 I'm Richard Moore and I'm here today to talk to you about environmental pollution, hazards that disproportionately impact low-income people, people of color, working class, and Native Americans where we live, where we work, and where we play. We live in communities where the air isn't safe to breathe, the water isn't safe to drink, and the soil isn't safe to touch. Our neighborhoods are polluted by manufacturing plants and refineries, by wastewater runoff and many other sources. It's frustrating, often the people involved feel there's nothing they can do to protect the health of their families. We're here today to prove that wrong, to show you there are a host of tools available to you that you can use without a lawyer to get action to make your environment a safer place. That's how the environmental justice movement got started. In the 70s and 80s, those of us who suffer from pollution banded together to address contamination that affected Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Pacific Islanders and others in low-income communities. There are also laws passed by Congress to protect all people, tools you can use, tools that protect vital natural resources, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, tools that give you the right to participate in government decision-making, the Freedom of Information Act, and the Community Right to Know Act, tools to address contamination problems which already exist, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Superfund. These laws aren't perfect, but when people concerned about pollution learn about them, they can use them as tools to benefit their community. We're going to show you how people just like you have done this, used environmental laws to strike back at pollution, to make our homes safer and our communities healthier. We can also provide you with this tool, a guide to using the laws that are there to protect you. It's not a simple process, but as you'll see, it can be done. It's scary because, I mean, there's a possibility that one day I could just be playing sports and just be riding my bike with my friends, and I pass out from my asthma test. Jamel Thompson is an active teenager. You'll often find him playing ball with his friends in the Atlanta sunshine. It's hard to believe that he and several others in his group suffer from asthma. Now that I see that a lot of my friends have asthma, I'm not really concerned about it anymore because I don't feel left out. I feel like I just blend in with everybody else. 33% of African American children have been diagnosed with asthma, and a lot of that does have to do with the environment, the environment in which the children live in, just the different communities and neighborhoods that they live in. Are they going to allow you to bring your inhaler if you have to? Yes. Jamel lives with his mom in a community with some of the worst air pollution in America. Atlanta, the fastest sprawling city in the world with an often expanding web of highways, consistently doesn't meet the Clean Air Act standards for ozone. Transportation is a key contributor to Atlanta's air quality problem and to the respiratory problems of its citizens. The environmental link is extremely, extremely strong. We know that even in healthy children who are outside playing outdoor activities, these children who are otherwise healthy over time, if they're playing outside in high ozone areas, do have a higher risk of developing asthma. I have been out, been going out and about real early, trying to just walk and get around and explore the neighborhood, passed out when I got up to the shopping plaza where all the cars are located towards Cleveland Avenue. Flora Tommy likes to get out and walk around her neighborhood. She's the eyes and ears of her South Atlanta community, but often, because of asthma, air pollution keeps her inside. So I learned, okay, keep your little self inside when you come outside and you feel that you can't breathe a certain way, then just go back inside and figure out how you're going to plan your day then. Frustration with air quality led Flora on a search for a solution. She convinced some of her neighbors to join forces with the Southern Organizing Committee for Economic and Social Justice. The group's goal of cleaner air started a campaign to convince the Atlanta Public Transportation Authority, MARTA, to reduce pollution from buses running through their neighborhoods. One of their first targets? The buses operating out of the Hamilton Bus Barn. The Hamilton Bus Barn was taken on because it has the oldest buses. They are all diesel, which are the dirtiest buses. And as a result, the spread of pollution from those buses on the routes that it serves, which is basically environmental justice communities, low income communities, and people of color, are getting the dirtiest air. After I explained to them the difference in different sides of towns as far as which services and what level of quality bus service you had, they took them around to see it then everybody was like, oh, this is just not fair the way we are being treated. Making sure that we have one set of rules and we don't create one set of rules for affluent folks in the suburbs and another set of rules for poor people in the city who are transit dependent. That's what I think transportation equity is all about, that's what environmental justice is all about. Carter operates more than 700 buses