“LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION” IS THE REAL ESTATE AGENT’S MANTRA. The central importance of location is also the core tenet of the field of geography, which is the study of places and the relationships between people and their environments. Geography is spatial in the way history is temporal: it is about understanding the physical relationship among places instead of the relationship of events along a timeline. We can analyze the past to understand how historical events influence the present. Similarly, we can assess one place and understand how it influences a neighboring place. In this chapter we’ll visit three places influenced by their immediate neighbors: Tonawanda, in upstate New York, with a neighboring coke factory; parishes in New Orleans, Louisiana, with neighboring petrochemical oil refineries; and Tillery in eastern North Carolina, with neighboring industrial hog farms. To activists supporting environmental justice, these communities are known as fenceline communities. Instead of the proverbial neighbor behind a white picket fence, these communities have neighbors who claim corporate personhood and cast a shadow of industrial pollution over the fence. Only when residents measure pollution are they able to succeed in legal, regulatory, and political actions that protect their communities.
Most of the citizen science projects we’ve examined thus far were initiated by scientists and engaged hundreds, thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands of laypeople. These citizen science projects built scientific knowledge that would be otherwise unattainable, and scientists published the discoveries in scientific journals. When citizen science is initiated by residents in communities facing local problems … well, let’s take a closer look at what happens.
In the blue-collar town of Tonawanda, New York, many residents were fighting for their lives against rare cancers, and almost everyone was dealing daily with skin rashes, burning mouths, and pungent smells. Residents described the air as having a foul, acrid, tar-like stench, strong enough to wake them in the night to shut the windows. While most of us check outside for hints of rain, residents in fenceline communities check the wind direction to decide if it is safe to go outside. To figure out what was causing the air to be bad, Jackie James-Creedon, Adele and Bob Henderson, and Tim Logdson learned how to build an air-sampling device made almost entirely from materials available at a building supply store.
After dark on August 16, 2004, James-Creedon, the Hendersons, and Logdson gathered about a half a mile downwind of Tonawanda Coke Corporation to collect a sample of the air. They recorded details of the environment: there was a light breeze that measured at six miles per hour, and the temperature was a comfortable sixty-four degrees.
The low-cost bucket design of their air-sampling device was originally crafted by an environmental engineer hired by Edward Masry, the crotchety litigator famed for wining a class-action suit against Pacific Gas and Electric that awarded over $300 million to victims of chromium poisoning in Hinkley, California; the story of the suit was made into the Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster Erin Brockovich. In the air-tight bucket was a special Tedlar bag purchased from a chemical analytic company. James-Creedon and her gang pumped the air surrounding the bag out of the sealed bucket to create a vacuum. At 10:50 p.m. they opened a valve and air was sucked into the bag as it expanded into the pressureless vacancy within the bucket. The night air carried a heavy mix of tar and ammonia odors, so thick they could taste it. At 10:53 p.m., they closed the valve. They completed chain-of-custody paperwork, which served as the official document turning the air sample into physical evidence. When they opened the bucket, the Tedlar bag was puffy like a clear pillow; they prepared the bag for shipment to Columbia Analytical, a lab in California, and then they went home, each with nausea and headaches.
Columbia Analytical is one of the few companies with special apparatus that allows it to attach the Tedlar bag to a gas chromatography mass spectrometer. The sample from Tonawanda whistled with benzene at a concentration of fifty-four micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m3). The acceptable level for this known carcinogen in New York State is 0.13μg/m3. Their fears were confirmed. One of the many industries surrounding the neighborhood was the source, but which? From the wind direction, they suspected that Tonawanda Coke was the culprit.
“We weren’t activists or anything,” James-Creedon tells me over the telephone. “We were winging it.” With evidence from their single sample in hand, they tried to talk to JD Crane, the owner of Tonawanda Coke, but were repeatedly refused meetings. They notified the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the agency had found Tonawanda Coke to be in compliance with emission standards during every inspection they scheduled. The physical law of inertia states that action does not come without applying force, and the same seems to hold true for regulatory protection. James-Creedon and her crew became forceful advocates for the health of everyone in Tonawanda. Over the next ten years, they helped guide a positive shift in the way regulators like the EPA view community monitoring.
A key turning point occurred when they found an ally at a state agency. Al Carlacci is the regional air pollutant control engineer with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, and when he saw the benzene results he wanted to help. James-Creedon calls him “their champion.” There are about twenty industries neighboring Tonawanda, and Carlacci knew it was essential to identify which was the source beyond any reasonable doubt. Science, and citizen science, in regulatory context has to pass the highest level of scrutiny, far beyond what’s common for peer-reviewed papers. Carlacci applied for EPA funding and was awarded $600,000. He set up four state-of-the-art continuous air-quality monitors, each many times more expensive than the James-Creedon’s simple bucket sampler. The time-stamped readings, along with measurements of wind direction, allowed Carlacci to not only further quantify the indisputably sickening amounts of benzene in the air but to triangulate and pinpoint the source, which was, as suspected, Tonawanda Coke. Carlacci’s study motivated the EPA to pay an unscheduled visit to the facility, because their repeated scheduled inspections had not found problems. This new inspection revealed that Tonawanda Coke was intentionally violating emission standards and, confirmed by a whistleblower, hiding its actions during planned inspections.
