In a previous blog by CHEJ’s Science Director, Stephen Lester, we saw that Environmental Justice (EJ) communities are not at all confined to the US. In fact, they may be even more prevalent in developing countries, and their struggles can help us better learn how to fight for justice in our own communities.
One such example is in the South American country of Ecuador, where Texaco, later annexed by oil giants Chevron, polluted massive portions of the Amazon rain forest with their oil drilling operations for nearly 40 years during the later half of the past century. Between 1954 and 1990, the amount of contamination dumped in Ecuador’s Amazon portion is estimated to be over 30 times greater than the oil spilled during the Exxon Valdez disaster.
In 2003, over 30,000 affected Ecuadorians – many of them indigenous people – filed a class-action lawsuit against Chevron, accusing the oil company of being directly responsible for more than 1,000 cancer deaths. Years of legal battles and stalling tactics by Chevron ensued, but in a recent development the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that a prior decision by an Ecuadorean court fining Chevron $9.5 billion in 2011 should be upheld.
Although it is still unclear what body would have the authority to enforce the ICJ’s ruling, this decision is a massive victory for the people of Ecuador. Their perseverance – over 10 years of struggle and activism – lead to this development. In addition, despite having severely limited monetary resources and little education as well as political influence, they found strength in numbers. More than 30,000 individuals came together and organized for the cause. They used the small connections they had to draw in NGOs and other organizations to help them in their cause.
In the end, the people from Ecuador may yet achieve retribution and justice from the multibillion company that polluted their homes and killed their loved ones. As for us, we should congratulate and learn from their hard work and determination.
Whether your group is new or has been organized for years, one of the most pressing questions you’ll face is about health problems in your community. Typically, if you raise enough public attention and pressure, the state will ask the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to do a health study. While you may initially be excited, be careful what you ask for. ATSDR has a poor track record at investigating health problems in communities. You are more likely to get a result that is “inconclusive by design” than you are to get an honest answer to your questions. At least that’s what history tells us.
You can expect at least two things from ATSDR: First, the agency is going to treat your community like every other community that they have gone into. Second, ATSDR is going to use the standard methods they use to evaluate and investigate the health problems in your community. Unfortunately, these scientific methods cannot answer with any accuracy or assurance the questions that people have about health problems in their community. The best state-of-the-art scientific methods that ATSDR will use cannot determine what’s causing an increase in cancer, birth defects or any other adverse effect in a population of people.
In 99 out of 100 instances, health studies conducted by ATSDR or other government agencies are inconclusive or at best incapable of determining what might be causing an observed increase in a disease found in a community. Given this likely outcome, it’s critical to have a plan for how to get the most from a health study done in your community.
One important step is to define as a community what you want. Do you want a typical epidemiological study where a questionnaire is distributed throughout the community asking about health problems and the results are then compared to a matched unexposed community? Do you want a clinic set up in the community where people could be tested to evaluate their health? Maybe some portion of the community wants to be relocated or evacuated and you want ATSDR to recommend such action.
Once you’re clear on what you want, then you need to figure out how to achieve these goals. This will take some strategic planning and a strong organized community effort. Ask these three questions about the health study, the answers to which will give you a good sense of the intent of the investigators and the limits of the study:
What are the goals of the investigation?
How will the investigators get the information they need?
How are they going to release the results?
Based on what you find out, you may decide that you don’t want to participate in this study. Or you may decide you want to change the agency’s plan to something that will be useful to your group. Changing their plan will require a strong organized community effort and a plan to get your points across to the agency. CHEJ can help you develop a plan to address a health study. Contact us at chej@chej.org
Also, tune in tomorrow at 12 noon EST to participate in a training session on Health Studies: What can they tell you about health problems in your community?
This past month I’ve spent time with several grassroots organizations fighting to protect their families from environmental chemical threats. In each case I was reminded of how impossible it is for parents, with dreams of a bright successful future for their children, to achieve their goals while living in the circle of poison and poverty.
