SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

Prayers of Steel II

OPENING TAG: Ellen Voss

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is the second part of our three-episode deep dive into fundamental questions about industry: how or if our key industrial processes can be reimagined to prevent a climate catastrophe.

MUSIC

We're using the steel industry as a case study. Steel is one of the most useful materials humans have ever created, and we're going to need a lot more of it to build the infrastructure of a renewable energy economy. But making steel requires huge amounts of coal, and releases stunning amounts of planet-warming gasses. So steel production has become dangerous to the planet. And as we learned last time, it's dangerous in other ways too.

AMY: Does it feel like a safe place to go into work?

(long pause)

MARK: It's not a marshmallow factory.

This is Mark Lash, we met him in our last episode. He's the president of the United Steelworkers Union, Local 1066, in Gary, Indiana.

MARK: We're making really hard stuff with really high temperatures and all kinds of other stuff. So I worked here twenty seven years and personally know four people who came to work one day and didn't go home.

Workplace injuries, and even deaths, are just a part of life in Gary. And in our last episode, Lori Latham talked about how industrial pollution has also heavily impacted workers and the whole community. These conditions help explain why the workers in the steel mills of Gary in the first half of the 20th century came from two main groups: newly arrived immigrants, like Mark's grandparents, who came from Serbia and Russia, and African-Americans who had moved up from the southern United States, like Lori Latham's grandparents. These were people who were hungry or even desperate for opportunity. They were often fleeing harsh realities somewhere else, and because of that, they were willing to work very hard in loud, dirty, and often dangerous jobs. They had a lot in common, but they were divided by something got mentioned in our last episode but needs more attention: racism. Racism is a big part of the story of Gary—and the story of global industrialization in general.

MARK: You know, the high school I went to when I graduated, I want to say I had four or five African-Americans in my class of 600.

Mark grew up in the town of Merrillville, which borders Gary to the south. When he graduated from high school in the 1980s, Merrillville was almost exclusively white and Gary was 70% Black. Mark says everyone knew where the line was dividing the two communities.

MARK: Merrillville started at 53rd Avenue. Gary was from 1st from 53rd. And at 53rd avenue it went from all white to all black.

MUSIC

This separation of the races was not accidental. Merrillville was initially just a neighborhood on the southern side of Gary. But in 1971, the predominantly white residents there voted to incorporate into their own city, so they could segregate themselves from Gary, where the population had just recently become majority Black. And for a while, the people of Merrillville were successful in creating a whites-only enclave. Ten years after it was incorporated, the town had a population of almost 28,000 people. And just thirty-six of those people were Black. Mark was just a kid at the time.

MARK: I mean, I guess I noticed that, but I didn't understand the dynamics of what it was or how it happened. And then you grow up and you realize and you take classes. You see that the systems kept these things in place.

Systems like housing discrimination; denying Black families credit, or just refusing to show them homes in certain areas. In a 1983 report by a federal civil rights commission, white realtors in Merrillville are quoted as saying they would face repercussions from their clientele if they sold homes to Black families. But slowly, over the decades, things have changed, and Black families have increasingly been buying homes in Merrillville.

MARK: And instead of everyone just said, OK, this is a great thing. Everyone just kept moving south.

Mark says now that it's clear that the project of keep Black people out of Merrillville has failed, a lot of the people he grew up with are leaving for other, whiter, towns.

MARK: You know, and I argue with people all the time because they're like, “well, you know, Merrillville has gone to hell,” and no, Merrillville hasn't gone to hell. Go drive through Merrillville, I grew up there, I went to school there. I'll drive through those neighborhoods. And the lawns are well-manicured, the houses are well taken care of, everything. If you closed your if you drove through Marysville at night, you couldn't tell if it was 1984 when I was going to high school or today. The only way you can tell is if it's daytime and everyone happens to be outside, because everyone who's outside now is Black and everyone who is outside then was white. You know, all of this that everything's going to go to hell once all the whites move out is bullshit. You know what I mean, but you can't. You just can't….you can't get it into peoples' heads.

MUSIC

I asked Mark how people respond to him when he gets into these kinds of discussions.

MARK: As soon as you start talking about racism, they….they, “oh, you're accusing me of being a racist,” and they get all defensive, and it's just hard to have the conversations when you get to that point. And that's the only way we're going to get this stuff turned around is is to have those conversations and have people that are willing to have those x

Mark is so right about this. We need to have more and better conversations about racism for so many reasons. And one of them is climate change. Because we can't solve the climate problem unless we understand what truly created it at the root level. And racism isn't just a footnote in that story; it's a central feature of how the modern industrial economy took hold and spread around the world. So in this episode, I want to have one of those conversations. I want to think together about the intersection of racism, industry, and the time to one-point-five.

