PORTLAND, Ore. - Despite more than 300 complaints that local environmental regulations have been discriminatory toward minority communities, the Environmental Protection Agency has never made a formal finding of a civil-rights violation.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, none of the eight complaints from Oregon since 1996 have been investigated.
Sarah Tory, who has reported on this issue for High Country News, says there's a disconnect between the EPA's Office for Civil Rights and its regulatory arm.
"It seems to be the case that the EPA is chiefly concerned with making sure industries, power plants, et cetera are complying with the laws," says Tory. "And if they are, the EPA is reticent to then turn around and say, 'Actually, while you may be in compliance with our regulations, you're violating the Civil Rights Act.'"
The Center for Public Integrity also found it takes the agency 350 days on average to decide whether to investigate a case.
The agency made its first preliminary finding of discrimination ever in 2011. Tory says seven parents had filed a complaint in California, saying the pesticide methyl bromide was being used more heavily near a high school with a high Latino population.
But it took 12 years for the agency to install a monitor to measure methyl bromide near the school and by then, Tory says another pesticide was in wider use.
"During the time the EPA took to investigate the impacts of methyl bromide, the pesticide had been phased out, and it had been replaced by a new pesticide called methyl iodide," she says. "Methyl iodide is also linked to numerous health problems, and the EPA knew this but didn't account for it in their investigation."
The EPA has released an action plan called EJ 2020, which outlines plans to better respond to allegation of environmental discrimination in the future.
The public can comment on the plan through July 7.
get more stories like this via email
By Elijah de Castro for Keen Sentinel.
Broadcast version by Kathryn Carley for New Hampshire News Service, for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration.
It's 11 in the morning, and the air in Michele Chalice's East Keene neighborhood is crisp and clean. But just three hours before, an air monitor on Chalice's porch reported unsafe levels of fine particulate matter, a group of microscopic pollutants that penetrate deep into the lungs when inhaled and can lead to breathing difficulties, asthma, increased risk of heart disease, and other adverse health outcomes.
"It happens really quickly, as soon as people start burning wood," Chalice said Monday in reference to the wood smoke that frequently fills the air in her neighborhood during colder weather.
Fine particle pollution has been a persistent public health issue in Keene, and attempts at mitigating the City's air pollution have been made over the years by the Environmental Protection Agency, the City of Keene and the American Lung Association. The pollution stems from Keene's local topography, which creates air inversions, a weather phenomenon in which cold air stays close to the ground as opposed to rising. In winter, when Keene residents fire up wood stoves, air inversions trap wood smoke close to the ground, creating unhealthy concentrations of fine particles, posing threats to vulnerable groups like children, the elderly, and people with heart and lung disease, according to the National Institutes of Health.
That's where Chalice's air monitor comes in. As small as a softball and hung from a hook under Chalice's roof, it's one of six spread throughout the city as part of Keene Clean Air, a community air monitoring project that involves Elm City residents taking part in collecting data on local air pollution.
"To me, the most important thing is to find ways of interest to become engaged," said Chalice, who has participated in the project for two years. "This is an extremely easy, no-cost way to be able to provide additional data."
Therein lies the idea behind community air monitoring, an emerging approach to tracking air pollution and informing public health decision-making while engaging citizens of at-risk communities. As the global climate crisis intensifies and fine particle pollution from wildfire smoke emerges as a public health threat, federal and state agencies in the United States have begun supporting community air monitoring projects like Keene Clean Air. However, the approach also has limitations in accuracy and access, particularly for rural communities.
For years, Nora Traviss, a professor emeritus of environmental science at Keene State College who studies Keene's fine particle pollution, saw a need for more data. In Cheshire County, a single air monitor from N.H. Department of Environmental Services submits data on concentrations of fine particles, ozone, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide to EPA. Data from these monitors, Traviss and scientists from the EPA said, is meant to collect background air quality in a large region over extended periods of time, not minute-to-minute updates on air quality in small communities.
With the help of citizen volunteers like Chalice, her students, and a few EPA grants, Traviss began installing commercial air monitors throughout the community in 2016. Using the data they collected, Traviss and her students would go on to launch KeeneCleanAir.org, a website that provides real-time monitoring of fine particle pollution in the community. The project also uses social media to send out alerts of when air inversions create unsafe levels of fine particle pollution in Keene.
"Having a wide network is incredibly important for public safety and public health," Traviss said. "Less expensive units can fill all these geospatial gaps and give really good information especially for wildfires because they can shift direction very quickly."
The EPA has used Keene Clean Air as a model for other community air monitoring projects across the country, and in 2022 announced $53 million in funding for 132 community air monitoring projects in 37 states.
"State regulatory monitors, they meet really stringent standards," said Eric Wortman, an environmental scientist at the EPA. "Then you have community air monitors where none of that applies, that's where it fills those gaps on what's going on at a local level. They help us know what's going on so we can do public health outreach."
The expansion of funding for community air monitoring comes at a turning point for fine particle pollution. Since the Clean Air Act was strengthened in 1970, fine particle pollution has been declining rapidly across the United States. In New Hampshire fine particle pollution declined by 66 percent, which the University of Chicago's Air Quality Index estimates raised the average life expectancy in the state by 1.2 years.
But that progress is now threatened by climate change, according to Jennifer Stowell, an environmental health scientist at Boston University. As temperatures rise and ecosystems dry out, wildfires are increasing in intensity and length, exposing communities across the United States to hazardous levels of fine particle pollution from the resulting clouds of smoke.