Many parents in low wealth communities, tell the story of how they work hard to support their children in school. Moms and dads make sure their homework is done, provide the healthiest breakfast and lunch they can afford and attend as many meeting and events that time allows. They want their children to succeed in school, to learn the skills needed to later secure a job that will bring them a better life.
Yet, no matter how hard parents try they often can’t stop the environmental poisons in the air, water or land. As the children leave for school the toxic air triggers an asthma attack. A parent must lose a day of work, daily earnings, and take the child to the hospital or care for the child at home. When a child is exposed to other environmental chemicals, or maybe even the same ones that cause the asthma, they can suffer from various forms of central nervous system irritants that cause hyperactive behaviors, loss of IQ point or a host of other problems that interfere with learning potential.
The end result is the child becomes frustrated because s/he can’t keep up with what is required at school because of being sick or unable to focus and often drops out of school. That child and the parent’s dreams disappear. A healthy baby, poisoned for years from environmental chemicals, life is forever altered. Often unable to earn enough money to ever leave the poisoned community, possibly even raising their own families in that same neighborhood, continues another generation within the circle of poverty and poison.
America’s environmental protection agencies are responsible for a healthy environment. As we all know the agencies fail often and even more frequently in low wealth communities. In my conversations with leaders in such areas I hear over and over again, parents saying we had so much hope for our child but the chemicals destroyed that hope. Our family can’t afford to move and our children can’t succeed if we stay and they are poisoned. What are families supposed to do? I can’t answer that question, except to say keep speaking up and out. Can you answer parent’s cries for a solution?
Styrene-acrylonitrile trimer. It sounds like some sort of noxious mega-rocket fuel that Wile E. Coyote used to power his Acme rockets as he tried to take the Roadrunner down. Turns out styrene-acrylonitrile trimer, or SAN trimer for short, is not so far from being just that as the residents of Toms River, NJ painfully and tragically found out.
SAN trimer is a compound set of similar semi-volatile chemicals that are formed during the production of acrylonitrile styrene plastics. This compound is relatively new to modern toxicology, having been studied in depth only within the past decade and a half. As a result, its toxicological properties remain poorly understood – and the residents of Toms River and its surrounding areas paid the price for our lack of understanding and, most importantly, our carelessness.
In 1971 a waste hauler working for Union Carbide improperly disposed of drums containing toxic solvents on a section of the three-acre Reich Farm property in Toms River leading to massive soil and groundwater contamination with volatile organic compounds such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE). Consequently, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and USEPA worked to address the site’s contamination, introducing it into the National Priorities List in 1983, developing a cleanup plan in 1988 and culminating the soil portion in 1995 (groundwater treatment was ongoing).
However, the SAN trimer lay hidden in the groundwater undisturbed by the treatment system – silently eating away at the health of the local residents. In 1996, significantly elevated rates of certain childhood cancers were found in the Toms River area. A staggering total of 90 cases of childhood cancer were reported from 1979-1995. New Jersey authorities were baffled by this and frantically looked for possible causes. Finally, with the help of the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, they found a possible culprit as high concentrations of the SAN trimer in groundwater surrounding the Reich Farm Superfund Site were detected. Despite having practically zero understanding of the toxicity of SAN trimer, this find led to an update in the groundwater treatment system designed to remove the SAN trimer. Simultaneously, the National Toxicology Program was asked to conduct studies on the SAN Trimer to determine its health effects, and they completed their review in 2012.
The results concluded that the SAN trimer has potential to cause peripheral nerve degeneration, bone marrow hyperplasia and urinary bladder hyperplasia, while also concluding that it has no carcinogenic effects. However, the study consisted of 7 week, 18 week, and 2 year reviews of rats exposed to the SAN trimer as well as bacterial assays. These studies were quite limited and simply underscore our incomplete knowledge of SAN trimer toxicity. Furthermore, although not statistically significant, dose-related increases in DNA damage in brain and liver cells of test rats were observed pointing the way towards a possible association with cancer.
