Millions of Puerto Ricans are still without water, food, electricity and shelter, four weeks after Hurricane Maria destroyed the island. With waterborne illnesses on the rise, a full-blown humanitarian crisis is on the horizon.
“Raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored,” the EPA warns in a memo.
When the agency issued this statement, eighty-four percent of Puerto Rico was without electricity, and sixty percent of water treatment plants out of service.
“Water contaminated with livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants can lead to illness when used for drinking, bathing, and other hygiene activities,” the EPA says.
To make matters worse, Puerto Rico is home to 21 Superfund sites – the nation’s most deadly depositories of toxic chemicals. The island also has a five-story-high coal ash dump in Guayama that was hit by the storm.
Floodwaters have already mixed deadly toxins from these sites into nearby waterways, which residents are forced to use to bathe and drink. In a desperate attempt to save their own lives, some Puerto Ricans are drinking highly contaminated water from wells that were once sealed to avoid exposure to deadly toxins.
Families who have lost everything now must contend with the possibility that their groundwater is tainted with poison.
The Complexion for Protection
On the same day the EPA issued its warning, President Trump took to Twitter to complain, “We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders… in P.R. forever!”
First, Mr. President, a reality check. The devastation caused by major storms takes years, not weeks, to repair. FEMA is still at work in New Orleans, twelve years after Hurricane Katrina, and in New Jersey and New York five years after Hurricane Sandy. EPA cleanup of contaminated sites takes even longer.
Second, a political check. Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and have been for more than a century. They serve in our Armed Forces and pay taxes, even if they weren’t allowed to vote for you – or any candidate – for President, and have no representation in Congress.
As Puerto Rico’s Governor, Roberto Roselló, wrote in his response to Trump’s Twitter tantrum, “The U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico are requesting the support that any of our fellow citizens would receive across our Nation.”
This is discrimination, plain and simple. When President Trump visited San Juan, he threw paper towels at a crowd of suffering people and scolded them for busting his budget. They weren’t amused by his theatrics.
They, like the Houston residents who live near waterways fouled by toxins from the San Jacinto Superfund site, are people of color – apparently not the right complexion for protection.
Dismissing the Victims
Dismissing victims is not unusual for this administration and for the EPA. The agency’s new chief, Scott Pruitt, spends his time on the road meeting privately with corporate CEOs responsible for these toxic waste sites. He then takes their wish-lists back to Washington so he can draft new ways to roll back the environmental protections they loathe.
But local community leaders, with few exceptions, have not been given the opportunity to talk with Pruitt.
Congress passed legislation in 1986 directing EPA to pursue permanent remedies or cleanups that conform to stringent standards. Although permanent cleanups cost more at the front end, they save money over the long term, as evident by the disruption of buried waste from storms like Harvey, Irma, Katrina and Sandy.
So, why won’t the EPA enforce the permanent cleanup of these sites to avoid future cleanup costs as well as protect the community?
Because the people who live around most Superfund sites are poor and of color and are considered not worth the investment.
This is even more the case in in Puerto Rico, since lawmakers in D.C. feel no accountability to the island’s citizens, who are separated from the mainland and denied the right to vote.
The EPA Told Me So
How do I know this? An EPA regional representative recently told me they were not going to spend millions to clean up a site when the surrounding houses are worth $60,000. It doesn’t make cost-effective sense, he said; we’ll just try to contain the waste.
Yet these houses are people’s homes; inside are human beings raising their families, having backyard picnics and celebrating birthdays. The homes are their American Dream. How dare these government officials devalue their neighborhoods because they are not wealthy!
These families pay taxes, contribute to society and deserve every protection available from our government, regardless of their wealth, language or the color of their skin.
I fear that families that have already lost so much in this summer’s severe hurricanes will suffer even more in coming months because of the color of their skin and the level of their income.
And as they try to clean up the mud and debris and rebuild their lives, families must also worry about how much chemical residue is in the mud they and their children have been exposed to.
