Category: Backyard Talk

By: Leia Ku Cheng Yee, Communications and Development Intern
As we enter the month of March, we mark one year of wrestling with the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In regards to the impacts of the pandemic, it comes to no surprise, that the minority, impoverished groups are the most negatively affected. One good thing that came out from the pandemic is that it has spotlighted the societal issue of the disproportionate amount of low-income population that live in contaminated areas. It has made these communities more visible than before. These low-income, racial-minority communities are more vulnerable to COVID-19 and have higher risk of death due to the decades of unjust and inequity in the system. The people still need to be more educated on this issue and raise awareness to the public. One year has gone by, and not much has changed. 
In 2020, the inequity in the country has been amplified through the Black Lives Matter Movement, but we still lack environmental regulations in the country to target environmental justice issues. I am sure that we are all aware that the virus does not discriminate, so why are certain communities struggling more than others? This is mainly caused by the lack of strong political voices in these communities, in comparison to a white, high-income community that has more economic power. Moreover, coal plants, landfills, injection wells, and other toxic waste sites have existed in communities of colors for decades, and have been emitting toxic pollutants to the air and water of these communities for years.
A new Harvard study found a significant overlap between COVID-19 fatalities and other conditions related to long-term air pollution exposure, showing that those who have lived in places with significant air pollution (cities) are 15% more likely to die from COVID-19 than those with the same health profile who live in less polluted areas. Through inhaling toxic chemicals in the air, these communities are more prone to cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, chronic health issues that increase their risk of contracting COVID-19. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first breakdown of COVID-19 case data by race, showing that 30% of patients whose race was known were black. Communities of color have long fought for environmental justice issues through addressing the unjust in the system, but they lack political and economic power to prevent incoming toxic exposure, or eradicate existing pollution. 
To address the disparities in COVID-19, we have to first address our structural inequalities in this country. The high-income communities have easier access to professional health care, priority access for testing kits as well as vaccines, and have the luxury to enjoy staying at home. On the other hand, low-income communities struggle to put food on their table, and are risking their lives everyday just living in the contaminated neighborhoods, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our country needs to invest more in public health preparedness, so that these vulnerable communities are prepared when encountering disasters like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo Credit: Bebeto Matthews

By: Judith Eppele, Community Organizing Intern
Growing up in a household with divorced parents, I quickly realized how important communication was for creating and sustaining strong relationships. This notion is the backbone of CHEJ, of which I’ve experienced firsthand through my time as an intern. Since I’m a community organizing intern specifically, I’ve found that having good communication with the different community groups we work with is incredibly important. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that maintaining this good communication is one of the most important parts of organizing. Though I haven’t been with CHEJ for that long–I’m coming up on my three month mark soon–I’ve been able to see this in action through helping out with the Unequal Response Unequal Protection campaign.
If you haven’t checked it out already, Unequal Response Unequal Protection is all about developing a framework to conduct health investigations for toxic chemicals. But the root of this campaign is the emphasis of it being community-driven. This is seen in the Operating Principles of the campaign, wherein the community leaders are involved throughout the entirety of the process in order to create the most effective and personalized response possible. When I first read this, I was a bit surprised, but in the best way possible. I’m an Environmental Science and Management major and so have taken some environmental policy classes, though usually there is more of an emphasis on what the government should/shouldn’t do or has/hasn’t done in respect to making change happen, as opposed to the role of community members and grassroots level organizing. I’d really only seen community members having the ability to be involved in policy making processes through a public comment period, though this doesn’t guarantee that the comments will actually be taken into consideration as the policy moves forward. On top of this, the public comment period is usually pretty short, sometimes being only 30 days long! This never sat right with me, as shouldn’t it be clear to policy makers to have solid communication with the community members that live in the area that they’re trying to enact a policy in? Aren’t they who you’re trying to help? That’s why I found Unequal Response Unequal Protection so refreshing, as there is that prioritization of solid communication between community members, scientists, and activists in order to make the best chemical contamination response possible. In doing so, everyone can submit their comments, questions, and concerns at any time throughout the process and feel confident that they’ll be heard and respected.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m a huge supporter of good and extensive communication. Without it, people and their experiences wouldn’t be accurately represented in decision-making processes, which could cause more problems than what was already there in the first place–and who wants that? While Unequal Response Unequal Protection and CHEJ in general are making waves in promoting communication, it’s definitely lacking in the greater world of policy making. While amending this may not be easy, it’s not impossible. Taking full advantage of any public comment period, setting up meetings with local policymakers, and reaching out to people outside of your community group in order to gain additional points of views on your issue are a few ways that you can take a stand in supporting the importance of communication. After all, many hands make light work, and the fight against toxic chemicals needs as many of these hands as possible.
Photo Credit: Liquid Planner

