Category: Stories of Local Leaders

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.

By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
In an interview on Wednesday, August 12, 2020 for CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Series, Hilton Kelley, Founder and Director of Community In-Power & Development Association (CIDA), shared his experience taking action against the neighboring chemical manufacturers, refineries and incinerator facilities in his hometown of Port Arthur, TX. CIDA is a non-profit organization that helps organize and educate local residents to fight back against corporate polluters and work together to promote healthy change. CIDA was founded in 2000 with the belief that “polluters should be held accountable for the chronic, systematic poisoning of low-income communities living along the ‘fence line’ of their operations.”
Mr. Kelley is a US Navy Veteran turned environmental activist. While Kelley claims to have always cared deeply about others, his road to activism was not planned. In his interview, Kelley described the moment his brief visit home to Port Arthur, TX turned permanent. “I was thrown aback by what I saw. Our downtown area was dilapidated … I went back to California but I kept thinking about my hometown. Someone needed to do something.” Within three months of his visit, Kelley had moved back home to Port Arthur and immediately got to work on his plan to help rebuild his hometown.
Kelley described the effects of ‘white flight’ in Port Arthur, which depleted the community of its school teachers, policemen, businesses, etc. This phenomenon helped lead to the “dilapidation” Kelley spoke about in his community by 2000. Without much-needed resources like banks, members of Kelley’s community had very little political power. Coupled with environmental health threats, given 30% of Jefferson County oil refineries are located in Port Arthur, local residents were under water. Corporations like Premcor, now Valero, claimed their oil refinery emissions were of “no harm” to residents, but Kelley found Premcor and, and a Saudi Arabian refinery, Motiva,  had been out-of-compliance with the Clean Air Act for years. In 2006, CIDA filed a class action lawsuit against Motiva and other out-of-compliance refineries in the area, which resulted in these refineries eventually implementing the proper controls to reduce emissions. The lawsuit’s settlement resulted in the purchase of a mobile medical van to provide on-the-spot medical care and health vouchers to Port Arthur residents. Despite this win, there was some push-back from locals who feared taking on the power of these corporations.
“It’s a really tough job because you’re not only fighting against these out-of-compliance corporations …. You’re also fighting against some of the very people you’re fighting for because they look at you as the villain. They buy into the rhetoric that you’re going to drive these businesses away, and they rely on these jobs.”
Reaching these residents can be tough, but Kelley described the effectiveness of framing the issue around family. When you tell people that emissions are hurting not only them, but their children and their grandchildren, they begin to see the issue in a new light. The impacts borne by Port Arthur families cannot be ignored. One in five households in Port Arthur is affected by emission-related illnesses, like cancer. And many families in the area lack resources to receive proper medical treatment for their illnesses, said Kelley. “After a while, you just stop counting and start fighting.” 
CIDA’s fight has resulted in numerous wins for Port Arthur, such as negotiating with Premcor for restitutions to community members in 2005, stopping 20,000 tons of PCBs from being shipped to Port Arthur for incineration in 2009, and much more. To learn more about CIDA’s fight in Port Arthur and neighboring communities, visit https://www.cidainc.org.

