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Coalition presses for environmental justice in climate bill

BOSTON (SHNS) – A coalition of more than 40 groups that includes long-standing environmental organizations, big players in the state’s financial world, tech companies, and more sent a letter Friday to the lawmakers trying to hammer out a climate bill highlighting the importance of including environmental justice provisions in the final product.
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Photo credit: Massachusetts State House

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Stories of Local Leaders

I Will Fight Until I Melt: Living Room Leadership with Pamela Miller and Vi Waghiyi of ACAT

By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
In an interview on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 for CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Series, Pamela Miller and Vi Waghiyi of Alaska Community Actions on Toxins (ACAT) shared their experience tackling toxics, protecting health and achieving justice for Alaska’s wildlife and people. 
The U.S. Air Force established a base at Northeast Cape on St. Lawrence Island in 1952. When the military vacated the base in the early 1970s, they left at least thirty-four contaminated sites in a nine-square-mile area. Contamination includes at least 220,000 gallons of spilt fuel, as well as heavy metals, asbestos, solvents, and PCBs which are known to cause cancer.
Vi Waghiyi is a Yupik grandmother who was born in Savoonga, a native village on St. Lawrence Island. Her ancestors’ connection to the land and her people’s disproportionate exposure to harmful toxins motivates her environmental activism with ACAT. Vi’s community has been struggling to hold the military accountable for their reckless abandonment of the formerly used defense sites in the area. Pollutants from these sites contaminate Alaska’s soil and groundwater and disproportionately affect the Yupik community given their reliance on traditional subsistence agriculture. Vi used the term “environmental violence” when referring to the military’s negligence in the area. 
“My people feel that our basic human rights have been violated”, said Vi. 
Pamela Miller founded Alaska Community Action on Toxics in 1997 after repeated requests from Alaskans for technical assistance. ACAT ensures that Alaskan natives are partners in the fight for justice, and believes in the power of community-based participatory research: combining local knowledge with science to better understand the long term effects of toxic exposure in these areas. Pam has been working with the Savoonga community for decades, transforming knowledge into policies that are protective of Alaskan natives’ health. She worked closely with Yupik leader, Annie Alowa, who had been trying for decades to get the military to clean up its toxic legacy at St. Lawrence. Annie, who served a health aide in Savoonga, began to notice serious health problems among island residents – including members of her own family – who lived, worked, and harvested greens, berries, fish, and wildlife from the Northeast Cape area. Health problems included cancer, low birth weights, and miscarriages among her people.
Annie’s motto was “I will fight until I melt.”
Her perseverance continues to inspire Pam and Vi’s work to protect environmental health and ensure justice. Over the years, ACAT has had many successes, including eliminating global pollution in the arctic, reducing pesticide use in Alaska, advancing state and national chemical policy reform, and achieving justice for Exxon Valdez Oil Spill workers. For a more in depth look at ACAT’s work, please visit https://www.akaction.org/our_story/accomplishments/
Click here to watch “I Will Fight Until I Melt,” a short film documenting Yupik elder Annie Alowa’s decades long struggle to get the military to clean up toxic waste on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska.

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Backyard Talk

Reforming Our Response to Toxics

By: Benjamin Silver, Science and Technology Intern
The government’s inefficient response to toxic chemical exposure in American communities can be the difference between life and death.
Once a dump for mill waste, the San Jacinto Waste Pits release toxic quantities of dioxin into the San Jacinto River. When these chemical carcinogens interact with the water, they are released into the air, endangering the local residents in Harris County, Texas. In 2017, the EPA approved a 2 year, $115 million cleanup plan. However, the project is still in the design phase, and the EPA has extended its timeline by five years. While the cleanup remains mired by bureaucracy, the San Jacinto waste pits continue to endanger local residents every day. In 2015, the Texas Department of Health found that 17 of 38 census tracts in Harris County have suffered statistically significant increases across multiple cancers. 
The development of these cancer clusters has left many residents wondering if they’ll ever get justice for their hardship. While the polluters, the International Paper Company and McGinnes Industrial Maintenance Corporation, have agreed to finance the cleanup, residents have been forced to cover their own cancer treatment.
Obtaining medical compensation for health impacts caused by chemical contamination inflicts a significant burden on communities across the United States. They must undergo years of suffering attempting to prove that chemical contamination is responsible for their adverse health effects. Communities then spend more years in court battling to secure health care from the responsible parties, often having little or no success.
Such a burden is amplified in communities that don’t have the resources to hire doctors and lawyers. Low income, minority communities are disproportionately impacted by pollution and are inadequately equipped to seek health care. Since impacted residents in these communities often do not have health insurance, many die or suffer permanent damage while seeking medical and other compensation.
The government must simplify the process of seeking health care and enable local residents to attain  justice more quickly. Proponents of the current extensive testing process argue that its complexity ensures that alleged corporate polluters are not mistakenly held accountable. But what if we could simplify testing while also ensuring medical compensation is provided?
If receiving health care only required proof of an association between chemicals and adverse health impacts, communities would not need to directly link contamination with specific health conditions in residents. The United States Department of Veterans Affairs already outlines a list of cancers, neurological disorders, and developmental problems associated with exposure to dioxin in Agent Orange. Exposed soldiers must only prove that they were stationed in places where Agent Orange was used, stored, or handled. They do not need to prove that their health problem was caused by exposure to Agent Orange. Similarly, communities exposed to toxic chemicals should not have to prove that their health problems were caused by these chemicals to receive medical care. They would merely need to prove that toxic chemicals are present. If an individual with an associated health condition interacted in an exposed region, as shown by testing, they could automatically qualify for health care coverage. 
But the significance of a reformed response to chemical contamination extends beyond any single community. For decades, corporate polluters have weaponized a broken system for responding to chemical contamination. They have fiscally and emotionally drained communities by denying responsibility for contamination, lobbying, and dragging out legal fights. Thus, polluters can often completely avoid being held accountable for their lethal actions.
Developing a new mode of responding to chemical contamination is about saying “enough is enough” to perpetrators of pollution. We cannot allow corporations to victimize innocent communities and compromise their health. While the government can medically compensate for chemical contamination, we must proactively dissuade corporations from endangering Americans. Responding effectively to chemical contamination is as much about standing up to polluters as it is standing up for human rights.
Photo Credit: Houston Chronicle

