SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

Prayers of Steel I

OPENING TAG: Beckett Martin-Fryscak

Last night I had a fleeting spiritual experience with a cookpot.

It was after dinner. We'd had curry. I was doing the dishes. But instead of doing what I usually do while cleaning the pots and pans, which is think about other things, I found myself actually looking at the cookpot in my hands. It's medium-sized, with two handles screwed into the sides near the top. A standard-issue IKEA stainless steel pot. Nothing special, really. But also, maybe a thing of wonder. 

As I said, the pot is made of steel, which is basically highly refined iron. And iron comes from the dust of exploding stars and asteroids that have crashed into our planet. So this ordinary household item began its life soaring through the universe, and then became a chunk of heavy rock lodged in the Earth's crust. Someone dug that iron ore up and carted it to a blast furnace, where it was liquefied and further refined into my miraculous steel pot. It's light and strong and easily cleaned. It can be heated up again and again without breaking down. It's built to last—in a world of single-use, throw-away products, this pot could easily outlive me. And eventually, it can be melted down again and turned into something new, because steel can be almost endlessly recycled.

I rinsed the pot and turned it upside down on the drying rack. Which is also made of steel. And then I started looking around the kitchen. The tea kettle is made partly of steel. And the thermos that I pour my tea into every day. There's steel in the stove, in the microwave, in the sink, in the silverware drawer. It's everywhere, from the cars in our garages to the International Space Station. We use steel to build the skeletons of our skyscrapers and to strengthen our own aging hips and spines. And we'll need more steel to build wind turbines, electric vehicles, even the heat pumps that Nick Mott was talking about a few episodes ago. The infrastructure of a renewable energy economy requires a lot of steel.

And therein lies a problem, because making steel is one of the most climate-unfriendly, carbon-intensive manufacturing processes in the world. It's responsible for about 10 percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions. If it were a country, the steel industry would be the world's third-largest emitter, after China and the United States. So we both really need steel, and we really need to stop making steel the way we're doing it now.

Steel isn't the only industry in this position, of course. There are major climate issues with the way we make all kinds of things. Cement, cars, and clothing, are three of the big ones. But hidden inside each of these climate problems is an opportunity. Because, as we've heard from multiple guests this season, the key to progress on climate is finding leverage points—places under the hood or way up in the supply chain, where we can make changes that ripple out and have an exponential effect. And steel manufacturing could be one of those points; if this industry could decarbonize, the emissions reductions would live on in all of our cars, buildings, appliances and cookpots. Some companies are already on the way to making so-called “green steel,” and if they're successful, it could give us a fighting chance of limiting global temperature rise to one-point-five degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels.

So we're going to spend the next three episodes exploring steel as a sort of case study in industrial decarbonization. We'll travel to two communities—one in the midwestern United States and one in northern Sweden—to meet people whose future is bound up with the fate of this industry; people who live in places that have been defined by iron and steel. But as we learn their stories, keep in mind that this isn’t really just about steel. If we want to prevent a climate catastrophe, we don’t only need to transform this one industry, we need to change our whole approach to industrialization in general. And that starts with examining how we ended up with the systems we have today. Who benefits, who pays the costs, and how—or if—we might be able to do industrialization differently in the future.

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and...don't touch that dial. Or do touch it, and ask yourself, is this made of steel? It probably is.

INTRO

AMBI: streets of Gary

It's a warm September day, and I'm walking north through the city of Gary, Indiana, toward the shore of Lake Michigan. It's the fifth-largest lake in the world, a 300-mile-long, teardrop-shaped freshwater sea, and Gary is perched right on its southernmost edge. But instead of sparkling blue water and fresh lake breezes, I'm surrounded by the sights and sounds of industry.

AMY: I'm walking under the train tracks, there's the platform going up to the train.

Just up ahead, I can see the entrance to a sprawling industrial complex. It's called Gary Works, and when it was built by U.S. Steel in the early 1900s, it was the largest steel mill in the world.

