There's a new resource for Nebraska communities and organizations facing environmental justice issues: the Heartland Environmental Justice Center (HEJC) at Wichita State University.

WSU received one of 17 Environmental Protection Agency grants to establish an Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center.

The HEJC's region covers Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and nine tribal nations.

Jeff Severin is the center's senior program manager. He said although people tend to see environmental-justice issues as an urban problem, plenty of rural Heartland communities also face environmental challenges.

He said the HEJC's involvement might involve several stages.

"That could look like just helping with an assessment to identify the major challenges that they're facing," said Severin, "what are some of the underlying causes of these challenges or threats, and then being able to identify the best funding sources to address those threats. "

Severin said their services are designed for communities, community-based organizations and nonprofits.

He said the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law include "unprecedented levels" of funding for environmental-justice issues. And helping groups access these funds is a major goal of the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers.

The Center for Rural Affairs is one of the HEJC's eight partners, and the only one based in Nebraska. Nebraska projects can be initiated through either organization.

Severin said smaller communities and organizations can be at a disadvantage when it comes to navigating the sometimes "burdensome" federal grant application process.

"Some of these smaller organizations are just so busy doing the actual work on the ground, or don't have staff to do this preparation and grant writing," said Severin. "And so, we're here to kind of help folks get organized and ready for that, and then help them through that process of applying for grants."

The Center for Rural Affairs Project Associate Deborah Solie pointed out that what qualifies as "environmental" can be somewhat broad.

"It could be that they're facing a brownfields issue," said Solie, "but it also could be that they're planning toward the future because they know that there are climate-related issues that they are currently facing that will be exacerbated. "

Solie said Kearney, Nebraska's "food reclamation" project is one example of the different types of environmental-impact issues communities may choose to address.

"They are looking at trying to find a way to get that food to the people who need it," said Solie, "versus it going into the landfill, which then causes some significant challenges with methane gas and other issues."

Hispanic families who fish to put food on the table are disproportionately affected by mercury, which accumulates in seafood in Southern California.

Surveys at 10 piers in Los Angeles and Orange counties found 60% of the anglers were Latino and native Spanish speakers, and 78% of them were fishing to feed their families.

Sofia Barboza, ocean manager for the Hispanic Access Foundation, said the families are exposed to toxins in fish from polluted waters.

"We found that Hispanic anglers in California are actually ingesting an average of 13.9 micrograms of mercury per day via fish consumption that they had caught in local waters," Barboza reported. "This is double the amount of mercury that has been determined as safe by the EPA."

Fish with high mercury levels have also been found in the Bay Area, the Central Coast near Humboldt and Deer Creek. A newly-released report from the foundation about Latinos in U.S. fisheries found 5% of Latinos in California, or about 785,000 people, work in the agricultural, forestry, fishing, hunting and mining sectors. But no research yet exists to determine how many Latinos are in commercial fishing.

Barboza suggested the warning signs about pollution at the piers, as well as government websites, should be translated into Spanish.

"Even though 28% of the California population speaks Spanish, the California Fish and Wildlife Department fishing regulations are not provided in Spanish on their website," Barboza pointed out. "Something we would like to see moving forward."

The report also recommends stronger oversight of commercial fishing companies hiring Hispanic migrant workers on H2B visas to ensure they receive fair wages, safe working conditions and access to safe housing.

By Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney for Capital B News.
Broadcast version by Shanteya Hudson for North Carolina News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Robert Thomas' home is still standing after the coffee-colored floodwaters of Hurricane Helene rushed through his community, but everything that made up his life has been swept away.

Thirteen days after Helene first made landfall in the U.S., it is known that at least 230 people died during the storm's surge, with hundreds of people still unaccounted for. While the Federal Emergency Management Agency ultimately sent out more than 7,000 employees and thousands of volunteers poured into the region with tons of food, clothes, water, and other supplies, it still took days for aid to reach some people - particularly Black low-income people, the elderly, and those living with disabilities.

"There's always a major disparity," said Thomas, who remains without electricity or clean water, but has already been denied aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency because his home didn't receive any physical flood or wind damage.

"You see which communities get up and running quicker," he said. Within two days of the catastrophic storm, he said he noticed utility workers restoring power in the majority white and wealthy areas of Asheville.

He, like most people who've been on social media over the past two weeks, quickly saw conspiracy theories about how the federal government was planning, or not planning, to respond to the storm.

