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Brownfields to Green Assets
What is our plan to develop Green Assets in communities?
Our communities are surrounded by brownfields, former industrial sites that often contain varying levels of environmental contamination. Many of these lands have been abandoned, left unused and neglected for years. But what if we could reclaim these spaces and restore them for community use?
Across many ancestral knowledge systems, there is a fundamental understanding: the health of the land and the health of the people are deeply connected. When the air is clean, the soil is alive, and water flows freely without pollution, people are healthier. When the land is harmed, our communities are harmed too.
Today, we use the term environmental racism to describe a painful reality. Because of colonial histories and ongoing systems of racism, some communities bear a disproportionate share of environmental pollution. Low-income communities, particularly Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, are more likely to live near factories, highways, toxic waste sites, and contaminated lands. Their neighborhoods are too often treated as sacrifice zones.
In cities, this reality is often visible in the form of brownfields.
Brownfields are former industrial or commercial sites where pollutants and hazardous substances may have been left behind. Some are lightly contaminated, while others have experienced significant environmental damage. Many remain unused for years. Corporations may have profited from these lands in the past, only to leave communities to live with the consequences.
These abandoned spaces can surround our communities like scars across the landscape, lands that could have become parks, gardens, gathering places, or other community assets, but instead remain fenced off, inaccessible, and forgotten.
In many of our ancestral cultures, land was never understood simply as a resource to extract value from. The land is alive. It feeds us, sustains us, teaches us, and holds our communities. We belong to the land; the land does not belong to us. When the land is harmed, we have a responsibility to help restore it.
That is why BEI is committed not only to protecting the land, but to helping heal it.
We work with scientists, volunteers, institutions, and community partners to access brownfield sites and support their restoration. One approach we use is phytoremediation, a natural process in which certain plants help remove, contain, or reduce pollutants in contaminated soil. Rather than simply excavating contaminated soil and moving the problem somewhere else, phytoremediation allows us to work with natural processes to support the land’s recovery.
Healing the soil is part of healing our communities.
Because when the land can breathe better, so can we.
Is it Communities responsibilities to heal the land?
In most cases, communities did not cause the contamination of brownfields.
These lands were polluted by industrial and corporate activities , factories, storage sites, extraction, chemical use. The damage was often done in the name of profit. So it is a fair question to ask:
Is it just to expect communities to heal land they did not poison?
In an ideal world, every corporation that contaminated land would be fully accountable. They would clean it properly, restore it, and ensure no harm remains.
But in reality, corporate timelines are often short. Their responsibility ends when profit ends. Too often, “cleanup” means digging up contaminated soil and moving it somewhere else, displacing the problem rather than truly healing it. The wound is not healed. It is relocated.
Communities approach land differently.
We do not believe communities should carry the burden alone.
But we are willing to participate in healing, if that healing leads to justice.
If contaminated land is restored, it should not simply return to private speculation. It should become a community asset. It should return to the commons. It should serve housing, green space, food growing, culture, children, elders, life.