INTRO

We're going to start out with a brief return trip to a place we visited in our third episode this season: Coalbrookdale, England. It's a quaint little spot tucked into the wooded hills of the English countryside. At a glance, you wouldn't think Coalbrookdale has much at all in common with Gary, Indiana, which is criss-crossed with train tracks and highways, and dominated by massive factories. But as it turns out, the story of Gary is very much tied to the story of Coalbrookdale and both places have a lot to tell us about the connections between industry and racism.

MATT: We see generations of families who are working here. And you have steelworks here. They have iron works here. Iron and steel really start the story off.

Historian Matt Thompson was my guide to Coalbrookdale. And just to quickly recap Coalbrookdale's importance here: this is the place where a guy named Abraham Darby figured out how to use coal in the process of making iron way back in 1709. That's why Coalbrook is considered one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution and the climate crisis. We're still using Darby's 300-year-old process in the making iron and steel today, and that is bad news for the climate. The steel industry is responsible for approximately 10% of global annual carbon dioxide emissions. But of course Abraham Darby had no idea about any of that, he just had a bunch of ironware to sell. And, happily for him, he also had easy access to the River Severn; the longest river in Great Britain, and the defining feature of this valley.

MATT: Traveling and moving material by land in the past was incredibly difficult. Whereas a river, you know, you've got that transport, you can get raw materials in, and you can get your finished products out. And if you're finished product happens to be made of iron. It's heavy, right? You know, you're going to need a lot of horses to get it out and get it somewhere. Whereas here you can put it on a vessel, these special kinds of barges called trows, and they would take it right downstream to Bristol, from there. It could go right round to London or what have you. Get it onto the river here and suddenly you've got mobility to get your goods to market.

And what were those markets? Where were they, and what was being traded there? Or perhaps I should ask, who was being traded there.

MATT: So, you know, I just said this river connected to the city of Bristol. What's Bristol best known for in terms of trading? Slavery.

MUSIC

Bristol was one of the most important cities in the British slavery economy. Hundreds of ships were built in Bristol, made to transport enslaved people and the products they produced. It was a major hub for investors in slave trade voyages and sailors looking for work on those trips. Throughout the 1700s, while three generations of Darbys were producing huge numbers of iron products here in Coalbrookdale, people downstream in Bristol were growing wealthy off of the trade in human beings.

MATT: You know, they might be selling cast-iron pots here, but are those—and this is a question this is not a statement—are those pot going to people who are involved in the transatlantic slave economy? Are they perhaps items that are maybe going to the west coast of Africa and being traded for people? You know, because metal goods were being traded for people, so these are questions, right? But we know that there are links between people working here in the 18th century—family links, business associations—and people who have certainly financial interests in the transatlantic slave economy.

I want to note that the Darbys were Quakers, a Christian group that believed in human equality and opposed slavery. But even if an individual person opposed slavery, whether they were Quaker or not, it was almost impossible to disentangle oneself from it, kind of like how it's really hard to not use fossil fuels today. Because as the Industrial Revolution revved up and took off, slavery was increasingly embedded into every aspect of the emerging economy. Matt says to understand those connections, what we need to do is...

MATT: Follow the money. But be prepared to find things that might be quite challenging I think.

LESLIE: Many of the slave-produced goods—sugar, cotton—these all fed the development of industry. All of these things are intertwined. They're not separated from each other.

Leslie Harris is a professor of history and African-American studies at Northwestern University, located just north of Chicago—and Gary, Indiana—in Evanston, Illinois.

LESLIE: The main body of my work is around the history of slavery. I teach the history of the enslavement of African-Americans in the New World, but I also talk about the moment right before the transatlantic slave trade in Africa, in Europe, and what led to the use of that labor.

Slavery has existed for thousands of years but Leslie says it looks very different in different times and places. Before the transatlantic slave trade began, she says, slavery had mostly been part of warfare. It was about capturing people and adding them to your realm. Being enslaved was, of course, never a good thing. But enslaved people could often move out of their low position over time.

LESLIE: Before the transatlantic slave trade, people who were classified as slaves would be incorporated into the nation. They might be soldiers, they might be part of the royal court, they might be wives, so you have women who are also bearing children. Those children become part of the family and part of the family's wealth.

