Category: Backyard Talk

By Briana Villaverde, Community Organizing Intern
According to the EPA, people of color are disproportionately affected by air pollutants and are exposed at a higher rate. I have lived this statistic, fought it firsthand, and have been propelled by it into the world of environmental advocacy. My hometown, Paramount, California, is in the nation’s most Latino congressional district (CA-40). For a small city of only 4.8 square miles, it contains an overwhelming amount of metal and heavy industrial activity. This is my story of becoming an “accidental environmentalist.”
In 2016, Paramount residents rallied to stop a medical waste facility from being built in the city. This culminated in a demonstration at the city’s annual Apples with Santa Clause distribution where adults and children held signs that read, “Dear Santa, We Want Clean Air.” At the time, I was the president of my high school’s Green Club, where we focused on more basic environmentalism such as recycling and planting trees. This instance was a huge turning point for me and my understanding of organizing/environmental advocacy and that it went beyond mainstream conservationist rhetoric.

Image credit: Paramount Community Coalition Against Toxics
In 2017, I officially joined the organizing efforts with other Paramount residents to hold metal forging companies accountable for their willful polluting. Due to the volume of metal forging companies in the city and their process for treating metal at a commercial scale, many residents were experiencing irritation in their nose, throats, and lungs, as well as smelling strong metallic odors throughout the day. Children near these sites also reported shortness of breath and irritability from the odor. Community leaders filed a class action lawsuit against 8 of the prominent polluting industries in our city, but they were met with great pushbacks from electeds, other community members, and governmental agencies. We had short-lived wins when the South Coast Quality Air Management District forced companies to temporarily shut down operations that emitted hexavalent chromium, but they quickly started back up again with more “monitoring.” What this really meant was that they would increase operations at night when particulate matter was low. Additionally, our council members’ revolving door with the city’s members of the chamber of commerce left community members and myself in a constant state of disbelief with how money flowed between the city officials and these polluting companies.

Image credit: Paramount Community Coalition Against Toxics
After graduating from high school, I pursued this passion academically, majoring in Environmental Science and Policy with a minor in Chicano Latino studies at the University of California Irvine. I have interned and volunteered with natural resource management agencies and climate justice advocacy groups with my story as a grounding experience. Initially, I had set out with the intention of fighting for my community’s right to clean air and a safe environment, because that’s what I thought being an environmentalist essentially entailed. However, this path from lived experience to becoming a full-fledged and dedicated organizer is a common one that people, like me, will continue to walk. With the emergence of powerful climate justice organizations like the Sunrise Movement, Uplift, and SustainUS, I meet more and more young people of color with similar stories like mine. Their communities are also suffering from adverse health effects brought on by environmental racism and lack of corporate accountability – which leaves us with one strong choice, to become strong environmentalists. After a lot of struggles I realized that there was a shift in what I considered the role of an environmentalist – it was the love I have for my community and our right to a livable future that made me an “accidental environmentalist.”
Cover photo credit: Long Beach Press Telegram

By Jessica Klees, Communications Intern
Every year since 1995, delegations from many countries gather for the Conference of the Parties (COP). And now as world leaders from more than one hundred countries convene in Glasgow for COP26, it is more important than ever that nations work to heal our planet and combat climate change. U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted, “History will judge us on what we achieve over the next two weeks. We cannot let future generations down.” The eyes of the world turn to this group of people as we pray that they won’t abandon us, and our future.
The leaders who attended the G-20 summit over the weekend were accused by activists of not taking enough action. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said he left the summit “with my hopes unfulfilled.” He also believes it will be “very difficult” to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times. 
The nations of the world have a great deal to do if they want to combat the climate crisis. According to CNBC, “To have any chance of capping global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the aspirational goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the world needs to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions in the next 8 years and reach net-zero emissions by 2050.” The UN has also found that out of the 191 countries taking part in the Paris Agreement, only 113 have improved their pledges for carbon reduction.
During the course of the conference, India pledged to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2070. 100 countries each signed a pledge to end deforestation by 2030 and a pledge to cut methane emissions by at least 30% by 2030. However, environmentalists were concerned that China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, did not introduce any new climate targets during the conference. In fact, Chinese President Xi Xinping did not attend the conference, and instead sent a written message to delegates.
Our future rests on the actions of these leaders, but there is still hope. Boris Johnson says he feels “cautiously optimistic” about the work being done at the conference, but there is still a “very long way to go.” He said, “The clock on the doomsday device is still ticking but we have a bomb disposal team on site – they are starting to cut wires.”
Photo credit: Andy Buchanan/Getty Images

