Photo: Zackary Canepari

As summer temperatures rise, so do fears of asthma and other illnesses caused by all the air pollution converging on the east Los Angeles community of Boyle Heights.

With its proximity to freeways, industrial sites and shipping corridors, activists say the geography of Boyle Heights brings a disproportionate health burden to residents.

Determined to reduce the adverse health effects caused by air pollution, residents and activists of this historically immigrant community are taking proactive and innovative measures to improve their environment.

“It’s a low-income, mostly transit-dependent community, there’s a lot of walking that happens, there are a lot of people that are out, being mobile through that pollution,” said Vanessa Rodriguez, associate director at the Alliance for a Better Community.

Rodriguez said Boyle Heights wasn’t designed for a mix of residential and industrial uses, nor the density of traffic it bears today.

“A lot of their central arteries are being used as thoroughfares,” she said. “The freeways that dissect the community, their entrances and exits cut up children’s routes to and from schools.”

One community group is installing air filters and monitoring devices in schools, hoping to draw attention to the issue.

The Air Quality Advancement Project of Mothers of East LA is funded by settlement money from a class-action lawsuit, and will install high-performance air filtration systems in seven Boyle Heights schools, and study air quality in and out of the classrooms.

“It’s an opportunity to get us on the radar regarding the injustice that is happening. We’ll be able to really validate what we’ve been claiming,” says Diana del Pozo-Mora, MELA’s executive director.

Health advocates are particularly concerned about ozone and particle pollution from traffic, which recent studies link to childhood asthma, hypersensitive allergies, infant mortality, and a variety of respiratory illnesses. Diabetics, people with heart or lung diseases, older adults, children and low income communities are at greater risk, especially when they are physically active.

Los Angeles was recently ranked by the American Lung Association as one of the most polluted cities in the nation, with several vulnerable and disadvantaged communities at greater risk for exposure to ozone and particles [PDF] .

With plans underway to expand the nearby Port of Long Beach (the largest source of air pollution in California, combined with the Port of Los Angeles) and the 710 freeway, residents face an even greater density of cargo ships, loading docks, diesel trucks and trains.

Activists say that so far, little has been done to address the health impacts on neighboring communities.

“There is a huge body of information to support that living in close proximity to polluting sources, puts one at great risk. The current level of standards doesn’t protect people,” said Bonnie Holmes-Gen of the group’s California office.

Bill Gallegos, executive director of Communities for a Better Environment, claimed that official statistics “don’t even begin to capture” the high rates and impacts of asthma, cancer, heart disease, pregnancy and childbirth complications, and respiratory problems.

“The county health system is struggling to survive, just to meet people’s basic needs,” he said. “With all these budget cuts it looks like what we’re facing is going to get worse.”

Beneath the 5 and 10 freeways, a view of Hollenbeck Park. Photo: Zackary Canepari

Photo: Zackary Canepari

Photo: Zackary Canepari

Mission Street on the north side of Boyle Heights. Photo: Zackary Canepari

This is the first such rejection in a long time – and it will delay both cleanup work and possible development in West Oakland.

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This Saturday, June 25, the community is invited to learn more about the new green technology this project will use to clean up residential properties there.

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Hollenbeck Park, one of the few green spaces available to families in Boyle Heights. Photo: Zackary Canepari

News about Boyle Heights in Los Angeles tends to be about crime or gentrification. There’s little coverage of air pollution, lack of safe and green spaces, lack of access to affordable and healthy food options — or the residents and organizations that are determined to change this.

On April 5, the East LA Community Corporation gathered community members to discuss the Boyle Heights Clean Air pilot project in which residents will collect data on local pollution and health risks.

“People really want to engage with us. They want to mobilize, act, and learn more,” said Lina Stepick, community organizing fellow at ELACC.

In January, the Clean Up Green Up campaign was launched and proposed to bring greener industries and jobs to “toxic hot spot” communities where concentrations of environmental hazards have resulted in high levels of health risks, including cancer and asthma. Clean Up Green Up is led by Communities for a Better Environment, Coalition for a Safe Environment, Pacoima Beautiful and Union de Vecinos.

“We know that Boyle Heights is very polluted and it’s a concern in our community. The children have asthma and there are more and more illnesses. We don’t know if it has to do with the pollution, the freeways, and the cars and trucks in our community,” said Angela Gutierrez, a volunteer at Union de Vecinos and White Memorial Hospital.

A mostly working class Latino neighborhood east of the Los Angeles River and north of the industrial city of Vernon, Boyle Heights has long been home to immigrant families, rich social capital and strong civic engagement.