They Don’t Care, So We Must
There is no question in my mind that the Trump Administration does not care for victims, whether in Houston, Miami or San Juan. So we have to take responsibility to compel the administration to act and hold them accountable.
We have to force the government to protect people living near Superfund sites by permanently cleaning them up, and to give Puerto Rico’s people the equal treatment they deserve.
Category: Backyard Talk
CHEJ Blog
On Wednesday, September 20, Hurricane Maria made a direct hit to Puerto Rico– virtually destroying most of its infrastructure and plunging Puerto Ricans into a humanitarian crisis. About 97% of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million population is without power, and about half without running water. Let’s not forget that these are American citizens we are talking about.
The Trump Administration’s response has been significantly slower and less effective than the response to Hurricane Harvey and Irma. President Trump tweeted about the situation on Monday, stating that,“Much of the Island was destroyed, with billions of dollars owed to Wall Street and the banks which, sadly, must be dealt with.”
His lack of empathy towards a U.S. territory struggling to survive following a disaster is alarming, even for him. Focusing on the massive debt held by Puerto Rico, whose economy is now even more ravaged than it was before, is just cruel but unacceptable.
Gov. Ricardo Rossell of Puerto Rico urged Congress to approve a commensurate aid package. A week after the hurricane, FEMA put out a statement that they have airplanes and ships loaded with meals, water and generators headed to the island.
In addition to the ongoing crisis, the Guajataca Dam in the island’s northwest corner has suffered a “critical infrastructure failure,” which poses immediate flooding threats to about 70,000 people. While the majority of residents in the potential flood zone have evacuated, efforts are being made to evacuate periphery areas.
The path for Puerto Rico ahead is uncertain. Its power grid is almost entirely wiped out, and has proven to lack resilience. Many experts on disaster response urge for the opportunity to be taken to rebuild Puerto Rico’s power grid from the ground up– a project that would require billions of dollars.
Not to mention, there are 23 Superfund sites on the island that likely have contaminated soil and groundwater. Unexploded bombs, bullets, and projectiles are among the toxic contents of these Superfund sites, specifically on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques which was used by the military as a bomb-test site.
In the southern coastal town of Guayama, a five-story pile of coal ash has been sitting next to a low-income, minority community of 45,000 people. This ash contains heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury, and chromium. The company responsible is Applied Energy Systems (AES), which was ordered to remove the pile prior to the hurricane but whether this was done is unclear. It is highly likely that this toxic ash has contaminated the surrounding land water sources.
At this point, we must continue to urge the U.S. government to provide ongoing aid to our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico. Be sure to check back with CHEJ on the front of environmental justice for Puerto Ricans following this humanitarian disaster.
Click on the below link to see how you can help the victims of Hurricane Maria:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/can-help-hurricane-victims-puerto-rico/
Categories
Who Owns the Sun?
Over the past 5 years rooftop installation of solar panels have seen explosive growth, perhaps as much as 900 percent, over the past six years according to an article in the New York Times. The U.S. solar market had its biggest year ever in 2016, nearly doubling its previous record and adding more electric generating capacity than any other source of energy for the first time ever. “It would be hard to overstate how impressive 2016 was for the solar industry,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “Prices dropped to all-time lows, installations expanded in states across the country and job numbers soared. The bottom line is that more people are benefiting from solar now than at any point in the past, and while the market is changing, the broader trend over the next five years is going in one direction – and that’s up.”
Despite this unprecedented growth, new residential installations in 2017 has hit a snag. According to Forbes magazine, rooftop installations in the residential market could slow to as little as 9% this year, down from 16% in 2016, compared to an average growth of 63% over the three preceding years.
