Living Downstream: Recent Episodes
Steve Mencher
For this final Living Downstream episode of the season, we're dropping in on three recent webinars:
One gathering considered Social and Environmental Justice at Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Another knitted together poetry and a powerful environmental film. It was put on by the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program. And a third event was cheekily called Toxics are a Drag, and was billed as a panel discussion on toxic beauty products in the queer community. That was hosted by one of the most important grass roots environmental groups in the country: New York City's WEACT for Environmental Justice.
Find more information about all these events in the Resources section of our website at https://norcalpublicmedia.org/resources/living-downstream-resource-guide
First, this show has an update on what's happening right now, the last week of October 2021. I called White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council member Dr. Robert Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice in this country. He spoke to me just days before leaving for COP26, the United Nations climate change conference set to start next week in Glasgow.
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This season, we’re looking at environmental racism across the country, and today that takes us to the sugarcane covered, oil-rich region at the intersection of southern Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico: Iberia Parish.
In this episode of Living Downstream, we will hear from people who say they are fighting over something that their families have already fought for generations to maintain: wealth. In this case, we’re talking about land: what grows on it and what lies under it.
We’ll hear from Black sugarcane farmers who say it’s become impossible to stay within the industry. These farmers describe the challenges of keeping their businesses afloat in an atmosphere of overwhelming racism, and they share with us how the stress is affecting their minds and bodies.
And we'll hear the poignant story of a woman who documents how oil was taken from her family's land, while the only compensation was a $10 contract she says is a fraud.
Gulf States Newsroom regional healthcare reporter Shalina Chatlani takes the story from here.
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From Northern California Public Media and Mensch Media, this edition of Living Downstream is guest hosted by Molly Peterson.
This time, from the Coachella Valley, east of Los Angeles, we’re talking about the biggest lake in California — now starved of water — and the people who live around The Sea Next Door.
The Salton Sea sits in a depression of land 30 miles from the Mexican border — and it poses a growing threat to public health. In this episode, two young women from the Eastern Coachella Valley introduce us to their neighbor.
We begin with Adriana Torres, who lives in a rural community there: an area called North Shore. We'll also hear from her classmate Rosa Gonzalez.
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On this episode of Living Downstream, we take you to a little city with big plans for changing the world. While we’re there, we ask what role local governments can play in the movement for climate justice — that’s where climate activism and the fight for social justice meet. Ithaca, New York sees itself as a living laboratory for climate justice. Climate justice is based on the recognition that the people whose lives are most disrupted by climate change — the people who tend to die in the storms and heat waves, or to lose their homes in the fires and floods — are generally the people with the least money, the most precarious jobs, the least access to health care, the shabbiest housing, and the least reliable transportation.
So if you want to do something about the climate emergency, the thinking goes, you can’t just focus on things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for disasters. You need to address long-standing social and economic inequities at the same time.
Climate justice is the big idea behind the Green New Deal — the resolution that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez first introduced with Senator Ed Markey in 2019 and re-introduced in April of 2021.
Congress hasn’t formally adopted the Green New Deal, but many local governments around the country have gone ahead and passed their own versions. Ithaca is one of them. And it’s brought in a man with a global vision to lead the charge. Veteran public radio reporter — and long-time Ithaca resident — Jonathan Miller takes us there.
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On this episode of Living Downstream, Texas Public Radio’s Yvette Benavides takes us to Central and South Texas where summer days are frequently in the upper 90’s, but where in many low income neighborhoods the mercury climbs even higher.
And with climate change, these areas will be experiencing more extreme temperatures, more frequently and for longer durations.
New research shows how these hotter temperatures are taking a toll on the people who live in some city neighborhoods — typically in communities of color. The heat is affecting their bodies and minds — effectively shortening their lives.
We'll be hearing from some Spanish-speaking residents as they explain how they coexist with the heat. Yvette will translate, but we’ll make room for these Texans to have their voices heard in their own language.
What's the connection between longstanding racism in our cities and the built environment there? What can be done to reverse what the EPA and many researchers call “the Urban Heat Island Effect”? The answers will demand that we untangle a complex web of issues, reject some of our prejudices and think creatively. That’s essential if we want to save lives and come to grips with the changing planet and our place in the community of people inhabiting it. Yvette Benavides reports.
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On this episode of Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast, Victoria Bouloubasis visits a rural county where the multicultural workforce kept America fed during the pandemic. We'll meet Esmeralda, who has become a community health worker, and her mother Marta, who works in a poultry plant.
In the face of blatant mistreatment and inadequate protection, food factory workers in North Carolina became sick, and died, in unacceptably high numbers. This mother-daughter team stepped up to protect the health of their neighbors and coworkers, efforts they continue today.
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For decades, community members and allies have complained about the diesel truck traffic around the Port of Oakland. People who live in this neighborhood, between several freeways and backing up to one of the busiest ports in the nation, have elevated instances of asthma, and shorter life spans, than others in the county. We meet the activists who are trying to change this reality, and we hear about the complex politics and alliances that have resulted in some hope that change is coming. The phrase "diesel death zone" is used more often with areas in Southern California, but we believe it applies here as well. Sarah Holtz reports. Click the icon below to listen.
On this episode of Living Downstream, we visit Houston's Greater Fifth Ward, to learn how creosote contamination has degraded the health of people living near a rail yard. We talk with residents, who describe all the cancer cases in the neighborhood and with Dr. Robert Bullard, widely considered the father of environmental justice. Residents have organized to advocate for compensation from the railroad company that owns the yard. What will stay with you is the story of "Mister" — a young neighborhood resident who dreams of becoming a veterinarian. Laura Isensee reports. Click the icon below to listen.
