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Backyard Talk

Public Hearings: Is Anyone Listening?

“A public hearing is an official event on a public issue where the public speaks and the officials don’t listen.”
Activists spends endless hours sitting and testifying in public hearings. Local leaders often have endless patience despite the fact that hearings are generally convened in inconvenient places, at inconvenient times and with the room set up to intimidate. Public hearings chew up a huge amount of time and burn out leaders. They alienate members who have such a lousy time that they never come to another group activity. And often, they have no effect on public policy.
When asked why they go to hearings in light of such bad experiences, here’s what some local leaders said:
We don’t want to miss anything. There could be useful information, though this is not the only place to get it.
It’s a chance to tell our side. Sure, after the “experts” for the agencies and polluters drone on for hours, knowing the news media will leave after the first hour.
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? The typical public hearing is a gross distortion of democracy. Hearing officers are trained to control public hearings. Your opponents will use public hearings to TEST you. Will you sit there and take it? Can they force you to conform to their rules? As the saying goes, “if you take what they give you, you deserve what you get.”
Do you have to go to public hearings? No, you don’t. If a public hearing ignores your needs, you can boycott it. You can hold a protest outside and denounce it. You can send a speaker inside to say you refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy. And you can organize a mass walk-out. You can even organize your own “People’s Hearing,” one you run and that deals with the truth.
If you do attend, insist they take their rules and throw them out the window. Let the people speak first, even if this means crying mothers speak, instead of the “experts” hearing officials prefer. Insist that officials respond, point by point. Use the hearing to present specific, concrete demands and insist on “yes” or “no” answers on the spot.
If they don’t cave in to your demands to do it your way, pull a mass walk-out. When denied the dignity of meaningful participation, the United Farm Workers would signal members to kneel in prayer and sing hymns.
At one public hearing, Concerned Citizens of White Lake (MI) were shocked when hearing officials turned out the lights when it was the citizens’ turn to speak. At the next public hearing, each member brought a lit flashlight.
At another hearing on contaminated water Concerned Residents of Muskegon (MI) showed up with water jugs. Their “testimony” took the form of queuing up at water fountains to fill their jugs from the city water supply they wanted hooked up to their neighborhood.
At a hearing in Maryland, Lois Gibbs, CHEJ’s founding director, stunned local leaders with a small but powerful tactic. As she testified, she saw that the hearing officials weren’t listening. Lois stopped and stood silent at the microphone. After a long pause, the hearing official saw she wasn’t talking. “Er, ah, Ms. Gibbs, are you through?” “No sir, “Lois replied, “I was simply waiting for you to start listening. When you’re ready, I’ll continue.”
We’ve advised groups who’ve been shut-out, silenced or scorned to physically display their response. Accordingly, groups have shown up wearing gags, ear plugs and in a couple of instances, wearing cardboard cut-outs over their ears bearing the label “B-S Protectors.”
The best way to handle the media black-out that results when community testimony is not given until after the media leaves (and after hours of testimony by the “experts”) is by calling the news media and holding a news conference before the hearing starts so they can get both sides of the story.
What you do with public hearings is up to you. If you let the hearing officials control the agenda and flow of the meeting, they’re assured of prime media coverage. All you’re assured of is the that they won’t be listening to what you and your group has to say. It’s up to you.
Excerpted from Public Hearings: It’s a hearing, but is anyone listening? Chapter 30, CHEJ’s Organizing Handbook.

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Backyard Talk

Environmental Justice for Overburdened Communities: A View from New Jersey

 Last year, the New Jersey state legislature passed a landmark environmental justice bill that requires the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to identify overburdened communities in the state and to evaluate whether facilities seeking operating permits pose a   disproportionate, cumulative environmental impact on these communities. Facilities located in the same census tract as overburdened communities are subject to this requirement and include facilities that are major sources of air pollution (as defined under the Clean Air Act); resource recovery facilities or incinerators; sludge processing facilities, combustors, or incinerators; sewage treatment plants with capacity over 50 million gallons per day; and certain kinds of landfills.
This important piece of legislation was signed into law by the governor making New Jersey the first state to require a mandatory denial of a permit for new facilities and to impose conditions on renewal and expansion permits for existing facilities based on environmental justice (EJ) concerns alone. A new permit will be denied for facilities “where an [EJ] analysis determines a facility will have a disproportionately negative impact on overburdened communities.”
An overburdened community is defined in this bill as any census block group that fulfills at least one of the following criteria:

  • At least 35% of households qualify as low-income
  • At least 40% of residents identify as minority or as members of a tribal community
  • At least 40% of households have limited English proficiency

A low-income household is one that is at or below twice the poverty threshold (determined annually by the US Census Bureau)
A household with limited English proficiency is one where no adult speaks English “very well,” according to the US Census Bureau.
The bill requires that a company that wants a permit for a new facility, an expansion of a facility, or a permit renewal for an existing facility and if that facility is located partially or completely in an overburdened community, then the company must do the following three things:

  1. Write an environmental justice impact statement that evaluates the unavoidable potential environmental and health impacts associated with the facility and  the environmental and health impacts already affecting the overburdened community.
  1. Provide the environmental justice impact statement to government entities and the Community.
  1. Hold a public hearing no sooner than 60 days after providing the environmental justice impact statement:
    • The public hearing must be publicized in at least two newspapers that serve the community (including one non-English language newspaper).
    • The notice of the public hearing must include: description of the proposed facility, summary of the impact statement, date/time/location of the hearing, address at which community members can submit written comments.
    • The state Department of Environmental Protection will post the impact statement and the information about the public hearing on its website.

At the hearing the company “shall provide clear, accurate and complete information.”
For a full text of the bill, go to: https://legiscan.com/NJ/text/S232/2020

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Backyard Talk

Inequity in the Distribution of Covid-19 Vaccine

Everyone’s talking about the Covid-19 vaccine these days – who gets it first; how will it be distributed; is there enough; where do I sign up; and so much more. While it’s still early in the rollout, it’s already become clear that African Americans and Latinos, who have been hit the hardest by the Corona virus and Covid-19, are getting vaccinated at disproportionately low rates. The early data (though limited by many factors including poor data on who is being vaccinated) indicates that vaccinations are not reaching the populations the virus has harmed most and that Black and Brown people are getting vaccinated at a much lower rate than their share of cases and deaths.
In Maryland, only about 16% of the first doses of the vaccine have gone to African Americans, and 4.6% have gone to Latinos. Those groups represent 31% and 11% of the population, respectively. Black residents have accounted for approximately 33% of Maryland’s coronavirus cases and 35% of deaths from the disease; Latino residents account for 19% of infections and 9% of fatalities. In New York City, about 5% of those vaccinated are Latino or African American, but these groups make up 29% and 24% of the city’s population, respectively. In Philadelphia, 12% of those vaccinated were Black while the city’s population is about 44% Black.
These results are consistent with a report released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation that evaluated race and ethnicity data on vaccinations for 17 states obtained from the federal government. Kaiser found that “the share of vaccinations among Black people is smaller than their share of cases in all 16 reporting states and smaller than their share of deaths in 15 states. For example, in Mississippi, Black people account for 15% of vaccinations, compared to 38% of cases and 42% of deaths, and, in Delaware, 8% of vaccinations have been received by Black people, while they make up nearly a quarter of cases (24%) and deaths (23%). Similarly, Hispanic people account for a smaller share of vaccinations compared to their share of cases and deaths in most states reporting data. For example, in Nebraska, 4% of vaccinations are among Hispanic people, while they make up 23% of cases and 13% of deaths.”
Conversely, Kaiser found that “the share of vaccinations among White people is larger than their share of cases in 13 of the 16 reporting states and larger than their share of deaths in 9 states.” For example, in North Carolina, 82% of vaccinations have been among White people, while they make up 62% of cases and 65% of deaths.
These figures make it clear that the early rollout strategy is not adequately nor appropriately targeting those most susceptible and vulnerable to Covid-19. It is early and much has been said about the logistics difficulties in getting the vaccine into the arms of the people who need it most. But it does seem apparent if not obvious that the rollout strategy for the distribution of the vaccine is not centered on equity – getting the vaccine into the arms of the people who have been infected the most and who are dying at the highest rate.