By: Evelyn Zavala, Science Intern
I was drawn to working with CHEJ because of their work with communities across the United States of diverse backgrounds, socio-economic status, ethnicities, geographical locations, and education. CHEJ is where the community meets science, environment, health, and justice. Recently we have seen how vital this relationship really is. While the snowstorms of 2021 are seen across the country, Texas has been hit hard. Within Texas, minority and marginalized communities were hit even worse. 
Social Determinants of Health are described as the conditions in the environment where people are born, live, work, play, worship, and age, affecting their health and quality of life outcomes and risks. The neighborhoods and environment of a community have a significant impact on the health of individuals. Many people in the United States live in areas with unsafe water, unsafe air, toxic chemicals, loud noises, and pollution. 
Lower-income and minority communities tend to live closer to industrial sites and can be exposed to more pollution. Hundreds of industrial facilities are located in Texas where electricity was lost and pipe eruption occurred, it is expected they release pounds of airborne emissions as plants shut down and then resume operations just like after Hurricane Harvey in 2015, which is very harmful to the surrounding communities. As with any disaster, marginalized communities are disproportionately affected. There is a disproportion in death and negative health effects, as seen by COVID-19 and other natural disasters. 
Stephen Lester highlighted earlier this year the inequity in those affected by the COVID-19. African Americans and Latinos are getting vaccinated at much lower rates than at the rate they have been affected. People of color and low-income communities who were also disproportionately affected by blackouts and pipe bursts just last week will now face an even harder journey to recovery. 
While the storm hit families of all races and ethnicities, here is where the social determinants come into play. People of low-income communities often don’t have access to a car or transportation to get groceries, live in food deserts, and may not have money for pipe repairs or insurance to replace damaged housing.  Lower-income families who live farther from densely populated areas, not near hospitals and nursing homes, are the last communities to have their power turned back on, leaving many historically black and brown neighborhoods without power.
CHEJ’s work is crucial in implementing policy change at the local, state, and federal levels to reduce health and safety risks that exist among these communities. By providing communities a voice and role in their environment, they have one less social determinant working against their well-being, creating a safe environment for their families to work and play. 
Photo Credit: Terri Gruca via Twitter