By: Leija Helling, Communications Intern
CHEJ had the pleasure of hosting Kaniela Ing, an activist, community organizer and former State Representative in Hawaii, at a Living Room Leadership webinar on August 5, 2020. A Native Hawaiian, Kaniela was first elected to represent South Maui in the Hawaii State House 2012 at the age of 23. After six years in the legislature, he returned to community organizing and now works as the Climate Justice Campaign Director at the People’s Action Institute, a partner organization of CHEJ. 
Kaniela was born and raised in one of the richest, whitest, and most conservative areas of Maui, a Hawaiian island known for its resort hotels and agriculture. Growing up, Kaniela witnessed capitalists using their power to harm native Hawaiians like himself. When he was young, a white business-owner stole land granted to his family, which, combined with the sudden death of his father, put them in financial peril. Kaniela and his brother started working in the pineapple fields, a brutal and hazardous job that paid below minimum wage. Both he and his brother developed serious respiratory problems from pesticide exposure. Kaniela’s experience working alongside undocumented workers, migrants with limited rights, and other marginalized folks for whom pineapple picking was not just a temporary gig left a deep emotional impression.
“Like many of us in impacted communities,” Kaniela says, “you don’t seek out politics. It finds you…I didn’t really have a choice but to get involved.”
As a young adult, Kaniela started to get involved in politics. He worked in native organizing and ran the student council at his university. When a Tea Party Republican was elected on his home island, hoping to dismantle the social security programs and environmental protections Kaniela’s family had relied on in tough times, Kaniela decided to run for office. By mobilizing a base of white liberals and Black, Filipino and Native workers in the hotel district, he was able to overtake an incumbent Republican and win a seat in the Hawaii State House.
During his time as a State Representative, Kaniela pushed for progressive policy changes in areas such as pollution and environmental contamination, education, and social inequities. He challenged corporate power in Hawaii, fighting against Monsanto, the infamous agricultural biotech giant, and Alexander and Baldwin, one of the original “Big Five” sugar cane companies that has dominated Hawaii’s land and politics since the 1800’s. Kaniela was the youngest legislator to hold a leadership role in the House. 
But Kaniela quickly grew alarmed by how his colleagues in office got sucked into an insular political scene. He watched as progressives were pulled toward the center, spending more time with their colleagues than their district: the people they were supposed to represent. He saw firsthand how corporate lobbyists charmed and befriended legislators, while activists and organizers, seen as demanding and disagreeable, were dismissed by people in power.
“A system that relies on appealing to the good nature of politicians is never going to work,” Kaniela says. “We never really learned how to do democracy right.”
Organizing, on the other hand, is about the pluralism of power, about finding pillars to stand on and building movement and community by feeding off of each other’s energy. COVID-19 has made Kaniela’s job harder, he admits, since sharing physical space is such an important part of bringing people together. But Kaniela has noticed that people, now more than ever, have a longing to be part of a movement. He is working hard to make sure the movement he is building centers people who are facing the “triple-pandemic” of pollution, racial injustice and COVID-19.

By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
In an interview on Wednesday, July 15, 2020 for CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Series, Linda Robles, founder of the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force, shared her experience battling TCE contamination in her neighborhood.
Since the 1940s, military installations in Tucson, AZ have been using and improperly disposing of TCE and other toxic chemicals. These chemicals leaked into the soil and groundwater of surrounding communities, poisoning residents who drank the tap water in their homes. In the 1980s, the EPA asked the city of Tucson to close all TCE-tainted wells in the area, but the city did not fully comply. As a result, a predominantly Mexican-American community, low-income on the Southside of Tucson has been severely affected.
The EPA declared Robles’ community and the surrounding area, including the Tucson International Airport, a Superfund site in 1994 due to its contaminated groundwater and soil. Despite declaring this Superfund site, the government failed to acknowledge the adverse health effects residents in the area were experiencing, such as high rates of cancer, birth defects, lupus and other diseases. Robles said, “We knew the TCE-tainted water was to blame”. Robles stated The Environmental Justice Task Force was created to organize around these health issues and prevent further pollution. In 2014, the group began a series of health assessments among its members through door-knocking, and the data on cancer clusters collected through these assessments increased awareness of the problem among Tucson’s elected officials.
CHEJ helped the Environmental Justice Task Force focus their organizing efforts. In 2018, Lois Gibbs came to town and provided the group with organizing training and strategies that helped Robles’ group grow. With CHEJ’s help, the group convinced the EPA and local officials to conduct a vapor intrusion investigation at six different schools between two districts in the area. While the community has this win to celebrate, Robles admits that organizing is still a challenge for her group due to the large undocumented population in the area. Many undocumented immigrants in the community care about the issue, but are nervous to get involved because they fear deportation, Robles stated. “Their silenced voices lead us all – local officials and the EPA, especially – to underestimate the threat we are facing”.
To learn more about the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force and how you can help, visit https://www.facebook.com/ejtaskforce.
To listen to Linda Robles’ full interview with CHEJ, click here.

