Michelle Pierce
How long have you lived in San Francisco?
I am 44. I have lived in San Francisco my whole life in the southeast corridor. I was born on Potrero Hill and when I was almost five, we moved out here to Bayview, which is where we still live now. I am third generation San Francisco. My father moved from the Midwest. He started his own business. My mother was born and raised here. She was born in the Fillmore. My mother works for the health department. She’s what got me into this field. She worked for the health department as the Environmental Justice Coordinator for years and years. When she was doing the environmental justice work for the city, she moved into that from this nonprofit that she and some of the old timers from the neighborhood started—the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, which they founded in 1994. As she would go to her meetings with government agencies, their technical people would try to outspeak or out-science the people who were showing up. I was majoring in chemical and biochemical engineering and her academic training was in the legal field. She and the advocates would give me whatever documentation they brought, or she would read her notes back to me and ask me to interpret what they were saying and what my impressions of possible impacts to communities might be. More and more, other groups around the Bay Area used me in that way. I spent a lot of my undergraduate time at City College translating technical documents for social justice and environmental justice groups so they could go back to whoever they were negotiating with and say, “stop trying to play us or make us look silly and actually come to the table and talk to us.” That’s how I got into this work. It’s been almost 20 years.
How would you describe the Bayview?
There were two predominantly Black neighborhoods in the city of San Francisco. This was one of them. These were the places that AfricanAmericans could buy homes. It remains the only neighborhood in the city that is zoned for both agricultural, industrial and residential use. This area has the convergence of all of the freeways and a lot of the trucking thoroughfares. The streets are open to 18-wheelers. The train runs right through this corridor. We have a lot of diesel fuel pollutants. All of that is in the air, but it also falls out of the air and concentrates in certain places, so the soil around here is pretty bad. We fought really hard to get all of the PG&E plants in this area and in Dogpatch shut down. We had a lot of benzene, mercury and lead in the air. That was one of the things that spurred the push to say [to PG&E], “Hey, you have these plants—you need to shut at least one or two of them down and move them to some other part of the city. No other part of the city is willing to take them? Then you need to get them all out.” Everything that you can think of that is dirty or harmful happened probably in BayviewHunters Point. We had high rates of asthma, high rates of breast cancer and other forms of cancer throughout the areas that were closest to those plants. There was talk of expanding them and or possibly introducing some dirtier technologies to them. One of the first major victories that environmental justice groups had was getting that cleaned up. They all rallied around that one issue and fought. There was a critical mass of people focusing on those power plants and getting them moved to somewhere else in the city, or getting them removed completely. It was a perfect storm of events and people and interest at that time. The most critical factor that helped get that those power plants closed was the passion of the community to really fight to make it happen—persistence on the part of the community
Link to Podcast
possible media to link to
https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/civic-data-solidarity/a-conversation-with-community-advocate-michelle-pierce/
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/events/bottom-research-environmental-justice-panel-discussion-oakland-and-sf-bay-area-community
https://sfbayview.com/2019/01/community-exposure-research-in-bayview-hunters-point/
https://sfbayview.com/tag/michelle-pierce/
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- Environmental Justice Henry Brannan