By: Kristen Millstein, Communications Intern
In the summer of 2016, I traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I was in high school and had not spent significant time outside my California bubble. Pine Ridge was like a different world. While there, I learned from tribal leaders about the continual violation of their sovereignty and the trauma caused by a history of massacres and loss of sacred land. At the time, I looked at these atrocities through the lens of colonization. It has only been since I joined CHEJ as an intern that I began to look at these issues as environmental justice issues as well. Treaties were often violated because white colonizers found something valuable on tribal land–either agricultural opportunity, mineral wealth, or lumber, and greed for these natural resources continues to drive violation of tribal sovereignty. The resulting industries have done irreparable damage to the environment and Indigenous communities.
Pine Ridge Reservation has a poverty rate as high as 80% by some estimates and is 59th out of 60 counties in South Dakota for overall health outcomes. The region is clearly struggling, and it’s harrowing history is the primary culprit. Pine Ridge was once part of the much larger Great Sioux Reservation, established by treaty in 1868. This treaty was broken only six years later in 1874, and tribes continued to lose land over the next several decades as the U.S. government violated treaties to access gold, lumber, and other natural resources. The remaining tribal land is only a small fraction of their rightful land. Despite these already great losses, attacks on tribal sovereignty and land rights continue.
High profile protests like the ones surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to recent activism against encroachments on tribal sovereignty. Indigenous activists also fought hard against the Keystone XL Pipeline despite fierce opposition by law enforcement, and scored a major victory when President Biden revoked the pipeline’s permit and halted construction. Pine Ridge activists are currently embroiled in a fight against the proposed Dewey-Burdock uranium mine that will threaten the water supply as well as countless cultural sites. 
Each of these projects has been vehemently opposed by tribes on the grounds of damage to human health and the environment and violation of tribal sovereignty. But under our current system, agencies are not required to make their plans contingent on the consent of tribes, rendering their input effectively meaningless. Changing this provision and requiring ongoing, informed consent of tribal governments for projects that encroach on their land or threaten their cultural heritage would represent a major shift in the U.S. government’s relationship with tribes. It would be a victory for tribal sovereignty and for environmental justice. The Supreme Court ruling that declared about half of Oklahoma to be under tribal jurisdiction and the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline by the Biden Administration are steps in the right direction and a sign that there may be an opportunity for real progress, but the threats are not over. We must continue to support Indigenous communities in their fight to preserve their culture, heritage, and environment against attacks on their sovereignty.
Photo Credit: JYM via Facebook

By Mihir Vohra, Research Associate
In the fight to end our reliance on fossil fuels, most of the focus has been on the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, but other emissions are harmful as well. Particulate matter (PM) is a type of air pollution made up of a mixture of dust, chemicals, and liquid droplets and gets released into the air through fossil fuel combustion. When inhaled, PM enters the lungs and bloodstream, exacerbating existing respiratory tract illnesses and causing lung disease, heart disease, and lung cancer. Very small PM – called PM2.5 to denote particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter – is particularly dangerous. A study published this week in Environmental Research made a shocking finding about just how dangerous this pollution is: PM2.5 emissions from fossil fuel combustion are responsible for over 20% of premature deaths worldwide.
Previous studies have calculated the effect of all sources of PM2.5 on worldwide mortality, but this is the first one with the data and computer modeling technology to accurately assess the effect of PM2.5 only from fossil fuel combustion. It incorporates fossil fuel burning from all sources and sectors such as oil and natural gas extraction, power generation, kerosene, and land, air, and sea transportation.
To do their analysis, the authors created a map of total PM2.5 emissions from all sources. They also mapped premature deaths, meaning deaths that occur before the average age of death in a given country. Then they used computer modeling to estimate PM2.5 emissions due only to fossil fuels. Using a mathematical function to calculate what percentage of premature deaths could be attributable to PM2.5 emissions, they arrived at an estimate of how many premature deaths were due to PM2.5 from fossil fuels. China and India had the highest fossil fuel PM2.5 emissions, with Europe and the United States not far behind. Unsurprisingly, these were the places with the highest death rates due to these emissions.
The study estimated that worldwide, 21.5% of all premature deaths were due to PM2.5 air pollution from fossil fuel combustion. This means that out of every five people who died before their natural lifespan, one of them died because of health effects of PM2.5 emissions from burning fossil fuels. This staggering number even surprised scientists because previous estimates using less accurate computer modeling estimated the effect to be much smaller. Overall, this study shows that a huge percentage of deaths across the globe occur because of air pollution from burning fossil fuels. Transitioning to clean fuels will have a direct impact on health and mortality worldwide.
Photo Credit: Vohra et al./Environmental Research