AMBI: train

AMY: OK, that's a train overhead

The people of Gary have been riding the ups and downs of the steel industry for over a century. This is a company town, named after Elbert Gary, one of the founders of U.S. Steel. I pass under the train tracks and the highway, and then I come upon this sign.

AMY: No trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Just to be clear here, I'm not out on the outskirts of town or something. I'm walking on Broadway, the main drag through the city. And right where you might expect to find a beach or some restaurants with beautiful lakefront views, the public road dead-ends into Gary Works. And it's just...huge. Gary Works covers 4,000 acres along seven miles of the lakefront, walled off and owned by U.S. Steel. I take a picture of the no trespassing sign, and then I get up on my toes and crane my neck, trying to catch just a little better view. And then I take just one small step past the sign.

AMY: Oh wow. You just barely come through and then you can start to see these giant hulking buildings in the distance. But I believe them that I would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, so I'm going to get out of here — (siren) — hello!

A security guard pulls up immediately and rolls down his window. He's friendly as he asks me who I am and what I'm doing. But I'm not feeling super chatty.

AMY: Ok, take care.

MUSIC

The story of Gary Works is in many ways the story of the industrialization of 20th century America. The steel produced here helped to birth the U.S. auto industry, defeat the Nazis in World War II, turn the United States into a global superpower, and create the climate crisis. So I really wanted to get inside and take a look around. I wasn't at all surprised that U.S. Steel didn't just let me walk in. It's dangerous in there, you can't have people wandering around. And they've got industrial espionage to worry about. But I was a little annoyed that when I wrote to them ahead of time, asking for interviews or a tour, they didn't bother to respond. But I did get to talk to someone who painted a vivid picture of what it's like inside the Gary Works plant.

MARK: We always say the best representation you have in regular media is is Gotham City.

Mark Lash is the president of the United Steelworkers Union Local 1066. He's worked at Gary Works since 1994, and the way he described the plant reminded me a lot of the way poets and writers described the scenes in Coalbrookdale, England back in the early 1700s.

MARK: Very dark. Big blast furnace structures, big buildings with a lot of steam, and, you know, graphite in the air comes raining down sometimes. And yeah, lots of smells, lots of other stuff.

I met with Mark in the union hall one night after he got done refereeing a football game. He's a big guy, and it's easy to picture him at work in the plant, suited up in the armor of the steel worker.

MARK: Steel-toed shoes, for the most part flame retardant pants, long sleeved shirts, hard hat safety glasses, earplugs.

Mark says the iron ore used to make the steel here at Gary Works is usually mined in Minnesota, shipped across the Great Lakes, and smelted in enormous blast furnaces. Then it's further refined from there, and turned into all kinds of things we use every day.

MARK: Appliances, cars, all the way down to Campbell Soup.

Mark says he tries not to buy anything in plastic or cardboard if he can get it in a can instead. Job security, he says. That's why he lives here, and that's what drew his grandparents here originally.

MARK: I'm of Serbian and Russian heritage.

AMY: Did they came over to get the job?

MARK: Oh yeah, no doubt.

AMY: Like right off the boat, they came here?

MARK: Yeah, right off the boat. Grandfather on my mom's side made a stop in Pittsburgh for a little while. Had some family there. But yeah, all over to here.

AMY: So were they kind of proud when you went to go in the mill as well?

MARK: Well, that's the bad thing about living mm….Yeah, none of my grandparents were alive by the time I hired into the mill at 24.

This is a very common story in Gary. Almost everyone I talked to mentioned friends or family members who had died relatively young, often from cancers and lung diseases. The steel industry has provided millions of people with dependable, good-paying jobs. But it's also given a lot of those people serious health problems.

MARK: My grandfather did work at U.S. Steel, at the coke plant. He died of black lung.

Mark's dad was a boilermaker who worked in lots in different plants in the area. Mark says he was able to take an early retirement, but he didn't get much time to enjoy it.

MARK: So he ended up retiring. I want to say 56, 57, and he lived a little bit longer.