"Here in the Northeast, we're going to start seeing wildfires take a bigger and bigger role [in fine particle pollution]," Stowell said, noting that unlike industrial sources of fine particle pollution, regulators can't control particulate matter from wildfires. "It doesn't just affect populations that are in close proximity to the fire because these larger wildfires can travel across state boundaries."
Traviss believes that interest in community air monitoring grew during the summer of 2023, when communities throughout the Northeast were blanketed in fine particle pollution during the worst wildfires in Canada's history.
"For us on the east coast and in New England, it was a wakeup call," Traviss said. Earlier this month, air monitors throughout the Northeast recorded spikes in fine particle pollution as wildfires swept through the region amid an ongoing record-breaking drought in the Northeast; locally, Acworth and Brattleboro have dealt with brushfires. "People really want to know what their air quality is. ... Keene is unique in the sense that we're one of the first, [and] we've got years of experience under our belts."
Unlike agency-led air monitoring that measures background air quality data over longer periods of time, commercial air monitors can be placed throughout populated neighborhoods and collect more diversified data on air pollution within a community. For Keene, where a fine particle pollution event depends on weather conditions, having more targeted data collection allows for better public health decision making, according to Traviss.
That was the idea behind PurpleAir, a startup company that makes the commercial air monitors Traviss uses for Keene Clean Air. After volunteers like Chalice install PurpleAir monitors, the data is automatically uploaded to PurpleAir's network, where it becomes part of a live map of fine particle pollution across the United States.
"We became an essential tool for people experiencing wildfires to decide where to go for the day, or to help track the smoke," said Adrian Dybwad, the founder of PurpleAir. "Schools and fire departments will decide when to shut the school down based on PurpleAir sensors."
Community air monitoring networks proved their value to state and federal agencies during the 2023 Canadian wildfires, particularly in the Northeast. As wildfire smoke drifted across the East Coast and fine particle pollution reached record levels, environment and public health experts began relying on the PurpleAir monitor network to track minute-to-minute air pollution levels, according to Michele Kosin, an air quality scientist at the EPA's Region 1 New England branch.
"The cheap little PurpleAirs actually work better when there's very, very high concentrations of smoke," said Kosin, noting that PurpleAir monitors are not connected to the EPA's Air Quality Service (AQS) system, which collects air quality data from agency monitors across the country. "... This is where the public comes in; we have the PurpleAirs in addition to the ones plugged into the AQS system, so if there are failures we can get a good reading and then get the information out there."
But Traviss also sees limitations in access to community air monitoring, particularly in rural communities, which rely on wood burning more that urban areas.
"In implementing these types of projects in rural communities, there's simply a lack of resources," Traviss said. "There's a conventional wisdom that air pollution occurs in only urban areas, where there's factories and traffic and smog. That's not necessarily true in rural communities all over New England that rely on wood [burning]."
In addition to grassroots community support, Traviss said, community air monitoring projects must be done with the help of trusted local institutions like nonprofits, hospitals, public health departments and universities. In rural communities where institutions have less resources and access, this could be a barrier, according to Traviss. "There needs to be some organization taking the lead."
Other limitations Traviss has encountered are in accuracy and reliability. Occasionally a monitor connected to the Keene Clean Air network will become disconnected when it loses internet connection, or will show a false reading when placed next to a minor source of smoke like a grill.
As a means for adapting to the public health threats of wildfire smoke, "It's definitely the future," Traviss said of community air monitoring. But without deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists like Stowell warn that fine particle pollution from wildfires will only worsen as a public health threat.
"It's going to get significantly worse," Stowell said, noting the northeast's lack of experience with managing the public health effects of wildfires. "I've nicknamed the northeast smoke virgins in the sense that we're not used to seeing this."
But Chalice believes that as wildfires increase fine particle pollution, communities can use air monitoring projects to take a larger role in protecting those most vulnerable to fine particle pollution.
"There are kids in the school nearby that have lung issues, and anything we do to make the air quality worse in the winter exacerbates their circumstances," Chalice said. "I'd like to think for that reason with the wildfires, it still can be very helpful."
Elijah de Castro wrote this article for the Keen Sentinel.
get more stories like this via email
Earlier this month, the U.S. Forest Service announced it would not be following through with the National Old Growth Amendment, which would have protected some of Oregon's iconic old-growth trees.
The amendment was the result of a Biden administration order to tally old-growth forests on federal lands and make a plan to protect them from climate-based threats.
For Brenna Bell, forest climate manager at 350PDX, pulling the plug may have been for the best. While acknowledging the amendment offered protections, Bell said there were too many loopholes.
"Old trees still would have been logged, except people might have believed that it was protected," she said. "So, not having it, so people don't have that false sense of protection, might be a good thing."
The amendment would have prohibited commercial logging on about 25 million acres of old-growth forests. Bell added that since the amendment would most likely have been repealed under the Trump administration, withdrawing now allows for the possibility of stronger legislation down the road.
Contrary to what many people may believe, Bell said, old-growth forests in the Northwest continue to be logged. She explained that federal timber targets drive logging on national forest land, pushing forests to meet volume quotas. While most logged trees are smaller second growth, she added, there's always pressure to cut large trees to meet targets faster.
Bell suggested eliminating timber targets to better protect old-growth forests.
"If we could just make it so trees could be logged a.) to meet the local timber demand or b.) to have restoration purposes," she said, "but not because of some arbitrary target that is set in Washington, D.C., and then just distributed to all of the different forests."
The Trump administration will most likely increase timber targets, said Bell, regardless of whether there is local demand. Reports show the Biden administration allowed the Bureau of Land Management to cut old-growth trees at a faster rate than the previous decade.
Old-growth forests in Oregon's Coast Range absorb and store more carbon per acre than almost any other forest in the world.
get more stories like this via email
Contact
