On Tuesday December 3rd my group with met with Hilary Meltzer, the Deputy Chief Enviornmental Lawyer for the city. We had originally scheduled to meet with Meltzer earlier in November but 3 of our group members were sick so we had to reschedule our appointment for the next month. When we arrived at the meeting we learned about New York’s sewage treatment. Hilary gave us some handouts and explained to us how the sewage system works (waste water treatment plants, etc). She also gave us helpful facts, like how global warming related disasters (like hurricanes) cause sewage and waste water treatment plants to overflow and then leak sewage and dirty water into rivers and other natural bodies of water. And also how the city used to use almost 2 billion gallons of water a day around 20 years ago, but thanks to raising awareness and some help from the state that number has been cut in half. After talking about water we shifted our conversations more towards fracking, which is something that relates more to corporate pollution (our topic). We had a discussion about the dangers of fracking, about how it could affect our water supply and put it in danger and about the pros of fracking, the importance of getting more oil. Throughout our fracking conversation Hilary told us a lot about how certain oil corporations handled fracking and ended up causing harm to water supplies and surrounding neighborhoods. A lot of the information we got was information we wouldn’t have been able to get from anywhere else to overall this fieldwork was very helpful. We learned lots of information, asked thought provoking questions and ended up finding out about some more environmental organizations we could contact.