The 40th anniversary of PCB protests in North Carolina is about to be commemorated. To mark the occasion, we revisit one of the most listened-to episodes from our first season. This story comes from Warren County. In the early 1980s, Warren County became a flash point in the fight for something that didn’t even have a commonly used name at the time: environmental justice.
These days, members of this community are not only marking that history, they are taking new approaches to raising environmental awareness. Their work begins with support for small farmers, particularly those of color.
Jereann King Johnson and Joe O’Connell have teamed up to tell the story of local environmentalism in the present day.
As we continue this second season of Living Downstream, make sure to subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. Please leave comments and rate us on your favorite app - it helps others to find us.
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On this episode of Living Downstream, we meet Catherine Coleman Flowers. In 2020, she released her first book, Waste: One Woman's Fight Against America's Dirtiest Secret. The book documents her two-decade crusade to expose the shameful conditions that many of her Alabama neighbors endure. Some Americans take for granted that when they flush the toilet their waste will travel to a place where it can be safely and effectively treated. But for others, the sewage may go only as far as their back yards, to become breeding grounds for insects and disease. In 2020, Flowers became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow - an award colloquially known as the "genius" grant for her work in Alabama and around the world. She also is the founder of CREEJ, the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, and a current vice chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Flowers talked in January, and again in April, with Living Downstream host Steve Mencher. In this episode we'll also hear selections from the documentary about Flowers, called The Accidental Environmentalist, and a story about a distant cousin and friend of Flowers, Pamela Rush, used by permission of NPR's All Things Considered. Click the icon below to listen.
More than a year into the pandemic, the Bronx is still the New York City borough with the highest death rate from COVID-19. That's where we begin the second season of our Living Downstream podcast.
Last year, Ese Olumhense, former Bronx reporter at THE CITY, explored why residents there were dying from the virus at a rate double the city's average. Public health experts said Bronx residents, who are overwhelmingly Black and Latinx, were more likely to work outside of their homes, regularly exposing them to the virus. The borough also sees high rates of chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma, which can make COVID-19 infection more dangerous.
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Season 2 of Living Downstream: The Environmental Justice Podcast premieres Earth Day (4/22/21). Producers are checking in from around the country, from California to North Carolina. And we'll talk with EJ warrior Catherine Coleman Flowers. Here's a preview.
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Last year we brought you the story of civilian workers at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, who tested the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Today these workers are in their 70s and 80s and suffer from the same diseases that Vietnam veterans have shown were caused by their exposure to the herbicide.
While surviving veterans receive disability benefits as a result of their exposure, these civilian workers do not.
Earlier this year NPR’s mid-day show, Here & Now, featured our story of the civilian workers at Eglin. That broadcast has prompted more individuals to come forward who say they too are suffering medical problems caused by exposure to Agent Orange at Eglin. The story also sparked interest by law firms in a potential class action on behalf of those affected.
Jon Kalish reports…
Read more about the class action lawsuit and Agent Orange.
[Photo: Penny Davidson. At 82 she has fibromyalgia, peripheral neuropathy, rheumatoid arthritis and a host of other ills she traces back to her time in the lab at Eglin working with Agent Orange. Credit: Jon Kalish]
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Non-Federally Recognized Tribes Struggle to Protect Environmental and Cultural Assets
By Debra Utacia Krol and Allison Herrera
Read more about federally non-recognized tribes.
Valentin Lopez was handed a dilemma: how to honor his elders’ admonition to fulfill an ancestral directive to guard and protect the ancestral lands of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, a small tribe along California’s Central Coast and parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.
“In 2006 the tribal elders came to a council meeting,” says Lopez, who’s served as chairman of the 600-member tribe since 2003. “They said our creation story tells us the Creator gave us the responsibility to take care of Mother Earth and all living things, and Creator has never taken away or rescinded that obligation. We have to find a way to do that.” Lopez left that meeting “just shaking my head saying, ‘How in the world could we ever do that?’”
One huge roadblock: Lopez’s tribe lacks federal recognition. Unlike recognized tribes, Amah Mutsun can’t use federal Indian laws such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, also known as NAGPRA or access federal funding to pursue environmental and cultural site protection. And, most of the tribal members have had to move east to the San Joaquin Valley, priced out of their stunningly beautiful—and expensive—homeland, because they don’t have a reservation or other trust lands to call home.
So, how could Lopez honor his word to the elders?
[Photo: Valentin Lopez. Credit: Debra Utacia Krol]
Lopez isn’t alone: Some 55 Indigenous communities in California aren’t on the BIA’s List of Recognized Tribes, the document used by the feds to provide funding and technical assistance to tribal governments for education, health care, governance, environmental protection and many other programs. In fact, California has the dubious distinction of the state with the largest number of unrecognized tribes. Entire cultural groups such as the Ohlone, Esselen, Salinan and other cultures fell completely through the cracks, while others like the Chumash, Mono and Maidu peoples have both recognized and non-recognized communities.
So, how can non-recognized tribes manage to protect their ancestral sites and exert environmental stewardship over their lands? In California, some state laws and policies offer at least some paths to protection.
In September 2011, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. issued an executive order that requires all state agencies to engage in meaningful consultation with Indigenous tribes in California, whether federally recognized or not.
The California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, was amended in 2014 provisions for tribal cultural protections. And, these cultural provisions apply to non-recognized tribes. Under the terms of the amendment, known to tribes as Assembly Bill 52, California tribes have legal standing to issue a notice for consultation regarding any proposed project covered under CEQA in the tribe’s traditional and culturally-affiliated lands.
More state agencies, most notably the California Coastal Commission, have enacted tribal consultation policies. And, the state’s Native American Heritage Commission coordinates consultation as well as identifying and cataloging Native American cultural resources with state borders.