in Atlanta, but the newest buses, buses which are fueled by clean CNG or compressed natural gas, are concentrated on the north side of town. The older diesel fuel buses run routes in the low income urban areas on the south side. SOC, with the help of citizens like Flora, is challenging that inequity, using environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Freedom of Information Act. It was basically about showing the people what the environmental laws were and saying, okay, match up the people with the problem with the non-profits that could actually document what the situation was, then start advocating before the martyr board. You start seeing a lot more people speaking up about all the environmental problems and you have citizens living in the city being trained at a grassroots level. When people understand that they have the potential for changing things and they have power that is unused and when they work as a collective, they draw upon each other's power and strength and they can make changes. Teaching them that, this falls under ICE T legislation and T-21 legislation whereby a user citizen can actually look at that problem and say, these are the steps that you're supposed to be taking to address that. We have a new Clean Air Act. If we could just ensure that what's in that Clean Air Act is enforced, then that would go a long way to prevent many of the health problems from air pollution. When the public again insists that conformity of the transportation programs with the Clean Air Act is a requirement, then we use it to get action and results. Positive results in Atlanta include Martha's purchase of newer, cleaner burning diesel buses based at the Hamilton Bus Bar. We have currently here 10 clean diesel fuel buses. Another 40 are on order. As soon as the manufacturer can produce them, they'll be here. Martha also has plans to build a CNG bus facility like this one on Atlanta's north side to eventually replace the Hamilton diesel yard currently running buses through the city's neighborhoods to the south. There's a lot of engineering and design work coming along to build a new facility that will support a fleet of 250 CNG buses that we can fill those in an eight-hour shift and fuel not only our fleet, but to accommodate the community. We can support external customers to help the community with a Clean Air Act here and provide clean fuel. We're already doing it with Amory and Georgia Tech out of one of the other facilities. So rules and regulations direct the public with respect to what they can do and what they can use to get justice or to get equity. If we're going to solve the air problems that we have, which are more and more at the local level, we need people to tell us what their problems are so that we can help find the solutions to solve it. We've got some of the answers, but we don't have all of them, and until we have that discussion and dialogue back and forth, we're never going to solve the problem. We weren't allowed to participate. We just went as an audience to listen to what was going on. We all felt I lived there to the state. We all felt that policymakers at the local level and at the national level and the state level were ignoring the problem. The water was the problem in South Tucson, groundwater contaminated by chemicals. Volatile chemicals like TCE, trichloroethylene, used while making aircraft missile systems. The chemicals ran into the soil and the groundwater in an industrial area around the Tucson airport, polluting a huge plume of underground water. The primary drinking water resource for Southwest Tucson. One of our highest priorities is to make sure that the water we deliver meets all of the standards set by the Federal Safe Drinking Water Act. When we found something that could have violated that, we immediately shut down wells and started delivering water into that area from alternative sources. The wells were shut down, drinking water was piped in from other areas, and the Tucson International Airport area was declared a federal superfund site, with cleanup by responsible parties to be supervised by the Environmental Protection Agency. The superfund laws, you know, when the south side was declared a superfund site, then we started digging up laws. Rose Augustine and her neighbors lived with the problems of groundwater contamination. They charted illnesses in their south side community, health problems that they blamed on TCE. They formed a group, Tucsonians for a clean environment, to ensure the cleanup was done right. Then we got a voice in the process. It wasn't easy. It was a lot of hard work. Rose's group also looked for help from the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. Assistance arrived with Richard Moore. One of the first things that we were asked to do and we strategized was to bring representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency to Tucson to meet with community residents, to go on a tour of the community, to see first hand for themselves some of the impact that this water contamination problem had caused. The whole issue of TCE contamination, environmental justice, they're very difficult problems and once you lose the trust of your customers, it's incredibly difficult to get that trust back. The meeting was on Thursday and Friday. We began to do workshops and so on around RICRA. What should it be doing from an environmental law, from an enforcement standpoint and