When U.S. Steel built Gary Works, in the early 1900s, they actually built their own hospital inside the grounds, because they knew there would be so many workplace injuries. Burns and broken bones were common. But a lot of the health damage from working at the plant is more long-term stuff that can be traced all the way back to Abraham Darby's innovation back in England in 1709. Darby was the person who figured out how to use the concentrated form of coal known as coke to make ironware. There have been important innovations in steel-making since Darby's time, but throughout all of those changes, for over 300 years, we've continued to burn coke in blast furnaces to make steel. And that's a big reason why the steel industry is doing so much damage to the climate.

MARK: When you make coke, it is a dirty process and you take coal, cook it in an oxygen-free environment so it can't burn, and you extract everything out of it, and you'd be surprised how many chemicals are in coal. But what you're left with is just basically pure carbon. And that is coke.

Mark says Gary Works doesn't have a coke plant on site anymore, but mountains of it still get used at the plant to produce what's called “virgin steel,” meaning it's not recycled. And here's a little quiz for you: if you had two buckets, one holding a chunk of that newly-made steel and put it in a bucket, and the other holding all of the carbon dioxide released while producing that steel, which one do you think would be heavier?

Well the answer is that the CO2 bucket would be almost twice as heavy as the steel bucket. For every ton of new steel produced, more than one-point-eight tons of carbon dioxide are released into the atmosphere. That means the emissions generated while making my stainless steel pot weigh almost two times as much as the pot itself. Knowing that, it's not surprising that some studies say the steel industry needs to cut emissions by a whopping 90 percent by 2050 in order to stay in line with the Paris Agreement. So the steel-making process is hard on human health in two ways: first for the people who are working in the mill, breathing in that coal dust. And then later, for all of us, when the greenhouse emissions hit the atmosphere.

Mark says he works in the finishing mill, where they add various coatings like tin or zinc to the steel for use in different products. And he says in that part of the plant…

MARK: It's hot. It's dusty because it's dry, you know, dusty, dirty. But then you get to the other end of the mill where they're actually rolling and put and water on and blowing slag off, and you've got lubrication and all that stuff. And that is loud, hot, humid and greasy. Instead of dusty and on and you're greasy, on the other, you know what I mean.

As I talked with Mark, I realized Gary Works isn't a plant, it's actually a whole network of factories, with interconnected processes running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And Gary Works is just one of many industrial complexes in this area. In 1890, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil company built a huge refinery in Whiting, right next to what is now Gary. The Whiting Refinery soon became the largest oil refinery in the U.S. It's now owned by BP, and it's still running. So for a time, the biggest oil refinery and the biggest steel plant in the country were right here. And there are more plants. Mark ticks through the list that he was familiar with growing up here.

MARK: You had U.S. Steel South Works on the south side of Chicago, then going west from there, you had LTV, which started out as Youngstown Sheet and Tube. Then Inland Steel right next to that, that was what kind of founded the city of East Chicago. Then further west you had Gary, and U.S. Steel Gary Works. And that created the city of Gary. And then a little further east from that you had the Midwest plant, that was until much later, and Republic Steel, and then Bethlehem Steel. So this whole lakefront here was nothing but mills and communities that sprang up around the mills.

One of the main reasons why all of these plants were concentrated here in northwest Indiana lies just 30 miles north up the lake shore: the city of Chicago. Chicago was booming in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and steel was a big part of its growth. The world's first skyscraper was built in Chicago in 1885 using innovative building techniques that relied on huge steel frames. Soon the city was a major hub of steel-based architectural innovation.

So steel helped Chicago grow upward, and also connect outward, in the form of railroads. In the late 1800s, tracks were laid down from coast to coast, and Chicago was at the center of the rapidly-expanding web. Wheat and wood, minerals and metals, and millions of people moved into, out of, and through Chicago, carrying their hopes and dreams on the new steel rails.