For small, resource-poor tribes such as the Amah Mutsun and the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini Northern Chumash Tribe (also known at the ytt Northern Chumash), whose lands lie about a four-hour drive north of Los Angeles on the Central Coast, utilizing these state regulations can be a challenge. Mona Olivas Tucker, tribal chair of the ytt Northern Chumash Tribe, manages relationships with a variety of state and local agencies.
Tucker believes that the state’s efforts to support tribes has a mixed record. “I think the Native American Heritage Commission tries very hard to be helpful to tribes federally recognized and non-federally recognized,” she says. “But I also think they have a giant amount of work and perhaps too small a staff to try to take care of it all; but, they do try pretty hard to help us when we reach out for help.” And, she says, the 30-day period to respond to requests for consultation is insufficient for the number of requests the tribe receives. “We work on a volunteer basis,” says Tucker. “Our tribal office is a spare bedroom here in my house and our tribal hall is my living room.” Each tribal member who helps with consultations handles a different area of San Luis Obispo County.
But, even though the ytt Northern Chumash has a good relationship with the county, working with the feds is a different story. “When you're not federally recognized you have greater difficulty in getting to the conference table for discussions about your area,” says Tucker. “An example is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management; they have been cordial. But, we're not a federally recognized tribe, so we have the status as a typical member of the public. We don't have a special status with them.”
Sometimes when the feds come calling, though, it can be a different story.
“Our tribe is very poor,” says Lopez. “We did not own any land. The vast majority of us cannot afford to live in our territory. And so, we live in the Central Valley versus along the coast or in the Gilroy, Hollister, Morgan Hill area.” In fact, we met in Winton, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley, a three-hour drive from the eastern edge of Amah Mutsun land. But the Amah Mutsun elders had issued their orders: resume land stewardship over their lands as they had for more than 10,000 years. Lopez had been praying for a solution when an unlikely would-be partner emerged—the National Park Service.
“We got a call from the superintendent of Pinnacles National Park,” says Lopez. “He invited us to come in and be part of the park; he had just transferred in from another park where he had a great relationship with the tribe.”
The superintendent told Lopez, “I recognize this is your territory." He offered the tribe a voice at the park.
“When he said those words, we were really happy, recognizing that perhaps this is the creator answering our prayers,” says Lopez. “At the same time, it scared us because we had lost so much knowledge that they expected us to have knowledge about to take care of the plants and animals, and to tell the interpretation story and talk about life as our ancestors had.
“We had lost so much of that knowledge.”
But, in addition to knowledge possessed by living elders, Amah Mutsun had a powerful tool at their disposal: Some 78,000 pages of notes compiled by anthropologist John P. Harrington, collected from the Amah Mutsun’s last traditional leader, Asencion Solorazno (1855-1930).
The initial call has evolved into a partnership, including conducting cultural burns and nurturing basketry and other culturally significant plants within Pinnacles’ land.
The situation is different for tribes that aren’t recognized but have allotments known as public domain trust lands, such as the North Fork Mono Tribe.
Mono families obtained Indian allotments after a promised reservation never materialized. Today, the North Fork Mono Tribe has 52 allotments covering well over 10,000 acres of land. The nearby federally recognized North Fork Rancheria, another Mono community, has an 80-acre reservation, or rancheria.
The Monos’ 1.2 million-acre ancestral land base encompasses portions of Fresno, Mariposa and Inyo counties, including parts of the Sierra Nevada. “We've been here in our area for thousands of years, down in the lower foothills for a good 500 years,” says Tribal Chairman Ron Goode. The Mono have maintained that land, including many of the more than 8,000 meadows dotting the mountain region. “That’s where the water starts,” says Goode.
In the early 1990s, the tribe began to work on restoration and enhancement of its cultural resources in partnership with three counties. “We have over 10 different resource spots that we've been restoring since then and many other smaller acreages of land,” says Goode. “Around 2003 we started working with the Forest Service and restoring meadows, and we've been restoring meadows since then.” By 2014, the tribe has restored six meadows, bringing water and both endemic and useful exotic plants back.
Goode takes us on a tour of one of those meadows.
It’s a rare almost-clear day in Clovis, just east of Fresno, where Goode and his family have a small deer farm. We can spy the mighty expanse of the Sierras through a thin haze, unlike the grayish muck that passes for open air in the San Joaquin Valley these days. To see where California’s water starts, we make our way up narrow mountain roads. The grasslands and fields give way to groves of oak, manzanita, buckwheat and blackberry. Above our heads, pine and fir trees rise to brush against the blue sky. “Look at black oaks and pine trees,” says Goode.
After about an hour on the road, we reach the small meadow in the Sierra National Forest. Goode reminds us to look up to ensure a dead tree isn’t about to crash on our heads. The deadfall is the result of California’s historic drought, when about 150 million trees perished. Although it proved to be good news for the meadows, the dead trees are a hazard.
“So why don’t people just cut them down?” we ask.
“I don't know,” says Goode. “I tried to get them to do that, but you know there was a policy problem. It was not declared a disaster federally, even though it's on federal lands. And Governor Brown declared a disaster, so we get state money. But we can’t get any FEMA funding. Nobody else comes in to help.”
We meander around the landscape. Goode explains the process he and his crews followed to restore the meadow. “We cleared up maybe eight refrigerators and hauled truckloads of stuff, beds and all sorts of stuff, the first time we started working.”
