Onondaga Nation and environmental partners win prestigious EPA award

Photo courtesy Robin Holland   The Onondaga Nation and its coalition partners – Onondaga County Executive Joanne Mahoney, the Partnership for Onondaga Creek, and Atlantic States Legal Foundation – were awarded an Environmental Quality Award by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in recognition of the coalition’s successful work to create a more just and sustainable solution to Onondaga County’s combined sewer overflow problem. The award was presented in New York April 23, during the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Pictured, from left, are Jeanne Shenandoah, Onondaga, Eel Clan; Lionel Logan, POC president; Tarki Heath, POC; Joe Heath, Onondaga Nation general counsel; Mahoney; Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation faithkeeper, Turtle Clan; Judith Enck, EPA Region 2 administrator; Vita DeMarchi, representing ASLF; Jean Smiley, Onondaga County; Aggie Lane, POC; Chris Beck, representing ASLF; and Tadodaho Sidney Hill, Onondaga Nation.

Green infrastructure involves hundreds or perhaps thousands of small projects to decrease the amount of impervious surfaces such as sidewalks, streets, parking lots and rooftops. These hard surfaces don’t allow water to seep into the ground to be filtered clean before entering waterways such as Onondaga Creek. Impervious surfaces create polluted runoff that flows directly into the nearest body of water.

Green infrastructure includes such things as permeable pavements in parks, parking lots and basketball courts, vegetated rooftops, rain gardens, cisterns, tree plantings and constructed wetlands to manage storm water runoff.

The award ceremony took place at the EPA’s office in downtown Manhattan.

“It was a very positive and upbeat ceremony,” said Joe Heath, Onondaga Nation general counsel. “It felt good to share with a number of other people from around the New York region that were given awards. It really marks a remarkable turnaround in our relationship with the EPA and environmental agencies generally.”

Heath recalled that more than 10 years ago he and one of the Onondaga Nation chiefs met with EPA officials to discuss the nation’s concerns about the pollution in Onondaga Creek, but to no avail.

Now, significantly, the EPA chose Onondaga Nation Faithkeeper Oren Lyons, Turtle Clan, as the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony, Heath noted.

“So, all in all, to go from being totally excluded from the decision making process when the nation’s views were just flatly rejected to receiving that award on the same subject meant a great deal both to the nation and this office. And it reflects a change that traditional ecological knowledge is now being accepted much more openly, at least in this area,” Heath said.

The Partnership for Onondaga Creek is a grassroots environmental justice organization that started in 2000 by neighbors who were disturbed by the local government’s proposal to build a treatment plant in their downtown Syracuse neighborhood.

The Atlantic States Legal Foundation is a nonprofit environmental organization established in 1982 to provide affordable legal, technical and organizational assistance to individuals, community groups, and other non-governmental organizations as a way to effectively remediate threats to the natural environment.

In the 1980s, ASLF used the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act and sued Onondaga County to force it to upgrade the large sewage treatment plant on Onondaga Lake that “was contributing horribly to the lake’s pollution,” Heath said.

The Onondaga County government was intransigent in dealing with the problems until the election two years ago of Mahoney, Heath said.

“For 10 years, we were losing and being ignored by the former county administrator, not getting along with the DEC (New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation), and not getting any help from the former administrator in the EPA. Joanne came in and made a very bold decision within her first month in office to scrap the plans for treatment plants,” Heath said.

The Onondaga Nation played a key diplomatic role in bringing all parties back to the table in 2008 shortly after Mahoney took office, and negotiating “a more holistic solution” to the problem, Heath said.

“And the change is remarkable in that people can – whether consciously or not – apply one of the principles of the Great law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee, which is everybody should bring their good minds together and find a solution that’s best for everybody.”