It also has experienced generations of environmental inequality.

In the summer of 2006, The Southeast Regional Energy Center proposed building a 943-megawatt fossil fuel power plant that would emit approximately 1.7 million pounds of toxic pollution per year as well as 2.8 million tons of green house gases. The plant would have affected the communities living in the six-mile radius around the proposed 27-acre site on the southeast corner of Boyle and Fruitland Avenues in Vernon.

Residents and organizations from surrounding communities, including Boyle Heights, formed an alliance and fought against the proposed project for three years. In 2009, Vernon abandoned its plan.

The alliance led mostly by immigrant Latinas, youth, and supported by several organizations including Mother’s of East Los Angeles, Resurrection Church and Communities for a Better Environment was a victory for low-income communities across the country that are suffering from political, economic and social inequities.

“Environmental issues are just one of many issues of structural inequality faced by poor people of color. You can’t understand this issue as separate from the attacks on undocumented immigrants, inequality in schools, housing, and employment, police brutality, cultural language repression, all of the facets of people’s repression,” said Bill Gallegos, executive director of Communities for a Better Environment.

Alison Soman, her husband John and their five-year-old son Ben live in perhaps the loudest area in San Jose.

Their home in the Newhall-Sherwood neighborhood sits within steps of Highway 880, a train yard sits about 1,500 feet to the east and San Jose International Airport is just beyond that.

Photo (c) by Donovan Farnham

Yet Alison said her family has gotten used to the planes, trains and, particularly, the whoosh of the automobiles.

“The neighbors and I joke about it being the beach,” she said.

The San Jose Toxic Tour is produced by the San Jose State University journalism students of Professor Michael Cheers, in collaboration with Newsdesk.org.

Washington Elementary School is under the direct flight path of the San Jose International Airport. As many as 10 jets fly overhead per hour, producing constant noise, fumes and exhaust, that disrupt students’ education and possibly their health as well.

Students cope with low flying jets all day. Photo (c) by Jessica Olthof

The San Jose Toxic Tour is produced by the San Jose State University journalism students of Professor Michael Cheers, in collaboration with Newsdesk.org.

I’m reading up on local history and air quality maps for our Air Check series on air pollution in Los Angeles. I’m knee deep in Smogtown: The Lung-burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles by Chip Jacobs and William Kelley. It’s written like the pair wishes they were really James Elroy, but it’s chock-full of archival research and unbelievable anecdotes about just how toxic the miasma called air was in Los Angeles before the oil companies and defense manufacturers were ever subject to regulation. And yes, back in the post WWII L.A., they actually used a contraption called a “smogometer” to analyze the air. You can visit the Smogtown website: http://www.lasmogtown.com/

Newsdesk.org’s award-winning, crowd-funded Toxic Tour project comes to Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco. We’re working with local news producers in each city to help develop and fund their work, and put neglected public-health issues “on the map.” In the process we hope to create a new model for independent journalism.

A year after the dissolution of the Restoration Advisory Board for Hunters Point Shipyard, the Navy says it will introduce a new community involvement plan that it says emphasizes diversity.

The announcement follows the White House’s reconvened interagency effort on environmental justice, which held its first meeting under the Obama administration in September.

The group is creating a four-year road map to develop ‘stronger community relationships” and targets “overburdened communities.” The next meeting is set for April.

But longtime Bayview residents are skeptical about local agencies” interest in community involvement since the advisory board’s dissolution. While government officials and activists both say that engaging the community in the cleanup process has not worked as intended, few of those involved are willing to accept blame for the communication failures.

In December, activists met with officials from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to tour the shipyard and adjacent public facilities built on or near land contaminated with PCBs and other toxins, such as a school basketball court downwind from an excavation of soil laden with naturally occurring asbestos.

Activists also said that the Navy’s unilateral dissolution of the Restoration Advisory Board in December 2009 enabled it to “fast track” major decisions while disregarding community concerns. The biggest decision was the approval of the environmental impact report for the second phase of a redevelopment plan for the neighborhood that will ultimately bring 10,500 homes to the area.

Community involvement

Navy records described the advisory board as “unproductive,” and an EPA spokesman said the Navy’s new “community involvement plan,” due to be released sometime in the next two months, will reboot community engagement.

The Navy and EPA interviewed more than 70 community organizations and leaders to develop the plan, which aims to increase public involvement in the Hunters Point Shipyard cleanup.

They said that the advisory board meetings were poorly attended — some, they said, just barely made quorum.