In March 2014, a twelve-person federal jury in Buffalo, New York, found Mark Kamholz guilty for poisoning the air of Tonawanda with hundreds of tons of benzene-laden gas. The sixty-five-year-old environmental control manager for Tonawanda Coke was a serial polluter, releasing ninety-one tons of benzene into the air per year, creating cancer risk seventy-five times greater than allowable by federal law and emissions standards set by the EPA. He was found guilty of one count of obstruction of justice, eleven counts of violating the Clean Air Act, and three counts of violating the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. His sentence: one year in prison, followed by one hundred hours of community service and a $20,000 fine. Tonawanda Coke is paying bigger fines, though the details are lingering in court battles.
This type of justice—in which a person in industry is held accountable for harming public health—is slow and scarce, and not particularly severe. The Kamholz verdict was only the second time in the United States that a corporate employee was convicted in criminal (rather than civil) court for polluting, and the first time such a conviction resulted in jail time. When Kamholz was sentenced, the US attorney for the Western District of New York, William Hochul Jr., said, “Today’s sentencing holds Tonawanda Coke and its environmental control manager accountable for one of the most egregious environmental pollution crimes in this area’s history.” Those are strong words given that Tonawanda is only ten miles from Love Canal, the blue-collar neighborhood in the city of Niagara Falls where pollution was so intense in the late 1970s that the federal government ended up fencing off the neighborhood and evacuating it, relocating families elsewhere.90
There are small groups across the world facing similar struggles. When the neighbors in Tonawanda wanted to learn how to build a bucket-style air sampler, they reached out to Global Community Monitor, an organization that teaches communities how to make and use inexpensive tools to monitor their environment so that data can be part of the battles for environmental justice. Data gives people leverage to address problems, whether they are pushing for detailed follow-up studies or for relocation or cleanup. Community monitoring will continue to be important because thousands of hazardous chemicals come from industrial sources daily, and the EPA—and their equivalents in other countries—can’t monitor them all. Global Community Monitor has worked with over a hundred partners in twenty-seven countries. Their air-monitoring system, known as the Bucket Brigade, has been replicated around the world, and people modify it according to local industrial sources and cultures. Pollution is not released with labels like the goods we purchase from stores; it remains unidentified until people find tools to reveal it. Global Community Monitor continually receives urgent calls from communities who want and need to uncover what hazards they may be exposed to.
As we’ve seen in earlier chapters, citizen science typically involves hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of people working toward a common goal. Crowds may be typical in citizen science, but they are not essential. James-Creedon quotes Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Global Community Monitor recommends a minimum core of five people monitoring air quality. Tonawanda had four, and they collected just one sample that triggered a cascade of investigations and ultimately a conviction and cleaner air.
A primary function of regulatory agencies is to establish whether federal or state air-quality standards have been violated, and they rarely accept volunteer data as valid for this purpose. According to Gwen Ottinger, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Drexel University, the common approach is exactly what happened in Tonawanda: the use of the volunteer data to spark an in-depth—and expensive—professional investigation. According to Ottinger, when agencies follow up on community findings, they usually find that the pollution is worse than detected by low-cost devices like the air-sampling buckets. But not always. Sometimes a low-cost method simply reveals a known problem. For example, a community might detect an emission violation but it corresponds to a refinery reporting an accidental fire that day. Industry mistakes that are rare, self-reported, and fixed don’t require further action on the part of a regulator. On the other hand, when the bucket sample reveals a problem that does not coincide with any industry reports, then it’s time for some sleuthing. In Tonawanda, that’s why the in-depth study triggered an unscheduled inspection from the EPA.
When James-Creedon and her neighbors in Tonawanda collected their air sample, they were guided by their noses and stinging throats. Given that air samples from citizen scientists are limited in their use to raising red flags and directing regulatory authorities to do a better job, the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB), an organization with the stated mission of ending petrochemical pollution in Louisiana, created a way for anyone detecting pollution with any of their five senses—even if lacking a bucket sampler—to easily inform regulatory efforts. After all, when petrochemical pollution is in the air people can smell it, taste it, and feel it. LABB created a way for people to map it online.
I met Anne Rolfes, the founding director of LABB, at an EPA workshop on air-quality monitoring. Rolfes has led the fight against petrochemical pollution in Louisiana for fifteen years; she grew up in Louisiana, and her friends and neighbors worked for oil companies. As a young adult, she helped shine a spotlight on Nigerian refugees in Benin who were there because their farmlands had been destroyed by Shell Oil. (She subsequently wrote a powerful report titled Shell Shocked Refugees.) The plight of the Nigerians made her realize that the problems of the oil industry were universal, and that she should return to Louisiana, where people were also facing harm from an unchecked industry.
LABB’s community-based air monitoring has long involved bucket samplers like the one used in Tonawanda, and has led to significant drops in industrial accidents and releases of toxic chemicals. But there is still a long way to go to ensure cleaner air. Rolfes explains that LABB’s activism arises from the framework of a broken system: “An ordinary person’s expectation would be that citizen scientists would present data to the responsible authority and then that authority would enforce laws and regulations and corporations would clean up their messes and stop making new messes. Unfortunately, that’s not how the system works.”
The area has over 130 chemical factories, petroleum plants, and hazardous waste incinerators. According to Barbara Allen, author of Uneasy Alchemy,91 in 2003 the chemical industry in Louisiana reported the equivalent of sixteen thousand pounds of hazardous waste for every person in the state. Louisiana is renowned for corrupt politicians, and the petrochemical industry has a checkered past. Put the two together along a river the size of the Mississippi (that draws those in the petrochemical industry who believe “dilution is the solution to pollution”) and you get a river corridor now known as Cancer Alley, or Allée du Cancer to many of the French-speaking locals.
