 Margaret Gordon is exemplary in demonstrating the one characteristic that any individual must possess if he or she is truly committed to change: curiosity.
I define curiosity as inquisitive behavior for the purposes of exploration, investigation and learning. Simply stated, it is the drive to know something; and it embodies Gordon's work.
It was Gordon's curiosity that took her from housekeeper to environmental activist, to the Port of Oakland board of commissioners, to being the recipient of the $100,000 Purpose Prize for her work battling industrial pollution and educating people about the health effects on her West Oakland neighbors.
The Purpose Prize is awarded by Civic Ventures, a San Francisco nonprofit think tank that honors work done by people over the age of 60 who make a social impact on the lives of others.
Gordon, 63, is co-founder and co-director the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. She worked alongside other residents to reroute diesel trucks away from residential areas; persuade officials to renegotiate a local manufacturer's permit to pollute; to pressure Oakland to do a better job to stop illegal dumping; and to develop a Port of Oakland plan to improve air quality.
To fully appreciate the work that led to Gordon receiving this prestigious award, one must also appreciate her curiosity.
According to Gordon, "I was a housekeeper. The family I worked for (the man) was an environmentalist. I used to read all of his environmental magazines and books."
Before this, Gordon, who suffers from asthma, had dismissed environmental issues as simply "kissing birds and saving whales," she had not yet made the connection between the environment and its impact of the quality of human life. West Oakland, where Gordon lives, is a community that faces five times more toxic pollution per person than other residents of Oakland.
Children in West Oakland are seven times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than the average child in the state of California.
Moreover, an astonishing 20 percent of West Oakland children ages 0-5 at some point go to an emergency room for asthma-related treatment. And nearly 82 percent of those who live in West Oakland are within 1/8 of a mile of an industrial area.
For 18 years, Gordon watched, as those in her community were disproportionately afflicted with asthma and succumbing to cancer. This tragic phenomenon unearthed an unbridled curiosity, creating a nexus within Gordon, connecting what she had learned through reading to the reality of those suffering, forging an activism for change.
The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, led by Gordon began asking critical questions.
Why are people sick? Why did West Oakland have disproportionate numbers of asthma and cancer in relation to other parts the city? Why was the air quality in West Oakland so bad?
As the theologian Paul Tillich opined, the questions are more important than the answers. The questions that Gordon raised transformed a former housekeeper, who knew only that she and her family were sick to an activism that connected the Port of Oakland to a more systemic problem.
Gordon's project is simple; she wants to reduce diesel emissions and protect air quality in West Oakland. It is a goal that I suspect would receive near unanimous support in theory, but there is always something about the application of these goals that invariably meets opposition.
I suspect the importance of Gordon's work just increased with the passage of Prop. 26. Any agent guilty of mitigating asthma or cancer-causing agents in the environment will not be forced to clean it up until the insurmountable two-thirds majority of Legislature or local government forces it.
All activism involves some measure of passion, but too often this is where the curiosity ends. The absence of curiosity and facts is the thin line that separates activists from gadflies.
Gordon is, therefore, an inspiration to us all. In an era where emotion alone masquerades as truth, Gordon reminds us that passion along with asking the right questions with an unyielding curiosity remains the best avenue for change. As the writer Arnold Edinborough once said of curiosity defining it as "the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly."
I would amend Edinborough's comments to read: Margaret Gordon is living nobly
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