Locating Elkhart

Where's Elkhart?

Elkhart, Indiana occupies traditional Potawatomi land. It is part of the Great Lakes watershed and was cultivated, loved, and defended by Potawatomi people for millennia until the Indian Removal Act of 1830 pushed them out of the area. When EFERT incorporated in 2022 there was very little recognition of their continuous and living presence in the area. We worked with Potawatomi and allied community organizers to begin changing this--acknowledging the land, water, history, and shared future of an equitable Elkhart. 

As a settlement, Elkhart grew because of the railroad. Located midway between Toledo and Chicago, steam engines would stop to refill with coal. At one point Elkhart had one of the largest roundhouses in the country. In 1851 the Indiana constitution ruled that no black people were permitted to settle in Indiana. While that law was overturned after the civil war, Indiana continued to boast many sundown towns and an active Klu Klux Klan presence in many parts of the state. However, when white railroad workers began to organize for better pay and labor, management recruited black workers to come to Indiana, which broke the striking white workers. Because of both this and the general atmosphere of white supremacy, race relations between black and white people didn't start out well.

After the decline of train travel, Elkhart's industry continued to focus on long-haul transportation manufacturing. With proximity to the car hub of Detroit, Michigan, recreational vehicles became the primary product of the region. Still to this day, Elkhart makes over 80% of the world's recreational vehicles. Since the liberalization of trade relations (NAFTA and CAFTA), the Latinx population has grown tremendously, as low wage workers (primarily but not exclusively from Mexico) have been recruited by the behemoth RV industry. In Goshen, the county seat of Elkhart County, the population is now 50% Latinx. Willingness to work without protections of citizenship has allowed these companies to exploit Latinx labor and keep wages low but profits high. When pressure has been put on local companies to create better conditions and standards, companies relocate to the southern side of the US-Mexico border. This dynamic coupled with American exceptionalism has also caused racialized tension.


Connection of Social and Environmental Issues

Why it's important to mention racial dynamics in the context of climate justice work is because social dynamics are interconnected with the natural world, and they are impacted by changes in it.  Furthermore, the choices that human communities make have had and continue to have significant impact on the planet as well. How the Earth is shaped, shared, and seen informs the way we relate to it--is the environment viewed as a supply house and a sewer, and sometimes a vacation destination? Or is the environment understood as a sacred home for all beings in which humans have the opportunity to live, learn, and love together with them? Or another view? 

How individuals and communities answer this question, and how power is distributed in their society, forms the basis of how they relate to one another and the larger web of life. There are dedicated people in Elkhart's community ready to work together for a shared future of equity, stability, and welcome in the face of lots of existing and coming challenges.  This includes tackling everything from river-polluting combined sewer overflows to creating decolonized land trusts to advocating for green jobs to ensuring food sovereignty.  It's not limited to those initiatives, however, and we're just getting started! We know that a beautiful future for all beings in Elkhart will not happen if those of us living today do not intentionally design and create it.  At EFERT, we're experimenting  with ways of enacting climate resilience, with a goal of realizing a just climate-aware transition.

What's Climate Resilience?

Climate change is a global phenomenon that impacts every community around the world. It affects each one in a unique way depending on their geography, economic reserves, resiliency resources, and political power. At every level of society there are concerted efforts to both mitigate increasing climatic instability as well as adapt to the changing conditions. To stay alive and prosper, humans that live in unsustainable societies must transition to sustainable ones, thereby allowing future generations to have, among other things: breathable air, drinkable water, fertile soil from which to eat, and safe jobs at which to work. 

Environmental protection and improvement are about the long-term quality of life of the natural world, but also overlaps with human flourishing, as the latter is essential for preventing increased violence. Climate change has been documented to be a conflict accelerator; every action taken to conserve accessible natural spaces and address environmental injustices is also an action to support social cohesion. Climate resilience is the ability to create stable and welcoming communities of all beings (humans and non-humans) to weather the literal and figurative storms of the climate (natural, social, and political climates).

Why Elkhart and Climate Resilience?

In the United States, the level of a city/municipality has proven to be one of the most effective scales to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Given that individuals will protect what they know and love, local communities are well positioned to come together in protection of the environment that surrounds them and improvement of their future. The city of Elkhart and the county more broadly are poised to grow in population as a result of climate-related pressures elsewhere. Growth will come with pains unless we begin to plan now in a concerted way what shapes sustainability, mitigation, and adaptation will take here. We want to be ready, and to be an attractive city in the new climate economy. And, because we love our home. Come visit! Email info@efert.org to get the latest news.