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.
 

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. 

By: Leija Helling, Communications Intern
This summer, community organizers in Birmingham, Alabama, coordinated a series of caravan protests calling for racial and environmental justice at the 35th Avenue Superfund site in North Birmingham. 
Communities living in and around the 35th Avenue site are facing decades of unabated industrial pollution, and after years of fighting for the EPA to intervene, people are tired of waiting. The contaminated area, encompassing three predominantly Black North Birmingham neighborhoods, was designated a Superfund site almost a decade ago due to high levels of lead and carcinogens such as BaP and arsenic, yet the community has seen little response from officials since. Meanwhile, coke oven plants, steel production facilities, asphalt plants and quarries continue to pollute the land, water and air, exacerbating health disparities.


“We are just going to have to start taking to the streets like everybody else,” said Charlie Powell, founder and president of the advocacy group People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination (PANIC). On July 11, members of the Right to Breathe Caravan gathered for a socially distanced rally where speakers shared stories and enumerated demands, most importantly calling for officials to move the site to the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List. Afterwards, the group drove dozens of cars decorated with signs and posers through neighborhoods in North Birmingham to raise awareness about the problem and galvanize the community into action. The events were live-streamed via Facebook and Zoom.
PANIC coordinated the protests alongside the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP) and other local partners including the Birmingham chapter of Black Lives Matter. According to GASP executive director Michael Hanson, the caravan was largely inspired by protests and calls for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd. Hanson says the global movement provided an opportunity to “highlight the way that environmental issues intersect with systemic racism and oppression.”
On Aug. 27, a second Right to Breathe Caravan traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery, the state capital, seeking a response from Governor Kay Ivey to their demands for justice for those living in and near the Superfund site. PANIC and GASP have been requesting a meeting with Gov. Ivey for months with no response, and she has yet to take a public stand on the issue. So, organizers, residents and their allies took matters into their own hands and drove to the Governor’s Mansion, seeking her support. With racial disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic further highlighting the need for racial health equity, the community needs remediation more than ever. “This is an environmental injustice, and we want relief,” Powell said.
To learn more about the environmental crisis in Birmingham, Alabama, check out parts one, two, and three of a series published by Scalawag Magazine and the Huffington Post in 2019.

By: Kayleigh Coughlin, Communications Intern
St. Louis, Missouri families are feeling hopeful following the commencement of the EPA’s long-awaited clean-up at the West Lake Landfill Superfund Site at Bridgeton. Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel, community activists and co-founders of Just Moms STL, a non-profit organization aiming to educate the St. Louis community about the negative health impacts of radioactive waste at West Lake, have been campaigning for the clean-up since 2013. 
“To see this positive result”, said Chapman, “I guess I can say makes the bruises hurt less”. 
In 1973, radioactive waste from the Manhattan Project, a secret U.S. military project created in 1942 to produce the first nuclear weapon, was illegally dumped in the West Lake Landfill and remained there quietly until 2010, when a fire at the site emitted a foul odor, exposing the waste. In 2018, the EPA proposed a partial removal plan following years of campaigning by Just Moms STL and St. Louis community members. In the proposed plan, the EPA promised at least 70% of the radioactivity would be removed over a 5 year period. Last month, the EPA set foot on the site and officially began the clean-up process. The sight offered relief for St. Louis’ community members like mothers Chapman and Nickel.
In response to the clean-up, Chapman said, “Seeing EPA workers working on the landfill is proof of what moms can really do”. The success at West Lake is proof that small communities working together can accomplish big things. Now that tangible progress has been made at West Lake, Just Moms STL is expanding their outreach by helping other leaders combat environmental injustices in their communities.
Please visit http://www.stlradwastelegacy.com to learn more about Just Moms STL’s work and get involved with their campaigns.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Just Moms STL and their campaigning journey, click here to watch a Zoom recording of CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership Event from July 8, 2020: a conversation with Dawn Chapman and Karen Nickel.