Winter with the Barge Canal
Dear Friends,
Now that the leaves are falling, we can start to see the actual contours of the land again. This is the perfect time to update you on the Barge Canal. It’s been almost a full year since Friends of the Barge Canal (FBC) started organizing to Conserve, Restore, Remediate and Rematriate this wild, damaged space in Burlington’s South End. With your active support, we’ve done a lot, but we won’t start listing all the work and the accomplishments. If you’re interested in knowing more, please check out our newly-refurbished website: pinestreetbargecanal.org. While there, you can sign the petition, sign up to get involved and make tax deductible donations directly now that we have received our non-profit status!
What’s happening with commercial development at the Barge Canal? You may have seen some action in recent weeks. FBC had to make a decision when the Governor held a press conference in the spring to announce a $6 million award to redevelop 4 acres of the Barge Canal land. The amount of those funds begins to tell the story of the level of contamination of the land and speaks to the amount of hydrogeological and geotechnical work necessary to build on the land. The state’s intervention forced us to clarify our mission and question how to proceed with our work. Hours of thoughtful discussion among us, as well as with developers and regulators precipitated into the simplest question: should our goal be to organize resistance to development at the Barge Canal or to continue the work we set out to do a year ago?
We have spent the year organizing, researching, educating, making connections, clearing up trash, restoring, identifying and documenting the life of the land. And raising money, of course! There is so much more work to be done to heal the land, to research, educate and change policy so that real remediation - bio, myco- and phyto-remediation of soil and water contamination - is the law of the land. So that we humans take responsibility for the legacy of industrial development and understand how to clean up after ourselves, to live in partnership with nature and to develop responsibly.
We have chosen (and seem to need to re-affirm that choice every day!) to hold our gaze on the remaining 24 acres of open land, and reaffirm our commitment to Conserve, Restore, Remediate and Rematriatriate the Barge Canal.
Our work continues, and we invite you to take another step to form your own partnership with nature. The Barge Canal is one of those places on Earth where you can take action, and we can work together to help make change right here, our homeplace.
Winter will find us walking and skating on the frozen Canal and actively strengthening the Friends so that we can do the work we have set out to do and make the work of Friends of the Barge Canal sustainable. Here’s a glimpse of our winter work:
Strengthen our connections and resources through private, municipal, academic and activist change-making fundations.
Monitor the development process at the Barge Canal
Bring Art and people on to the land
Build a team of scientists and students to design research strategies for bio, myco- and phyto-remediation of soil and water contamination.
Organize a public panel discussion on national remediation trends aimed at changing the way we think about living on Earth in partnership with nature; cleaning up after ourselves and taking care of the land.
Expand our capacity to offer eco-literacy curriculum to all ages, and to offer opportunities to step into direct action on behalf of our home planet.
Watch for all of this in future updates!
We aim to change the way we humans think about our relationship to nature, and take action to work together for Earth. We aim to change state and federal policies so that remediation of brownfields and superfund sites implies strategies to heal the land, not digging it up and dumping it elsewhere; so that paving over the legacy of our industrial development is no longer acceptable. Along with clean water and access to decent food and housing, we aim to make access to wild spaces our birth right.
Ruby (for Friends of the Barge Canal)
Photographer Maribeth Long