Several factors are cited for this decline including saturated markets like California, financial troubles for several top solar panel manufacturers, and lower energy costs primarily due to fracking. Another factor however is a well-funded highly orchestrated lobbying campaign by traditional utilities. According to Forbes magazine, utility companies are pushing back against residential solar in multiple states, citing the higher effective costs of catering to customers with residential installations. In states such as Nevada, residential and small-scale commercial solar users face higher electricity rates, along with reductions in the credits they receive for sending their unused solar generated electricity back to the grid, a practice known as “net metering.” The utilities are growing increasingly uncomfortable with homeowners generating their own energy and even making a profit by selling their unused energy back to the grid.
An outrageous example of how this scenario is playing out is occurring in North Carolina where Duke Energy used its power and influence in the state to attack the green energy efforts of a small environmental advocacy group to build solar projects for non-profits. Just this month, the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld a $60,000 fine levied against NC WARN of Durham for installing solar panels on the roof of the Faith Community Church in Greensboro, NC and selling the energy to the church. Duke Energy who has a monopoly of the energy use in the state (as well as several other southern states), asked the court to make an example of NC WARN and to heavily penalize them for illegally selling solar electricity. North Carolina is one of only four states where third party sales of energy is thought to be disallowed.
Duke’s position is particularly outrageous because NC WARN had installed the solar panels on the roof of the church as a test case to clarify state policy on third party sales that allow solar companies to sell power directly to customers from systems on those customers’ property. NC WARN and the church’s Rev. Nelson Johnson very publicly announced their reason for installing the solar panels which was also accompanied by a legal request for a declaratory ruling by the NC Utilities Commission.
NC WARN is strongly considering an appeal to the NC Supreme Court. They have no intention to give up their efforts to break Duke Energy’s longstanding monopoly on electricity sales in the state. Energy companies like Duke Energy do not own the sun. They cannot dictate who profits and who does not from taping the sun’s energy to generate electricity. What NC WARN and multiple other nonprofits and solar companies are doing is what we need to do to safely and cleanly generate electricity and create jobs while doing it. Despite the efforts of the utilities to control the sun, the future for solar continues to appear quite bright.
Innocent Families in wake of hurricanes Irma and Harvey were given choices: Stay and risk your families lives with the wrath of the hurricanes or face interrogation, detention and deportation.
How inhumane can our government be? I’m shocked and saddened by the uncaring, cruel and downright dangerous behavior of our country’s police. A category five hurricane will hit Florida and people need to find a safe shelter for their families. But the police publicly announced that will be checking people as they arrive to shelters for outstanding warrents.
They need help not threats and more fear of harm. In Texas, last week it was border patrols checking vehicles leaving via evacuation routes.
Over 50 inches of rain and rushing water flooded Houston and surrounding areas. Innocent people; women, children, and men are homeless, without food, water, health care. Isn’t a natural disaster, which is predicted to take away everything the families owns and values, enough pain and suffering? Do we also have to harass those trying to escape to higher ground because of the color of their skin or harass those seeking shelter by forcing them to stand in line to prove they are legal or don’t have a warrant out against them.
What ever happened to America’s humanity, compassion and kindness?
Five years ago, when tropical Storm Sandy hit New York City, immigration enforcement announced that the highest priority was promoting “life saving and life promoting activities, the safe evacuation of people who are leaving the impacted area, and the maintenance of public order, not checking immigration status. Neither the New York or New Jersey police were stopping people at shelters to be sure they don’t have an outstanding warrant.
As Hurricane Irma approaches Florida, a sheriff in Poke County, announced on Wednesday that law enforcement authorities would check the identities of people who turn up at shelters and take to jail anyone found to have an active arrest warrant. “If you go to a shelter for Irma and you have a warrant, we’ll gladly escort you to the safe and secure shelter called the Polk County Jail,” announced sheriff Grady Judd, of Polk County.
When Hurricane Harvey was approaching Corpus Christi, TX the Border Patrol kept their check points open: causing extreme traffic, endangering drivers, and potentially making people who need to evacuate decide to stay behind in the storm out of fear of interaction and interrogation.