And in the early 1900s, many of those people ended up finding jobs here in northwest Indiana. Most of the people who were initially hired to work in Gary were newly-arrived immigrants, like Mark's grandparents, and African-Americans who came north as part of the Great Migration. That was the mass movement of Black Americans looking for better economic prospects and freedom from the violent white supremacy of the southern United States in the early 20th century. So many of the people who arrived in Gary at this time had struggled to get there, and they were hungry for work. And when Mark Lash looks at this history he has some questions. Like, why were so many of these dirty, often dangerous plants built just over the Indiana side of the state line. He says he doesn't know this to be a fact, but he can't help but wonder if some of the reason for this might be….

MARK: ...because Indiana's workers legislation is horrible compared with Illinois. Indiana was a very, very employer-friendly state when it came to the laws of the state. Illinois was not so much.

When he says “employer-friendly,” Mark means Indiana didn't have as many laws protecting workers. And I just want to pause and note the language here, which is definitely not Mark's invention. In the United States, laws and policies that exempt companies from taking responsibility for harm to their workers or the environment are often referred to as “employer-friendly.” And that says so much about our whole approach to industrialization. Instead of thinking of the health of the workforce and the surrounding community as a shared interest, a common goal, we tend to operate within a zero sum game paradigm, where what's good for workers is defined as “unfriendly” to their employers. And vice versa. And that's really weird when you think about it. We're going to circle back to this in a future episode, so hold on to that thought.

But moving on for now: for companies like U.S. Steel, things were feeling very friendly indeed in the first half of the 20th century. The United States had become the world's leading steel producer, and the wars in Europe only increased the demand. More than half of the world's steel came from the U.S. in the 1940s.

MARK: And it's pretty much boom time after that. Getting into the '60s and '70s, this place was running like crazy. In the early '70s was the most employment U.S. Steel Gary Works had. We had 30,000 hourly employees in this mill.

But in the early 1980s, the U.S. went through a major recession, and the steel industry was hit hard. Foreign competition, especially from Japan, was driving down the price of steel, and that, combined with inefficiencies in manufacturing processes, began to take a toll on the bottom line. Steel production in the U.S. plummeted.

MARK: Everyone was going out of business. And I remember at that time walking into one of the heating pulpits out in the mill, and a guy said, hey Mark. I looked up and he threw me a quarter. I said do you want me to do with this, he goes, go buy me two shares of LTV and one of Inland. I was like, you're kidding me. He's like, no. And you looked, and for a quarter, you could get two shares of LTV and one share of Inland.

After a wave of consolidation of companies, the steel industry bounced back. But a lot of steel towns like Gary didn't. And that is primarily because of mechanization. Tasks that previously took many workers doing hands-on physical labor can now be accomplished by one person pushing a button or watching a screen. Gary Works went from 30,000 employees to fewer than 4,000 today. And this same pattern was repeated in mill after mill. In the year 2000, the steel industry employed just one-fifth of the workers it had in 1963, nationwide. But steel production is still going strong. The mills are churning out as much or more steel as ever before. They're just doing it with far fewer workers. 

And that's how you end up with an oversized industrial complex attached to a city drained of its most precious resource: people. As I walked and drove around Gary, I saw street after street full of boarded up businesses and abandoned homes. It's heavy. You can tell this community has been through some really hard times. And you can tell those hard times are not over yet.

LORI: You'll see blight. You'll see negligence and degradation.

This is Lori Latham, and we'll hear more from her after the break.

BREAK

Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm walking through a globally rare habitat called a black oak savanna, less than two miles from the southern shore of Lake Michigan. Clumps of tall grasses are sprouting up out of the sandy soil, and all around me, elegant black oak trees raise their long, twisty limbs up toward the sky. They form a beautiful canopy overhead, an airy sort of latticework of branches and leaves swaying in the breeze.

AMY: It feels foresty but it also feels really open. And it feels really verdant here underneath lots of grasses, little shrubs.

