Environmental Integrity Project

As the incoming Biden Administration makes plans for its environmental agenda over the next four years, we interview a national leader in the environmental justice movement about how the White House can prioritize protecting minority and lower-income communities that have long been neglected. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali, a Vice President the National Wildlife Federation, worked for 24 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency until March of 2017, when he resigned because the Trump Administration wanted to eliminate EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, which Dr. Ali helped to create. He started working on social justice issues at the age of 16, joining EPA’s efforts as a student. Dr. Ali talks about the need to tackle COVID-19 as a justice issue and broadly expand the scope of federal efforts to reduce air pollution and improve water quality not only in urban neighborhoods, but also rural areas across the U.S. According to news reports, Dr. Ali is among those being considered for a high-level environmental role in the Biden Administration, perhaps directing the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Charlie Reeves grew up in public housing in South Philadelphia near the oldest and largest oil refinery on the East Coast, the Point Breeze Refinery, later owned by Sunoco and then Philadelphia Energy Solutions. Back in the 1970s, his father led public protests at City Hall and Sunoco headquarters over what he was convinced was toxic air pollution from the plant that was harming his family’s health. But authorities dismissed the protests and assured the neighborhood that everything was fine. Those reassurances didn’t ring true – especially when Charlie, his mother, and several neighbors were diagnosed with cancer, and Charlie’s mother died. But the neighborhood could not do anything to stop the refinery, because they had no evidence. Finally, the refinery closed on June 21, 2019, when a massive explosion and fire at the plant sent a fireball into the sky and rattled windows for miles around.

To Charlie Reeves, the most devastating fact was what he learned six months later, when the Environmental Integrity Project, working with NBC National News, revealed that air pollution monitors ringing the refinery had registered benzene – a known carcinogen — at the plant’s fence lines at concentrations averaging more than five times the federal limit (EPA’s “action level” for benzene) for an entire year. That meant that local residents like the Reeves family could have been exposed to excessive cancer risks for a long time – including months after the explosion, and potentially months or years before the fire. Charlie is determined to use the new benzene air monitoring data collected by the Environmental Integrity Project to fight for environmental justice for his lower-income neighborhood. Southwest Philadelphia is one of 13 communities across the country that face potential cancer risks from excessive benzene air pollution detected at the fencelines of nearby oil refineries, according to EPA data produced for the first time in 2019 because of a lawsuit filed by the Environmental Integrity Project and allies to help protect communities in Texas and Louisiana.

Brent Walls, the Upper Potomac Riverkeeper in Western Maryland, dedicated his life to fighting for clean water in the Nation’s River after he experienced a moment of clarity. He was serving in the U.S. Navy aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Constellation when he witnessed a routine procedure during his first cruise in the Pacific Ocean. “Twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, the ship would slow down and a bell would ring, and everyone would gather their trash and take it to the back of the boat and just throw it over,” Walls recalled. “I remember one time, in particular, it was a sunset, and there was nothing but open ocean. The ship slowed down and I could see just miles and miles of huge garbage bags floating that we just unloaded into the ocean. That kind of made me sick, it really did.” He knew there had to be a better way. And so, when he got out of the Navy, Walls transformed himself into a clean water warrior and a high-tech sleuth. As the Upper Potomac Riverkeeper for the last 11 years, he has worked to document and report pollution with digital photos, water sampling equipment, and a drone he launches from a James Bond-like compartment on the back of his motorcycle. He’s working with the Environmental Integrity Project to stop toxic water pollution from a paper mill site in Luke, Maryland. There, local residents are struggling to imagine a new future for themselves after the plant's shutdown. Walls thinks he may have an answer.

Anne Rolfes is the Founding Director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a nonprofit group that, for the last two decades, has been campaigning for public health protections for mostly lower-income families living just beyond the fences of chemical factories. Her advocacy for air pollution controls has long made her a target for Louisiana’s powerful chemical industry. But recently, her protests against what would be North America’s largest plastics factory, proposed by the Formosa Plastics company atop a site with an historic slave burial ground in the African American community of St. James, Louisiana, provoked more than just the irritation of the political establishment. The Baton Rouge Police Department charged Rolfes with terrorism – a felony – for placing, as part of a peaceful protest of plastics industry pollution, a box with plastic waste from a Formosa plastics plant on the porch of a plastics industry lobbyist. Civil liberties experts say the charges are part of a national pattern of law-enforcement agencies and even the Trump Administration attempting to criminalize dissent and peaceful protests.

The poultry industry is growing in the Chesapeake Bay region, with a new generation of mega-sized chicken houses and more ammonia air pollution. On Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Carlene Zach, a 60-year-old retired postmaster, and her husband Peter Zach, 62, a lineman for an electric company, were in good health until a poultry farm opened next door with 24 airplane hangar-sized buildings holding a million chickens. Since then, the ammonia and fecal dust blown from the exhaust fans has drifted their windows, triggering incessant coughing, sneezing, and sore throats. After struggling to find a solution, they decided they had no option but to abandon their dream house. They sold their home for a $40,000 loss and moved to the mountains, feeling betrayed and abused by the industry's march over America's farmland.

Juan Flores grew up near Houston, the son of a refinery worker who repeatedly warned his children of the risks of going into his profession...and then died on the job. Juan became a community coordinator for nonprofit Air Alliance Houston, and now works to protect the people of Baytown and other neighborhoods from air pollution, fires, and explosions. A new report by the Environmental Integrity Project reveals that minority neighborhoods like this one are put at greater risk by severe budget cuts to pollution control programs at state environmental agencies in Texas and across the U.S.

For years, fishing guide Rod Bates has been taking families out on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania and letting kids swim and play in the water. Then he learned about something disturbing being piped into the river from the Governor's Mansion and State Office Complex in Harrisburg, the state capital. The Environmental Integrity Project and Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper investigated the outfalls. We discovered information that -- when released at a packed press conference -- sparked an interstate furor and demands for an investigation.

One of the biggest sources of water pollution in the U.S. is runoff pollution from farms and livestock operations. But a new Environmental Integrity Project study found that only 19 percent of livestock farmers in Virginia's two largest agricultural counties are fencing their animals out of waterways, creating unhealthy bacteria levels and algal blooms in the Shenandoah River and Chesapeake Bay.

Coal's Poisonous Legacy by Environmental Integrity Podcast

The Environmental Integrity Project examined two decades of EPA data and concluded that environmental enforcement under the Trump Administration in 2018 set record lows for civil penalties against polluters, inspections, and people charged with environmental crimes. In our report, “Less Enforcement: Communities at Risk,” we give 10 examples across the U.S., from Louisiana to Minnesota, of well-documented, major environmental violations that the administration has so far failed to crack down on that threaten the health of local communities.

EIP Executive Director Eric Schaeffer, former Director of Civil Enforcement at EPA, offers his analysis of the trend. He also discusses his testimony on February 26, 2019, before a U.S. House oversight committee investigating the drop.

You can find a text version of our full report here: http://www.environmentalintegrity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/EIP-Enforcement-Report.pdf

(Photo from Karen Kasmauski/International League of Conservation Photographers)