I’ve worked with communities across Texas, Louisiana and Florida. Families living in Corpus Christi are at the fence line of Refinery Row, miles of petroleum refineries. Every day they live in fear not of deportation or going to jail for a bad deed they did, but fear of cancer, asthma and disease from exposures to air pollution. Where are the police then? The pollution police, at the federal or state levels do almost no enforcement after receiving calls after calls for help because young children and the elderly can’t breathe. Families live there are mostly Latino and African Americans who settled there decades ago because the city would not allow them to live in other neighborhoods.
Corporations get away with the poisoning of innocent families every single day. It’s about time that our racist enforcement agencies start going after the real criminals, corporate polluters. Instead of border patrols for evacuation routes there should be border patrols for air pollution beyond the corporate fence line.
Instead of looking for those individuals at shelters that have an outstanding warrant against them, police should start issuing warrants for CEOs of corporate polluters responsible for harming innocent children’s lungs, neurological systems and their abilities to learn and succeed.
It’s time our country’s police went after the real corporate criminals, they come dressed in suits, carry briefcases and use their private planes to escape danger like we’ve seen in Harvey and Irma.
The Trump Administration and newly-appointed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt claim to desire to return Superfund cleanups “to their rightful place at the center of the EPA’s core mission”1, however their actions speak differently: their proposed budget includes a 30% cut in funding to the Superfund. In April, Pruitt assembled a Task Force to provide recommendations for the future of Superfund, chaired by Albert Kelly, a prior bank chairman with no environmental experience. On June 22nd, the report was released and the recommendations it contains raise major concerns decreasing cleanup oversight, privileging corporate interests over public health, and a lack of community involvement.
In response, CHEJ has prepared a point-by-point rebuttal of the key recommendations of Pruitt’s report. We intend to share this document with members of our coalition to serve as a guide in the on-going process of organizing together in the pursuit of Superfund reform and Environmental Justice.
Read our response to Pruitt’s plan for Superfund here:
Response to the EPA Superfund Task Force Report (1)
Don’t drink the water. That’s something you’d expect to hear when you travel to a developing country. But that’s what people are saying in Wilmington, a historic beach, tourist and retiree destination and the eighth-largest city in this state. It also happens to be one of my favorite places to go when I need a reprieve from the heat and humidity of central North Carolina. With its charming historic riverfront, shops, delicious restaurants, parks, water sports and beautiful beaches, it’s a great place to relax and unwind. The last thing one should have to worry about is the safety of the local drinking water.
Over the past couple of months, Wilmington residents have learned that DuPont and its spinoff company Chemours have been dumping unregulated chemicals into the Cape Fear River for decades and only recently stopped at the request of the governor. The result: Disturbing levels of chemicals like 1,4-dioxane, GenX and PFOA have been found in the drinking water of residents in Wilmington, Brunswick and the surrounding area.
These types of of chemicals, called fluorinated compounds, have been linked to cancer, thyroid disease and obesity. GenX and other fluorinated compounds are used in the making of Teflon, Scotchgard and other stain-resistant and water-repellant products. They are designed so that they are water- and oil-repellant, which means that they are extremely difficult to treat in water-treatment plants before they hit our taps.
While GenX has received a lot of the attention, the chemical 1,4-dioxane – which is much more well-studied – has been found in some places to be in excess of 35 parts per billion, a level at which, when consumed regularly over the course of a lifetime, cancer risk becomes two orders of magnitude higher than that at generally acceptable levels. Many Wilmington residents have been drinking this water their whole lives. Now they must worry about the risks to their and their children’s health.
Wilmington has asked the EPA to start looking into GenX and investigating the safety of its water. But with asbestos denier Scott Pruitt and chemical industry representative Nancy Beck overseeing EPA’s program in charge of regulating these chemicals, I don’t have much faith in their investigation. Now, the Trump Administration has nominated Michael Dourson to lead the entire toxics program at the EPA. Will Mr. Dourson provide hope for Wilmington?
