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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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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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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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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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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