By: Benjamin Silver, Science and Technology Intern
I never imagined that a five-gigabyte software on my laptop could contain an approach to fighting environmental injustice. The keys lie somewhere between map frames and advanced geostatistical interpolations.
Before interning at CHEJ, I had an incomplete understanding of environmental justice. I pictured the field solely as activists and victims opposing corporate polluters. Although I understood that research supports these organizing efforts, I never considered methods that scientists adopt to evaluate ecological data. One of these methods is GIS (geographic information systems), a computer program designed to collect, analyze, and distribute spatial data. GIS specialists create maps to interpret data across various disciplines. When appropriate techniques are applied, GIS can help solve geographically-related problems.
One environmental application of GIS is its use to develop comprehensive disaster responses. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey ripped through Southern Texas, killing 68 people and causing over $120 billion in infrastructure damage. However, widespread GIS usage after the storm significantly decreased Harvey’s devastation. The International Association of Fire Chiefs used GIS in their search and rescue efforts to determine flooded regions with high concentrations of vulnerable populations. They prevented dozens of elderly, children, and disabled people from being stranded in their homes. Additionally, the Texas Division of Emergency Management mapped shelter locations with ArcMap, a GIS platform, and created a web application for tracking evacuees.
CHEJ has allowed me to learn and implement GIS into my work. In December, I began my first GIS project with the Brave Heart Society, a non-profit dedicated to preserving traditional elements of Dakota culture on the Yankton Sioux Reservation. I worked on the Mni Wizipan Wakan Project, which aims to create a long-term resource management plan for the Dakota tribe. My contribution of the project focused on vegetation, an integral component of Dakota lifestyle for their various tribal uses. The goal is to create an inventory of culturally-valuable plants along the Missouri River Basin. This information is important because soil erosion, agricultural runoff, and invasive species along the river have undermined biodiversity and decreased the abundance of healthy vegetation. Using Dakota ethnobotanical data, I created an interactive map of the bioregion with GIS. Viewers can click on species survey points on the map to learn about each location’s plants and their respective uses.
This project taught me that GIS is a useful tool. Like any tool, its value lies within the creative context the author invokes. While my map informs the Dakota where they can find various vegetation, it does not address the underlying sustainability question facing the Dakota: How can the tribe ensure their access to these plants for future generations? Therefore, I integrated the map into a presentation that incorporates broader themes of the project, including ethnobotany, environmental threats, and local conservation efforts along the river. My aim in designing this product was to create a useful resource in the Ihantonwan’s struggle for environmental justice. 
GIS is a groundbreaking technology with the power to transform the modern environmental justice movement. Maximizing GIS’s potential to combat issues hinges on engaging local communities by familiarizing them with the program and its benefits. Residents fighting contamination often feel helpless due to their lack of agency during testing and investigations. Empowering these communities with basic GIS education will provide a resource to better involve them in local environmental justice battles. Even if communities are not working with the data directly, viewing GIS-generated maps can foster citizen science participation around issues that impact their everyday lives. 
While GIS expands horizons for scientific advancement, we must remember that it is most valuable when harnessed to assist the people impacted by the environmental justice movement. Only then will mapping elements on the computer screen translate into meaningful social change.
Photo Credit: Huawei Enterprise

By: Leija Helling, Organizing Intern
Today marks the inauguration of Joe Biden as our president and there is work to be done. Across the country, groups are coming together in an effort to push the incoming administration on progressive policies. We must continue to demand better from our government and, unlike over the past four years, we are soon to have a White House that just might listen.
Throughout the past few months, part of my work at CHEJ has included contributing to our Unequal Response Unequal Protection campaign, a project through which CHEJ is seeking to make its voice heard in the Biden White House. The campaign is attempting to address the federal government’s repeated failure to protect communities from toxic pollution, building on growing calls for community-oriented approaches to science across environmental and public health fields. We centered community voices in our process by holding multiple meetings with local leaders from EJ and Superfund communities throughout the country to discuss their experiences around environmental contamination and public health studies. These conversations helped me understand why building trusting partnerships between scientists and marginalized communities and creating a substantive role for local expertise in the scientific process are so crucial to developing strategies for environmental justice.
The burden of proof is one example of how the current scientific approach fails to protect communities from the health impacts of environmental contamination. Impacted communities currently bear the burden of proving their health issues were caused directly by exposure to toxics in the environment. This can be incredibly difficult to do, as exposures can add up over years and health conditions can be caused by the cumulative effects of many exposures and risk factors. Agencies can use a lack of hard proof of a direct link between a chemical exposure and a health condition to deny a community the intervention they need. In other words, the current response assumes chemicals are innocent until proven guilty. The system values scientific certainty over protection of communities being harmed. This approach cannot provide environmental justice. Something that is not statistically significant can still be causing harm!
All this reminds me of an article I recently read by a professor in the Science, Technology and Society department at my university. The piece first talks about a “data-to-action paradigm” which leads us to believe that more data and better science will tell us how to solve problems. More data and more science equals more action, according to this model. What we need, Professor Samantha Jo Fried argues, is a new “civic engagement paradigm” where issues that matter to the public would guide the scientific process through collaborative partnerships between empowered communities and humbled scientists. I believe CHEJ’s Unequal Response campaign and the many community groups and organizations that are working alongside us in these efforts are attempting to provide just that. This would be a fundamentally different approach, but it is only through these equal partnerships and collaborative processes that science can address the disparate impact of environmental hazards on low-wealth communities and communities of color.