A look at his background also leaves me skeptical. In 2002, DuPont hand-picked Dourson’s firm Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA) to advise West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality on setting health levels for PFOA, one of the same chemicals now found in Wilmington’s water. His firm came up with a level that was thousands of times less protective than a later EPA assessment. 1,4-dioxane is currently under review by the very office that Mr. Dourson has been nominated to lead. Yet he also published research on that chemical paid for entirely by PPG, a company responsible for discharging this chemical and contaminating Ohio’s waterways.
Saturday, I went to a Rally for Clean Water in Wilmington to talk with residents about their concerns. They want what we all want – to know that when they open up the tap, they can drink the water without worrying about toxic chemicals. And they deserve better: corporate polluters that are held accountable for egregious pollution and government officials who will protect their health and safety at the local and the national level.
By Ansje Miller resides in Hillsborough and is the director of policy and partnerships for the Center for Environmental Health.
It has been almost 40 years since the nation heard the cries for help from Love Canal, a school and neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York built on a toxic dump filled with 21,000 tons of chemical waste. Children were sick, parents were scared and families lost their homes.
I know, because my children, my family and my home were among them.
The Love Canal crisis created a public awareness and scientific understanding that the chemicals people are exposed to in their everyday environment can cause serious harm to their health, especially to pregnant women and young children.
This understanding of the serious risk of living near pollution was the impetus to creating the Superfund program in 1980. The program gives communities power to hold corporations responsible for cleaning up contamination.
The cornerstone of the program is the “polluter pays” principle.
President Jimmy Carter signed the Superfund bill knowing that other sites similar to Love Canal would have immediate resources to reduce and eliminate people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. And it worked well for 20 years, including under presidents Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, and Clinton, who all supported the program and the tax that funded it.
Then, in 1995, Congress allowed the tax to expire and by 2003, the entire financial burden of paying to clean up the worst orphan toxic sites fell to the taxpayers. As a result, the number of toxic sites cleaned up went from an average of 85 a year down to as few as eight a year now.
The recently appointed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says Superfund is his priority. As the “mother of Superfund,” as I am often called, I should be thrilled. Instead, I’m terrified.
How can Pruitt call Superfund a priority if he’s proposing cutting the program’s budget by $330 million without advocating for the polluters’ tax to be reinstated?
There are 1,300 sites on the Superfund list. Of those, 121 sites don’t have human exposure under control. Contaminant levels at these sites are unsafe and people are at risk. There are another187 sites where groundwater migration of waste isn’t under control.
Nearly 53 million people live within three miles of a Superfund site, 46 percent are people of color and 15 percent live below the poverty line.
Pruitt is forming a special task force to improve Superfund, but his directive sounds eerily like a plan to expand the Superfund Alternatives program, and that would be a disaster.
Under Superfund Alternatives, responsible parties agree to clean up a site to avoid the stigma of being listed on the National Priority List. The program benefits the polluter while punishing the victims. It gives power to corporations, takes it away from communities harmed by the toxic sites, and weakens EPA oversight.
Superfund Alternatives removes mandatory citizen participation and access to information and resources provided by Superfund. Under the program, technical assistance grants that allow citizens to hire their own experts to review data and plans are awarded by the polluter rather than the EPA.
The alternative approach also allows a company to avoid flagging a National Priority List site as a liability in its financial papers. This can have a significant impact, especially if the company is being sold.
If the polluter is cleaning up the site under Pruitt’s watch, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the cleanup will be as minimal as possible. The result will be partially cleaned-up sites being used for other purposes – and on a path back to where we started 40 years ago.
Institutional controls are supposed to prevent land that is too contaminated for residential use from ever being used for homes and schools. At Love Canal, those institutional controls failed in the 1950s to stop construction of the 99th Street School.
Under Pruitt’s direction, families like those recently evacuated from contaminated public housing in East Chicago, Indiana, might still be there, getting sicker.