MUSIC

But this started to change in the 14 and 1500s, when the Portuguese and the Spanish began kidnapping people in western Africa, or purchasing people who had previously been captured by warring groups in modern-day Angola, Senegal, and other countries in the region. Some of those people were taken to Europe, others were moved to Brazil and the Caribbean where they were forced to work on plantations producing sugar and rum. The British got involved in slavery early as well. In the 1600s, they started taking enslaved people to Caribbean islands they had captured, and to the colonies they'd established in North America. Many other European countries were also involved in slavery. And Leslie says as the Industrial Revolution began to accelerate, the slavery system began to speed up and change too. Human beings became commodities in ways they'd never been before.

LESLIE: It's really in the Americas that it becomes more so about buying and selling people, chattel slavery, rather than about this idea of conquering and incorporating people and making them part of your nation, even if they're at the very lowest level. On this side of the ocean, there's no way to escape slavery.

The transatlantic slave trade had huge, lasting effects on every society it touched. We're going to focus on the intimate ties between enslavement and the industrialization of the United States.

MUSIC

LESLIE: So imagine being kidnaped from everyone you know. Going on a journey in Africa. For maybe several weeks being held on the coast. All this time perhaps naked, abused in numerous ways. Held below decks for weeks on rough seas. Hundreds of people below decks. The minimum, absolute minimum of food and water necessary to get across the ocean.

The conditions are truly horrific. You're chained to other people in hot, stuffy compartments, unable to stand up or even turn around. There's no way to dispose of your waste. Beatings from the crew arrive unprovoked at any time, and if you became sick or get injured, you'll likely be thrown overboard. So many bodies get tossed into the sea—both alive and dead—that sharks learn to follow the ships.

LESLIE: And then you arrive and you're sold. You stand on this auction block of sorts, and you probably don't know the languages you're hearing around you. You're seeing even the people that you were on board ship with disappearing into the hands of different groups.

More than 12 million people were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. Scholars believe about two million died on the journey.

LESLIE: And it is still the largest coerced migration in human history.

Those who survived were transported to labor camps, also known as plantations. Children, men and women were forced to do backbreaking work from dawn to dusk. They were denied adequate food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. And the threat of beatings, rape, torture and death hung constantly over their heads.

LESLIE: And then you end up learning this new work, having to do this new work. So it's an incredibly disorienting experience.

Disorienting, deeply traumatic, and key to the industrialization of Europe and the United States. In the early 19th century, in the newly formed United States of America, enslaved people worked primarily in the cotton industry.

LESLIE: We have to understand that industrialization, much of the industrialization happened through fabric, and the production of slave produced cotton was a big driver of that. It was the fuel in a sense for industrialization.

Much of the cotton that was grown and picked by enslaved people was shipped to the new fabric-making factories that were springing up in Britain, aided by James Watt's steam engine and other new technologies.

LESLIE: Slave-produced cotton fed the mills that originated in the U.S., as well as the mills originated in England. They're intimately intertwined.

Similar stories were playing out in the sugar and coffee industries. By the mid-1800s, around a third of the world's sugar was being produced on the island of Cuba, by enslaved people. By the end of the 19th century, 80 percent of the world's coffee exports came from Brazil, where three-and-a-half million enslaved people were taken, more than any other country in the Americas. So slavery wasn't a little sidebar in the industrialization process: it was at the heart of it.

LESLIE: African enslaved labor was the best way to make these economies work.

Another thing essential to making these economies work was the stealing of land. With few exceptions, Europeans saw Indigenous people throughout the Americas and the Caribbean not as owners of territory, but rather as obstacles to be overcome.

Some Indigenous people were enslaved, others were killed or driven off in warfare, wiped out by European diseases, or forced to assimilate.

So with vast amounts of stolen land and vast numbers of stolen people to work on it, industrialization, slavery, and consumption all increased together. Europeans and European-Americans didn't have to personally own enslaved people or invest in slavery-based businesses to benefit from the slave trade. All they had to do was buy slave-produced cotton cloth to make their clothes, or put slave-produced sugar in their slave-produced coffee while smoking slave-produced cigars. But many people did benefit from slavery very directly—investors in slave ships, owners of plantations, white industrialists on both sides of the Atlantic. These people became used to counting human bodies as if they were bales of cotton or barrels of rum. Individual people with names and families, stories and songs, thoughts and feelings and needs and their own unique minds, were listed in accounting ledgers as assets and liabilities.