Keith Forman, the Navy’s regional base realignment and closure coordinator, said he plans to cast a wider net in the community than the advisory board ever sought.

“We give them material and they are suppose to take that out of the RAB meeting and disseminate the info,” Forman said. “We didn”t see that going on at all.”
Since dissolving the advisory board, the Navy has continued to host regular meetings at the Bayview YMCA and meet with neighborhood groups by invitation.

Mark Ripperda, the EPA’s cleanup project manager for three years, said the Navy has not provided an adequate replacement for the advisory board.

“When we did our community interviews, some had never talked to the RAB,” Ripperda said. “The RAB wasn’t reaching the broad section.”

Ripperda said some members of the advisory board proved unable to move beyond certain technical details such as development, earthquake safety and dust, when they also had to deal with a broader range of questions including excavation, cleanup and water quality.

“Seen and not heard”

Yet former advisory board member Marie Harrison, who served since its inception in 1994, said she met with many people to explain the cleanup process and what it might mean for community health.

She said some people felt intimidated about asking questions and that the Navy ran “rampant over the community.”

“You know how you tell a child to be seen and not heard,” Harrison said “Well, that’s kind of how I felt the Navy was looking at the community representatives.”

Stancil, who has lived in Bayview-Hunters Point for 58 years, said she does not believe the Navy is sincere about community involvement, and that some cleanup measures have been inadequate.

“They made us promise that they were going to fully clean up,” she said. “And all of a sudden, they started backing down where they don”t do anything.”

Esselene Stancil, Bayview resident by sfpublicpress

Marie Harrison, Greenaction by sfpublicpress

“Environmental justice”

Stancil’s frustration at government agencies is echoed in communities throughout the country, and the White House says it is listening.

Mathy Stanislaus, the assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, met in December with community organizations to tour the shipyard and discuss their concerns.

The visit coincided with the White House’s first forum on environmental justice and formulation of “Plan EJ 2014,” a four-year roadmap whose goal is stronger community relationships and improved conditions in environmentally “overburdened” communities.

Stanislaus’ department heads the EPA’s Community Engagement Initiative, and says it has committed funding as well as staff to help resolve ongoing struggles at the shipyard cleanup.

Getting the community involved is “a significant component of the cleanup process,” said EPA spokesman Richard Yost in an e-mail. He said the EPA has handed out $400,000 in grants and contacts in the surrounding community. The agency also has provided technical advisers and facilitation, he said.

“Disappointing” is how the Navy’s Forman describes the situation. “It’s a downer. You put a lot of work into these things.”

In a related development, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Lennar Urban and the city settled a lawsuit with some environmental groups Saturday that will reduce the harm to the shoreline and wildlife.

Canada oil sands development

Canada is the largest exporter of crude oil to the U.S., and Alberta’s Premier Ed Stelmach claimed that over 340,00 jobs will be created in the U.S. alone over the next five years from oils sands development, according to Nanaimo Daily News.

Yet in a letter to Pelosi and Markey, who chairs the House Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee, activists cited several recent studies showing dire environmental impacts from oil-sands mining on caribou and bird populations, forests and public health.

Of particular concern to activists is the proposed TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline that would send oil from Alberta to Texas.

The pipeline “would be both a cause and a symptom of a failure to address climate change and to reduce oil consumption. These failures would make us less secure, as they would lead to conflict and economic risk,” the groups wrote.

Canadian groups filed two actions in court on Sept. 8, saying oil-sands development must stop to protect caribou herds in northeastern Alberta, reports CBC News.

By some estimates, caribou herds have shrunk to about one-tenth of their largest size — and biologist Stan Boutin told CBC News that some herds may disappear completely by 2030.

Oil sands in Alberta, Canada

He said the primary cause was habitat destruction. Canada’s oil country now has about 35,000 oil and gas wells, 66,000 kilometers of seismic lines, 13,000 kilometers of pipelines and 12,000 kilometers of roads, according to the report.

Caribou try to avoid these man-made structures — and become more susceptible to predators.

Three aboriginal groups added that allowing caribou herds to die off would violate their treaty rights to hunt for sustenance.

Another report found oil sands tailing ponds are responsible for killing over 30 times more birds than the Canadian government claims.

Ecologists said that over 1,900 birds died every year because they were “oiled” in the ponds — but those numbers could be far higher because the study didn’t count birds that were oiled at night or those that had sunk to the bottom of tailing ponds.