What is clear is that the SAN trimer is one of many new chemicals whose toxicity we simply do not understand. The reality is that it was present for nearly 20 years at the Reich Farm Superfund Site, and it ate up the lives of the children living there. Now, over 35 years since the site became contaminated, EPA held a public meeting in Toms River last Friday to explain how the SAN trimer is not responsible for the cancer cluster that devoured so many lives. And what are they basing this assessment on? On the lie they tell themselves and the rest of the public – that we understand how the SAN trimer works on our bodies, and that this hidden killer is not responsible for ruining 90 lives.
Truer words have never been spoken. In CHEJ’s recent training on Lessons Learned from New York State, which recently banned fracking until it can be proven safe, Eric Weltman from Food and Water Watch told the group to demand what you want not what is feasible.
I find it frustrating and a bit troubling when I visit communities who are struggling to protect their health and environment from environmental threats and they ask for less than they deserve and need. When I ask leaders, “why short change themselves,” they often respond saying they don’t want to sound unreasonable or worse because their opponents said it’s too expensive. Leaders and community members are often bullied into believing that they must take less or they won’t get anything. This is just not true.
At Love Canal in 1978, our community was told that government does not evacuate families and purchase homes because of toxic pollution. If we didn’t stick to our goal we would never had been evacuated. When the environmental health and justice movement demanded that no more commercial landfills be built, we were all told it must go somewhere. Several years later up until today no new commercial hazardous wastes landfills have been built, although it is still legal to do so.
In one of CHEJ’s consumer campaigns around a multinational corporation, we were demanding they take certain products off their shelves. The corporations response was, we won’t be bullied by radical environmental group. Yet a short time later they did exactly what we and consumers across the country asked.
No one should ask or accept as the final decision, what is not right and fair. However, winning the big ask is more difficult and demands serious discipline. Everyone needs to be on the same page and demand the same goal. Yes, there are always those few who will say out loud and even in the media that they would be wiling to accept less. Yet if the loud vocal people, the base of the majority, the framers of the campaign stick with their larger goal for justice, they will dominate the campaign. Those with smaller goals will be essential drowned out by the voices and actions of this larger group.
This was the case in New York State around fracking. There were good people who would have accepted better regulations or only drilling in certain parts of the state. In every issue those working from various groups often have different goals. Sometimes their efforts help build toward the larger goal and other times they may be an irritation. The key to win it all is to build larger stronger, more visible opposition and demand for the larger goals. In this way you can win your goals without publicly fighting with others.
As Eric told us, “we were relentless. With op-eds, press events, using the public participation/comment period to submit a hundred thousands of “comments” that said Ban Fracking Now –not detailed line by line comments about regulations that were proposed. Hundreds of groups participated in bird dogging the governor who couldn’t go anywhere without a group, small or large in his face demanding he ban fracking.”
Secondly, Eric was clear that you need a single target, in NYS it was the governor. “You need to find the person who has the power to give you what you are demanding,” he said. I would add that it always needs to be a person not an entity, like regulatory agency or corporation. You need a human face on your opponent and your messengers to make it all work.
This is a time tested strategy and if you follow it you are more likely to receive a higher level of justice not a compromising solution.
A former official with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources writes a sizzling farewell letter about the burning Bridgeton landfill. He has issued an open letter claiming politics – not science – is dominating the state’s handling of the landfill crisis. Norris says within the DNR, scientists are “losing their minds because they are fighting their own management structure,” which seems more concerned with politics than public safety. He says there is “an overall cozy relationship between the landfill owner and the DNR.” Read more.
Over 5000 kids products reported to contain chemicals linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and other chemicals that are a concern for kids’ health. Read the new report from Washington Toxics Coalition and Safer States. http://bit.ly/chemreveal
In 1965, when I was 8 years old, my mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was given less than a year to live. By some miracle she survived, only to be diagnosed with breast cancer some 20 years later. She survived this too, but in 1995 she developed a rare T cell lymphoma. She died in 2007, after fighting these three different types of cancer for over forty years.
