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TRACKING THE INVISIBLE KILLER

MILLIE CORDER DIDN’T know why there was so much cancer in her family. Her daughter, Cheryl, was only 27 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and 34 when the disease killed her in 2002. By that time, Millie’s husband, Chuck, had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He recovered, only to develop skin cancer in 2005. The next year, Millie herself was diagnosed with colon cancer and, two years after that, with breast cancer. Those years were a blur as she shuttled back and forth between her office, her home, and doctors’ appointments. While she was recovering, Chuck died of his cancer. Two years later, her stepson, Brian, was diagnosed with and died from lung cancer.
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Photo Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis/The Intercept

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‘Environmental racism’? Tenn. pipeline sparks uproar

The Memphis City Council yesterday stepped into the path of a proposed oil pipeline through the Tennessee city, casting its opposition as a fight against “environmental racism.”
The council’s 13 members unanimously passed a resolution opposing the Byhalia Connection pipeline, a joint project of Plains All American Pipeline LP and Valero Energy Corp. Members also gave unanimous initial approval to a proposed ordinance that would require City Council approval for new oil pipelines within city limits and set strict conditions.
Several miles of the 49-mile pipeline would run through low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods in South Memphis. Opponents say the area has already borne the burdens of too much pollution. They also say that a pipeline spill could damage the aquifer that Memphis and the surrounding region rely on for drinking water.
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Photo Credit: Sean Davis/Flickr

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Stories of Local Leaders

From Shy Young Woman, To Powerful Leader: Penny Newman

By: Ruth Rodriguez, Communications Intern
Penny Newman, Founder of Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ) was born and raised in California. Her parents taught her from a young age that you need to be involved if you want your community to be a good place to raise children. In fact, Newman’s mother was the first female mayor of Perris, CA. As a young woman, Newman was extremely shy, but she did not let that get in her way when she learned of what was happening in her community. She became an activist by accident, like many of the great activists of today. 
After getting married she moved to Glen Avon, CA. It was not until her children began school that she became aware of the Stringfellow Acid Pits. When she became president of the PTA, a woman asked her to cancel the speaker for the meeting one night so that she could speak about the Stringfellow site. Newman asked if she could schedule her for another day, but the woman said no, it was an emergency. That was her first significant encounter about the toxic site. She began questioning what the site was which led her to call the Water Board who assured her that it was nothing to worry about. 
The Stringfellow site is 17 acres of pits used as a cheap way for industry to dispose of waste. There were over 400 chemicals scrambled and mixed together at the site. Around 1978, there were many heavy rains in Southern California. Teachers at the nearby school were told to keep students in the classroom because the pits were starting to fill and flood. The teachers were also instructed to keep silent about the issue, but they were rightfully worried and started spreading the information provided to them. 
Kids had bloody noses, rashes, dizziness, headaches, and Newman’s son even had seizures. Her family spent more time at the hospital than at home. Doctors had no idea what the cause for all the health problems was. 
Newman told her son, “I promise you that I will do everything in my power to make this stop…I’m not going to let this happen to any other child ever again.” “That kept me going.”
Penny was invited to a meeting where concerned residents talked about what was happening and what actions should be taken. Members of the community believed that if they were able to gather facts about the chemicals in the pits and their effects on health, then agencies would better understand their issues and provide aid. They soon came to realize that the decision makers of agencies that could help were already aware of the facts. It was a turning point for her. She said she now knew we lived in a cruel world of money and politics.
“The hardest thing to get over is that you would have people in positions that are supposed to be doing these things and they weren’t. They were choosing not to do it…deny the problem existed.” 
The early organizing group of Glen Avon was Concerned Neighbors in Action. It was made up of other moms in the area, about 20 to 25 families. None of them were professional organizers, but they put their heads together to try to figure out what to do. They even received help from Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.  
Chemicals from the site were overflowing, vaporizing, and leaching. The community’s initial approach was to dig up waste and truck it to a safe hazardous waste site. They then came to the conclusion that they could not put their problems onto other communities fighting for a clean environment as well. After radiation was discovered at Stringfellow, Glen Avon then became taboo, said Newman. No one from the outside wanted to visit and consequently businesses struggled.
They had to switch their plan of action. One of the main methods they used was the media. By telling people’s personal stories and keeping the public updated on their every move, they received lots of support and generated outrage toward what was happening in the community. For each demand or thing they wanted they targeted the person that could give them that. Newman said they had to plan strategically by conducting protests, using gimmicks, getting coverage, outlining demands, and giving a timeline. In one of her acts, Newman attended a fundraiser she knew the Governor of California, at the time, was going to be at. As he made his way down the crowd she took ahold of his hand and said “we need to talk” without letting go as he tried to pull away. The media loved this interaction. The Governor later had another engagement in Newman’s area that was picketed by over 150 people asking the Governor to meet with them. After this, Newman heard that the Governor told his team to do whatever they needed to do to get the concerned neighbors off his back. 
Residents were awarded a $17 million special fund which allowed everyone to hook on a private well into a municipal water system. That was not enough though. They continued to build leadership and come up with policy so that these battles did not have to be fought at every toxic site. 
“We wanted to make sure the people affected by the problem were the ones defining what the solutions would be.” 
Newman’s transformation from a shy young woman to a leader that has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people was all as a result of her and her family suffering from the harm of a toxic site. She said, “We had a right to live in a safe community.”
“It was out of necessity. It was really a survival thing. Either we step forward and took it on now, or we’d be dealing with it down the road…It would continue to pollute our families.”