Rolfes and Iris Brown take about three hundred people per year on a biking and driving tour of Cancer Alley called Down by the River. Brown began fighting for environmental justice after losing family members to illnesses related to chemical exposure. Rolfes and Brown don’t frame the tour as doom and gloom, but as activism and citizen science across boundaries of race and class. According to the LABB website, “Down by the River is an evolution of what has traditionally been called a Toxic Tour in which polluting sites—dumps, refineries, and chemical plants—are toured. The Down by the River ride transforms a litany of depressing sites into powerful beacons of resistance.” Here the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the environmental movement of the 1970s intersected to create the environmental justice movement in the 1980s and the online crowdsourcing of the twenty-first century.
One of those beacons along Cancer Alley is the small town of Norco, in St. Charles Parish, west of New Orleans. In Norco, where Brown was born and raised, sits a Shell Chemical plant that frequently exposed residents to pollution. There was regulation intended to minimize pollution, but the financial penalties imposed by regulatory agencies were far lower than the profits Shell Chemical made by polluting. A primary way for the Shell plant to lower pollution involved lowering production, but that caused lower profits. Instead, Shell preferred to maintain high production even when it meant that excesses had to be burned in sudden flares that released toxic gases. Shell Chemical created a siren system to alert their neighbors of these incidents of acute pollution, and instructed residents that the siren meant to go indoors, close all doors and windows, seal off ventilation, and remain there until they heard a subsequent all-clear signal.
Residents formed the Concerned Citizens of Norco to fight for an alternative.92 They campaigned for a long time to bring attention to the pollution, but they didn’t have any leverage until they started using buckets to sample the air.
According to Rolfes, “Industry would rather have a community siren system to warn residents of a highly polluting flare than to temporarily lower their production and reduce pollution.” Norco residents collected bucket samples as part of their campaign for compensation to relocate to homes elsewhere; these samples held Shell accountable when it misrepresented the frequency and size of accidental and intentional releases. Data on pollution actually made the people on the receiving end more visible to industry and got them a seat at the negotiating table. Brown played a big role with the Concerned Citizens of Norco and in persuading Shell Chemical to buy out tainted property so that residents could relocate to towns with clean air.
Rolfes is grateful for the bucket samplers and the relocation of Norco residents, “but Norco was just one battle, and it needs to be repeated a thousand times over. In the long term, the environmental justice fight will be won by changing the paradigm of our acceptance of major polluters like the oil industry. We need to get off this stuff all together. We just need to get rid of this stuff. Citizen science helps demonstrate the harm of petrochemical industries and offers a counternarrative; otherwise the narrative is one-sided and people only see the industry and government perspective. There are two sides, and citizen science helps us show our side. Otherwise the problems remain invisible.” Rolfes subsequently began exploring other forms of citizen science that could be effective in giving voice to more people who bear the burdens of industry pollution.
LABB created an online map to crowdsource testimony about pollution. It partnered with Ushahidi,93 an organization creating open-source tools for crowdsourcing—particularly tools for mobile devices for use in emergencies. The Ushahidi platform was initially created to map reports of postelection violence in Kenya in 2008. Ushahidi hosts many projects, including QuakeMap, which has helped guide rescue efforts in areas hit by earthquakes, such as Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2015.
LABB calls their map the iWitness Pollution Map, and uses it to help focus the efforts of those putting out monitoring equipment. The crowdsourcing effort is based on the assumption that in Louisiana the EPA has been unable to adequately detect the extent of pollution and exactly who is exposed to it in quantities that put them at risk.94 Years prior to the iWitness Pollution Map, the EPA put out air monitors and reported that these monitoring stations detected no major problems with air quality. When LABB analyzed the crowdsourced locations of testimonials reporting high pollution on the iWitness Pollution Map, it showed that the EPA monitoring sites were poorly chosen: they were nowhere near where residents were reporting odors. Rolfes explains, “We didn’t have to say a lot. The maps visually showed that the EPA isn’t monitoring in relevant places.”
The process of creating the iWitness Pollution Map coincided with the 2010 BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The crisis prompted LABB to modify its plans in order to quickly launch the site first as the Oil Spill Crisis Map. An online map for crowdsourcing information about the disaster, it was the first use of crisis mapping for humanitarian purposes in the United States. In 2013, in continued partnership with Ushahidi, LABB morphed the Oil Spill Crisis map into the iWitness Pollution Map, which is now the world’s largest site for community-gathered data on environmental pollution. On the Down by the River tour, tourists can add their observations (that is, sensory experiences) to the iWitness Pollution Map, just as those on bird tours enter their observations to eBird (see chapter 2).
The online mapping and the bucket brigades represent an array of organizing tools for communities to put pressure on industry to change. When I ask Rolfes if it would be possible for the petrochemical industry to not pollute, she responds, “We are so far from asking that question. We are dealing with problems that are so egregious like pipes with duct tape, leaking pipes, unlawful emissions, and ignoring basic engineering practices. It can be like the Wild West with unenforced laws.” The common chemical leaks, flaring, and accidents are symptoms of a larger problem. Even while these symptoms need attention from citizen science monitoring, those seeking environmental justice can’t ignore the underlying problem: a culture that protects industry instead of people.