My mother’s illnesses influenced me profoundly. As a child, I wanted to become a doctor so I could make her better, but as the physicians failed to cure her, I became more interested in how cancer could be prevented. To find out more, I decided to study biochemistry. After completing a bachelor’s degree and a doctorate, I became convinced that toxic chemicals and radiation played a role in this life-threatening disease. This realization led me to join the environmental health movement.
I suspect that most people join this social movement because, like me, they know someone with an environmentally-related disease or because they live in a community affected by pollution. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Social activism is often a result of direct, personal experience. Although scientific and economic information is important, living with or witnessing an environmental health problem firsthand can inspire activism in a way that facts and figures alone don’t.
The leaders of the U.S. environmental health movement are well aware of this. For the past 35 years, they have intentionally drawn attention to the health effects of toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards. By highlighting the effects of pollution on living, breathing people, they are putting a human face on the issues. Whether it’s a cancer survivor talking about how she copes with daily life or a mom talking about her child’s learning disabilities, the stories of real people dealing with real illnesses make environmental issues much more tangible and immediate.
This is the environmental health movement’s unique strategy. Unlike most environmentalists, who emphasize the natural world, the environmental health movement shines a spotlight on human health and well-being. This may sound like a subtle difference, but it affects how issues are framed and communicated to the public. More importantly, it makes a huge difference in how the public understands them.
Shining a spotlight on human health has made the environmental health movement successful. Working mostly at the state and local levels, activists have organized countless communities to protest abandoned toxic waste dumps, oppose new hazardous facilities, raise awareness about local disease clusters and draw attention to environmental injustice. The movement has also won numerous legislative victories. Over 900 toxics policies were proposed or enacted in the U.S. between 1990 and 2009, and between 2003 and 2011, 18 states passed 71 chemical safety laws..
The environmental health movement was born in 1978, just two years before I joined it. As supporters of CHEJ will know, in that year, Lois Gibbs first raised the alarm about the health effects of toxic chemicals leaking from an abandoned waste dump in Love Canal, New York. Organizing her neighbors to demand action, she fought the government and won.
Since then, the environmental health movement has spread across the U.S. and around the globe. Today, about 10,000 environmental health organizations and people are listed on WISER, a worldwide social networking website for sustainability. Almost 4,500 members in about 80 countries and all 50 states form the Collaborative on Health and the Environment. There are now environmental health groups in every major city and state in the U.S.
But despite its success and widespread public support, very little has been written about this social movement. There are many books on the environmental movement, the environmental justice movement and the science of environmental health, but only a handful on the environmental health movement.
My new book, The Rise of the U.S. Environmental Health Movement, is an attempt to remedy this situation and give it the recognition it so richly deserves. In the book, I describe the historical and cultural origins of the U.S. environmental health movement and analyze the organizations and strategies that comprise it today. By examining what has made this movement successful, the book provides insights into what social movements can do to advance positive social change.
Those of us who are part of the environmental health movement do this work because we are called to do it. For us, there is simply no other choice. As the poet Adrienne Rich wrote:
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
Today in the Washington Post was a front page news story that talks about how the large environmental organizations are not diverse enough.
This is the same story written many times beginning in the late 1980’s. It sparked a national conversation and action that lead to the first Environmental Justice Summit in 1991 and in 1994 Bill Clinton signed an executive order Environmental Justice Act. The story talked about counting heads (non-white) on staff, in decision making positions and members of the Board. That story is not new and I believe is way too narrow of a focus.
The large environmental organizations have brought more diversity to their staff and their board, then was the case in 1990, but they are still a far cry from being diverse. However, I think just counting people of color within an organization is not the only or even the best measurement of their efforts to address the multitude of issues within the context of environmental justice.