By: Gustavo Andrade, Organizing Director
After the horrific display of violence and hatred in Washington, DC last week, we must unite to uphold our most basic common values of democracy and safety for all. We fully support the bi-partisan efforts to impeach, convict and remove this president.
There is no place for white nationalism in a just society, no “middle ground” between fascism and fairness and no excuses for violence and murder.
We must focus on holding all those involved in the failed insurrection fully accountable, while also moving forward an aggressive agenda for justice. While the Georgia runoff elections have opened a window to significant legislative progress, President-Elect Biden should also make decisive use of his considerable executive powers to protect us from violent extremists and to undo the damage of the last 4 years as soon as possible, and chart a new course towards a more perfect union.

By Mihir Vohra, Research Associate
For over 40 years, the Navajo Generating Station (NGS), located on Navajo nation land near Page, AZ, was the largest coal plant in the American West. The NGS and the coal mine that fed it shut down in 2019, and on December 18^th, 2020 its three smokestacks were finally demolished. Air pollution from coal plants is associated with higher risks for asthma, cancer, heart and lung diseases, and neurological dysfunction. The burden of these facilities disproportionately affects poor and minority communities. A 2012 report from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) determining that of the people living within 3 miles of a coal plant, the average per capita income was $18,400 and 39% were people of color.
Navajo and Hopi community members fought for closure of the NGS and issued a statement observing the December 18^thdemolition. It notes that NGS provided electricity for many cities in Arizona, Nevada and California, but not the Navajo or Hopi communities, illustrating an egregious reality: not only are there disparities in the toxic burden of energy generation, but there are disparities in who gets to reap the rewards. Those most burdened are least likely to receive benefits. This exploitation isn’t limited to coal, either. During its operation, the plant pumped billions of gallons of water from the Navajo Aquifer to the city of Phoenix. This has left the Native land in a drought and decreased access to running water in Navajo and Hopi communities, endangering health as well as Tribal culture.
Now that the NGS is closed, Navajo and Hopi community members are outlining what is required for community restoration. This includes securing electricity and clean water access for residents as well as job training. A 2012 Department of Energy report estimated that the NGS employed over 800 Native people, and community members want them to be first in line for new clean energy jobs in the area. More broadly, they demand investments in a sustainable economy for the Navajo and Hopi tribes with a just transition to new industries.
Another key feature of community members’ demands is cleanup and land reclamation. The mine and plant closed over a year ago, but the company operating them has done little to clean up these sites even though it is required to return the land to its original state. Groundwater contamination from toxic waste and coal ash is a serious concern, and community members are calling on the incoming Biden administration and Department of the Interior to enforce a full and transparent process to restore the land and ensure residents’ safety.
The Navajo and Hopi people who spent decades in the shadow of the NGS deserve more than just this demolition of its smokestacks, they deserve an investment in their future.
Photo credit: Adrian Herder, Tó Nizhóní Ání.