Now, Goode and his crew has restored the meadow. “We can see it's all green,” says Goode. “And how wet it is because the little spring grasses are all right here. We brought the water back by clearing it and opening it up.“
Goode points out the spring, a small hole in the damp ground that oozes water. “The idea is to raise the water table back up,” he says. “Most of the meadows were incapacitated. They were not functional. You might have one spring working part of the year and maybe not. Maybe had a spring that was dried for two or three years or longer. So, we began to remove and eradicate what didn't belong on the meadow, such as conifers. And any other plants with too many specimens. It might be too many willows. It might be too many manzanitas. It may be too many of something that didn't belong there in that meadow, had to come off.”
We carefully tread around the deer grass, being cautious of the wet ground, looking for rattlesnakes, detouring around soaproot and wild strawberries.
“We've monitored the acorns. So right here we're looking at what's called a golden oak. And we have about 40 golden oaks. We have had, had 64 black oaks, but I think it's closer to 60 now because a few of them died or got felled. So, we have close to 100 new oaks coming up. Last year, 2018, was like the best acorn year. And we had over seven trees that were what we call abundant. So, we got bags and bucketsful of acorn out of these trees. It’s been really good.”
Goode says success is determined by measuring resources. “We monitor those resources whether it be acorn or young oaks. How many oaks do we have? How many young oaks are coming up? How many different plants?”
“We create lists while we're working out there on the land and identifying the insects and birds and reptiles and animals and trees and shrubbery and all the different plants, medicine plants, fiber plants, food plants.” In the six meadows the tribe maintains, Goode counts up to 160 species per meadow.
Back along the Central Coast, landless tribes engage in a different tactic.
Amah Mutsun established a land trust which allows them to establish stewardship partnerships even though they don’t own any of the lands. For example, the land trust was asked by California State Parks to assist with restoration of the coastal prairie in Año Nuevo State Park, in Santa Cruz County. “We currently have 10 stewards working in the field,” says Lopez. “Those coastal prairies are very important for the insects and the birds and the four-legged creatures,” says Lopez. “They provide much more than a forest does. So today we have MOU agreements that allow us access to over 140,000 acres in our traditional tribal territory. And those MOUs allow us to steward, to tend, to gather, to hold ceremony, to have prayer, conduct education research on those landscapes.
“We don't own an inch of land but we say our ancestors didn't own land either.”
One essential task the tribal stewards perform is repairing the damage from more than 300 years of fire suppression. “When they stopped fire during the Spanish period, the mission period, Mexican period, in the American period they outlawed fire,” says Lopez. “And so we're out there with the chainsaws to cut down a lot of the trees that have encroached on that coastal prairie. Then, we’re replanting a lot of traditional native plants back out there. Those native plants provide the most biodiverse landscapes that there is in the world.”
Restoring and sustaining California’s biodiversity also supports species worldwide, says Lopez. For example, he notes that wine grapes owe their continued health to endemic California grape species that, when grafted to other varieties, helped wine grapes to recover from a blight.
“We believe that we know that we have Creator with us,” says Lopez. “We know we have our ancestors with us. If something was to happen, they would they would lose a lot more than we would, because we would still have our ancestors and creator with us.”
“I'm saying quite frequently now that if we're going to ever recover and heal from climate change, it's the Indigenous people that will show the way,” says Lopez, “and our tribe is working hard now to prepare ourselves to be such a leader.”
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This is the story of a 15-year conflict over what would be the biggest dam removal ever, a modern cowboys and Indians tale that shows how victories for Native American rights still come with fits of racism and armed conflict, and how rural folks learned to make peace (and collaborate on an 1800-page Congressional bill).
It’s a complex story about a fight over shared (and limited) water, with both sides fearing the disappearance of traditional lifestyles. Written and produced by Emrys Eller and his brother Greg Eller. Language alert: some salty language courtesy of real folks who lived this story.
Read more about the Klamath River Dam removal. (Image: John C. Boyle Dam on the Klamath River in southern Oregon. This is one of the dams scheduled for demolition within the next few years. Credit: Wikipedia/Bobjgalindo) Editor's Note: This story was completed in 2018, before Gavin Newson took over as governor from Jerry Brown. The timeline for removal of the Klamath River dams is evolving. The most recent estimates are that the California dams may start being "deconstructed" in 2021.Comments are now open (until Feb. 26, 2019) on the California Environmental Impact Report. From the Klamath Falls Oregon Herald and News: The Notice of Availability and Draft EIR are available at: https://bit.ly/2TcxefF. Additional information related to the Lower Klamath Project water quality certification and California Environmental Quality Act process can be found at: https://bit.ly/2jwgIcL.
Comments on the draft EIR are due by noon, Feb. 26, and can be sent to wr401program@waterboards.ca.gov, or Ms. Michelle Siebal, State Water Resources Control Board, Division of Water Rights — Water Quality Certification Program, P.O. Box 2000, Sacramento, CA 95812-2000
A mural in Happy Camp, a small indian town in the Klamath National Forest.
The Iron Gate Dam is the biggest and only earthen dam on the Klamath River.
Emrys Eller on Copco 1, one of four dams slated for removal along the California-Oregon border.
Iron Gate Dam.
Emrys Eller interviews Klamath Tribal leader Don Gentry near an elementary school in Chiloquin, Oregon. In 2003, two men shot up the signage of this native school amid tensions over whether to remove dams on the Klamath River.
Emrys Eller speaks with Karuk tribal leader Leaf Hillman on the banks of the Klamath River.
Emrys Eller speaks with Karuk tribal leader Leaf Hillman on the banks of the Klamath River.
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This story comes from Warren County, North Carolina. In the early 1980s, Warren County became a flash point in the fight for something that didn’t have a commonly used name at the time: environmental justice.
These days, members of this small, “majority-minority” community are taking new approaches to raising environmental consciousness.
Jereann King Johnson and Joe O’Connell have teamed up to tell the story of local environmentalism in the present day.