People affected by industrial pollution are white and black, rural and urban, in the United States and across the globe. The only thing they generally have in common is that they are not wealthy. In many cases, there isn’t a single fall guy like Kamholz to shoulder all the blame. Instead, there is a long-standing power structure of politicians and academics that intentionally or unwittingly shields industry from responsibility. Communities cannot easily overcome these power dynamics. What does citizen science look like in this context? Even when the source of pollution is different, the story is remarkably similar.
Throughout eastern North Carolina the hogs don’t live on Charlotte’s Web farms but in efficient industrial complexes that look like metallic military barracks. In towns near industrial hog farms, when the wind changes direction, children waiting in line in the school cafeteria begin to vomit from the putrid sulfuric stench of urine and feces; before stepping off the school bus in the afternoon, they cover their noses and mouths, then run into their homes with their eyes stinging. Families can’t have guests over for dinner because they are embarrassed by the foul air that engulfs their home. Neighbors can’t even imagine a cook-out together, and no one hangs clean laundry outside. Elderly people in homes without air conditioning find opening the windows out of the question, even in the heat of summer. People who live next to these hog farms are struck with physical ailments as hog sewage literally rained down on them as it was sprayed onto adjacent fields to keep the sewage pits from overflowing.
In addition to the inequality problems that arise with being poor and black in the south, eastern North Carolina’s problem with air pollution started with Wendell Murphy, who served as a Democrat in the North Carolina House of Representatives and later the State Senate; in his elected positions, he facilitated legislation that supported the growth of the swine industry in North Carolina. This type of hog farming resembles factory chicken farming: that means five thousand pigs in a building, each confined to a stall, with food piped in and large fans to ventilate. Each 250-pound pig produces fifteen pounds of manure daily. Collectively, that can be seventy-five thousand pounds of feces, plus untold gallons of urine, daily—all of which falls through slats in the floor and is flushed out and into unlined, uncovered ponds about thirty feet deep and up to eight acres in size. One hog farm can produce volumes of waste equivalent to that of a medium-size city. Yet a medium-size city would be a preferable neighbor, because municipal waste is treated in sewage plants while hog waste is not. The unlined sewage ponds and the bacteria in the waste pose a potential contamination risk to nearby private wells because the water table is high—the wells are only about fifteen to twenty feet deep. As the ponds fill up, the facility workers spray sewage onto surrounding fields. The wind carries a fine misty rain of urine and feces into neighboring towns, turning people into prisoners in their own homes.
In this system, soil, air, groundwater, and streams are at risk of contamination from bacteria, nutrient overloads, and even pharmaceutical drugs like antibiotics that are heavily used to stem infections among the overcrowded hogs. There are more pigs in North Carolina than people, and they are concentrated in a way that puts people at grave risk. Pigs do not make good neighbors.
The industry spins hog farms differently, as is explained to me by Naeema Muhammed, a community organizer and the director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, and Gary Grant, the charismatic leader of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery (CCT) in Tillery, North Carolina. The mission of the CCT is to promote social justice and self-determination for rural African American communities. Grant tells me that at a town meeting industrial lackeys told Tillery residents that they should feel a special honor to have hog breeds from England on their neighboring farms, as if excrement from the queen’s subjects smells sweeter. He holds an imaginary tea cup with his pinky at a right angle, “Oh, and do we get tea and crumpets at ten o’clock?”
Grant and Muhammed try to one-up each other in stories about the hog industry representatives, politicians, and academics who act as if rural blacks are stupid. They have been told the sewage ponds were called lagoons, as though that should conjure images of beautiful girls splashing in the shallow blue waters of the South Pacific. They have been told the lagoons are not filled with sewage, but with “organic fertilizer.” Muhammed recounts a time when a professor from North Carolina State University tried to convince Tillery residents that the waste from hog farms would be “no worse than herds of deer running through the forest.” She adds, “When have you seen five thousand deer running through the forest, and all stop to poop at the same time, in the same place?” She and Grant joke, but they have been deeply insulted. Muhammed organizes such dedicated people in citizen science and activism, and it wears her down to see them incessantly being treated like they are dumb, spoken to like children, and never invited to the table for discussions.
Those who persist against such negative forces have one key trait that makes them resilient: a creative sense of humor. The North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN) once received a permit to demonstrate on the capitol lawn. They set up inflatable kiddie pools with a sprinkler fountain and filled them by trucking in organic “lagoon” fertilizer from a nearby hog farm. To avoid the demonstration site, politicians were abruptly detouring from the usual path between their offices and the legislative chamber. The facilities manager threatened NCEJN: “If you spill one drop, we have to fine you because it is toxic waste.” Muhammed recalls saying, “So you mean to tell me that we loaded a truck with organic fertilizer and by driving it forty miles down the road, it became toxic waste? Hmmph. Besides, the permit doesn’t specify that we can’t spray hog waste.” The following year they got another permit to demonstrate. This time the permit specified in bold print, “No permission for hog waste.”
Whether demonstrations, phone calls, or letters, ultimately every imaginable way that residents turned to elected government officials for help received the same basic response: “We were told to prove it,” Muhammed explains. “The government put the burden of proof on the public to show that farms cause health impacts instead of telling the industry to prove it was safe.”