One point that the Washington Post article raised, I think is at the heart of the issues. “Today, minority communities — black, Latino and Native American — along with low-income white neighborhoods still bear a disproportionate burden of the nation’s toxic pollution. They are in the shadows of petrochemical plants and coal-fired power plants, the nation’s greatest source of stationary pollution, according to the Congressional Research Service.” A diverse group of staff and board members will not change anything unless the large green organizations decide to makes a radical shift in their missions, goals and resource allocation.
It is a fact, detailed in a NCRP report that, environmental funders mainly support large, professionalized environmental organizations instead of the grassroots community-based groups that are most heavily impacted by environmental harms. Organizations with annual budgets greater than $5 million make up only 2% of all environmental groups, yet receive more than 50% of all environmental grants and donations. This makes it even more imperative that large organizations need to not only change the ethnic makeup of staff and board but also move significant resources to reflect their commitment to the field. The report makes the simple but profound argument that the current environmental funding strategy is not working and that, without targeting philanthropy at communities most impacted by environmental harms, the movement will continue to fail.
In movements throughout history, the core of leadership came from a nucleus of directly impacted or oppressed communities while also engaging a much broader range of justice-seeking supporters. In other words, successful movements for social change — anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, and civil rights — have always been inspired, energized, and led by those most directly affected. Yet these are the very groups within the environmental movement that are starved for funds.
Robert Garcia said in the Washington Post article, “The values of the mainstream environmental movement don’t focus on the needs of people. They focus on clean air, water and climate.” I agree with Robert Garcia, who founded and provides counsel for the City Project in Los Angeles and would add why are they not investing in communities on the front lines?
Alonzo Spencer, CHEJ’s Board Chairman, lives with a hazardous waste incinerator that has been out of compliance more often than in compliance. His community was designated an Environmental Justice Community by the US EPA in the 1990’s. Other than CHEJ, his neighborhood has no skilled national group helping them. Where are the lobbyists that are needed to change the laws, not at the national level but at the state level?
In Ohio if you are out of compliance (not obeying the law) but you have a plan or schedule to come into compliance, you are considered in compliance. I know this because that is what the appeals court ruled when CHEJ took the case as far up as we could. So, in reality the facility never really needs to be in compliance they just need to keep putting together plans that say they will someday comply with the law. Yes, it is a fence line problem but it is also a climate issue given they release more than permitted of chemicals that impact climate and discharges contaminate the Ohio River and other sources of water.
Alonzo’s community has the highest rate of cancer in the state. Their elementary school was closed, which was a necessary action because the top of the stack of the incinerator was almost level to the school windows due to it being built below the bluff where the school stood. The local taxpayers had to pay to move the children to another school. A low-wealth county, spending money they don’t have to keep their children safe.
Or where are the resources to assist communities in Corpus Christi, TX? Along refinery row, all the industries say they are in compliance, and maybe they are, but when you have miles of refineries collectively the air is not breathable. Who lives there? Suzie Canales, another member of CHEJ’s board who tells the story about how the city charter designated section of the city specifically for African Americans and Latino’s to live. If you were Latino or African American family you could not purchase property outside of the cities designated area for your ethnic group. Therefore, homes were purchased near the refineries because they were not permitted to buy other properties. Now the properties are not only unsalable but a health risk to families who live there.
The conversation about environmental organizations and environmental justice really needs to be about resources and assistance to the front line communities rather than head counting. Someday, maybe all of the Green Groups would be diverse, but that alone will not translate into playing an active role in bringing real aide and justice to front line communities. There needs to be diversity, resources and a core commitment to solutions and necessary actions that come from the people who are impacted.
Two studies, from completely different states were recently released concluding the same thing. Both said there was no cause for alarm. Their findings . . . every elevated health abnormality was more likely due to something other than the chemicals in the environment. Poof the words on the paper report deflected the problems. Yet that is not what the studies honestly found.