LESLIE: And then the mindset appears to be well, if they die, I can get more. And these are, you know, the the enslavers, these companies, if you will, are trying to get as much wealth as they can out of these systems.

The accumulation of wealth through industry. That was the primary driver behind the transatlantic slave trade.

I want to linger on this for a minute because I think there's a way in which, intuitively, it doesn't compute. Slavery is so ugly, so morally repugnant, enraging, and sad that we expect it to have a cause that's also extraordinarily awful. Or maybe, we need it to have that sort of cause. It would be comforting to think that enslavers were evil to the core, motivated by hatred, and therefore, somehow, different from us.

But actually, the main motivation for the enslavement and abuse of millions of people was something totally ordinary, something we're all intimately familiar with: the desire for profit. Slavery was first and foremost an economic institution. In fact, as Ibram X. Kendi and other scholars have highlighted in recent years, the whole notion that people can be separated into races, and that those categories have meaning, was invented to justify the creation of an underclass whose labor could be stolen with impunity. In other words, the economics of slavery created the need for an ideology to rationalize the system; a story that would make it OK to dehumanize Indigenous and African people and build systems of oppression. That ideology is white supremacy. It's been woven into the fabric of our industrial economy from the very beginning, and it's still alive and well today.

AMY: You know, I've been learning about how industrialization kind of really grew out of the Enlightenment, in this belief in human advancement. And you know, there were a lot of people who were kind of leading thinkers of that time who had very high ideals on paper of but yet, this is what was actually happening.

LESLIE: (laughter) Yeah

AMY: How do you make sense, how do you think they were making sense of that at the time? Was it total cognitive dissonance or what?

LESLIE: Well, a couple of things. They were at the beginning of a sea change, a massive change, in how we think about human life. What does being humane mean? What does humanity mean? What are the basic? What is the basic? What are the basic things that you should not do to humans? And I think slavery is central to that rethinking; the brutality of slavery becomes central to that rethinking.

This feels extremely relevant to the questions we face in the climate crisis: societal norms can and do change. When the United States was founded, slavery was accepted and rationalized, because it was so important to the economics of the new country. And now, we are accepting and rationalizing the use of fossil fuels for the same reason—because it feels unimaginable that we could live without them. And yet, the truth is bearing down. We're going to have to figure out how to make our economy work without fossil fuels, just as people had to figure out how to make the economy work without slavery.

And they did. In the 19th century, countries around the world abolished slavery. The United States officially banned the importation of people in 1808, but of course, slavery continued until the Civil War. For four terrible years, between 1861 and 1865, Americans fought each other over the question of whether or not people should be allowed to buy, sell, and own other people. Three-quarters of a million soldiers died, along with tens of thousands of civilians, until finally, the north prevailed, and slavery was ended.

LESLIE: After the Civil War after emancipation, four million plus enslaved people gained freedom in the south and attempt to live as full citizens with the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendment.

But the pathway to true freedom for Black Americans was by no means cleared of danger.

LESLIE: Whites rebel against sharing that space with Black people.

MUSIC

LESLIE: And they as best they can, and they're pretty good at it, strip them of their rights to vote. Strip them of economic agency. And in the worst cases, use violence and terror to let Black people know that the only thing they should be doing is working for white people, and contributing wealth to white people, and not for themselves. And that they should not be in competition with white people as business owners, as educated people, as politicians.

Southern states passed thousands of so-called “Jim Crow laws,” aimed at depriving Black citizens of education, housing, economic opportunities, and political power.

LESLIE: And so this moment known as Reconstruction, which was really an attempt to incorporate Black people as equals in the nation. It ends in 1877 and inaugurates what Black historians call the nadir. There's a particular kind of pain that comes with dashing dreams in this incredibly brutal way. So by the early 20th century, Black people are they have not given up, but they have definitely been beaten back, and I mean that word literally.

At the same time, the southern economy was struggling mightily. The region was still recovering from the devastation of the Civil War, and the cotton industry was collapsing due in part to the infestation of the boll weevil. Times were hard.

LESLIE: And so Black people vote with their feet. They begin to go north and they enact the Great Migration. Several million Black people from the south moved north up. They become laborers in industry and many other kinds of jobs that would not have been available to them in the south.

And one of the places they went was Gary, Indiana.

We'll pick up the story there after the break.