Muhammed and I meet at the Curing House, which sits between the Tillery Community Center and the Tillery History House.95 Don’t let this cluster of three buildings mislead you into concluding that Tillery is a thriving town, because these are the only three buildings you can shake a stick at along a country road cutting through pine plantations about an hour east of Raleigh. The Curing House is an almost-defunct health clinic. There are empty spots where computers used to be when the building held examination rooms in which patients met online with doctors at the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University. Funds ran out, and now one doctor drives out and spends three hours each month seeing patients. There have never been doctors inquiring about illness related to the hog farms; instead, each doctor has had a “tell me what’s wrong and I’ll treat it with pharmaceuticals” approach. Yet Tillery is a data-driven community, and locals want to collect information on health patterns and the environment and fix the cause, not treat the symptoms. “Is that why you call this the Curing House?” I asked Muhammed. “No,” she laughed, “when Tillery was still a community of farmers, this building is where the crops of sweet and white potatoes were put to cure.”
The hog industry had been spreading across eastern North Carolina for decades before it got close to Tillery. Hog cities were built and their sewage pits dug adjacent to rural communities that are predominantly black, with high unemployment and poverty. The industry leaders assume citizens in those communities lack political clout, don’t know anything or anyone in the state capital in Raleigh, and have no champions in politics because they don’t have spare change to donate to politicians. Plus, their land is cheap. Robert D. Ballard, author of Dumping in Dixie, called such communities “avenues of least resistance.”
Based on demographics, tax records, and the highest number of homes with outdoor plumbing in any county in North Carolina, anyone might mistake Tillery for an avenue of least resistance, as the hog farming industry did. To the contrary, Tillery is a vibrant and organized community, and when it got wind of plans for over fifteen facilities in the area, the townspeople rolled up their sleeves for a fight. The burden of proof foisted on them by elected officials was one of many burdens they already carried, and they set out to gather evidence to set the record straight.
Because of its fairly unique history, Tillery might have been different from otherwise similar towns that were unable to resist the encroachment of hog farming. Tillery was established as a farming community as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s; by establishing the Resettlement Administration in 1935, Roosevelt hoped to end tenant farming and sharecropping. The program aimed high—hoping to help over 500,000 farm families own farms—but ended with only 4,441 families relocated to land they could call their own. The situation was reminiscent of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when former slaves and descendants of slaves were given forty acres of land and a mule, only to have it soon taken back in a way that led to sharecropping becoming the dominant agricultural system by the 1870s. A poster advertising the Resettlement Administration even included a drawing of a black farmer with a mule and the words “A mule and a plow.” A second wave of black settlers with the dream of farming came to Tillery in 1947 with Farmer’s Home Administration loans.
When Grant gives me a tour of Tillery’s History House, we watch a film titled We Shall Not Be Moved that includes interviews of residents of Tillery. Maggie Crowell, never looking up at the camera, recalls her youth seventy years earlier: “I come up in fear because I thought my mommy and daddy would get hurt.” Grant explained that Crowell was looking away from the camera because she was afraid to look at the white camera crew. The deeps scars of Jim Crow laws never fully heal.
Of the older residents in Tillery and surrounding areas, Grant says some have always been activists, continuing to fight all forms of oppression, and others just want to leave whites and their industries alone in hopes of being left alone themselves. Either way, people travel far across rural North Carolina to attend CCT meetings; Grant says they come because it is a liberating experience. For example, one day before a meeting, Crowell was at the Tillery Community Center when a white representative from the Methodist Church dropped in to verify whether CCT was a legitimate organization because it had applied for a grant. The representative confronted Grant: “Why have I not heard of CCT before?” Grant retrieved and proudly displayed an enormous stack of news clippings about CCT and asked, “Now you tell me why you have never heard of CCT.” Crowell was elated by the exchange, and later said to Grant, “You can talk back to white folks like that? I didn’t know. Times have changed!”
Grant invites me to lunch at the Tillery Community Center with a group called the Open Minded Seniors to meet some community members. I learn that many of these senior citizens are raising their grandchildren, and sometimes their great-grandchildren, while their own children have moved away to take jobs, many in Baltimore, to support their families. As is universally acceptable among grandparents, they proudly boast of the intelligence, good grades, and accomplishments of their grandchildren. Although these seniors “shall not be moved,” they are sad that the next generation will undoubtedly move away for jobs elsewhere. Industries have tried to come to Tillery with promises of jobs, but offers like a battery recycling plant, a facility to turn New York City’s sewage sludge into fertilizer, and any offers you can imagine that are low on wages and high on pollution have been easy for Tillery residents to reject. These were farming families; “forty acres and a mule” had seemed like a good deal, but even that one was broken by systematic exclusion from farm aid that should have come from the US Department of Agriculture.96
After the main meal and before dessert, Grant takes a picture of three people in their nineties. Instead of prompting them with “Say cheese” he uses “Say sex,” which elicits big smiles. Everyone who has a birthday that month sits at a special table, and we sing “Happy Birthday” to them all, naming each person in turn. Grant announces the age of each; one woman writes down their ages and, like an awesome science nerd, reports that their average age is 76.3.
Grant concludes the gathering with a joke about pollution.
A police officer asks a man why he is putting garbage in a ditch. “Can’t you see the sign right above?”
“Yes, sir. It says, ‘Fine for putting garbage in the ditch.’”
Grant identifies as “second-generation New Deal,” meaning his parents arrived in the second wave of settlers. He was a hippie in the 1960s, engaged in the civil rights movement, and boasts nineteen civil disobedience arrests. He still calls people like me “white folks,” but qualifies it with “don’t take it personally.” A pivotal time for Grant was when North Carolina governor Jim Hunt was going to allow PCBs to be dumped in Warren County. During protests of this, Grant heard the term environmental racism and it instantly made sense; he transitioned from the civil rights movement to the environmental justice movement. Like that representative from the Methodist Church, whites in the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, or Greenpeace sometimes wonder, Why do I not know any black environmentalists? African American communities and other disenfranchised minorities experience an unprecedented burden of environmental pollution and struggle against power imbalances to restore environmental health, while white environmentalists are donating money to save the whales. Until traditional environmental groups also include environmental justice in their mission and vision, the environmental movement will remain highly segregated.
