Minutes Exhibit D
From: Michael Foster To: Commission-Public-Records Subject: [EXTERNAL] of course, port expansion is racist Date: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 3:15:21 PM WARNING: This is an external email. Do not click on links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and expect the content of this email to be safe. Pursue Equity and Environment at the Port or lip service The Port recognizes the struggles of Black people in our community to break free of policing that descends in a straight line from the slave trade. Living in this country altered how ourpeopleperceivethe world. We've grownup with it. We are all racist. Anti-racists are those acting to set people free from the curse, often starting at home. Today our behaviors define us in a given moment as racist or anti-racist. Every port faces this truth: In 2020, Ports are racist descendants of colonial slavetrade. The people we displace, we exploit, and we pollute/injure are predominantly BIPOC. The spoils and revenues go to Whites. It's how we built our country and our ports. For all the many efforts to level the playing field, we never did. Black and brown-skinned people earning a living wage, laboring all week in company towns like SEATAC, give up their lives with every breath. Who flies? Who cruises? Who buys the tickets to visit family and vacation? Whose frequent flyer bucket list gets longer the more places they fly and cruise to pollute? Who lives in the deadly company towns near our shiny, optional, tourist-stoked pollution? 1 out of 3 African Americans have never been on a plane. They do not benefit from the skyrocketing growth in travel thisdecade. They choke on it. "I can't breathe" with every inhaler. TheCOVID-19 "injury" "lasting damage" "killing" of the "crippled" travel industry, so "brutal" only proves the point. Those are all things you do to people, with impunity to people whose lives matter less than ours, while the industry is not alive. Our magnificent ability to study, understand, perceive business or jobs as alive and yet not see the invisible yet essential BIPOC workers and neighbors who are very real, very much alive, very hurt by our travel, and make our industries possible, is exactly what is killing us all. Take a look at the physical conditions ourPort gives residents. Particulate pollution from air and cruise travel makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19, hospitalization, respiratory illness and death. As Black and Brown lives are hunted and runfrom racist police, they breathe air that kills them younger and injures them more. Boeing sees brown people as the next opportunity, to exploit a newmarket, and looks globally at one billion brown people with rising incomes for their growth. Boeing cripples their "new market" (which is living breathing people who don't fly) with every new aircraft. Whose lives are cut short by particulate pollution from wealthy (white) travel? When you have chances to vote against expansion and create ways to regulate and reduce emissions, you must vote for black and brown lives every single time. Anything else is an act of aggression against their lives. Did you often confuse good jobs at the port, with healthy lives or life expectancy near the port? For port employees living 10 miles away in cleaner neighborhoods, our excessive travel poisons them at work each day, mostly in jobs that don't have to exist. What kind of community can thrive in poisoned air? Authorize funding to convene an independent Peoples' Assembly to envision and recommend the transformation by 2030 for the "company towns" of SeaTac and the lands along the Duwamish into 21st century liveable communities, where health and Port facilities serve as the backbone for real local sustainable models for transformation beyond tourism and shipping with fuels. (There is no bridge fuel.) Commission independent studies to verify pollution and impacts of the Port of Seattle. Act on the results to champion de-growth. That is not heroic. That is being an "Anti-racist" to the people who die and suffer under your watch. That is also the only responsible thing to do for your own families, your own lives, since climategasses crossed into emergency levels 30 years ago. Air travel pollution shot up 300% since 1990. But the IATA makes sure to tell the world that emissions are "going down" per passenger, and how much more airlinesplan to reduce emissions... while quadrupling flights. Skip those two steps, savemore lives. Cut to the chase: quickly shutter and abandon the Port to save lives. Sounds extreme? But look what happened to air traffic when flying was suddenly endangering lives. 95% drop in travel? Even with all those ghost planes in the skies, a 70% drop in fuel consumption? We never need to go back to 2019 levels. It is deadly now and murders BIPOC forever into the future as surely as a knee on George Floyd's neck. Find every way to stop flights and cruises to keep people living, not millions like with COVID-19, but billions. That's equity. That's environmental justice. There's no other way forward. Like many colonial holdovers, flying and cruising are so racist. And they are on a timeline like COVID-19 that doesn't care about our economy. It will crash if we don't deal with climatepollution. You know. You have no time to waste. Please protect life,people, not stuff, money, jobs. Jobs and stuff are fungible. Lives of the people who depend on you, not so much. 2020, the year of COVID-19, Australianbushfires, unprecedented Arctic heatwaves, ICAO greenhouse gas baseline (postponed), and the Movement for Black Lives to end racist violent policing, How else doesa Port truly pursue Equity? Michael Foster (206) 999-3477 The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade one never expects to sit. --Nelson Henderson
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