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Backyard Talk

The Rachel Carson Amendment

Our colleague and friend Lou Zeller at the Blue Ridge Environmental League (BREDL) shared an article he wrote a few years back about the great pioneer Rachel Carson who wrote in her epic 1962 classic Silent Spring that “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed either by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.”
Lou continued. “The public outcry created by Silent Spring led to a ban on DDT from agricultural use in 1972. However, today the industrial use of poisonous substances continues almost unabated, based on regulatory risk assessments and legally acceptable death rates. For example, retail shops are still permitted to dry-clean cloths with perchloroethylene, a carcinogenic solvent, even though non-toxic alternatives are available. Household hand cleaners laced with toxic Triclosan contaminate wastewater and sewage sludge deposited on farm fields as fertilizer. Nuclear power plants routinely spew radioactive Tritium into the air and water. And chemical giant Monsanto sells the weed-killer Roundup to farmers and homeowners—components of which are carcinogenic and known to damage the liver, kidney, brain and lungs. The list goes on.
“How can it be that after the passage of two generations we have let this continue?  Worse, a new natural gas extraction industry—cracking underground rock with high-pressure chemicals and water—exempts itself from the few environmental, public health and safety laws still on the books. It is indeed a strange blight creeping over the land.
“The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution states, ‘No person shall…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’  The Fourteenth Amendment adds that the States may not, ‘deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ Rachel Carson’s Fable for Tomorrow painted a grim picture, but it was meant to prompt action.  In part, she succeeded.  But it remains to us to ensure that the next forty years complete the changes necessary so our legacy to future generations is not a silent spring.  Either the fundamental principles established under the Constitution mean what they say, or Rachel Carson’s admonition should become the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.”
I think Lou is onto something. What do you think?

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Backyard Talk

The Life of an Intern at CHEJ

By Sophie Weinberg, CHEJ Science Intern, Summer 2020.
This summer was unusual to say the least. Despite living through a pandemic, people around the world innovated their lives to create a new normal. One of these changes included working remotely. This posed a unique challenge to the entire workforce, but particularly to interns. This summer, interns were put into the difficult position of entering a new job while fully remote. Interns did not have the ability to get to know their employers as easily, so it was ultimately up to the organization to welcome interns. CHEJ excelled at this.
This summer, I worked as a science and technical intern at CHEJ. Despite the obvious disadvantages that COVID-19 posed, I felt very connected to both the organization and the work that I was doing. Due to the small staff size, I was able to get to know each staff member through multiple weekly meetings and various projects. We were not only expected to discuss our work, but also encouraged to catch up on a more personal level in order to foster a positive work environment. Instead of water cooler talk, we would Zoom as interns to get to know one another. More often than not, we all found similarities in our passions, goals, and personalities.
Beyond the work environment at CHEJ, my projects were all very meaningful. As a science intern I did not work directly with many communities, but I did have an opportunity to learn a lot about the issues impacting so many people across the US. I did not have expansive knowledge of environmental justice before joining this organization, but I have learned so much this summer and become very passionate about these issues. The work I did as an intern was applicable to helping communities fight environmental threats. Specifically, a large majority of my work was taking scientific concepts and converting them to a more understandable format for the use of community leaders. My supervisor always made sure to connect my work back to the relevant issues to make me aware of the impact of my internship. I completed this internship with a sense of appreciation for what I was able to contribute and what I learned.
Working for CHEJ this summer was an extremely valuable experience, and I would recommend it to other students who are looking for an internship in environmental justice. I was able to apply a large range of skills, and learned many more in the process.