It is in the Curing House after lunch that Muhammed explains to me that citizen science fit into their environmental justice strategy in two ways. One way was to examine the geographic distribution of the hog industry in relation to the geographic distribution of people of color and thereby expose whether environmental racism was present; the other way was to gather time-synchronized data on levels of air pollution from hog farms and the physical health of residents in order to see if the relationship showed evidence that farms were physically harmful for residents. For both purposes, Muhammed and Grant carried out citizen science in collaboration with Steve Wing, a professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina– Chapel Hill.
To expose environmental racism, Muhammed and Grant worked as citizen scientists with Wing and his students to create maps, which were also a community organizing tool. By overlaying maps of race and income characteristic of each county and seeing where farms were and were not located, they calculated that industrial hog farms were more likely to be located next to communities of the poor and people of color than near a town with wealthy white residents. They published the results in a scientific journal. The only thing worse than bearing the brunt of pollution is being saddled with an unfair amount of it.
To document whether farms were negatively impacting public health, they gathered data. Muhammed recruited and trained residents in sixteen communities near hog farms to monitor their own health and keep records. After sitting outside twice a day for ten minutes, residents filled out data sheets about their immediate health (such as watery eyes, headache, irritated throat) and used small devices to time-stamp and automatically measure their blood pressure, gather a saliva sample (used to measure stress hormones), and quantify their lung capacity. In tandem, UNC professor Wing had deployed small trailers full of automated equipment to measure concentrations of particulates and chemicals in the air over time. Was public health correlated with pollution levels?
A common argument leveraged by science skeptics and Internet trolls is that correlation does not mean causation. For example, increases in spending on science may correlate with increases in per capita consumption of cheddar cheese, but the two variables are completely unrelated: unfortunately, eating more cheese won’t increase my likelihood of getting science funding. Nevertheless, correlation is one necessary, but not sufficient, condition of finding a causative relationship, and that’s why the statistical process of correlation is integral to research. Another condition to establishing causation is having a set of prior reasons (a priori hypotheses) about the mechanism of the causation. In this case the expected mechanism was hydrogen sulfide, which was known to be a hazard in laboratory studies. Did the amounts in the air in the real world matter? Short answer: yes. What made the study with Wing rigorous was that his automated devices measured ups and downs in hydrogen sulfides in the air over time as it fluctuated with wind and manure-spraying schedules. Thus, if airborne hydrogen sulfides in the real world caused health impacts, then the personal health data would fluctuate up and down according to the exact same temporal schedule; if hydrogen sulfides did not cause health impacts, then health data would not correlate with hydrogen sulfides in the air at all.
When Wing combined data about air quality with the time-stamped data residents had collected on their personal health, the correlations were obvious enough to establish causation. Wing published several papers, some with Muhammed and Grant, showing that personal health declined when hydrogen sulfide levels in the air spiked, and health increased when these levels were low. Snap! They had proof to take to the state legislature.
Muhammed tells me, “We call it community-based participatory research.” In fact, the term, often referred to more simply as CBPR, has been used longer than the term citizen science and describes a process in which community members and professional scientists work together to carry out science to gain knowledge useful to the community. CBPR puts the community in the driver’s seat while the scientist navigate from the passenger seat. Muhammed rattles off a list of reasons why communities do it. “The benefits include increased understanding of the scope of justice, raising awareness, educating policy makers, informing legal disputes, and contributing to the knowledge base. Most importantly, it adds legitimacy.” Teachers and other educators focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning from citizen science, particularly among populations underrepresented in the STEM workforce. When I ask Muhammed about STEM she says, “Sure, we learned to read charts, graphs, and report results back to the community.” Even though the primary motivation for studying hogs and health was not to motivate Tillery youth into science careers, STEM learning is just as essential to community organizing as it is to recruiting students into the science career pipeline.
People of color in the Deep South have health issues that arise from multiple factors, but race and geography also matter. African Americans in the South are more likely to have heart disease, cancer, diabetes, AIDS, and health markers that indicate higher vulnerability to ill health, such as high blood pressure and obesity. The communities least able to handle additional health risks from hog farms are the ones most likely to get it.
The struggles continue, though the activists won one battle when the state legislature passed a moratorium that prevents new hog farms from the spraying of sewage from the open “lagoons.” As the industry began losing, the fight got ugly. The hog industry targeted Wing as the community’s most powerful accomplice. Academia is structured around rewards, like peer-reviewed publications, that keep science busy within the ivory tower. Academic interests usually don’t conflict with industry, and sometimes even align, if science can help bring home the bacon. This was not the case with Wing, who had given people access to the validated system of science and with it the ability to discover authoritative knowledge to take to the legislature, and that ran counter to industry interests. By not following traditional academic incentives, it was as though he breached an unspoken code. The Pork Council decided to put him in line, lest other academics follow suit; the council took Wing to court to force him to breach a clearly articulated ethical code among researchers: confidentiality. It obtained court orders directing Wing to hand over the citizen science data set created with the help of Mohammed and Grant. It would be an unethical breach of confidentiality to reveal the names of the people who participated in gathering health data about themselves. After a long court battle, UNC lawyers could not help Wing protect the identities of the citizen scientists, but Wing would not be intimidated, so he hired his own lawyer with his own money. The solution he crafted was to agree to hand over the data set after anonymizing it—that is, stripping all unique information that would allow individuals to be identified.