If Pruitt truly wants to protect people around Superfund sites, then his first steps should be to advocate for reinstating the “polluter pays” tax to provide funds to adequately clean up sites.
He should hold polluters, not taxpayers, responsible for cleanup costs and collect triple damages from polluters who force EPA to go to court. He should also continue the technical assistance grants that provide communities with the information they need to understand their cleanup options.
Pruitt must protect the power of communities to hold polluters responsible, because after 40 years, it is painfully clear that we can’t count on corporations.
We in the wealthiest country in the world should feel ashamed. America takes our most vulnerable families – poor or working poor – and houses them next to polluting industries, poisons their children and now wants to take away their access to health care.
This vicious cycle of poison and poverty leads young men and women to end up sick, dead or in prisons.
Polluters Don’t Pay, We Do
Many low-income families only find housing near polluting facilities or on contaminated lands. There are many reasons for this: for many years, African Americans and Latinos were only allowed to live in certain sections of a city or town because of their race. Polluting facilities were often built near these vulnerable communities of color, creating a poisonous environment for innocent families.
As a result, children become sick, poisoned by lead and toxic chemicals in the air and soil. Too many of these children miss too many days from school, which leads them to fall behind or develop learning disabilities. This creates a situation in which they cannot succeed in school.
Polluting industries often find ways to avoid contributing to their local tax base, which funds public schools. As a result, these schools are unable to hire enough special education teachers to help vulnerable children succeed. Students become frustrated and drop out of school, ending up on the streets and getting in trouble.
Remember Freddie
Let’s remember Freddie Gray, who was killed in police custody in Baltimore in 2015. In court, the officers charged with his death justified their recklessness by claiming they could not prevent his fatal injuries because he became combative after arrest.
Gray’s aggressive behavior – if it even happened – could have been a result of toxic poisoning. In 2008, he and his two sisters were found to have damaging levels of lead in their blood, the result of living for years in a rented house where lead paint flaked off walls and windowsills in the rooms where they slept.
From Paint to Prison
There are hundreds of conclusive studies that confirm lead exposure is a cause of aggressive behavior. Freddie Gray needlessly lost his life at 25 years of age. Far too many young people and children like him are poisoned by environmental chemicals, then end up dead or in prison.
Prison isn’t free of chemicals either, adding an additional burden to these young victims. At least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site, which are the most environmentally dangerous sites in the country. 134 of those prisons are within one mile of a Superfund site. Furthermore, it is common practice to build prisons directly on former industrial sites that conceal a myriad of health hazards.
Poverty keeps families from living in safe, unpolluted environments. America builds “affordable housing” often on top of poisoned soil. Today, the state of Indiana is trying to find housing for hundreds of families in East Calumet because the land is so contaminated with lead and other chemicals that no one can live there. Yet families have lived there for years, with young children playing on that contaminated soil.
We Share The Same Dreams
Today, our lawmakers want to deepen these violations of the most vulnerable among us by taking away what little health care they have. Children in poisoned communities can’t breathe because of contaminated air; now they want to take away their asthma medication. In some communities, there are clusters of childhood cancers with victims who need extensive medical attention. Regular access to clinics for infants and blood testing for lead are not a choice: parents must be able to secure that medical screening and care.
These parents have the same dreams of success for their children as those who are wealthy. But their children have little chance of achieving those dreams because they are poisoned, without their knowledge or consent, and failed by our educational system.
If the Trump administration has their way, they will let the poor and communities of color be poisoned with no ability to seek medical attention. Young people already poisoned will end up in prison or dead on the streets.
Today, all parents with dreams for their children must fight back to break this cycle of poison and poverty. If we join together we can win justice for all, not just the privileged.
Environmental Justice is a system of thought which asserts that all people have a right to equal environmental hazard protection and access to the decision-making process upon which their welfare hinges. Moreover, this paradigm recognizes that marginalized groups are, by far, the most affected by environmental harms. Environmental Justice and Incarceration my not seem to have much in common at first glance, however, over a thousand prisons across America are home to shocking toxic hazards.