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In Test for Environmental Justice, Grijalva and McEachin Urge Biden to Revoke Permits for Proposed Plastics Plant in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley

Washington, D.C. March 17, 2021 – Chair Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.), authors of the landmark Environmental Justice for All Actwrote to President Biden today urging him to revoke Army Corps of Engineers permits for the proposed Formosa Plastics petrochemical complex located in St. James Parish. The site is in the heart of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley corridor, one of the most heavily polluted regions of the United States, and the community residents have expressly asked the federal government to protect them from further heavy industrial contamination.
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Photo Credit: Giles Clarke/Getty

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Reproductive Problems in Both Men and Women Are Rising at an Alarming Rate

When you see or hear a reference to “the 1 percent,” most people think of socioeconomic status—the people with the top 1 percent of wealth or income in the United States, which is how the term is commonly used in our culture.
Not us, though.
What we think of is the fact that the whole spectrum of reproductive problems in males are increasing by about 1 percent per year in Western countries. This “1 percent effect” includes the rates of declining sperm countsdecreasing testosterone levels and increasing rates of testicular cancer, as well as a rise in the prevalence of erectile dysfunction. On the female side of the equation, miscarriage rates are also increasing by about 1 percent per year in the U.S., and so is the rate of gestational surrogacy. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate worldwide has dropped by nearly 1 percent per year from 1960 to 2018.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Backyard Talk

Environmental Justice for Inmates

By: Ruth Rodriguez, Communications Intern
Nearly 600 federal and state prisons are within 3 miles of a Superfund site in the United States. Over 100 are within 1 mile. These numbers are staggering. To make matters worse, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world with 655 incarcerated per 100,000. Further, people of color are overrepresented in the incarcerated population, and are more likely to live near toxic waste sites. 
The siting of prisons is an environmental injustice. These facilities are built next to mines, landfills, and as previously mentioned, Superfund sites. Some are legitimately built on top of toxic land. Inmates, as well as the communities nearby, are bearing the threats of harsh pollution. 
The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act states that all federally funded construction must report to the Environmental Protection Agency to continue. In these reports consideration is often taken into the impact of the project onto the environment and how the environment would, in turn, impact its residents. Paul Wright, the director of the Human Rights Defense Center, says that the EPA does not consider the impact on prisoners in its environmental reviews. Additionally, advocates say that even though most of the prison population is made up of people of color and people from low income communities, the EPA does not apply its environmental justice regulation to prisoners. This is due, in part, to inmates not being counted in overall population data.
Here are just a few of the many facilities putting inmates in harm’s way:

  • State Correctional Institution Fayette in Labelle, Pennsylvania is located next to a coal ash dump.
  • Victorville Federal Correctional Institution in California is on top of, former Superfund site, George Air Force Base.
  • Rikers Island in New York was built on top of a landfill and even had a lawsuit in which former correctional officers claimed the facility gave them cancer.