Jereann has been involved in social justice work in the county since the 1970s. She knows Warren County intimately. Joe, on the other hand, was drawn to this story through his work as a folklorist. He lives in Durham, about an hours drive to the south of where our story takes place.
Learn more about PCBs and global environmental justice conflicts.
(Image: Anti-PCB demonstration 1982. Credit: Mac Shaffer)
Slideshow of protests against PCB site in Warren County, photographer Mac Shaffer:
PCB March September 15, 1982, photos by Matt Cooper, Jr.
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The peat swamp forests of Borneo are the site of a failed agricultural experiment. Planners believed that rice should grow in the swamps, but it couldn't. Even today, experiments with growing oil palms and other trees are changing the forests, with little positive to show for these efforts.
As indigenous people lost their livelihood, carbon poured into the atmosphere from uncontrolled fires.
Daniel Grossman reports:
Learn more about peat fires in Indonesia.
Read an article by The New York Times on the same region of Indonesia.
(Image: Smog and smoke over Borneo and Indonesia, 1997. Credit: NASA)
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You may be familiar with Coachella from hearing about the annual music festival there. But for 10 years, journalist Ruxandra Guidi has been visiting farmworkers in the area, learning about the deplorable conditions in which they live.
There’s now some hope that community health workers are making a significant difference in the lives of workers. Here’s Ruxandra with the story – and stay tuned afterwards for a conversation with her detailing how she gains the trust of folks whose lives she’s documenting.
Learn more about Coachella Valley trailer park activists.
READ: Amid California's Toxic Dumps, Local Activists Go It Alone, by Ruxandra Guidi (In this historic photo by Dorothea Lange, migrant farmworkers pull carrots in the Coachella Valley. Credit: Library of Congress)
Ruxandra Guidi reported and produced this episode of Living Downstream, The Trailer Park Activists of Eastern Coachella Valley
Thanks to Anthony Garcia for mastering the show.
The Living Downstream theme music was written by David Schulman.
Steve Mencher is the host and senior producer. Darren LaShelle in the executive producer, and the president and CEO of Northern California Public Media is Nancy Dobbs.
Subscribe to Living Downstream wherever you get your podcasts. If you see environmental injustice in your community, write to us at living@norcalpublicmedia dot org
LIVING DOWNSTREAM thanks our sponsors who make this podcast possible. A list is available at norcalpublicmedia.org
Activist Eduardo Guevara takes a picture inside Lawson Dump as smoke rises from a fire smoldering belowground. Although it was ordered closed in 2006, underground fires continued to burn for years afterward, and residents of nearby mobile home parks continued to complain about noxious odors and possible contamination. (Credit: Roberto (Bear) Guerra, 2010)
A hand-written sign warns Duroville mobile home park residents in Thermal, California, to stay away from a waste pond on the neighboring property. On the far side of the pond is Lawson Dump, now closed by the EPA because it contained dangerous amounts of arsenic, PCBs, asbestos, dioxin and other toxic materials. (Credit: Roberto (Bear) Guerra, 2010)
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For the Navajo people Mother Earth is sacred. She places her mineral riches below ground. That’s where they’re meant to stay. If the Earth’s elements are hauled up to the surface, Navajos believe they can turn monstrous -- or they can unleash the monsters in humankind. Uranium mining produces radionuclides and other toxic wastes full of heavy-metals. Transformed for weaponry and fuel, uranium can affect human genes, according to the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity. To get at uranium deep underground requires scouring the earth with chemicals to extract the raw ore and its poisonous bedfellows. What’s left are soils that blow contaminants through the air as dust, and wastewater that seeps deep into underground aquifers and pollutes groundwater. The residents of the Red Water Pond Road community in New Mexico have lived with uranium mining contamination for 50 years.
(pictured: Jean Hood and Peterson Bell at Standing Black Tree Mesa. Credit: Hannah Colton) They’re sick of the mess -- and tired of being in a state of toxic limbo that the uranium industry bequeathed when it packed up and left.
Producer Ellen Berkovitch made several trips to Red Water Pond Road to visit this community. She brings us the story.
Learn more about the Navajo Nation and uranium contamination.
Music from this episode includes:
Moonlight Sonata (Shifting Sun Mix) by Speck © 2018
The Code of My Heart by Gurdonark, © 2017
8-String Ballad (Instrumental) by Aussens@iter © 2017
Where the Wind Blows by Martijn de Boer (NiGiD) © 2016
Dark Clouds by onlymeith © 2013
The Raven by Analog By Nature © 2007
The Drilling Begins by Stefan Kartenberg © 2017
All of the music titles above licensed under Creative Commons licenses courtesy of CC Mixter dot org.
Geiger counter, recorded by Scott Williams of Death Convention Singers. Courtesy Death Convention Singers.Click the icon below to listen.
"Smackdown" tells the story of Richmond California, a working class town that grew up in the shadow of a massive Chevron refinery. The refinery emits a toxic soup of chemicals and residents suffer an asthma rate that is double the national average.
Explosions and fires have periodically shaken the refinery since 1989. But Chevron is also the biggest employer in town and its taxes supply tens of millions of dollars for city services. Can Richmond maintain a healthy economy while transitioning away from fossil fuels and lessening its reliance on Chevron? And what role does electoral politics play in the mix?
In October, 2018, Chevron settled a suit brought by the U.S. EPA, requiring it to pay nearly $3 million in damages, and spend about $160 million dollars upgrading refineries around the United States, including the facility in Richmond, Calif.
(Pictured: Community demonstrates against Chevron, April 20, 2012. Credit: Daniel Arauz, Flickr)
Listen to Smackdown, produced and reported by Claire Schoen.
Learn more about refinery towns in the U.S.