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Backyard Talk

Residential Segregation and Disproportionate Exposure to Airborne Carcinogens

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis published a paper late last year that found carcinogens present in the air of the St. Louis metropolitan area to be highly concentrated in Black and poor neighborhoods. They found that approximately 14% of the census tracks in the city had elevated cancer risk due to exposure to toxic chemicals in the air and that these air toxic hots spots were independently associated with neighborhoods with high levels of poverty and unemployment, and low levels of education. Census tracks with the highest levels of both racial isolation of Blacks and economic isolation of poverty were more likely to be located in air toxic hot spots than those with low combined racial and economic isolation.
This paper is important because the authors used an innovative geospatial approach developed by other researchers to identify spatial patterns of residential segregation in their study area. This approach captures the degree of segregation at the neighborhood level and identifies patterns of isolation of different metrics, which in this study was black isolation and poverty isolation. This approach differs from tradition methods that looked at the percentage of blacks or poverty in a neighborhood.
The authors used these two segregation measures – Black isolation and poverty isolation – to identify neighborhoods segregated by race and income in the St. Louis metropolitan area and evaluated the risks of exposure to carcinogens in the air in these areas. The cancer risk data came from the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Air Toxics Assessment and the census track sociodemographic data came from the American Community Survey. All spatial analyses were conducted using Arc GIS software.
These researchers found that census track levels of poverty, undereducation and unemployment were associated with toxic hot spots, while factors such as per capita income and median household income were inversely associated with toxic hot spots. These findings support other studies that identified disparities in exposures to ambient air emissions of toxic chemicals and that raised questions about whether residential segregation leads to differential exposure to air pollutants.
While the authors discuss a number of possible pathways connecting segregation and health, the relationship between segregation and exposure to air toxics is unclear. They discuss various factors that result in segregation leading to the “cycle of segregation” that includes neighborhoods with low social capital, few community resources and low property values which tends to attract more low income and minority residents and exposures to unhealthy air toxics.
The authors concluded that this study provides strong evidence of the unequal distribution of carcinogenic air toxics in the St Louis metropolitan area and that residential segregation leads to differential exposure to chemicals in the air that cause cancer.

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Remembering the bombing at Hiroshima Japan – 75th Anniversary

Survivors of the world’s first atomic bombing gathered in diminished numbers near an iconic, blasted dome Thursday to mark the attack’s 75th anniversary, many of them urging the world, and their own government, to do more to ban nuclear weapons. Read more.

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Backyard Talk

CDC – Where are you?

As the country moves to reopening this summer, with some states moving more quickly and others more deliberately, one thing seems clear, people are not paying attention to details and to the rules of living with a pandemic. Where are the masks and where is the social distancing? And where is the Centers for Disease Control or CDC? This is the agency that was born to step up and be front and center during a pandemic like we are now experiencing. This is their time to shine, to lead by example and to guide public behavior and response to the worst infectious disease event that most peel people alive today have ever experienced.
As we move into reopening the country, where is CDC’s voice guiding the decisions made by politicians and leaders? Where is CDC’s voice reminding us to wear masks, telling us how important they are in protecting the wearer and the potential spread of the virus from asymptomatic carriers and in fighting Covid-19.
Where is CDC’s voice reminding us why it’s important to wear masks and in what places and circumstances, they are critical; and in providing information and data on how effective they are and what kind to wear.
Where is CDC’s voice reminding us why it’s important to maintain social distancing as we travel out of our home to interact with people?
Where is CDC’s voice educating us about the primary means of transmission of this deadly virus which is by airborne transport, not just through sneezing or coughing, but also through singing, shouting and even just talking, especially in confined spaces.
Where is CDC’s voice reminding us how much this virus is transferred from person-to person, and from surfaces and by direct contact.
Where is CDC’s voice reminding us why testing is so important, not just to determine if you have the virus (not the disease!), but to identify asymptomatic people who don’t think they have the virus when they do and to then to isolate that person and to trace and isolate  others who might have been exposed to  contain the spread of the virus and the disease.
Where is CDC’s voice taking the lead in providing a rationale and clear vision of how we can all return to living with a viable highly transmittable virus and disease during a pandemic?
We miss you CDC and we need you. The prospects of a successful of reopening without your voice are not good.
It’s time to come out of the shadows, or the closet or wherever you have been the past few months. We need your knowledge, your experience and your ability to separate the many confusing messages coming from every which place.
It’s not too late to make your presence felt. We really need you.

