Everyone deserves a healthy environment
Oscar Mayer in 1947 (Wisconsin State Journal photo) In May 2020, a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment (ESA) contracted by the City of Madison, while it was preparing to purchase…
For 100 years, Oscar Mayer & Co. and corporations that purchased it have polluted the land and groundwater beneath the site–as well as Starkweather Creek, Yahara River, and Lake Monona.…
Firefighters spray PFAS-containing foam on exploded transformer at the Madison Gas & Electric Blount St. station in Madison, summer 2019 (Photo by Wisconsin State Journal) On July 19, 2019 an…
Photo: City of Madison worker applying pesticides along curbs at the Warner Park Center parking lot A letter by Jim Powell to The Cap Times : In 2017, I wrote…
Free time after work! (Photo by Maria Powell, Summer 2018) This fish worked very hard cleaning up the PFAS in the west branch of Starkweather Ditch as it flows through…
Fish art on Monona Bay created by Eric Anang. Photo by Amber Arnold, Wisconsin State Journal. Graphic additions by a MEJO collaborator. PFAS was found at significant levels in Monona…
While unfunded, exhausted, and beleaguered Madison citizens slog for years begging city, county, and state agencies, and the U.S. military, to do more about the forever PFAS chemicals and a…
Oscar Mayer site in 1947 (photo from Wisconsin State Journal) Victory for Madison’s Northside! Madison’s Metro Transit authority has abandoned plans to buy the northern part of the highly-contaminated former…
As PFAS pollution in Madison is detected in more and more places, and as the government regulating the pollution (WDNR) and the government entities responsible for much of that pollution…
MEJO’s Jim Powell and Touyeng Xiong teach kids how to put bait on fish hooks at the Olbrich Park fishing pier on Lake Monona, summer 2018. Sadly, they couldn’t eat…
From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”: “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the…
By Madison Northsiders No Bus Barn is the Northside community’s voice for better land use at the previous Oscar Mayer site. We are dedicated to place-making in this new era…
Above: Burke sewage plant “trickling filters” built around 1916. Photo from Wisconsin Historical Society ******* One of Madison’s long-standing corporate powerhouses, Madison Gas & Electric (MGE), plans to build a…
Madison newspaper The Cap Times published this column on October 8. Column Madison’s long history of racist planning and development By Maria Powell | executive director, Midwest Environmental Justice Organization…
Photo: Oscar Mayer in 1947 (Wisconsin State Journal archives) ********** Flying in the face of its stated commitment to racial equity and social justice, Madison is as racist and classist…