For a technical but very accessible animation describing the explosion and fire at Chevron's Richmond refinery in 2012, see below. The video was produced by the U.S. Safety and Chemical Hazard Investigation Board.
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During the Vietnam War the U.S. military defoliated large swaths of Vietnam with Agent Orange to deprive enemy forces of jungle cover. In the process it exposed American soldiers to this toxic chemical as well.
Our own civilians back in the U.S. were also exposed to Agent Orange, along with other herbicides. They were involved in testing herbicides at an Air Force base in Florida throughout the 1960s. Dozens of civilians involved in the testing at the base say that more than 40 years after their exposure, they are ill and dying. (Billy McLean (L) and Von Jones pictured. Credit: Jon Kalish)
Jon Kalish reports from the Florida panhandle on Agent Orange and "The Forgotten Civilians of Eglin Air Force Base."
Learn more about Agent Orange.
Terell Ratlin died soon after being interviewed by Jon Kalish for this story
Lawyer Victor Yannacone on the left in the dark suit. Kerry Ryan, a child born with profound birth defects attribute to Agent Orange, is in the wheelchair. Her father, Mike Ryan, then a cop on Long Island, is on the right in the light jacket. Both Kerry and Mike are deceased. This was taken at the very beginning of the Agent Orange litigation, which reporter Jon Kalish covered from 1979 to 1986. Photo credit: Andrew PopperClick the icon below to listen.
When we imagined a podcast about environmental justice – it was before the Tubbs fire here in Sonoma County – and the deadly fire seasons of 2017 and 2018. Even so, we wouldn’t have thought of Indians and their relationship to fire as a matter of environmental justice.
But producers Allison Herrera and Debra Utacia Krol have a different viewpoint. They’re members of a Western tribe – and see the increasingly destructive fires in Northern California as a matter of the Anglo society forgetting lessons that Native Americans have known for millennia. Fire, they say, can be an important – even necessary – part of the landscape.
Fire helps clear habitat for animals and space for plants. And smaller fires can allow us to avoid the cataclysmic fires that leveled neighborhoods in Santa Rosa and the surrounding communities – especially in the past two years.
Herrera and Krol say Indian traditions once protected these lands and could do so again— Allison Herrera brings us the story.
Learn more about native traditions and controlled burns.
(Photo: An ancient oak tree at Pepperwood Preserve likely won't survive its burns from the 2017 Tubbs fire. Credit: Debra Utacia Krol)
Read the story here:
Firing Forests to Save Them: Could Native American Traditions Protect Land and Lives? Can Native land management render the next round of wildfires less destructive? These Indigenous people say ’yes.’ By Debra Utacia Krol and Allison Herrera Alice Lincoln Cook at her jewelry bench at the Book Nook in KlamathAlice Lincoln-Cook understands why burning is preferable to huge fires. She and her family survived the Fire Siege of 1987, which ravaged a large swath of Northwestern California. “They took out half the country here; I mean, it was a huge fire,” she says. “It was really scary for [us] because all our family down there and many other families had their homes and stuff burnt down.” That harrowing time led Lincoln-Cook’s her family to action. They clear the land around their homes every year, and sprinklers are placed to wet the ground in case of another fire. It’s also made her cognizant of what cultural burn managers are working to accomplish. “That's why we're hopeful of more controlled fires rather than disaster fires of that sort because those are those are pretty hard to take when they're taking lives and homes and stuff like that,” she says.
The 1987 fire—and the wildfires that raged through Northern California in October 2017—are the stuff of nightmares to residents. They, and other smaller fires, ravaged this part of California. The October 2017 fires resulted in 44 lives lost; 10,000 structures destroyed with more than $8 billion dollars in property damage; and more than 200,000 acres torched. And, in 2018, the region took another fiery hit: this year’s Mendocino Complex Fire is even bigger; to date, more than 460,000 acres have burned, making it the largest fire in recorded California history.
But could these fires have been, if not prevented, at least rendered less destructive? Many Indigenous peoples in California say yes. They say their traditions once protected these lands and could do so again—if they’re given the opportunity. Journalists Allison Herrera and Debra Utacia Krol visited several Northern California tribal communities to learn more. From fire comes new plant life at Pepperwood PreserveThe first stop: Pepperwood Preserve, a 3,200-acre facility just east of Santa Rosa. It contains oak groves, mixed conifer forests and grasslands, and is home to many endemic species. It’s a beautiful drive despite the burned-out sites we see on our way up to the preserve. This hilly region is also home to Indigenous peoples, including the Pomo and Wappo cultures. Here, we meet Clint McKay, one of several Indigenous Californians who are using fire to fight fire. McKay is the cultural consultant and Native American advisory committee chair at Pepperwood Preserve. McKay is a citizen of the Dry Creek Band of Pomo and has Wappo heritage. He is also a noted cultural practitioner, particularly in living with the land—and carefully setting fires to cleanse the land. “[Pepperwood] asked us to provide some insight to the native way of working with the land,” says McKay. He adds, “Land management means to me that you’re controlling something. I don’t believe we have the ability or the right to control nature, so we work with it.” McKay shows us where the fire came through an area that was scheduled for a controlled burn. It was supposed to clear the area of the “duff,” as McKay calls the accumulation of dead plants, weeds and unwanted trees that choked the area, but the fire ripped through here and basically did its job. He points out plants meant for medicinal purposes and food. “Soaproot is used for soap and brushes,” he says. There’s also miner’s lettuce, wild potatoes and other useful plants growing out of the ashes.
Cultural burning creates the perfect conditions to grow the basket making materials Pomo people need to keep their tradition alive, McKay says.