Scientists like Wing, willing to incur industry ire, place priority on responding to the needs of communities. Community and industry interests don’t always conflict. But in situations where the industry causes the air to have a foul smell, taste, and sting, or where it has to put a siren system in place, or where it literally causes feces to rain down on people, identifying the problem should be a no-brainer. Instead rigorous citizen science and lots of public pressure are need to change industry practices. In these cases, scientists need to decide whose interests they will serve.
It isn’t just academics in the field of public health who respond to community interests. Let’s detour to Flint, Michigan, where government, rather than industry, decisions led community members to take up citizen science in efforts to balance the scales of environmental justice. The problem in Flint began when unelected officials, appointed as emergency managers to run the city, decided to alleviate the financial crisis by switching water supplies. The switch, which occurred in April 2014, disconnected the city from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department, which drew water from Lake Huron, and connected it with the Karegnondi Water Authority (KWA), which drew water from the Flint River. By June, Flint resident LeeAnne Walters noticed that she had a rash. This might not have been a cause for concern had it not occurred in conjunction with her husband, her older son JD, her older daughter Kaylie, and her toddler twins Gavin and Garret also developing rashes, hair loss, and a host of other, unexplainable symptoms of illness. The Flint Water Study, the citizen science project developed to address the underlying problem, unofficially began a year later when Walters telephoned Marc Edwards, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech.
At that point, the Walters family had already stopped using Flint tap water. But for eight months Walters’ children, like many in her community, had been exposed to the water—and the lead it contained—and suffered irreversible harms. By the time she called Edwards, Walters was certain that the water was the source of their health problems. Others in her community knew it too, but everyone they turned for help—city, state, or federal authorities in various agencies—refused to own up to the problem.
After spending months visiting doctors and slowly progressing through a series of unnecessary treatments based on incorrect diagnoses, the situation in the Walters’ household intensified at the end of 2014. Just after Christmas, brown water started coming through the Walters’ faucets with increasing frequency. In January 2015, Walters received official notice that there was a safety violation related to their water. The violation noted excessive levels of a carcinogenic substance used to disinfect water—not lead. At a City Council meeting on January 7, 2015, staff distributed out-of-date handouts, evaded questions, and simply assured residents that everything was fine.
“We had been struggling with illnesses and had believed it was just our home, our plumbing, that had a problem. At the first City Council meeting, we realized it was the whole community,” Walters explained to me over the phone. To address public concerns, Flint officials held a town hall meeting on January 21, 2015. “Everything felt wrong about the meeting: the location was changed at the last minute to a smaller venue, no one was sworn in, and police presence was apparent.” Not only were no solutions in sight, but no one seemed willing to acknowledge a serious problem. On the drive home, Walters and her family pondered a key question: “How do we get the authorities to hear us? We decided we had to figure out the science of it because the authorities won’t be able to argue with science.” For people like Walters, attaining the authority of science in order to sway political authorities is a common approach when needing to protect themselves from hazards in the environment.
Walters started reading everything she could find about water management as well as laws related to water. She came to understand the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, and a key EPA regulation called the Lead and Copper Rule, inside and out and every loophole these contained. She explained, “I began gathering information and trying to figure out the bigger picture.” By the beginning of April, Walters discovered that the City was not using a corrosion inhibitor in the water. “I was puzzled and thought maybe polymer aids, which were present in the water, could be used for corrosion control. But when I asked Miguel Del Toral97 about polymer aids, he said no, they couldn’t provide corrosion control. Together we realized that the city was breaking federal law by not using corrosion control!” This discovery coincided with one of her twin sons finally being tested for lead and receiving an official diagnosis of lead poisoning.98 Walters’ extensive research led her to Marc Edwards, whom she called to back her findings and solicit help for the next stages. Walters noted how easy it was to discuss her findings with Edwards: “Scientific people can sometimes make you feel stupid or beneath them, but it was never that way with Marc. He is blue collar. He is one of us. He explains things in ways that are not condescending.”
My own conversation with Edwards affirms Walters’ assessment; Edwards told me, “Even though I’m a professor, I’m basically a plumber at heart who just wants to help people. Even though I don’t go around unclogging toilets every day, all I do is study plumbing systems and how to improve them to protect public health.”
Through a follow-up phone call, Edwards guided Walters step-by-step through an intense sampling procedure to obtain thirty bottles of tap water. Walters immediately sent the samples to Virginia Tech. Edwards recalled, “About a week later, the results showed that LeeAnne’s water contained literally hazardous waste levels of lead. One gulp could raise the lead level of a child to over the CDC level of concern. Thank goodness they weren’t listening to the state’s claims that the water was safe.”
“First we wanted the EPA to do their job,” Edwards explained. Allies in the EPA like Del Toral agreed. He wrote a memo that outlined the dangers in Flint and requested that the EPA exercise emergency powers to intervene. Unfortunately, those higher up the chain of command did not value Del Toral’s assessment of the situation. He told Edwards that an EPA ethics officer told him to never again speak to anyone from Flint, or about Flint.
