Tours to Newark 2003 & 2005

In 2003 and again in 2005, GreenFaith offered environmental health and justice tours in Newark.

As New Jersey 's largest city, Newark made great sense as a site for an environmental health and justice tour. For GreenFaith it was even more compelling for the following reasons:

• A strong and growing community in Newark of environmental justice advocates interested in engaging religious leaders as allies.
• The presence, unfortunately, of a host of environmental health threats
• The presence in Michelle Garcia of the Ironbound Community Corporation of an outstanding tour guide with an intimate knowledge of the threats facing Newark
• The New Jersey headquarters of several denominations – including the Catholic Archdiocese of Newark and the Episcopal Diocese of Newark
• GreenFaith's working relationship with First Hopewell Baptist Church , which served as host for one of the Tours
• GreenFaith's admiration of the Rev. Jethro James, pastor of Paradise Baptist Church, who has provided advocacy leadership on protecting community health in relation to the demolition of the Pabst Brewery on South Orange Ave.
• The offer by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection to provide a tour of a contaminated site in a Newark city park that was then being remediated.

The itinerary for the 2005 Tour gives you a sense both what Green Faith seeks to achieve by putting these tours together and what those who take the tours get out of them: a fact-based, first-person experience of places under acute environmental stress.

Following the 2003 Tour, GreenFaith, with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic and NY/NJ Baykeeper, succeeded in extending the boundaries of the Passaic River Superfund site to include Newark Bay. This meant that the Bay would receive additional levels of environmental protection in the future.

In late 2004, GreenFaith and these groups filed suit against that Army Corps of Engineers, charging that the Corps had failed to plan its pending dredging of Newark Bay in a way that protected the environment from the reintroduction of dioxin from the floor of the Bay into the surrounding environment.

Since then, on two separate occasions, a Federal judge has found in favor of GreenFaith and its partners. The groups are currently negotiating with the Corps around improvements in its dredging plans.

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"Growing up in the Ironbound neighborhood in Newark , I experienced firsthand the impacts of environmental injustice. Although I felt a great sense of pride for my hardworking, diverse community I could never shake the deep sense of resentment about the degraded conditions we lived in – the abandoned sites, foul odors, lack of greenspace..."
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