The year is 2014, and the sleepy mining and agricultural towns of Northern Appalachia have transformed into gold-rush towns. But this is a new type of gold – Shale gas.
These towns sit above an underground formation called the Marcellus Shale that could help make America the world’s greatest producer of natural gas – and in 2014 the Marcellus region is booming. The restaurants are buzzing, bars packed, hotels full for the first time since many people can remember. Each generation of this area has seen the boom and the bust of other major industries – timber, coal, steel – and shale gas is the next one. It’s marketed as energy independence, good paying blue collar jobs, the American Dream. In areas where decades of economic decline have created a culture of need, this dream is welcomed with open arms.
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Photo credit: Amanda Gillooly
Month: December 2020
In the first major test of Virginia’s historic environmental justice law, the state’s air board Dec. 3 approved a U.S. Navy proposal to build a power plant near a predominately Black community with higher-than-normal rates of respiratory illnesses.
Environmental and health advocates were dismayed by the State Air Pollution Control Board’s 5–1 decision, saying it shows that the state still hasn’t fully embraced equity and justice at the regulatory level. Board members, meanwhile, pointed out that the Navy plans to install technologies that will ensure the plant produces few emissions.
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Photo credit: Don S. Montgomery, USN (Ret.)
WASHINGTON — When Joseph R. Biden, Jr. won the presidential election, his top candidate to lead the nation’s most powerful environmental agency appeared clear: Mary D. Nichols, California’s clean air regulator and arguably the country’s most experienced climate change official, was seen as a lock to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
Now Mr. Biden’s team is scrambling to find someone else, according to several people who have spoken with the presidential transition team. The chief reason: This month, a group of more than 70 environmental justice groups wrote to the Biden transition charging that Ms. Nichols has a “bleak track record in addressing environmental racism.”
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Photo credit: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
For environmental justice advocates who have spent decades fighting to protect communities from polluters, the new year cannot come too soon. After four years of the Trump administration shredding the Environmental Protection Agency into “little tidbits,” as President Donald Trump put it during his first campaign, change is in the air.
President-elect Joe Biden has vowed to make the climate crisis and environmental justice guiding principles of his administration from day one, Jan. 20. It’s a huge promise—and a tall order.
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Photo credit: Spike Johnson
On Dec. 5, 1982, about a month after residents learned of dangerous dioxin levels in Times Beach, the town along the Meramec River was ravaged by a record-breaking flood. The flood damaged or destroyed most homes in the town.
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Photo credit: St Louis Post-Dispatch Staff photographer
By: Ruth Rodriguez, Communications Intern
As an intern for CHEJ, I reflect on environmental justice every single day. This leads me to ponder over the intersection of homelessness and environmental justice. We see environmental justice as an issue that affects low income communities and communities of color, but we fail to address those who do not really have a “community.” The definition of “community” is important when discussing this issue. A community is a group of people living in the same place. But those who are unhoused are not located in one single location, rather they are all over the world, making it difficult to address this environmental justice issue. The ability to organize is difficult for those experiencing homelessness because they do not have a “community” by the sense of the definition. How do you organize for a group that is so widespread? Additionally, they do not have the resources often needed to fight for their rights to a clean environment.
The effects of pollution can be catastrophic to communities. Those who are unhoused are at a greater risk of being exposed to pollution and environmental hazards. Homelessness has increasingly been regulated and even criminalized by the banning camping in safe places and “move-along” orders. This has led people to be exposed to even more hazards by forcing them to move into risky areas in terms of violence and crime, water and soil contamination, noise pollution, pests and rodents, and natural disasters. One of the biggest environmental risks, though, is air pollution and particulate matter like dust and debris. Health effects of air pollution and particulate matter include, premature death, heart attacks, chronic diseases, respiratory conditions, and lung disease.
In some places those experiencing homelessness are viewed as environmental hazards for nearby communities. Some of the byproducts that arise from those who are homeless are trash, human waste, bodily fluids, needles, and fires. Urban development is in part increasing homelessness through increasing housing costs and gentrification. It is therefore, in part, feeding into environmental injustice. With COVID-19 comes more problems for the unhoused. Many do not have access to masks and cannot properly social-distance making their potential for exposure high.
The exposure to pollution, homeless hazard, urban development, and COVID-19 issues could possibly be mitigated by providing housing. For example, vacant housing and empty hotels could be allocated for those who are homeless to quarantine or for housing in general.
In Austin, Texas there are about 2,506 people experiencing homelessness, with 1,574 being unsheltered. Recently, Austin cut its police department funding by one-third through the reorganization of a number duties out of police oversight. Some of the money saved from this reorganization could potentially be used to provide the housing previously mentioned. This is just one possible solution to get environmental justice for those who are homeless.
By: Ruth Rodriguez, Communications Intern
Pam Kingfisher, an experienced community organizer and advocate for Indigenous Peoples’ rights shared her experience for CHEJ’s Living Room Leadership series. Pam has over 30 years of experience in organizing and policy work, and has led the fight in shutting down 23% of the world’s uranium supply and fighting off unwanted poultry CAFO in her community.
Her father had a similar experience while working on a bomb in Hanford, Washington. In 1943, her father had the decision of going to war or helping build a bomb. He saw this as an opportunity to get out of Oklahoma and receive a better paying job for his family. Her mother and siblings made their way to Washington thereafter. The working conditions her father endured were harsh. As a child Kingfisher realized this and began questioning her world. One question she had was why she, a Cherokee Native, was always surrounded by white people. The other question was the reasoning and implications of the bomb her father was helping to build.
“Asking questions…that is the key of organizing…nobody wants to be an activist, you know, but we are questioning, and we are very curious, and we want to know why, and we keep pulling those threads and pulling that string.”
