groundWork 2010

Born in resistance to oil and waste, groundWork was set up to support activist groups in communities affected by industrial pollution. The organization started working with people active on the fencelines of the major oil refineries, waste dumps and incinerators. Most fenceline communities are poor and black. Under apartheid, they were in principle excluded from decision making processes. The democratic transition promised their inclusion but it was immediately evident that people would have to fight for their rights. Many were already doing so, mostly with slender resources, and it was these activists who inspired Bobby Peek, Gill Addison and Linda Ambler to establish groundWork ten years ago.

Environmental injustice is a brutal reality and it is driven by an economic system, invariably justified as ‘development,’ that puts profit before people. The damage done to people is starkly evident within the workplace and on the fencelines. At Thor Chemicals in Cato Ridge, at least four workers were killed by mercury poisoning and many more were permanently disabled. On the fenceline of the Engen and Sapref refineries in south Durban, most families are either nursing someone with cancer or have lost someone to cancer.

This is groundWork’s heart. The passion for environmental justice is about people and the damage done to them in a heartless system. The struggle to change this system starts at the fenceline but must also confront the powers that drive the system in the media, in negotiating chambers and corporate halls, in the legislatures and on the streets. While not shy of expressing its own views, groundWork’s basic commitment has been to enable local organisations to articulate and act on their own concerns.

To that end, in collaboration with Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and the South African Exchange Programme on Environmental Justice (SAEPEJ) from the US, groundWork introduced the ‘bucket brigade’ to local groups as a tool for action. The buckets take grab samples from the air which are then tested in an accredited laboratory. They enable fenceline groups to produce hard evidence in support of community claims that they are exposed to dangerous toxic emissions.

The results have been electrifying. The first samples in Cape Town, south Durban and Sasolburg showed a veritable cocktail of toxic emissions ignored by government and industry. Readings for benzene were particularly high. This upset a regulatory system founded on purposeful ignorance. Under the misnamed Air Pollution Prevention Act (APPA), officials negotiated emissions permits in secret with industry and relied on what industry told them. The bucket brigade campaign discredited industry claims to superior scientific information along with assurances that it could be trusted to monitor its own emissions. It also discredited government’s reliance on industry data and exposed the paucity of official information.

While the bucket provides a focus, the process is designed to build organised resistance through community air monitoring committees. Connecting people is at the heart of groundWork’s work: supporting local organising, joining up struggles on different fronts of environmental injustice, bringing people from different locals together on national policy issues, organising community exchange visits nationally and internationally, and linking local struggles with global formations, action and support.

Exchange visits have been particularly rich in learning. In 2005 activists from oil refinery fencelines in South Africa visited the Niger Delta where they witnessed the unofficial war on people who found themselves in the way of the ‘upstream’ industry. The village of Odioma had recently been razed to the ground by the Nigerian army while everywhere the gas flares roared and spilt oil saturated the ground and slicked over the waters of the Delta. People from the Niger Delta returned the South African visit in 2007. They concluded that, upstream and downstream, theirs was a common struggle.

Alongside solidarity exchanges, groundWork has created inclusive spaces where organisations working at the local, national, or global scales can participate as equals. The Corpse Awards is one such space. It resulted from groundWork’s ‘corporate accountability week’ held ahead of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development. As Bobby noted, it was “abundantly clear that a single thread running through all our community campaigns was the corporate abuse by corporations dished out with impunity from prosecution or penalties.” The week was rounded off with the Green Oscars for corporate greenwash. BP won for pulling off its ‘beyond petroleum’ ad campaign while its real investments go beyond climate safety to get at petroleum.

The Corpse Awards are for ‘worst corporate practice.’ They lampoon corporate claims but also provide the stage for real stories that people want to tell. The big corporations at the heart of South Africa’s minerals and energy complex have been lined up for awards: ArcelorMittal for poisoning Steel Valley; AngloGold Ashanti for collaborating with warlords in the Congo and proliferating state violence in Colombia; Anglo Platinum for dispossessing the Mapela people in Limpopo; Shell and BP for leaking in a public place; Sasol for big bangs and bad air. The list goes on.

The idea of corporate accountability suggests a prior recognition of corporate rights and the campaign has been reframed as ‘rolling back corporate power.’ With its partners in Friends of the Earth International, groundWork has taken the campaign international. Shell has been bearded at its annual general meetings by fenceline activists from Durban, the Niger Delta, Sao Paulo in Brazil, Sakhalin on Russia’s east coast, County Mayo in Ireland, Pandacan in the Philippines, Curacao in the Antilles, and Port Arthur and Norco in the US. No greenwash will wipe away the blood of Ken Saro-Wiwa and the rest of the Ogoni nine or rub the stain of environmental destruction from its record.

ArcelorMittal is the first corporation with a Southern origin to be the focus of a global campaign and so joins the hall of corporate infamy previously reserved for Northern transnationals. Having built its global empire by taking over cheap and dirty steel makers around the world, its new neighbours paid a visit to its glitzy headquarters in Brussels. Even as resistance to corporate abuse is globalised, the front line remains local. On an exchange visit to India, people living in the shadow of the Vanderbijlpark plant met people who are resisting forced removals to make way for a new ArcelorMittal plant in Keonjhar.

groundWork has grown over the last 10 years. In 2003 Heeten Kalan and Ravi Dixit of SAEPEJ suggested they should merge with groundWork to form groundWork US. Sunita Dubey is now at the Boston office and is leading the international corporates campaigning. At home in Pietermaritzburg, Bathoko Sibisi joined the founding trio and holds the front desk. Campaign staff have since opened new directions for groundWork. Siziwe Khanyile leads the Air Quality campaign and has added climate change to her portfolio. Rico Euripidou brought a depth of technical understanding to the relationship between pollution and health and is using it to support struggles across Africa. Nomcebo Mvelase is using her nursing background to take the work with health professionals beyond medical waste to environmental health. Musa Chamane has pioneered work with waste pickers on the municipal dumps while also supporting resistance to incinerating industrial waste in cement kilns.

Environmental justice is tough work. The groundWork team has enjoyed the support of a formidable board of trustees who ask hard questions because they share the staff’s commitment. In the next ten years the work will get tougher still. It will be a testing time. May it also be joyous.