Smokestack city: An industrial neighborhood decides it has had enough

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http://grist.org/cities/smokestack-city-an-industrial-neighborhood-decides-it-has-had-enough/

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Charles Graham approaches the front porch of a home perched a block up the hill from his school, Benjamin Franklin High, in South Baltimore. From that porch, you can see the school, and in the background, a row of chemical plants and coal transfer stations that provide most of the jobs here. The skyline envisages a school-to-polluting-plant pipeline — a line Graham hopes to rise above by urging cleaner energy projects in this place he calls home.

The 17-year-old environmental activist knocks on the front door and is greeted by Winston Bower, a longtime resident who looks old enough to be Charles’s grandfather. “Do you know about the incinerator they’re building less than a mile away?” Graham asks him.

Bower says he read about it in a newsletter circulating around the neighborhood and doesn’t approve of it: “It’ll just be polluting us even more than it already is around here.”

Graham gets Bower to sign a petition he’s carrying with the names of dozens more in the Curtis Bay neighborhood who disapprove of the Fairfield Renewable Energy Power Plant project, a waste incinerator/power plant planned nearby.