A June 2010 Newsdesk.org story also reported on high levels of arsenic, mercury and other toxins in fish, a regional dietary staple, that critics linked to oil-sands development.

In Fort Chipewyan, in northeast Alberta’s oil-sand region, one researcher said cancer rates are 30 percent higher than the regional average, a statistic that was disputed by the local health department.

Canadian caribou

Oil sands extraction requires huge amount of water and energy to produce a single barrel of synthetic crude, with over 23 billion cubic feet diverted from local rivers to aid in extraction, according to Business Insider.

Other reports suggest that hydrocarbon and greenhouse gas emissions from oil sands development are significantly higher than government reports claim.

The province of Alberta is estimated to contain over 171 billion barrels of oil spanning an area of over 54,000 square miles.

—Don Clyde/Newsdesk.org

VIDEO: Alberta Oil Sands – BBC News

CITATIONS:

Court challenge launched to halt new oilsands development on caribou land
CBC News, Sept. 8, 2010

Oilsands tailing ponds kill 30 times more birds than government estimates: study
CBC News, Sept. 7,  2010

Oilsands chat with Pelosi ‘open, candid’: Stelmach
CBC News, Sept. 9, 2010

Nancy Pelosi Is Headed To Canada And May Shut Down America’s Next Big Oil Source
Business Insider, Sept. 10, 2010

15 Frightening Facts About Canada’s Booming Tar Sands
Business Insider, July 14, 2010

Environmental groups target Canadian oil sands ahead of Pelosi meeting
The Hill (Washington, D.C.), Sept. 8, 2010

Way up north, another kind of oil controversy
Newsdesk.org, June 3, 2010

U.S. politicians put Canada on the defensive over oilsands
Nanaimo Daily News, Sept. 8, 2010

Animals seized from Brazilian jungles by wildlife traffickers, then confiscated by well-meaning officials and animal rights activists, frequently face even more problems than they had before, says a biologist from the University of São Paulo.

Juliana Machado Ferreira

Biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira, who is pursuing her doctorate in Conservation Genetics at the Laboratory of Evolutionary Biology and Vertebrate Conservation, said in a speech in the U.S. last February that the animals’ troubles may have just begun.

“People say ‘Yay!’ The good guys arrived and took the cute, mistreated animals from the evil traffickers and everyone lives happily ever after,” she said in a five-minute presentation at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif. (Speech below.)

(Courtesy Smithsonian.com)

“But these days, no. This is where many of our problems begin because we have to figure out what to do with all these animals. In Brazil, they are first sent to governmental triage facilities, which in most cases, the conditions are just as bad as with the traffickers.”

She said an estimated 38 million animals are trafficked each year in Brazil, fueling  a $2 billion pets market  just  to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro alone.

In 2002, she said, the “good guys” recaptured 45,000 animals, 37,000 of them birds, representing just five percent of what had been trafficked.

Worldwide, according to a 2009 report in Smithsonian Magazine that cites U.S. State Department figures, wildlife trafficking is thought to be the third most valuable illicit commerce in the world, after drugs and weapons, worth an estimated $10 billion a year. Birds are the most common contraband; the State Department estimates that two million to five million wild birds, from hummingbirds to parrots to harpy eagles, are traded illegally worldwide every year. Millions of turtles, crocodiles, snakes and other reptiles are also trafficked, as well as mammals and insects.

Ferreira

Ferreira said the recaptured birds frequently face death at the hands of the very people who saved them.

“The Brazil Ornithological Society claims we have too little knowledge about these species in nature, and that it would be too risky to release these animals. They also claim we spend too many resources o

(Courtesy BBC)

n rehabilitation. They suggest all birds seized from non-threatened species should be euthanized.

“That would mean having killed 26,267 birds only in the state of São Paulo, and only in 2006.”

She said she is leading a research team in rehabilitating the rehabilitators.

“Technically responsible releases are possible,” she said, “both for the well being of the individual and for the conservation of their species.”

She exhorted the audience, “Let’s study more, and shed light on this issue.”

VIDEO: Juliana Machado Ferreira at the TED Conference, Long Beach, Calif., February 2010

VIDEO: Illegally traded wild animals seizure operation with the Civil Police of São Paulo and Juliana M. Ferreira

Citations:

The fight to end rare-animal trafficking in Brazil
Ted.com, March 23, 2010

Wildlife Trafficking
Smithsonian Magazine Dec. 2009

SOS Fauna

Conservation Genetics at the Laboratory of Evolutionary Biology and Vertebrate Conservation (LABEC) at São Paulo University