The South Bronx today sounds like the Tower of Babel and environmental groups in the borough find themselves wishing they could speak in tongues.
In a place where billboards and store signs are often written in Spanish and where most people consider English a second language, borough-based environmental organizations have discovered that multilingualism makes their job harder than that of groups elsewhere.
Home to almost half the city's 1.7 million Latinos and numerous other immigrant groups, the borough is considered one of the most diverse communities in the country. Children from 78 nations attend school in community District 9 alone.
"We should be able to reach out to different people," said Gray Russell, Compost Project manager of the Bronx Botanical Garden. "But translating adds more difficulties to our jobs than normal."
To reach out to and mobilize communities, Russell's group and others rely heavily on flyers, posters and pamphlets. And printing in multiple languages costs money.
Out of the 12 existing environmental groups in the borough, only the Bronx Green Up and Compost Project, both sponsored by the Botanical Garden, can afford to produce bilingual literature. Recently, though, they had to let go of their translator due to government funding cuts.
The South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, a 3 1/2-year-old organization formed in response to the construction of the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital medical waste incinerator, also suffers from a communications breakdown. Although the group tries to have a Spanish-speaking staff and even a French-speaking Haitian to help them in this area, the coalition said they feel they can still do better.
Though translation has become a necessity for environmental groups, it is just one of the many obstacles they face in raising environmental awareness.
Nancy Wallace, executive director of the Bronx River Restoration Project, said that involving minority communities in environmental issues and making them care is the biggest problem they face.
"The environmental movement was seen originally as a white middle-class movement," said Wallace. "Issues like this are new things for minorities, and the low-income families we deal with are already burdened with their own needs."
In interviews with residents along 138th and Cypress Avenue in Mott Haven, residents were only vaguely aware of the controversy even though the incinerator is located less than 10 blocks away.
"In weather like this you can't smell anything, but in summertime we get this awful odor, something like a dead rat, and they said it's coming from that place but I can't really speculate because I haven't seen the place," said Mary Green, 47. "And I don't know of any environmental group and I've lived here for 20 years now."
Wallace said low environmental awareness and ``the language makes it doubly hard to reach these communities." Other groups agree that knowing the communities' language could make their jobs easier. In the meantime, they can afford only to have translated messages on their phone answering machines.