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Homepage News Archive

Her Town Depended on the Mill. Was It Also Making the Residents Sick?

In 1981, a doctor in a small mill town in Maine read a study suggesting that prostate and colon cancers in his community were nearly double the national average. Spooked, he brought the research to the board of directors at the local hospital; they ignored it. A few years later, a survey conducted by the Maine Department of Health suggested that the town, Rumford, had an especially high incidence of cancer, aplastic anemia and lung disease. The state epidemiologist insisted that the data were inconclusive. In 1991, a TV news series christened the area “Cancer Valley” because of the number of people there who had been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Doc Martin, as the local doctor was known, got a call from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Why, the institute wanted to know, were “all these kids with cancer” coming from Rumford?
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Photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

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Stories of Local Leaders

Celebrating Success and Urging on Young Activists: Living Room Leadership with Jackie Young Medcalf

By: Leija Helling, Communications Intern
In August of 2017, shortly after Hurricane Harvey hit, Jackie Young Medcalf parked her car outside of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits in Houston, Texas, waiting for EPA administrator Scott Pruitt to finish a damage survey. The security guard wouldn’t let the young activist through the gates of the Superfund site, but she was determined to relay the concern of local residents. As Pruitt left the site, Jackie conveyed to him the urgent need for a full clean-up effort of the site, underscoring the damage from the hurricane and the continuing spread of contaminants into surrounding communities.
Pruitt promised Jackie that he would get the clean-up underway by mid-October. She told a reporter, “he has until that date to prove to me whether he’s a man of his word or wasting my time.” By October, Pruitt signed a record of decision for full remediation of the site. Jackie wonders what would have happened to the site had she not camped out outside the site that day, leaving Pruitt in conversation only with the corporate responsible parties. “It was a pivotal moment in my career,” she recalls.
“Like Lois Gibbs, I’m an activist by accident,” Jackie said in a Living Room Leadership interview CHEJ in July. She grew up with a slew of mysterious health problems, and soon a family member fell seriously ill, too. She was studying environmental science and geology in Houston and working on a project for her hydrology class when she discovered the root of her family’s unsolved health problems: heavy metal contamination in their well water.
Jackie lived beside San Jacinto River Waste Pits, a decades-old Superfund site containing dioxin, heavy metals and PCBs from paper mill waste. Since the 1960s when a paper company first dug the pits into the banks of the San Jacinto River, highly toxic waste had migrated into the river. From there, migration and flooding during hurricanes and tropical storms spread the waste into the aquifer, residential wells, and residents’ backyards. Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of storms, speeding up this process.
After learning about the contamination, Jackie started attending local meetings with EPA officials, but grew outraged by the inaction she saw. So, in 2015, she founded the Texas Health and Environment Alliance (THEA), an advocacy group working to protect public health and water resources from the harmful effects of toxic waste in the Houston area. Through strategic science, media exposure, grassroots organizing and education, the group has led the fight for full remediation of San Jacinto River Waste Pits Superfund Site.
“We are creating the change we so desperately need.”
Encouraging young activists to be bold and unafraid, Jackie describes how she learned to trust her instincts. She had to have tough conversations even when they intimidated her. She had to enter rooms full of older men in suits with the confidence that she was supposed to be there. She had to discover a place for facts, but also a place for conveying emotion and personal experience. And she grew to trust herself because even when people in power denied it, she knew in her gut it wasn’t chance that so many people in her community got sick.
Thanks to THEA’s efforts and Jackie’s daring leadership, full remediation of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits is underway. THEA is actively involved in the clean-up efforts, working with EPA officials to ensure a safe and just process.
Visit https://txhea.org to learn more about THEA and their fight against environmental contamination in Houston.
 