In 1985 she moved to her grandmother’s allotment land in Oklahoma. There she got involved with the community talking about the uranium facility that was going to deep well inject their waste. Jesse Deerinwater created Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE) and stopped the injection well. After, many in the community came to aid her in any way they could. Later, Deerinwater moved on and Kingfisher became the board chair for NACE.
The Sequoyah Fuels Nuclear Plant in Gore, Oklahoma was responsible for bringing in yellowcake uranium from New Mexico and turning it into uranium hexafluoride, used for fuel, and uranium tetrafluoride, used for the shelling of army tanks and bullets. Instead of dealing with toxic waste, known as raffinate and partnering with Monsanto, the facility created fertilizer that was spread onto 10,000 acres. As a result, a “happy cow operation” came about. New cows would need to be brought in every 3 months to replace those who had died. People were also becoming ill. Because of this, Thelma Moton, a local member of the community, created a cancer map of Gore, Oklahoma by going door to door and asking questions.
Because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), who conducts facility inspections, had already been sued, Kingfisher and/or her associates were allowed to be on site when the NRC came to inspect the uranium plant. They had standing. Kingfisher said, “Even if you don’t win and it cost a whole lot of money it got us in rooms we never would’ve gotten in to.” During one of the inspections it was noticed that 3-month contract workers with no insurance or tracking were standing in and cleaning uranium tanks. On a Saturday night, an explosion occurred and the plant was not immediately evacuated. Later that same night, 350 people were fired and the plant was closed.
Although the plant was closed, the Cherokee Nation continued to have interest. Their eyes were now on the company conducting the cleanup. The company did not know where to put the waste and tried to get the state to allow them to leave the waste on site. The Cherokee Nation did not allow that and won a case forcing the company to move the waste to Utah.
“This is human health, this is public health. I don’t care what stripe you are. I do care that we all live in this place, and what are we passing on.”
After the plant was shut down and the case was won, Kingfisher knew she had to do something new. She felt exhausted and out of balance. She started working on Native women’s reproductive rights and health, food and agriculture. Kingfisher explained how food, farming, environment, and health were all the same category to her.
In 2017 her community noticed construction near the highway. Then in 2018 they realized the Simmons company out of Arkansas had a sort of poultry monopoly system going on. Workers received all their feed, propane, etc from Simmons. The poultry application was only $10 and they barely had to pay for water. 260 new houses on mega-barns were being created with 20 thousand more chickens in each barn. That is 400 tons of waste per day. The first study over the quantity of water in the local aquifer is currently being conducted. In a win, a megahouse next to an organic farm was shut down and taken off the market in 13 days after the Cherokee Nation bought it for $380 thousand.
Kingfisher cites how important gatherings like conferences are. From conferences, people are able to learn from each other, about different tactics that worked in other places, and network with people and groups like CHEJ. Additionally, garnering attention to the impacted people from her community was important in her fight. People affected by the uranium facility and poultry operation would be put on TV to speak on their negative experiences. Whether it was the family of the little girl that almost died from E.coli that came from a chicken house, or the grandfather talking about how his family was not able to have a birthday party due to too many feathers being in the pool. Cultivating your press and showing things that everyone “gets” and can relate to is important.
“The community can lead it even if there’s not a community when you begin, you create that community by being very inclusive and listening.”
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on the most ambitious environmental justice plan ever offered by the nominee of a major political party. His Build Back Better agenda included a commitment to invest 40 percent of his $2 trillion clean energy plan into communities living on the front lines of poverty and pollution.
At the same time, his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, co-authored the Climate Equity Act with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), outlining ways the next administration can operationalize environmental justice across the agencies. After a summer of historic protests that saw some 15 million to 26 million people take to the streets to take a stand against racial injustice in policing, it’s almost certain that the incoming Biden administration will take bold action to address the intersecting crises of environmental pollution and racial inequality.
But this mandate for anti-racist policy raises a question: How, in the first place, will a Biden administration identify the most polluted and impoverished communities across the country?
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Photo credit:Andrew Harnik/AP
Martha Romero felt that she had to send her daughters to safety.
She had seen air pollution grow worse in recent years as the truck traffic near her San Bernardino neighborhood increased so she made the difficult decision to send her three daughters to live with her mother, whose home is farther from the worst of the fumes and dust from the unending parade of trucks moving to and from nearby warehouses. “Unfortunately, we cannot keep them in an air bubble,” she said.
A coalition of local organizations is leading the fight against the expansion of the San Bernardino International Airport to accommodate Amazon’s burgeoning logistics needs with a complex that will bring more flights, more warehouses and even more truck traffic and pollution to her area. The coalition has an unusual ally: Xavier Becerra, the attorney general for the state of California, and the choice of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
Opposing the airport expansion plan is the work of the environmental justice bureau Mr. Becerra created in 2018, the first of its kind. Its focus: the unequal effect pollution and other forms of environmental damage have on health in the most vulnerable communities. While local officials, understandably, want to promote economic development, the bureau created by Mr. Becerra is saying that environmental justice needs to be part of the equation.
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Photo credit: Stephen Lam/Getty Images
The Trump administration on Monday declined to tighten controls on industrial soot emissions, disregarding an emerging scientific link between dirty air and Covid-19 death rates.
In one of the final policy moves of an administration that has spent the past four years weakening or rolling back more than 100 environmental regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency completed a regulation that keeps in place the current rules on tiny, lung-damaging industrial particles, known as PM 2.5, instead of strengthening them, even though the agency’s own scientists have warned of the links between the pollutants and respiratory illness. In April, researchers at Harvard released the first nationwide study linking long-term exposure to PM 2.5 and Covid-19 death rates.
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Photo credit: Dane Rhys/Bloomberg