By: Emily Nguyen, CHEJ Science & Technical Fellow
There is no such thing as a natural disaster. This is one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my academic career. While this phrase may be referring to droughts, hurricanes, and the like, its message is equally relevant to communities that have lived with toxic pollution for decades. Disasters and crises don’t decide who lives and who dies, society does. This has nothing to do with chance, but everything to do with ethnicity, race, and socioeconomic status. Similarly, who gets to live in a house with lead-based paint and who doesn’t is dictated by generations of racist environmental and housing policies. There’s nothing “natural” about that.
In California’s Santa Ana community, low-income and Latino families have been disproportionately impacted by soil lead contamination for decades. Despite leaded gasoline and lead-based paint being banned over the past 25-40 years, their toxic effects continue to plague predominantly minority communities.
Studies have shown that Latino and low-income children are among the most at risk of high blood lead levels, due to disproportionate lead exposures from living in older lead-contaminated homes, urban areas, and near industrial contamination sites. The developmental consequences of these toxic inequalities are most evident in the academic achievement gaps of Latino children compared to their white peers in the Nation’s Report Card.
In Santa Ana, a recent University of California Irvine (UC Irvine) study found that over 50% of the 1,500 soil samples gathered from residential homes were above what the California Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deems safe (80 ppm). Researchers also estimated that 12,000 kids within these neighborhoods have been exposed to lead concentrations exceeding the US EPA’s 400 ppm federal limit for children’s residential play areas. Furthermore, neighborhoods with average median household incomes under $50,000 showed lead soil samples levels 440% higher than areas with median household incomes above $100,000.
As UC Irvine historian Juan Manuel Rubio asserts, Santa Ana’s rampant racial disparities in lead contamination are nothing short of a “manufactured crisis”; in other words, something that could have easily been prevented. Instead, decades of systemic racism in housing policies, coupled with crumbling infrastructure and aging housing stock have left residents with few options but to bear the consequences of a system rigged against them.
The first step towards effecting meaningful change for these vulnerable communities is recognizing and addressing the existing social inequalities that rendered them vulnerable in the first place. Much like natural disasters, these victims aren’t randomly selected. Every day, these individuals are chosen because of their location, economic conditions, and lack of sociopolitical power. They suffer and endure these crises because of deliberate decisions made by society. So, thousands of minority families in Santa Ana being subject to decades of toxic soil is anything but “natural.”
Photo Credit: Daniel A. Anderson/Grist
 

By Anabelle Farnham, Communications Intern
October 13, 2021
Ever since I can remember, I enjoyed science in school because it helped me to explain the world with concrete answers. It was a way of illuminating universal truths, and providing objective views of the world….right? 
Though I have abandoned all hope of becoming a STEM major, since coming to college I have classes that challenge the ways I think about science and the weight I put into the answers “science” provides.
Most recently, I learned about something called the Threshold Theory that made me think of CHEJ. The Threshold Theory originates from Earle B. Phelps and H. W. Streeter, two engineers who developed this theory while working in the Ohio River and published it in 1958. The theory goes like this: nature, in this case a river or body of water, has the ability to absorb contamination up to a certain point. It is after this tipping point that we consider harm is being done and the “contamination” become “pollution.” This tipping point, the point when water/nature is unable to purify itself and the contamination we are putting into it becomes harmful, has been coined “assimilative capacity.”
I had not realized until reading about this theory how much I used the assumption of assimilative capacity in my life. It can not only apply to the way we consider land, but also how we consider our bodies. The EPA has set limits on many chemicals and the concentrations at which they can be released into the environment, operating under the assumption that both the environment and people’s bodies can absorb toxicity up until a certain point. 
Under this theory, the question we ask is: what is this tipping point of chemicals at which we are causing harm? However, this question assumes that all chemicals follow the same model of the Threshold Theory when this theory cannot be universally applied. 
For example, certain chemicals, such as those categorized as “endocrine disruptors” do not fit into the Threshold Theory. These chemicals can mimic our hormones, which constitute a delicate balance in our body, and can send big signals with small changes. In the case of these chemicals, a small amount can be more harmful than a large one because our body is unable to detect the difference between an endocrine disruptor or a hormone. Chemicals like these defy the Threshold Theory. 
Learning about the Threshold Theory has made me reflect more on what truths I take as givens and when these assumptions might be blinding me to something bigger. It’s not that I used to think all science is good and now I think all science is flawed; it’s that I know more clearly that the questions we ask are going to determine the answers we find. Science is a tool that we can use to help each other live healthy, full, abundant lives, but the assumptions we bring into our scientific studies will create limits for how useful science can be. It really comes down to a very basic but powerful question: What stories will we use science to help us tell?
 
Inspiration for this blog comes from Max Liboiron’s book Pollution is Colonialism, which I highly recommend if you are interested in thinking more about the way methodologies in science have the power to create or minimize harm and violence in the world.
See also A Study of the Pollution and Natural Purification of the Ohio River by Streeter and Phelps for more on the origins of the Threshold Theory
Photo Credit: David Howell/Quebec Science. Max Liboiron is an indigenous Canadian scientist who does work on plastics pollution on the island of Newfoundland. 
 