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Backyard Talk

A Pandemic of Pollution

The death toll due to Covid-19 passed the 90,000 mark in the United States this week. This is a truly staggering if not sobering number that raises many questions about how we as a nation respond to this incredible loss of life. These are not just numbers, but people – someone’s mother, father, brother, sister, grandfather, grandmother, uncle, aunt, friend, lover, child… The daily news boils this down to statistics. Numbers of new cases and deaths are reported each day before the newscaster moves on to the next story. Are we normalizing this staggering loss of life? Even worse, are we accepting it?
Yet I look at the leadership of this country and I don’t see people who empathize with those who have lost someone to this deadly virus. I don’t see people who are taking steps to minimize the impact of this insidious virus.
There is still much that we don’t know about Covid-19 and its effects on people, but it is becoming quite clear that low income residents and people of color are disproportionately impacted by exposure to the coronavirus. It’s also become clear that underlying health conditions, such as respiratory problems like asthma and COPD; diabetes, high blood pressure, immune diseases like lupus multiple sclerosis make people more vulnerable to covid-19, not just among the elderly, but among people of color and others with these diseases.
Why then is the USEPA doing all that it can to dismantle (repeal or weaken) regulations that protect people’s health. A report released today by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee describes how specific actions taken by EPA to weaken or repeal air pollution rules and regulations will “harm public health and potentially add to COVID-19 risks.”
The report specifically points to seven rules that were initially designed to remove greenhouse gas, soot, mercury and other pollution from the air that the agency has targeted and proposed or finalized actions since March 1st that “will result in increased air pollution and could cause tens of thousands of premature deaths. EPA has, in short, unleashed a pandemic of pollution in the middle of an actual pandemic, the respiratory effects of which may be amplified by pollution exposure.”
The committee is clear that the agency should reverse its deregulating efforts and strengthened rather than weaken the country’s air pollution laws and regulations, and take steps to address the Covid-19 specific risks posed by air pollution. In the committee’s words:
“EPA should re-focus its enforcement, compliance and monitoring activities in a manner that prioritizes the early detection of high exposure to air pollutants in communities that have both historically experienced such exposures and those at greatest risk of adverse outcomes from COVID-19.”
This and other recommendations made by the Senate Committee offer hope that we will not accept 90,000 deaths and counting as the cost of doing business in the United States. There are steps we can take to reduce and minimize the impacts of Covid-19.
Read the full report here.

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Backyard Talk

Vulnerability to Pollution and Susceptibility to Covid-19

A new screening tool is now available that identifies populations across the country that are most vulnerable to severe complications following exposure to the coronavirus and development of covid-19. This community vulnerability map which was developed by Jvion, a health care data firm, in collaboration with Microsoft. Jvion uses socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to pollution, unemployment and mortality rates at the census block level to identify communities vulnerable to severe effects of covid-19.
In an article about his new mapping tool in Grist magazine, Jvion is described as using “machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to identify ‘environmental health hazards’ as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable  to severe covid-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor respiratory air pollutants such as fine particulate matter can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease – preexisting conditions that make exposure to the novel corona virus more severe and fatal.”
This interactive and searchable map differs from others available on the internet in that it identifies the populations that once infected will likely experience severe outcomes ranging from hospitalization to death.
This vulnerability map can be used together with the USEPA’s EJScreen, an Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping tool. The EJScreen uses 11 environmental and health indicators and standard demographic data to identify communities most susceptible to air quality pollution. The EJ screen specifically includes a cancer risk and respiratory hazard index that is provided as a percentile in the state or nationally.
When the vulnerability mapping tool is matched with the EPA’s EJ Screen, the results are astounding. The relationship between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and the projected risk of severe covid-19 outcomes is very clear and very strong. The areas of high vulnerability identified on the Community Vulnerability map match well with areas with high pollution from industrial facilities identified by the EJScreen, painting an all too familiar picture of communities suffering disproportionately from multiple and cumulative risks.
The preexisting respiratory and other health conditions that African Americans suffer from living in the shadows of industrial facilities in sacrifice zones across the country contribute significantly to their susceptibility to the lethal effects of covid-19. This reality isn’t an accident, but the result of economic and environmental conditions imposed on people of color over the long history of discrimination in this country.
In spite of these obvious disparities and the growing threat that people of color and African Americans in particular face from covid-19, EPA announced this month that it has stopped enforcing regulations that hold corporate polluters accountable for releasing toxic chemicals into the air we breathe. This is another outrage. Sign our petition to demand that the government reverse this disastrous decision.