By Larisa Manescu
Photography Credit: Vanessa Ramos
And when I got back to Dallas, they said,
‘Welcome to America, where we claim your lungs.
You thought you were free, but my name is Pollution.’
Dallas-based activist and poet Olinka Green closes her poem about living in the mountains of St. Croix with the reality of returning to Dallas, a city the American Lung Association ranks as the 13th most polluted in the nation for its high ozone (smog) pollution.
One of a handful of several poets, artists and activists, Olinka shared her poem at Educate & Activate: A Community Celebration of Cleaner Air, an event organized by our Dallas Beyond Coal Organizer Misti O’Quinn at the Pan-African Connection in South Dallas last month.
In 2016, Olinka left Texas and moved to St. Croix. She prefaced her poem by telling the audience that moving to the Virgin Islands was the first time in her life that she understood what it felt like to have clean air.
“The air that I was breathing was so pure [in St. Croix], that when I got back here [Dallas], my lungs did not know what to do.”
The moment she got off the airplane, back in Dallas, she had an asthma attack. What followed was the typical asthma remedies: steroids, a ventilator, cough syrup, and expensive medication for respiratory illness as a result of air pollution from fossil fuels.
Unfortunately, Olinka’s story is common. Dealing with asthma and other respiratory illnesses, triggered by smog, is a somber reality for many in Dallas.
The purpose of Educate and Activate was to bring together community artists, activists, and community members to reflect on the weight of air pollution on the bodies and minds of those most affected and to celebrate the closing of three coal power plants in Texas that directly affect Dallas air.
But as the saying goes in the realm of environmental justice, the work isn’t over.
Though relatively new in her Sierra Club position, Misti is no stranger to organizing around clean air in Dallas. She’s been active in the Breathe Is Lyfe (BIL) project, driven by her family’s personal experiences with respiratory illness (two of her three children have been plagued by asthma since birth). Her January event began with a screening of The Air We Breathe Tomorrow, a short film about the impacts of Texas coal pollution in Dallas, in which Misti talks about how asthma has affected her family’s health.
Breath Is Lyfe’s creator and long-time Sierra Club Dallas Organizer Cherelle Blazer made the trip from her new home of New Orleans to co-facilitate and reconnect with community members. Educate and Activate is just the beginning of this year’s work for BIL.
The evening’s message was one of community resilience, a testament to the power of art to engage people on the issue of air pollution and its effect on the health and wellness of all Dallas residents.
“Every day, more and more clean air is being compromised by the shortage of knowledge regarding clean air,” said Mattie of Tha Mystics, a local melodic and hip-hop collective. “We are a part of this project because we support the gathering and distribution of information about clean air, particularly in the African-American community.”
The work of mobilizing as a community for clean air doesn’t (and shouldn’t) always look like the sterile inside of a courtroom hearing, a city hall, or the Texas Capitol.
Community organizing can and should look like a song, a dance, a reverberating poem that speaks truth to power.
As someone who works in the communications aspect of justice work, this event felt like a breath of fresh air, where people were given the space to express their agency and connect with others in an genuine and joyful way despite the gravity of the issue of dirty air and public health.
