004, officially retired last May. However, this fall he returned to teach the Environment and Social Justice class one last time.
This year, Scipes decided to end the course with a panel discussion led by students; he organized a similar presentation at the Westville campus in 2016.
This year's panel, held Thursday, was a combination of both campuses: Hosted in Hammond, Westville students participated via Zoom.
"I wanted to go out with a bang," Scipes explained. "I don't know if this course is ever going to be taught again."
Scipes said the research students conducted throughout the semester is important because while people may know about climate change in an abstract sense, many of the real-world effects are not discussed enough. Data from NASA shows the average global temperature has increased by at least 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880. Though 1.9 degrees may not seem consequential, "a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age," according to NASA.
Though scientists have been warning political leaders about climate change since at least 1988, Scipes said that misinformation and a general lack of action has made matters much worse.
"Had our leaders done what they should have done, we wouldn't be facing the conditions we are today," Scipes told his students.
The student panelists covered a wide range of topics on everything from landfills to organic farming. Many presenters also noted how climate change issues specifically impact Northwest Indiana.
Sebastian noted that Indiana has the most miles of impaired waterways in the country. Earlier this year, the Environmental Integrity Project reported 73% of Indiana's streams — more than 24,395 miles — are impaired by agricultural runoff.
In addition, the Grand Calumet River is one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 31 Great Lakes Areas of Concern, or AOCs. Characterized by environmental degradation, AOCs contain what the EPA calls Beneficial Use Impairments, or BUIs. The EPA has identified 14 BUIs, ranging from beach closings to habitat loss.
At one point, the Grand Calumet River was the only Great Lakes AOC to have all 14 BUIs. Remediation efforts have led to the removal of six of the Grand Calumet's BUIs.
Becerra discussed air contamination throughout the Region. According to the American Lung Association, Lake County received an "F" grade for its annual number of high ozone days between 2018 and 2020. Ozone is the primary ingredient in smog; high ozone days are times when the amount of ozone in the area is higher than the EPA standard.
High ozone days can be dangerous for older residents or other populations that have difficulties breathing, Becerra explained.
The impact pollution has on an area goes beyond just "physical," sociology major Tim Howard said.
"It actually changes the way the members of that community relate to one another. How they see value in their community," Howard said "It hits at the core of what makes a society what it is."
Residents can have a hard time feeling connected to their home when it is contaminated, and low-income populations and communities of color often "end up carrying an undue percentage of the burden," Howard explained.
A recent regional greenhouse gas inventory found that Gary, which has a median household income of $34,085 and a population that is about 80% African American, produced 12,555,294 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, or MTCO2e, in 2017. In comparison Indianapolis, which has a population about 10 times larger than Gary's, produced 14,630,253 MTCO2e in 2016.
Industry accounts for 90% of Gary's emissions.
"We cannot treat the environment as separate from people, and I think a lot of the environmental movements have tried to do that," Scipes said. "They talk about the polar bears, but they ignore us."
Though Indiana is beginning to transition to a greener economy, with utilities retiring coal-fired units and construction on the largest solar farm in the country underway in Starke and Pulaski counties, Scipes said wealthy U.S. residents must also start consuming fewer resources.
"We've got to become citizens of the world," Scipes said. "We've got to create a world where we can all live."
© Copyright 2024, nwitimes.com, Munster, IN