Enough already . . . real people, with real families need honest answers. However, when there is a question or a real statistical finding of an abnormality the health authorities, as to not upset the corporate polluters or their friends in government, assumption that it’s more likely be a meteor, like recently seen in Russia, than due to chemical exposures in the air or soil. O.K. maybe not the meteor but the answers are just as foolish. The cause for high disease is almost never related to the obvious, 500 pound toxic elephant in the room, nor do the recommendations falls on the side of precaution and cleaning up the environment.
In North Birmingham a recent study around soil and air contamination suggested that the levels of chemicals would not be harmful to health unless you had pica children. Pica children are young and frequently because of age put hands and other things into their mouths. O.K. but the soils samples came from an elementary school grounds, just the place you would find pica children. Just wash their hands and teach them not to place their fingers in the mouth. Poof deflected. It’s the children’s fault and parents for not training the children well enough to keep their hands away from their mouths.
The second study came from New York. The NY State Department of Health undertook a study in Tonawanda where air contamination from multiple industries have been an on-going problem. They found high rates of cancer and birth defects. The study found cases of bladder cancer in the area were 24 percent higher for men and 81 percent higher for woman compared to the rest of New York State, excluding New York City. And women living in the neighborhood had 93 percent more leukemia cases than the rest of the state. Lastly, they found 30 percent more birth defects than the rest of New York State.
The analyses of birth outcomes in the study area compared to birth outcomes in NYS showed some elevations that were relatively smaller than the cancer elevations. Preterm births were elevated in the overall study area. Total heart defects as a group were also elevated, but major heart defects were not elevated.
Then poof the results went away! How? Doctors are better at reporting in the region then in other regions of the state. The report said, “the health investigators compared the birth outcomes in the study area to birth outcomes in Erie and Niagara Counties, the elevations declined substantially. This is consistent with other evidence suggesting this area has more complete reporting than elsewhere in the state.” Poof deflected.
Cancer results the health department said, “factors include smoking, family history, and occupational exposures, as well as others. In the general population, smoking is the most important risk factor for both lung and bladder cancer. We do not know the individual medical and exposure histories for the people included in this study.” Deflected again. So because the victims themselves could have cause the problem and we don’t know if they did the default is, these are sad people who are likely making themselves sick.
If only families living in contaminated areas could create that same magic and poof make the toxic, cancer causing and birth disrupting chemicals go away. Or pretend that contamination in school property will somehow not hurt young children even though the entire property, building and play area is intended for small children.
I walk with these parents, sit in their living rooms and listen as they try and struggle with the pain of their sick loved one and the disappointment they have for those who are supposed to protect and defend American families from criminals and their poisons.
It is hard to respond when parents, women ask over and over again, “why?” It’s not right when can’t smoke in buildings and restaurants (a very good law) but industries can just violate the law, poison people and government covers up the problems just as the tobacco industry did for decades. I never thought I’d see the day when the American people through our tax dollars hired scientists that mirror those that our elected leaders despised-tobacco scientists.
The message to all those fighting for justice and hoping that science may provide some evidence, it won’t – not because it can’t but because our scientists lack the back bone. Our struggles, although should be won on science alone, are clearly political fights and these two studies are just more proof.
In a previous blog by CHEJ’s Science Director, Stephen Lester, we saw that Environmental Justice (EJ) communities are not at all confined to the US. In fact, they may be even more prevalent in developing countries, and their struggles can help us better learn how to fight for justice in our own communities.
ems in your community. Typically, if you raise enough public attention and pressure, the state will ask the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) to do a health study. While you may initially be excited, be careful what you ask for. ATSDR has a poor track record at investigating health problems in communities. You are more likely to get a result that is “inconclusive by design” than you are to get an honest answer to your questions. At least that’s what history tells us.
In 1965, when I was 8 years old, my mother was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was given less than a year to live. By some miracle she survived, only to be diagnosed with breast cancer some 20 years later. She survived this too, but in 1995 she developed a rare T cell lymphoma. She died in 2007, after fighting these three different types of cancer for over forty years.