Cancer-Causing Waste Along The Texas Eastern Pipeline in Pennsylvania Still Exists
By: Sharon Franklin, Chief of Operations
Jim Ryan of the Perry County Times recently reported that it has been over 30 years since the public first learned that the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation in Pennsylvania buried industrial fluids containing the carcinogen polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) along the natural gas line, which could represent thousands of tons of contaminated soil.
Unfortunately, the PCBs still have not been fully cleaned up and there isn’t an estimate for when that will be completed. Max Bergeron, a spokesperson for Enbridge, the owner of the Texas Eastern gas pipeline, stated, “We have undertaken PCB remediation efforts at (the Shermans Dale) facility in accordance with applicable regulations and are committed to continuing efforts supporting the health and safety of the communities in which we live and work.” However, according to the state of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), Enbridge is supposed to conduct PCB cleanups as it makes updates to its facilities, and that companies that previously owned the Texas Eastern pipeline were supposed to do the same, but did not completely remove all the PCB-contaminated soil. 
It has been confirmed that there are nineteen Texas Eastern PCB waste sites across Pennsylvania, according to DEP. When Bergeron was asked about how much PCB soil was removed and how much cleanup was left to do along the Texas Eastern line in Pennsylvania, he did not specifically answer those questions. 
 Why is this being reported now?  It is being reported now because it is the 30th anniversary of the 1991 Texas Eastern PCB settlement, but work on the natural gas pipeline has been ongoing in central Pennsylvania for several years. It came to the attention of the Perry County Times when a resident asked about regulatory violations at the Shermans Dale facility. They found the alleged violations on EPA’s website where it was noted the Shermans Dale Texas Eastern site had three violations in less than a year, including what appeared to be effluent runoff and emissions violations. However, EPA found no violations in their records, and Pennsylvania’s DEP said they were generated in error.
EPA spokesman Roy Seneca said in a May email that “We checked with our Water and (Resource Conservation and Recovery Act) enforcement staff and they are not aware of any direct EPA involvement with these events.  They believe this was likely handled by the state.” Pennsylvania DEP stated that the incidents only appeared as violations because of a glitch in how data is uploaded to the EPA website.  Sometimes if a large batch of data is uploaded, it can trigger paper violations in error. But the permit for Texas Eastern Shermands Dale under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) had no violations attached to it. “The records we have regionally and downtown don’t show violations,” John Repetz, Local Government Liaison, said, referring to DEP’s records in Harrisburg.
There are many other communities throughout the country that are facing issues such as these. While EPA says it should have been handled by the state, the state says something like it was an uploaded data issue to the EPA site, therefore it wasn’t a violation.  This leaves communities along the Pipeline asking “Why is there still cancer-causing waste along the Pennsylvania Texas Eastern Pipeline after 30 years and a settlement to cleanup PCBs in contaminated soil?”
Photo Credit: Jim T. Ryan/Perry County Times

By: Jose Aguayo, Senior Science Associate

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

By: Sharon Franklin, Chief of Operations
In a recent article in Environmental Health News, Environmental injustice and disability: Where is the research?, it sites that one group remains largely ignored: disabled people, who make up more than 25% of the United States population. When descriptions of environmental justice are made, the EPA doesn’t even include a category for individuals with disabilities. While a recent study Unequal Proximity to Environmental Pollution: An Intersectional Analysis of People with Disabilities in Harris County, Texas suggests that disability status—especially in combination with race, ethnicity, and income—can determine the amount of environmental harm exposure, it doesn’t address the environmental harm and exposure for physically challenged individuals. When we compare similar other marginalized communities, these individuals are also forced to live in areas that disproportionately expose them to environmental hazards.
While environmental justice researchers have spent decades trying to document these inequalities, there are only a few studies focused on the disabled population. Jayajit Chakraborty, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, observed that in Houston, where “neighborhoods located near pollution sources—like Superfund sites and hazardous waste facilities—were home to a significantly higher proportion of disabled people compared to the rest of the city. In addition, race, ethnicity, and age all further amplified these inequalities—disabled people of color and those aged 75 years or older both lived in even closer proximity to polluted areas, likely decreasing their quality of life.” Conversely, expanding on this research will be difficult, as work like Professor Chakraborty’s is uncommon.
Professor Chakraborty concludes that the goal has always been to expand the scope of environmental justice research. He hopes that studies similar to his Houston study will “lead to a better inclusion of people with disabilities in environmental justice research and environmental policy.”
Daphne Frias, a disabled youth organizer, told EHN researchers that the lack of available data is just a symptom of a larger problem: “ableism.” “It’s the idea that disabled lives are unimportant and disabled lives are invisible. It doesn’t matter if where we live makes us even more unhealthy.” That’s why Frias believes this framing needs to change. “Our community is beautiful and powerful, and I think that needs to be embodied instead of this doom and gloom narrative of how we’re perceived.” She added that moving forward, it’s important that researchers begin reaching out directly to the community and listen to their lived experiences. “It’s the phrase that [disabled people] always say, ‘Nothing about us without us.’”
Photo credit: Environmental Health News