This place is called Miller Woods and it's part of the Indiana Dunes National Park. Sand dunes, wetlands, prairie, and this black oak savanna once met and mingled here, forming an extremely diverse wilderness. And this park still boasts an impressive array of plant and animal species—it's the fourth-most biologically diverse national park in the country.

AMY: There's just so much life like shooting up everywhere. There's a monarch. Cool! So good to see them.

Mastodons, bison, wolves and mountain lions used to live here. And for more than ten thousand years, people have made their homes here too. In fact, Indigenous methods of intentional burning are part of what made the black oak savanna habitats what they are. Or were. This kind of open forest I'm walking through used to cover 50 million acres of the midwestern United States. Now only about 30,000 acres are left. The Miami people were forced off of this land in the mid-1800s, some were moved all the way to Oklahoma. 

Just a few decades later, industry arrived. The U.S. Steel company leveled most of the dunes, filled in the wetlands, chopped down the forests, and built an industrial complex so big it can be seen from space. Miller Woods is a little postage stamp of preserved land, located less than a mile-and-a-half from the edge of the Gary Works complex. I can’t see the plant from where I’m standing, but the birds soaring up above me definitely can. But it's so beautiful here, you can almost forget how close you are to the steel plant. Almost.

AMBI: wilderness/train

AMY: This strikes me as a really good sound postcard of Gary. Because we've got the wind blowing through the oaks and all the little bushes and grasses in this beautiful natural area. And then we've got the train.

I've never been in a place where nature and industry collide more abruptly than they do here on the lower lip of Lake Michigan. It's a startling patchwork of neighborhoods, pieces of the fragmented Indiana Dunes National Park, and gargantuan factories. They're all smashed right up against each other, with no transition zones in between.There's a lovely city park, with access to the beach. And if you look straight ahead, it's just wide open, beautiful blue Lake Michigan. But if you look to your left, you see the Gary Works plant, and to your right is the Midwest plant, also owned by U.S. Steel. I came to Gary to learn about how factories like these are impacting our global climate. But spending time here makes it crystal clear that we also need to be asking how local communities are being impacted by industry.

LORI: And you go to the beach. And of course, the beach is beautiful, but in relation, you see that they saved just a little bitty piece, and developed and polluted the rest.

Lori Latham is the chair of the Environmental and Climate Justice Committee for the Gary branch of the NAACP. She's lived in Gary all her life, and served in all kinds of leadership roles. She's spearheaded tobacco prevention efforts, directed the Gary Youth Service Bureau, and led Gary's parks department. Lori is the kind of person who looks around her community, figures out what needs to be done, and then does it, equipped with a big smile and a gift for straight talk.

LORI: I mean, they use the Grand Calumet just as a dumping ground.

She's talking about the Grand Calumet River, which flows through the Gary Works complex. It's one of the most polluted rivers in the country.

LORI: You should take a look. We have a bike trail. We did a bird and bike where we were partnering with the Audubon Society, and we biked along the bike trail on 4th Avenue and went to the Grand Calumet. There were no birds, but you can see the sheen on the Grand Calumet River. And it was like, OK. Nobody reported this, but there's obviously some pollution here. There is a sheen on the water. And no birds.

In 2020, the state of Indiana was third in the nation in toxic pollution emitted per square mile. Gary Works has been one of the state's top polluters for years, and other plants in the area are often cited for pollution violations as well. The city of Gary is also struggling economically. The median household income is half the national average, and 33 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the most recent census data. Some people might look at all of these issues and just give up on Gary. In fact, a lot of people have. The city has one of the highest percentages of vacant and abandoned properties in the country. But giving up is not Lori Latham's style. She wants Gary to have a better future, and she feels a responsibility to help make that happen. That's just how she was raised, she says.

LORI: I remember being six years old, knocking on doors. You know, we would go door to door making sure everybody was registered to vote. So I was used to organizing just about everything. And just figuring that was just the way to make change and to get things done was through organizing.

But it's not just a sense of duty that keeps Lori in Gary. She loves this place. She loves the people, the natural beauty, and her deep family roots here.