BREAK

PROMO: The Moth

PROMO: Woods Boss Threshold IPA (Nick tasting)

Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I owe you an apology. We spent an entire episode in Gary, Indiana last time, and I failed to tell you one of the most important things about it.

MUSIC: ABC

Michael Jackson is from Gary. Yes, THE Michael Jackson. He was born in Gary in 1958.

MUSIC: ABC

In fact, it was a Gary label, called Steeltown Records, that recorded the first songs by the Jackson 5 in 1967. A year later, the group signed with Motown Records and the family moved to Los Angeles.

MUSIC: fade ABC

As I said in our last episode, steel is everywhere. In our kitchens and cars and wind turbines...and it's even in Michael Jackson's life story. Several of his grandparents came to northwest Indiana in the first half of the 20th century, when the steel industry was booming. They were searching for a better life than they could find in the Jim Crow south. Michael's dad, Joe, worked in one of the Gary steel plants before the Jackson 5 took off.

CLIP: Ed Sullivan intros the Jackson 5

So before the break, we were talking about how industry developed through the oppression of Black people. But paradoxically, industry jobs also provided a key stepping-stone on the pathway out of that oppression in the 20th century. Families like the Jacksons, working in the steel mills in Gary, were finally able to make their attempt at the American dream. A lot of the steel they produced went to Detroit, Michigan, known as the “motor city,” or “motown.”

MUSIC: Baby Love

Hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved to Detroit in the middle of the 20th century, leading to a unique concentration of young Black talent there. Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Aretha Franklin.

MUSIC: Respect

From 1910 until 1970, approximately six million African American people took part in the Great Migration—a mass movement away from the poverty and violence of the rural south into the industrializing cities of the northern and western U.S. And after centuries of brutal repression, there was a volcanic release of creative expression, athletic talent, and political leadership. Black intellectuals like Angela Davis and James Baldwin pointed out the hypocrisy embedded in the nation's founding and the inequalities that were being perpetuated through the booming industrial economy.

JAMES BALDWIN: unions, realtors clip

And as African Americans moved north and west, they demanded justice for those who were still suffering in the south. Elders who had grown up eking out a living as sharecroppers watched as their grandchildren led one of the most transformative social justice movements the world had ever known.

MLK: starvation wages clip

But of course, the ideology of white supremacy didn't stop at the Mason-Dixon line. As African Americans moved into cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Gary in record numbers, they often faced hostility from European Americans at home and at work. In our last episode, Lori Latham explained how Black steel workers were often funneled into jobs with more health hazards and fewer prospects for advancement. And as Mark Lash described earlier, as black families moved in to Gary and its surrounding communities, white families fled. It's a story that's been repeated in city after city across the United States.

But historian Leslie Harris says despite all of these obstacles, African American families kept moving north and west, drawn primarily by something they'd rarely if ever experienced: hope for a better life for their children.

LESLIE: In the north, you know, even if you are working in manual labor, you can send your children to a much better school and again, have this hope for the next generation. And of course, we know that that happened, that people got better educations and went on from there. So it really was different.

AMY: So could we say then that in this phase industrialization actually provides some opportunities and some ways out of the dominance of white supremacy?

LESLIE: Definitely, it gives people immense freedom. Even if you didn't feel that you could access it as equally as white people could. You knew it was there and it sets your sights higher.

AMBI: Marquette Park

Karen Freeman-Wilson is clearly a person who sets her sights high. She was the first woman elected mayor in Gary, and the first Black woman mayor in the state of Indiana, from 2012 to 2019. She was born and raised here, and she still lives in—and loves—Gary. I know this, because she's wearing an “I love Gary” t-shirt.

KAREN: Growing up in Gary was was great. I just remember having a really happy childhood, seeing a very vibrant city, vibrant downtown area. We would go for blocks and go from store to store to store, which is very different today.

I'm walking with Karen through a park near Lake Michigan in Gary which she helped to restore when she was mayor. You can hear the wind blowing through the trees around us. She was born in 1960, and she says her family thrived here, along with the steel industry.

KAREN: It's been a tremendous benefit. I mean, you know, because of the steel industry, my parents were able to send me to school. You know, I didn't have to take out one student loan as an undergraduate.

Karen’s life is kind of the classic Great Migration success story. Her grandparents moved here from the Jim Crow south, her father worked in the steel mills here for 35 years, and she graduated from Harvard University, and Harvard Law School. Today she leads the Chicago Urban League. But every step along that path toward greater freedom and opportunity has been hard-won by African American people, and as the story of Gary shows, gains can be fragile.

