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)

What is the environmental impact of the food you eat? We investigate the water pollution produced by the meat processing industry. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Environmental Integrity Project examined federal records for 98 large slaughterhouses across the U.S. that discharge into rivers and streams and found that 75 percent of them violate the federal Clean Water Act by dumping illegal amounts of fecal bacteria, nitrogen and other pollutants -- with little enforcement and few penalties.