Independent cartographer Paige Williams claims that at least 589 federal and state prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund cleanup site on the National Priorities List, with 134 of those prisons located within just one mile. Furthermore, it is common practice to build prisons on former industrial cites which are hosts to a myriad of health hazards.
Paul Wright, Executive Director of the Human Rights Defense Fund, explains that “one of the patterns that we see is where corporations have come in, they pillage the environment, be it by mining, forestry or whatever, and then when everything has been exhausted, when trees have been cut down, every last grain of ore has been ripped from the soil, and everything has been contaminated and poisoned in the process, the final solution is, okay now we’re going to build a prison here.”
SCI Fayette is one of many such prisons, located on the corner of an abandoned coal preparation plant which has become a dumpsite, containing 45 million tons of coal refuse. Coal ash exposure can lead to a host of conditions, including respiratory problems, hypertension, heart problems, brain and nervous system damage, liver damage, stomach and intestinal ulcers, and many forms of cancer, including skin, stomach, lung, urinary tract and kidney. A 2014 review found that 81 percent of the 75 prisoners who responded to a health survey claimed to suffer from respiratory, throat and sinus conditions; 68 percent experienced gastrointestinal problems; 52 percent reported adverse skin conditions; and 12 percent said they were diagnosed with a thyroid disorder. The report also noted 11 of the 17 prisoners who died at SCI Fayette between 2010 and 2013 had died of cancer.
Kenneth Hartman, who nearly died from contracting a fungal infection in a California State prison, asserts that “prisons found to be a serious health risk need to be closed. The changes made [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”][to address valley fever] are about managing risk and trying to avoid lawsuits, not about fixing the problems of a massively dysfunctional prison system.” He alludes to a larger issue with the public mindset: “the problem is, the intersection of environmental justice and mass incarceration runs right into the teeth of prisoners not being considered worthy of justice. If we complain about dirty water, or poor ventilation systems, or inadequate medical care, there is a collective societal shrug: You should have thought about that before you committed crime.”
Mass incarceration traps thousands of Americans in areas of life-threatening toxic exposure. We cannot go on turning a blind eye to this sickening abuse of human rights.
Action Resources:
Join the Prison Ecology Project Campaign: http://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/
Citations:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/40756-america-s-toxic-prisons-the-environmental-injustices-of-mass-incarceration
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/jun/3/ncarceration-justice-and-planet-how-fight-against-toxic-prisons-may-shape-future-environmentalism/[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
Last week, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Here’s what Pittsburgh had to say about it:
“Mr. President, when you took our country out of the global agreement to stop climate change, you said you “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” As a proud native of western Pennsylvania, I strongly disagree.
You do not represent Pittsburgh. Our people overwhelmingly rejected you at the ballot box, and we have seen your brand of charlatanism before.
For generations, glorified highwaymen like you have come to exploit the people and land of western Pennsylvania, and gorged themselves on their spoils. These salesmen claimed gold would rain down on us, if only we let them dump toxins in our rivers. We didn’t buy it then, and we don’t buy it now…
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Rights for workers and protections for our land and water are victories that had to be fought for and won by the people of western Pennsylvania from highwaymen like you…
Mr. President, Pittsburgh is not your punch line. Your speechwriters probably chose us from a Google search of “cities that start with P,” but we are indeed on the front lines of climate change, and we will bear the cost of your bad choices.
If we stay the course you have set and do nothing to halt climate change, both Pittsburgh and Washington, DC will be coastal cities as New York and Boston sink below the rising tide of warming oceans.
Mr. President, Pittsburgh is proudly part of the planet we share. The people of Pittsburgh breathe the same air as the people of Paris and Poland and Palau. You represent profits for the few, not the People of Pittsburgh.”
Read the entire letter written by Daniel Doubet of Keystone Progress on OurFuture.org[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]