It hasn’t been easy for McKay to put his point across. “The very thing you’re trying to preserve you are killing,” McKay says. “Nature isn’t here to be hands off.” The philosophy of “leave the land alone”—and that of excluding Native people in particular from their ancestral homelands to create what Muir refers to as pristine land untouched by human hands—dates to back to John Muir, best known as the father of modern environmentalism. “That Native people were inferior to white Europeans was a given, and widely accepted by the general public well before and after the 19th century,” Dina Gilio-Whitaker, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes and a noted Indigenous studies scholar, writes in her upcoming book As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock. “It was as true for John Muir as it was for his predecessor Henry Thoreau.” When Muir came to San Francisco in 1868, “California was engaged in an open campaign of extermination of California Indians which he doesn’t seem to ever have actively opposed,” Gilio-Whitaker writes. “Instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park, he supported the expulsion of the Yosemite Indians from their ancient home in the valley, and journaled his experiences with and thoughts about California ‘digger’ Indians (a derogatory term even then) whom he found dirty, lazy, ugly, and altogether disappointing.” This philosophy became embedded in the environmental movement, and although it’s slowly being replaced with a more Indigenous, holistic approach, it’s caused no end of issues for Native cultural practitioners. Clint McKay says that the conifers were crowding out oak trees and other plants at PepperwoodThe Pepperwood community is no exception. “It’s taken a long time for us at Pepperwood to understand that things are deeper than traditional environmentalism,” Ben Benson, cultural resources coordinator at Pepperwood, says. People seem to be finally heeding McKay and other Indigenous fire experts. “We’re here to support the habitat the best we can,” McKay says. “Everything we do is reciprocal. We’re not just doing it for the land and the animals, but we are also doing it for ourselves.” “I gave a talk out here and tell people that it’s like we’ve pushed a reset button on the land,” McKay says. “You can see here we’ve seen what seven generation of neglect can do.” McKay is referring to the length of time that fire suppression has been official government policy--roughly equating to seven generations of Native peoples’ tenure in California. Others, like the California Chaparral Institute, believe that prescribed burns can do more harm than good. They point to what they call “fire management practices on incomplete records from prehistory” as a rationale for not heeding Native peoples’ calls to burn. The institute also says that Native people claim that their burning will prevent fires; however, the Native practitioners we spoke with all refute that claim. What they told us is that cultural burning will greatly mitigate the severity of wildfires and prevent killing off beneficial microbial life that lives in the top layers of soil, or “sterilizing” the soil.
However, recent fire science research validates Native fire and land stewardship practices. For example, Stephen J. Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University, has been a strong advocate for a return to active lands management including the reintroduction of fire. “We are uniquely fire creatures,” Pyne began, “on a uniquely fire planet.”Pyne said during a 2016 seminar. “The real argument for fire is that it does ecological work that nothing else does.”
The U.S. Forest Service is another player which has come to understand that forests need fire to remain healthy. We visited with one Forest Service ecologist who’s demonstrating that. Some six hours north of Santa Rosa lie the Trinity Alps, some of the most beautiful--and treacherous--peaks in the West. Narrow valleys are walled by nearly vertical slopes, carved by the mighty Klamath River and its tributaries. The Hupa, Karuk, Yurok, Wintu and other northwestern California Native peoples call this region home. Narrow roads wind through the valleys, providing the only lifeline out of harm’s way in case of fire or other natural disaster. We’re driving north on State Route 96 on a chilly wet spring day, weaving around construction zones, delivery trucks and local residents to visit with Frank Lake, an ecologist for the Forest Service. Lake is stationed at Six Rivers National Forest in the small town of Orleans. Frank Lake shows off huckleberry in burned areaLake is a Karuk descendent, who grew up in Northwest California. The Karuk also have traditionally used fire to maintain their lands and create room for important food and medicinal plants to grow. Lake knows these mountains and valleys intimately. Lake uses this accumulated knowledge of more than 10,000 years of living and thriving here in his work with the Forest Service. That traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, includes using fire to increase biodiversity and support the entire ecology. “I came to work for the Hoopa Tribe for a while to be culturally closer to this area which is just to the south, about 20 miles from Orleans,” Lake says. He sports a crocheted cap with a geometric basketry pattern under his regulation hard hat. He’s also wearing field gear and heavy boots. His office is cluttered with maps, printouts, books and various other tools of the biologist’s trade. Lake takes us to a burn site outside of town to show us where he and his crew conducted a demonstration burn in late September 2016. There’s open space between the tanoaks and a few other larger trees, giving food and medicinal plants room to breathe—and grow. “This is a mixed forest type,” Lake explained. “It has Douglas fir, tanoak and madrone.” He points out healthy huckleberry bushes and other shrubs such as the thimbleberry and blackcap raspberries. Across the road, though, lies an overgrown, unwalkable thicket. Just a few flowers dust the huckleberry bushes, as opposed to the white blossoms with their tasty promise covering the bushes in the burn area. “We're going to be looking at the recovery of the sites from the ecological and cultural perspectives,” says Lake as he points out the regrowth from the burn. Recreating what Lake calls “drought-tolerant fire adaptive species”—or stimulating the growth of plants that can withstand California’s periodic dry spells, and that can also benefit from the fires that accompany the droughts—has more benefits. It promotes ecological resistance and resilience as well as “promotes cultural resiliency.” Other tribes in the Trinity Alps echo Lake’s sentiment. Margo Robbins and her nephew Rick O’Rourke of the Yurok Tribe meet us in the nearby town of Weitchpec. Robbins is the co-leader of the Indigenous People's Burn Network, which aims to revitalize cultural burns, or as McKay says, “burn off the duff,” in Native communities, at the same time revitalizing culture. They’re restoring the use of fire in ceremonies, and training tribal members how to safely conduct cultural controlled burns. “For thousands of years, Native people used fire to manage the lands,” she says. “But when the Europeans came, the park-like countryside that they saw they thought was natural that way.” But the new settlers didn’t understand how fire was used to care for the land, and Robbins says they were fearful—even to the point of shooting or, later, jailing Indians who set fires. Margo Robbins and Rick O'RourkeRobbins echoes what Clint McKay says about government policies and fire suppression.“The land is choked out with brush because of the fire exclusion policy by the government,” Robbins says. “And, we are basket weavers here, known for basketry the world over.” To keep that artform alive, Yurok weavers need top-notch materials, such as hazel sticks. “In order for hazel to be used as a basket material it has to be burned the year before—and we hadn't had sticks for a long time,” she says. “The art of basketry was really starting to decline.” But with the advent of prolonged drought, blights like Sudden Oak Death Syndrome and bark beetle infestations, huge wildfires and a changing climate, that’s all changing. Tribal members now burn in culturally important sites, and places where animals can graze, Robbins says. They’re restoring prairies to provide habitat for deer, woodpeckers and other species that had grown scarce. “The animals are coming back, our predator animals, our prey animals, all aspects,” says O’Rourke, Robbins’ nephew and part of the culturing burning team. “Owls, birds, all aspects of species are coming back. I’m seeing animals I’ve never seen here before coming back – flying squirrels. It’s beautiful.”