The State Correctional Institution (SCI) Fayette in Labelle, Pennsylvania is nearby two coal slurry ponds and 40 million tons of coal waste. The ash dump is made up of toxics like mercury, lead, arsenic, and thallium. Because many prisoners were complaining of health issues, the Abolitionist Law Center and the Human Rights Coalition issued an investigation into the health of those incarcerated. More than 80 percent of inmates were “suffering from exposure” to the coal ash. Health problems included cancer, thyroid disorders, fatigue, throat and sinus conditions, dizziness, and headaches. Residents in the town of La Belle had similar symptoms and illnesses.
When Marcus Santos arrived at SCI Fayette he knew something was wrong. That led him to begin keeping notes of his symptoms. During his time at SCI Fayette, Santos had multiple emergency medical treatments for things like skin rashes, vision loss, and throat swelling. When he was finally relocated to another facility his health noticeably improved. Though Marcus was able to leave, the consequences from pollution exposure can be long lasting, especially on long-term inmates of SCI Fayette. 
Other environmental health issues inmates deal with are sewage and sanitation violations in their institutions, furthering the threats to their health. 
Those incarcerated are being further criminalized and punished by being prevented from living in a clean environment that is not a threat to their well-being. No one deserves to be breathing toxic air, drinking unclean water, and living on top of contaminated land. A clean environment is a basic human right, and no one should be subjected to these conditions.
Photo Credit: Bruno Mallart

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Environmental Justice Plays a Key Role in Biden’s Covid-19 Stimulus Package

President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief package includes a downpayment on his ambitious climate plan, including $100 million to address harmful air quality and environmental health risks in minority and low-income communities.
The provisions begin to make good on Biden’s pledge to address environmental injustice as an integral part of his drive to put the nation on track to net zero carbon emissions by mid-century. And they constitute the U.S. government’s first response to the growing scientific evidence—at least 17 peer-reviewed studies so far—showing that areas with high levels of air pollution have higher coronavirus death rates or more severe outbreaks. Some studies were able to trace the higher mortality specifically to fossil fuel pollution.
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Photo Credit: Barry Lewis/InPictures via Getty Images

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Michael Regan and the Reconstruction of the U.S. EPA

Many agencies of our national government suffered from neglect during the four years of Donald Trump’s anti-governmental reign as president, but EPA was already damaged when Trump arrived. Writing on this issue a year ago, I noted that EPA reduced:
“…staff during the Obama years from 17,049 in 2009 to 14,777 in 2016 and was further reduced [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][under Trump] to 14,172 in 2019. Funding has been reduced from a peak of $10.3 billion in FY 2010 to $8.8 billion in FY 2019. These data do not account for inflation so the reductions over the past decade are underplayed by these figures.”
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Deb Haaland confirmed as first Native American Cabinet secretary

The Senate on Monday voted to confirm Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., as President Joe Biden’s secretary of the Department of the Interior, making the second-term Democrat the first Native American Cabinet secretary in U.S. history.
The vote was 51-40, with four Republicans joining Democrats in favor.
Haaland, an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, earned bipartisan support to run the Interior department, which has a staff of 70,000 employees and is charged with overseeing the country’s natural resources. The agency manages nearly 500 million acres of land, or one-fifth of the surface area of the United States.
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Senate confirms Michael Regan to lead EPA

The Senate confirmed Michael Regan to lead the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, putting the North Carolina regulator in charge of restoring the climate and water pollution regulations that the Trump administration had weakened.

Regan spent four years as secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, where his record of fixing environmental problems faced by low-income residents and communities of color drew national attention. It also propelled him to the Cabinet-level position above more prominent state regulators, such as California’s Mary Nichols.

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Photo Credit: Caroline Brehman-Pool/Getty Images