LORI: Yeah, my grandparents moved up here in the 20s during the Great Migration. My grandfather, he was from Louisiana, working as a sharecropper in Mississippi and moved up for a better life and for a job in the mill.

Lori's parents grew up on a street called—tellingly—Industrial Boulevard.

LORI: In that area, which was the oh, historic like Midtown Central District. You know, you would scrape the shillings off of your window.

AMY: Wait you said “scrape the shillings?”

LORI: Shillings is what they called them. Think small, gritty, but long, like, shivers of steel that you could like, you know, scrape off of the window.

So pollution from the steel mill was just a regular part of life. And people put up with it, because they needed the work. Demand for workers was high, which meant pay was good.

LORI: The mill needed so many workers. The issue was, though, the racist hiring practices. If you walked in, as you know, a European immigrant, you were usually offered a skilled job. A blacksmith or even in the electrical fields of the mill, compared to a Black person. And you'll get put in the unskilled part of the mill, and in the dirtiest parts of the mill around the coke plant or the blast furnace, those places.

Those workers were breathing in coal dust all day. Her grandfather was one of them.

LORI: And so he worked in the mill for about 40 years before he retired, died of emphysema. Never smoked a day in his life, but died of emphysema.

Lori was a kid in the 1980s, during that massive downturn in the industry that Mark Lash was talking about. And she says the fact that most Black workers had been blocked from developing higher-level skills in the steel mills had long-term effects on the community.

LORI: That contributed directly to the way the Black community was able to respond when the steel economy began to shrink. After you know you've been let go, you go into the employment office and you say, Well, you know, I got 30 years working in the coke plant. I've been, you know, shoveling coal into the blast furnace or something like that. Well, these are jobs that only exist in the steel industry. So, you know, the person in the unemployment office is like, I don't really have any place to put you. Compared to someone who has 30 years working as a blacksmith where you can do that anywhere. You can go get another job. These are transferable skills that you can use.

Lori says most of the families she grew up with were employed by the steel industry, either working directly in the mill, or in some related factory. So when hard times hit, everyone she knew was affected. She watched her community reel as they grappled with the changes that were upending life in Gary.

LORI: That was a lot of my my childhood. Around a lot of workers, talking about workers rights in the steel industry, but then also, how do we build political power?

And as she grew up, Lori was increasingly aware of how pollution was affecting her community too. It’s not confined to the steel mills. She says, it's not safe to grow food in your backyard soil in Gary. You're only supposed to plant in raised beds with soil brought in from somewhere else.

LORI: The industrial pollution is just so heavy and so invasive and so a part of of our living up here.

And when Lori was a kid, she says it was common for her classmates to get lead poisoning.

LORI: Lead poisoning was like a rite of passage when I was in elementary school. What would happen when kids would get really sick lead poisoning and they would have to get their heads shaved. But a lot of girls, the edges wouldn't grow back. Edges is a real African-American women's hair type thing. Edges are important. And there was so many girls who, you know, had lost their hair. The edges didn't come back and it was it was from lead poisoning. And that was just kind of like a story, a common narrative.

People in Gary have been living with the impacts of industrial pollution for so long that these experiences have almost gotten normalized, Lori says. But they’re not normal. Or they shouldn’t be. And these are not just historical problems. Dangerous amounts of lead can still be found in the soil and water in and around Gary, and the steel mills in the area continue to release it into the air as well. Lori says her friend in a neighboring branch of the NAACP is working on something called a tooth fairy project.

LORI: Where you know you collect kids' teeth and then measure how much lead is in them, to help measure their exposure to lead. Well just in that one project, right, now we're looking at public health, like how the environment like affects our physical bodies. But then there's also, you know, racial justice. Like why is it that African-American children are so much more likely to be exposed to not just lead but other toxins, other environmental toxins?

MUSIC

So for Lori, worker's rights, racial justice, and environmental health can't be separated from each other. Whichever thread she tugs on first leads her to the others.

