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,

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

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

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

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,