several other factors that go along with RICRA. We applied for a technical assistant grant so that we could have an advisor review all of the material. I mean, the material that we have from the government, only a scientist can read that. It's important for everyone to decipher all that information in a way that the community could understand it. It was the EPA that told us these grants were available and we applied for them. By people banning themselves together and then joining other organizations and then using the combinations of the law from what's taking place in the community, then that they have major, major accomplishments. The people working together accomplished many things in Tucson. They stopped construction of a pipeline through a business district on the south side. They were going to pass the pipeline down 12th Avenue. It was to transport the TCE contaminated or chemically contaminated water down 12th Avenue. The business people did not want that pipeline down the road. If it had broke, psychologically everybody was scared of TCE, the chemicals that we had in the water. This would, they felt it would finish them off. People together, we can do something. Sometimes you like to do something by yourself, but nobody listen to you. You have to talk to the town, to the people, you know. They took the people to get together to reroute the pipeline where it would have the least effect on the community. And they listen to us. They listen. The thing is, we have to go make everybody to work together. Involvement of the people also resulted in other victories, like the creation of a TCE clinic at a neighborhood health center. The upside was that through public pressure and a lot of hearings, I was on the board of supervisors at the time, we started conducting hearings from the board of health. We established a clinic there funded partially by the state and partially by Pima County to begin the process of screening and referral. The money was good, but the symbolism was, and the precedent was very important, that a local community was saying, okay, there is a problem here and we need to use public dollars to begin to remediate that problem. I think all of the physicians who work here are pretty well informed about TCE and talk to patients on an individual basis and we try to be extra vigilant for these people. The people also have a repository, documented information on the Superfund site, now housed in a library in the neighborhood. We felt that if anybody was to have any of the documentation of the Superfund site, it should stay in the Superfund site where the community could have access to the material. It's still being used. It's not a steady number, it's not a big number, but it is very steady. We get people who come from the EPA to look at things. We get different lawyers who come and I think about 50% of the usage is actually by students who are writing term papers on it or doing different reports on it. One corner of the Superfund site catches the Tohono O'odham Reservation, which is a federally recognized tribe. The Tohono O'odham have their own meetings with the federal government. The public continues to be a part of the process, invited to monitor the groundwater cleanup efforts still underway in South Tucson. We developed a set of wells that deliver only to a specific treatment plant that uses an air stripping process. It forces the TCE out of the water. TCE is a volatile chemical, it wants to evaporate. The air stripping process forces that to happen. That TCE is then removed from the water, then goes through carbon filters, so that's removed from the air before it's released from the treatment plant. We take tests at the treatment plant on a weekly basis to make sure that the treatment plant is operating properly. The citizens board that oversees this project, they have the opportunity at any time to come in with an independent firm and test the water coming out of the treatment plant to give them assurance that everything is operating exactly as we said it would. We have an area of significant contamination that we are cleaning up. We're doing a spectacular job. We're adding about 8.5 million gallons a day of drinking water to our supply that otherwise would be unusable. One of the things that's good about the laws as they exist is the community involvement aspect, a level of right to know that the community is informed and knows what that information is, and then the responsibility attached to the cleanup. Community involvement became probably the most important aspect of our dealing with this problem of cleaning up the TCE contamination. We use the laws to back our concerns and to back our demands, then you can make demands once you know what the laws are. We have come a tremendous way and I do see that as a great success for the city of Tucson and it's a success for the people who are in that area. Once you have the laws behind you or in front of you, however you want to refer to it, and you're armed with the laws, you're armed with power. I don't care what part of the country you are from, there is an issue in your community regardless of the district you are at that has to do with clean water, that has to do with cleaning contaminants in the environment, that has to do with discharges, whether it's into a waterway or into the air, that has to do with these kinds of health and safety and environmental issues that you must be conscious of.