LORI: My dad would always say, if you see a good fight, get in it. And it just became that, you know. The planet is on fire. We need to do something. You know, folks are being discriminated against, you know, we need to do something like, how come folks on this side of the track experience in public health outcomes and folks on this side don't? We need to do something about that. So the environmental justice work just kind of became an extension of everything else I was doing. But then I realized it actually...it was the work.

And it's not just Lori's work, or the people of Gary's work. Making these kinds of connections is central to the work of averting the climate crisis. Because the destabilization of the climate is just one item on a long list of ways that our industrial processes are causing real harm. And they're all interrelated. Earlier this season we talked about how the impacts of climate change are hitting some communities harder than others; how wealth and privilege can act as shields, at least temporarily. This is what people mean when they say climate injustice. But that almost makes it sound like a new phenomenon, when actually, it’s just another version of the same inequality that allows me to enjoy my stainless steel pot while suffering none of the negative consequences involved in making it. The costs and benefits of our industrial processes have never been distributed evenly, as people in Gary know very well.

LORI: We're talking easily one of the richest corporations in the world, right? Living in a city with some of the nation's poorest people. And I don't like to negate U.S. Steel's responsibility for that.

Right now, a lot of people are thinking seriously about how our industrial processes are damaging the climate. But long before anyone knew about that, people in Gary—like people in other manufacturing cities all over the world—could see how industry was damaging their air, soil, water, and even their own bodies. And from that perspective, the climate crisis looks more like a symptom, not the disease. To get to the root of the problem here, maybe we need to think about a lot more than just reducing the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the air. Maybe we need to examine how we’re think about people, and places, and power.

LORI: And I think for me, it's so personal because again, you know, my grandfather retired from that plant. Died, you know, from working in that plant. It has marked so much of our history as a city. You know, our city, the not in not just Gary, right, but people came from all over the world to work in in that plant and make that plant profitable. And have contributed to it being what it is.

Lori says sometimes friends and family members who have left Gary question her choice to stay. And she says sometimes she questions it too. But for now, she and her husband are raising their three kids here, and they prioritize getting outside and appreciating the natural beauty of the area.

LORI: I can ride my bike to the beach. And then we spend a lot of time in the national park, hiking to the beach. So they know that part and they love that part. But then they also ask questions like Mommy, why is Gary so dirty? You know, why is Gary? They use the term raggedy? Like, why is the city raggedy?

AMY: How do you answer that?

LORI: We got a lot of work to do. That's why we're here. To help rebuild the city.

We need to rebuild many communities all over the world that have been polluted and hollowed out by industry. And we need to prevent more places from being subjected to what Gary's going through.

So the real question we need to ask is not just: how do we decarbonize the steel industry. It's how we do industrialization differently. Can we? Is it possible to make the things we want and need without disregarding people and contaminating places? That's the driving question behind this subset of episodes about the steel industry. We're calling them Prayers of Steel, parts one through three. That's a reference to a poem by Carl Sandburg. The first four lines go like this:

Lay me on an anvil, O God.  

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.  

Let me pry loose old walls.  

Let me lift and loosen old foundations. 

What are the true foundations of our industrial processes? And can they be lifted and loosened and shaped into something new? We'll pick up the story there next time on Threshold.

~

FUNDING CREDITS: Hannah from Australia

This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erika Janik. The music is by Todd Sickafoose.

The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wiske, Eva Kalea, Sam Moore, and Shola Lawal. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sara Sneath, Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Beckett Martin-Fryscak, Hanna Moser and Cale Bergschneider.

We've got a link to the full poem called “Prayers of Steel,” on our website, along with another Sandburg poem I really love called “The Mayor of Gary.” Carl Sandburg wrote quite a bit about this part of the world, and about how working people helped to make the United States a leading industrial nation. So go to threshold podcast dot org to find those poems, and our recommendations for further reading about every episode this season. You can also sign up for our newsletter there, and get those recommendations delivered directly to your inbox. 

Find all of that and more at threshold podcast dot org.