When Del Toral’s memo failed, residents were left in imment danger. Edwards launched the Flint Water Study in mid-2015 as a citizen science project in which residents could follow a simple protocol to collect tap water in their homes, ship it to Virginia Tech, and receive results about water chemistry, particularly lead. He also felt the site would document an environmental crime. Flint residents needed access to scientific methods, just like residents in Tillery, Tonawanda, and New Orleans. Edwards said, “We provided the funding, technical and analytical support that allowed Flint residents to save themselves.”
Even with data in hand, Walters and other residents still had to fight to be heard. Authorities tried to discredit the citizen science. “Fortunately, Dr. Mona’s blood work of kids made it that much harder to ignore,” Walters said, referring to Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, who led a study that retrospectively examined blood lead levels in young children before and after the change in Flint’s water source. For many years, the Hurley Medical Center had routinely tested the blood lead levels of children, creating a database with information about lead levels from over one thousand children living in Flint and over 2,000 living outside of Flint. Hanna-Attisha found that outside the city, blood lead levels did not change, but within the city of Flint, the incidence of high lead levels increased after the change in water supply.
Ultimately, President Obama declared Flint as a federal state of emergency and authorized help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. Michigan’s Governor Snyder allocated millions to aid Flint residents and replace lead pipes. The Michigan Attorney General has been filing criminal charges against an assortment of people for crimes including tampering with evidence, misconduct in office, and willful neglect of duty. Walters continues to campaign to close every loophole in the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule so that others won’t fall victim to lead poisoning.
This wasn’t the first time Edwards had listened to people suspicious about problems with their water. He knew from past experiences, including finding lead in water in Washington, DC, that when someone complains about their water, they are often correct in noticing a real problem.
Professional societies for scientists, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and science funding agencies, like the National Science Foundation, are encouraging scientists to hone their communication skills. With public skepticism about global climate change, genetically modified foods, and vaccinations, these organizations view science communication as a responsibility of scientists and a necessity for informing the public on scientific issues. Unfortunately, most scientists communicate as though giving a lecture in class; they talk at people rather than converse with people. Edwards and his colleagues at Virginia Tech excel as science communicators in the opposite way: they listen to people.
In fact, Edwards and Yanna Lambrinidou, in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, take the skill of listening so seriously that they offer a college course in which students learn to listen to the public. The course is called Engineering Ethics and the Public, and the focus is on what they call transformational listening. By honing listening skills, researchers can collect information—not by measuring or observing but by listening—to inform their research agendas to meet public needs. At the same time, the conversations challenge stereotypes, expose power inequalities in the relationship, and transform relationships into trusted partnerships.
Another listener is Mordecai (“Muki”) Haklay, professor at University College London, who studies a broad range of topics related to environmental inequities driven by geography, particularly using citizen science approaches in response to the interests of local communities. Haklay began the Extreme Citizen Science lab, which collaborates with nonliterate communities around the world, and he cofounded Mapping for Change, a community mapping platform to help communities add their voice and their data to counter environmental injustices in London. Haklay’s approach to citizen science is at the grassroots level, while most scientists pursue topics that are trending in the literature or stated priorities of funding agencies. When I ask Haklay how he decides what topics to study, he replies, “Meh,” humbly waving my question aside, “It’s not rocket science. I go into a neighborhood, sit in a café, and have conversations with people.”
Edwards, Wing, and Haklay are examples of a new breed of STEM professionals who are skilled in shaping their research agendas to serve public interests. (We’ll meet another, Julia Brody, in chapter 10.) Unfortunately, these types of scientists are still few and far between. More often, when communities look for academic allies, they tend to find only those dedicated to their own research agendas. Given the importance of citizen science to justice, and the need for scientists to support citizen science endeavors, it is high time to revamp public expectations.
Public expectations are related to perceptions of scientists, which are typically reflected in movies and literature: middle-aged or elderly white men in glasses and lab coats carrying out dangerous experiments, like Dr. Frankenstein, or with dual personalities like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or bumbling nerds like Sherman Klump (played by Eddie Murphy) and Julius Kelp (played by Jerry Lewis) in each of the very different movies called The Nutty Professor. For decades, common perceptions were that scientists aimed to do tremendous social good, but sometimes their curiosity got the better of them and they were so absorbed by their work that they possessed few social skills.
The stereotypes are reinforced by television, movies, and comic books, and never countered because most people do not personally know a scientist nor recognize one even after the Science Cheerleaders (see chapter 6) point them out. Now that citizen science is putting more people in touch with scientists, and more scientists are defying stereotypical behaviors, could firsthand contact flip both public perceptions and expectations of scientists?
The answer could affect the diversity of people who imagine themselves as scientists and are happy with science careers. Although governments, academia, and foundations have repeatedly sought to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM careers, progress has been slow, even stagnant. Andrew Campbell, a biology professor at Brown University, carried out candid discussion with underrepresented minorities (URMs) considering STEM careers in order to understand the pertinent issues. Campbell’s synthesis pointed to impediments related to the culture of science, which wasn’t teaching students about career paths soon enough, nor providing solutions for work-life balance, nor—most important—valuing diverse traits and skills through different metrics of success. Campbell and his colleagues reported that to stay interested in STEM careers, URMs want scientific work to connect with communities and intersect with the humanities and arts. Science in silos shuts out too many types of people. Campbell recommended adding a social justice component to STEM education, as well as training in science communication so that students could help their families understand what research careers were all about. Expecting students to learn to collaborate with communities via citizen science designs seems like another approach that might broaden pursuit of STEM careers.
In chapter 10 we’ll explore highly varied forms of citizen science in public health, a field that values both social and environmental justice.