Clif Bar “In Good Company” volunteers on our worksite adjacent to the AMCO Chemical Superfund Site in West Oakland, California preparing bamboo cuttings and root divisions for our Bioremediative Plant Propagation Facility. The first stage of our Superfund Integrated Greenbelt towers in the background.Our Mission
is to design, implement, and advocate for innovative, green infrastructure and biological systems solutions within and for environmentally debilitated urban communities.
Dark pink areas show the worst air pollution while the lighter shades show the air pollution plume over West Oakland from the shipping operations at the Port of Oakland.The Problem
In West Oakland and similar urban areas, the health problems stemming from air, water, and soil pollution, the mismanagement of urban waste streams, vulnerability to the effects of climate change, proximity to toxic sites and environmental pollution, and the unacceptable levels of poverty and lack of access to healthy food and food security exist as daunting and interconnected problems. These are social and economic problems as much as they are ecological problems, and our multifaceted campaigns and projects are intended to rapidly bring about mitigating and remediating results which are replicable in other urban areas in which environmental justice requires fast, creative solutions based on ecological design and engineering as well as community empowerment.
What We Do
We bring a unique perspective to the non-profit sector. Founded and developed by ecological engineers, architects, and community organizers based in West Oakland, we design ecological solutions to the air, soil and water contamination issues which cause significantly disproportionate health issues for residents of West Oakland and other urban communities.
Our approach involves assessment of circumstances in which environmental justice warrants creative solutions. We work with communities to design, develop, and enact those solutions through multi-faceted campaigns and projects which rapidly bring about mitigating and remediating results. We also take on the challenges and opportunities of open, unused, and blighted urban lots, brownfields, urban parks, and “greenspaces”, being both underfunded and under-utilized.
We create infrastructural design solutions in which we find creative ways to fund, design, and construct urban greenspaces as critical urban infrastructure. These spaces and projects provide quantifiable ecosystem services such as air, soil, and water filtration as well as heat mitigation and climate change preparedness. We wish to remediate affected communities through the creation of new green remediation projects and job creation in underrepresented communities disproportionately affected by environmental degradation and pollution.
We approach environmental and social problems holistically insofar as we advocate for and design solutions which work with communities to empower them to make changes of global importance in their own neighborhoods. We believe that poverty, ecological degradation, and lack of access to clean air, water, and food are interrelated socio-ecological problems which can be alleviated through creative science and community based solutions from the bottom-up.
We first identify pollution sources, and underutilized resources such as wastewater or blighted land. We then select appropriate microorganisms, minerals, and plants that can provide rapid solutions for collecting, sequestering, and transforming the pollutants and wastes that our cities and communities generate into products and services that can both create jobs and provide a funding mechanism for our urban greenspaces.
We simultaneously run innovative and effective community organizing campaigns employing creative media strategies; community outreach and empowerment; design and planning; and research and advocacy. We are working to transform the conventional public City, Redevelopment, and Federal Agency process—typically consisting of report reviews and a small group of residents providing loose feedback on official decisions already made—into dynamic grassroots campaigns utilizing new media, electronic communication, and ecological design solutions from the ground up.
We are working to provide third-party scientific analysis and deeply ecological and community based solutions. We serve as technical advisors, community organizers, project managers, job creators, engineers, artists, grant writers, and ecologists in varying capacities as the projects and the communities dictate. Through empowerment with scientific and engineering knowledge, our community organizing campaigns aim at empowering underrepresented, individual community members and neighborhoods to assess their own ecological and social justice needs for their communities, to assert these needs to appropriate agencies and organizations, and to design grassroots solutions to these community challenges together when agencies fall short of meeting demand. We translate technical language and bureaucratic processes used by government agencies and scientists into understandable formats for community members, so that they can make informed choices about what they would like to see happen in their neighborhoods.
The intentions of the Urban Biofilter Project are multifold. Our overall goal is the rapid catalyzation of sustainable and resilient communities, starting with our own in West Oakland. We believe the primary facets of such communities include freedom from toxicity, access to clean water, air, and soil, as well as socioeconomic necessities including innovative new industry creation, jobs, alternative energy and materials sources, and community empowerment, opportunity, and access. Our intention has been and will continue to be to use our unique, multidisciplinary approach to bring about these urgent and widely-replicable solutions.