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Stories of Local Leaders

Pushing Back Against Polluters: Living Room Leadership with Tom Kilian of Citizens for a Clean Wausau

By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
In an interview on Wednesday, July 29, 2020 for CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Series, Tom Kilian of Citizens for a Clean Wausau shared his experience monitoring local polluters in Wausau, Wisconsin and bringing environmental justice to his community. Citizens for a Clean Wausau is an organization of volunteers monitoring and researching current and past significant polluters in the Wausau area. The organization’s two main goals, according to Tom, are defining the nature and extent of industrial contamination and promoting and striving for stronger environmental justice in their community. 
Tom got involved with Citizens for a Clean Wausau after learning about a major road construction program planned for his neighborhood, Riverside Park. While researching this project, the community stumbled across documentation that revealed there were significant contamination issues in their neighborhoods at the hands of a former window factory, SNE. In these documents, community members complained of alleged illnesses such as lymphoma, brain cancer, breast cancer and more caused by SNE’s pollutants like dioxin, a known carcinogen.
SNE had been using pentaclorofenol as a preservative on their windows since the 1940s. In their own internal memo from the 1980s, SNE disclosed in great detail the potential concern surrounding the dioxins in the pentaclorofenol and related health issues. SNE’s window factory was located in a densely populated neighborhood in Wausau, and testing of soil and groundwater revealed significant levels of dioxin in residents’ drinking water. Despite these results being made known to SNE and the state regulatory agency, these results were not disclosed to the public until several years ago.
CHEJ got involved with Citizens for a Clean Wausau in 2019, helping the organization organize and move the needle against some of the powerful corporate polluters they were facing. When Citizens for a Clean Wausau gained traction and the media began reporting on the contamination, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) triggered an investigation into waste burning at a railroad corridor near the window factory site. The WDNR learned that the dioxin levels were in excess of state standards in the railroad corridor and issued a responsible party letter to the city of Wausau, which owned the railroad corridor, to remediate the site. Citizens for a Clean Wausau criticized the WDNR for failing to issue a responsible party letter for contamination at the Riverside Park neighborhood, given dioxin levels were higher there than at the railroad corridor. Pressure from Tom’s organization resulted in an order from the WDNR to finally test and remediate the Riverside Park neighborhood earlier this year.
Since getting involved with Citizens for a Clean Wausau, Tom has been elected to serve on Wausau’s City Council. His advice to other environmental activists who are looking to get into electoral politics is to “know why you’re going into politics” and “let the cause and the policies drive you”.
To learn more about Citizens for a Clean Wausau and follow their fight for justice, visit http://cleanwausau.com

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Homepage News Archive

Dr. Marion Moses, Top Aide to Cesar Chavez, Dies at 84

She tended to the health of poor workers and was at the forefront of a 1950s national grape boycott that brought his agricultural union triumph.
Marion Moses, who as a trusted aide to the farm workers’ leader Cesar Chavez promoted a nationwide boycott of table grapes and helped create a health care system for impoverished grape pickers, died on Aug. 28 in San Francisco. She was 84.
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Photo credit: Bob Fitch | Stanford University

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Homepage News Archive

Ginsburg left a long environmental legacy

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday at age 87, helped establish critical Supreme Court precedent that empowered EPA to address the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.

The landmark ruling she joined in 2007 that affirmed EPA’s power set up the Obama administration to issue rules limiting carbon pollution from cars, power plants and other sources — and set up a contentious legal battle over the extent of federal authority still being waged today.

 
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Photo credit: Nicholas Kamm |AFP | Getty Images

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Homepage News Archive

How America’s air pollution might be spiking COVID-19 deaths

COVID-19 can make the air more deadly. So can industrial emissions. Combined, they’re likely a recipe for disaster.

According to a new study published last week in the Journal of Environmental Research Letters, regions with a certain kind of industrial emission can make COVID-19 increasingly fatal.

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Photo credit: V. Kreinacke

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Homepage News Archive

Gas Companies Are Abandoning Their Wells, Leaving Them to Leak Methane Forever

Just one orphaned site in California could have emitted more than 30 tons of methane. There are millions more like it.

The story of gas well No. 095-20708 begins on Nov. 10, 1984, when a drill bit broke the Earth’s surface 4 miles north of Rio Vista, Calif. Wells don’t have birthdays, so this was its “spud date.”

The drill chewed through the dirt at a rate of 80 ½ feet per hour, reaching 846 feet below ground that first day. By Thanksgiving it had gotten a mile down, finally stopping 49 days later, having laid 2.2 miles of steel pipe and cement on its way to the “pay zone,” an underground field containing millions of dollars’ worth of natural gas.

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Photo credit: Lisa Vielstädte