KAREN: Gary has the highest number of vacant and abandoned properties by percentage than probably any other city in the United States. And that is largely because of what I refer to as a disorderly departure. There was a sequence of events.

One of the first events in that sequence happened in 1967, when Richard Hatcher was elected mayor. He was Gary's first Black mayor, and one of the first Black mayors of any U.S. city.

KAREN: You saw white residents decide after Richard Hatcher was elected in '67 that the city was going to deteriorate. And there was no real reason. I mean, you had someone who was a lawyer, who was a very accomplished member of the City Council who was extremely capable. But the ascent, the assumption was that because he was Black, that he would bring the city down. And so you had a very accelerated form of white flight. So that was in the early '70s.

White-owned businesses also fled Gary after Hatcher's election. The Sears and Roebuck department store, a major downtown anchor in Gary, moved to the newly-formed white enclave of Merrillville. And in the early 1980s, with Richard Hatcher still in office, the national recession hit and the steel industry went into a tailspin.

KAREN: And so you had an industry and its related parts that utilized steel from U.S. Steel that were located within the city of Gary. And then all of a sudden that industry went bust. Or it didn't go bust—what it did was it changed.

Automation was the most profound and long-lasting of those changes. Jobs disappeared and they never came back. Unable to pay their mortgages or sell their homes, Karen says many people basically fled foreclosure and headed to Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, anywhere they could get a job.

KAREN: I mean, they just left everything, took what they could and went to other cities.

When Karen was born in 1960, 178,000 people lived in Gary. Now, the population is less than 70,000. That's a loss of 60 percent in 60 years. But as the city of Gary has been drained of people, and businesses, the corporation that started it all—U.S. Steel—has continued running, and continued making money. It's among the top 40 largest steel producers in the world, with sales totaling more than 20 billion dollars in 2021.

KAREN: They took the best that we had to offer in terms of labor that was more dedicated than you would find anywhere else in the world. You know, you've got people coming from the South, happy to get off the farm, glad to work as many hours under whatever conditions that you would provide. We made steel for the world. And then all of a sudden, now that we're on hard times, nobody cares, oh, you know, Gary's armpit of the country.

KAREN: You see all of the health challenges that people have. And you know that that has come at the cost of industry. You know, nobody wants to say that, well, you're willing to risk human life for industry, but that's what certainly has happened during the course of of U.S. Steel's existence here.

MUSIC

This is true not just for U.S. Steel, or Gary. This is the shadow side of our entire industrialization process. We have been willing to risk human life for industry. We've been willing to sacrifice places, ecosystems, entire species for industry. And the ideology of white supremacy is one of the main gears keeping that industrial machine moving. It gives people permission to look away from what it really means to work in the steel mills of Gary, the meat packing plants of Iowa, the lithium mines of Chile, and the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It's the Faustian bargain of the Industrial Revolution, in which some people and places are laid on the altar so others can prosper.

But the climate crisis is exposing this ideology for what it is: a lie. There is no one group of humans that's entitled to more safety, prosperity and power than any other. Because ultimately, we sink or swim together. Whether you hold that as a moral belief or not, it's what the physics of the planet tell us.

Karen Freeman-Wilson believes Gary can and will rebound—and she thinks industry can be part of that.

KAREN What I began to understand probably halfway through my tenure, was that we didn't just want to do away with industry. We just wanted to get a greener and environmentally more sustainable industry going. There's a place for everything. But the environment should be considered throughout that development.

When the world decided to bring an end to slavery, industry didn't collapse. It changed. So what could industry become if it was freed from white supremacy, and any ideologies that serve as a rationalization for abuse? Maybe Gary can be brought back to life and health. Maybe we can figure out how to make the things we need and want in a way that respects the fact that every place is someone's beloved home.

KAREN: I live here. I care about this city because this is a place that has given me so much. You know, I've gotten a lot from this community.

AMY: And you've given a lot to this community.

KAREN: Yeah, it's mutual.

So can we produce steel in a way that's actually good for the people who work in the industry, and good for the planet overall?

ANDERS: The world needs steel…

We're going to try to answer that question with a visit to northern Sweden next time on Threshold.

CREDITS: Maureen

This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Nick Mott and Erika Janik. The rest of the Threshold team is Caysi Simpson, Deneen Wise, 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 Ellen Voss and Hannahbess Thompson Laing. The music is by Todd Sickafoose.