Meanwhile, other Native people are developing protocols to deal with the aftermath of fires. One such program is Follow the Smoke, an initiative of the California Indian Basketweavers’ Association. We met Alice Lincoln-Cook, who’s CIBA’s vice president, at her business in Klamath, along the Northern California coast.
The Book Nook is a cozy space. There’s an art gallery in front where Lincoln-Cook makes traditional California Native jewelry for sale and sells other Native people’s work. The bookstore is in back. Here, shelves are stuffed with all manners of books for sale or to give away if the shopper has no money--a frequent occurrence in a town with twice the unemployment and an average household income that’s half of the rest of California. The center of the room sports a table for basketweaving classes or, lately, a girls’ youth group that meets here. Lincoln-Cook, a Karuk, says that Follow the Smoke’s goal is to develop relationships with the National Park Service, California State Parks and the Bureau of Land Management so Native people can gather materials after a fire has passed through. “If there are natural burns, we can help them by going out there and collecting and helping them clean some of those areas and then be able to process it for [our use],” says Lincoln-Cook. “If there are trees that have fallen down, we can go out there and help process the tree,” and clean up the land. “We look at areas where we used to pick hazel sticks, because those come back stronger and they're better materials for first to work with,” Lincoln-Cook says. Clint McKay shows Allison Herrera some shots of the burn zone immediately after the 2017 fireAt Pepperwood, the land is recovering. Oak tree seedlings are beginning to take root where they couldn’t before because of the poison oak, weeds and bushes that had taken over. It becomes apparent that the work of Indigenous fire practitioners is far from over. There is still resistance to Native land oversight and practices. But Indigenous people like Clint McKay are hopeful the movement back to Indigenous management protocols will spread. And he’s not doing it just for food and medicine--he’s doing it to ensure that Pomo and Wappo basketmaking can continue. The nephew of famed Pomo basketweaver Mabel McKay, Clint McKay also understands that his work to restore fire to the land also restores sedge, redbud, willow and many other tools of the basketweaver’s trade is also preserving this world-class art form for generations to come.
“The land is coming back stronger than ever,” McKay says. “We’ve seen what seven generations of neglect can do. We’ve been given another opportunity, I’ll be excited to see what the next seven generations will do.” (All photos: Debra Utacia Krol)
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Here's a preview of our 12-part podcast, featuring stories from California and the rest of the country (and the world). We're doing a deep dive on environmental justice issues. The timing couldn't be better, as the media is now turning its attention to this issue with full force. Most recently, the Washington Post ran a news analysis under this headline: "In the U.S. Black, Brown and Poor People Suffer the Most from Environmental Contamination." We start our podcast with a story from East Chicago, Indiana. Why did municipal authorities build a public housing project on top of a Superfund site contaminated with lead? (Photo: 350.org, Raphael Bodin, Survival Media Agency) Future stories will visit a testing range where civilians were doused with Agent Orange, and look at an election in Richmond, California, where communities organized to reduce the economic and political power of the oil company that dominated, and still dominates, city life. Subscribe today, and please review the show if you like it. That helps others to find us. Here's our preview: Click the icon below to listen.
In East Chicago, Indiana, authorities built a public housing project on land once occupied by a lead smelting operation. The area has been declared a Superfund site, and residents of the housing project, but not the surrounding area, have been moved. After we produced this episode of our podcast, the housing project was torn down.
Nevertheless, in the summer of 2018, revelations have continued about inaccurate and misleading information provided to community residents by officials, who hid the health impact of the buried lead in their neighborhood.
(photo: Calumet Lives Matter president Sherry Hunter, left, sports her group's signature shirt at the independent Community Strategy Group's Calumet Day table with Rev. Cheryl Rivera. Photo credit: Annie Ropeik for Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations.) Annie Ropeik and Nick Janzen followed this story for two years when they worked together at Indiana Public Broadcasting, and were part of a team that won several awards for its coverage.
Here's the first episode of Living Downstream: the Environmental Justice Podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts (coming soon!)
Read more about lead contamination and Superfund sites. Read more about Annie Ropeik and Nick Janzen.
Read a 2011 report (PDF) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about the lead smelting operation in East Chicago and the contamination left behind.
Below: watch a discussion between East Calumet resident Akeeshea Daniels and reporter Annie Ropeik from the project "Blood Lead and Soil: A Year in East Chicago" produced by Indiana Public Broadcasting.
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