Helene's devastation far exceeded most people's predictions, pointing to why it took FEMA time to get to some of the hardest hit areas such as western North Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Most residents Capital B spoke to ultimately applauded the federal response to the storm. Yet, it is in those long days between the storm's destruction and when people can get back to their lives where stories that fuel political discontent - and in Hurricane Helene's case, political disinformation - can take root.

The social media platform X has helped fuel a firestorm of conspiracies and politically charged lies, which may have severe implications for the election. Some conspiracy theories, mainly pushed by right-wing actors, claim that FEMA abandoned some parts of North Carolina so that the Biden administration could mine lithium there for electric vehicles; that FEMA ran out of money because the Biden administration has diverted disaster funds to new arriving migrants; and that the government was bulldozing communities to cover up bodies left behind by the storm. Even North Carolina Lt. Gov Mark Robinson - the current Republican gubernatorial nominee - pushed disinformation online about recovery efforts and days later skipped a vote on hurricane relief support for a second time.

Some Black residents in Asheville and Augusta told Capital B that they don't have electricity and elections are the last thing on their minds. Asheville is about 11.2% Black and Augusta is 60% Black. In Georgia, the voter registration deadline has already passed, and in North Carolina, it is just a day away, on Oct. 11. After storms, communities usually have fewer in-person voting polls, and more mail-in ballots are lost or destroyed. And those who originally planned to vote feel like they won't have enough time or access to information to cast an educated vote.

"It is absolutely a reality that voter turnout is going to decline because at this point, everybody is so discombobulated and distracted, who is really going to want to go to a damn poll at this point when you don't have a house?" said Falasha Talbert, a mother of 10 and small-business owner in Augusta.

Typically, Black voter participation in North Carolina and Georgia is above the national average for Black voters, but based on a series of studies, there is an expectation that voting in the impacted regions will decline by around 10%. Augusta's Richmond County was just one of two eastern Georgia counties impacted by the storm that turned blue in 2020. Likewise, Asheville's Buncombe County was the only storm-impacted western North Carolina county outside Charlotte that went Democrat.

As Hurricane Milton causes destruction across Florida, advocates are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to heed what has already been seen across the region. "It is unreasonable to expect people to focus on registering to vote with multiple storms wreaking havoc," a coalition of community groups wrote to DeSantis.

"People are tired"

However, as right-wing talking points have infiltrated the disaster recovery ecosystem, it may be backfiring for Republicans - particularly because of Project 2025's vision to "defund" FEMA. After storms, elections can become more competitive if a candidate leans more anti-environment.

"FEMA has helped some people, even if they didn't help me," said Thomas, who has been assisting in relief efforts as well as voter registration in Asheville.

"But I wouldn't say that they need to be disbanded just because I didn't get what I needed from them, and [Hurricane Helene] shows the need of FEMA. So, [former President Donald Trump] talking about disbanding FEMA, and me being in a situation where I need FEMA, pushes him further away."

Thomas, 37, is a staunch supporter of Black reparations - the need for which he said has been made only more clear after Hurricane Helene's impact, but has also contributed to a lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming election because no major candidate has a reparations plan.

In Asheville, immediately after the storm hit, Keynon Lake turned his nonprofit group's headquarters into a resource distribution center. Over the week since, he and other community activists have distributed 10 to 15 passenger vans worth of water, food, and cleaning supplies every day to Black and brown victims, including those in nursing homes.

"We are still digging through the rubble and trying to find a way out," said Lake, the founder of My Daddy Taught Me That. Other places routinely hit by hurricanes like Florida and Louisiana have well-oiled response ecosystems, he said, but North Carolina's has been piecemeal.

"Everyone is in survival mode and a mental lull to where it's like, 'I can't even take a shower today, so why would I be talking about next month, about politics. I don't know if people will get back there before the election."

Tomiko Ambrose Murray, a political organizer in Asheville, laid it out plainly.

"We are trying to figure out how to get Black folks to participate in the election; I think there can be a narrative that Black people don't care about climate change, and that's just false," she said.

But, "people here are sleep-deprived, aren't able to work their jobs, don't have money, or maybe possibly having been denied by FEMA, No electricity, no water, you know, those kinds of things, not being able to shower."

"And so people are on the front lines trying to support their communities. Connect people with what they need, and they're exhausted, and it's been like day after day after day. People are tired."

The exhaustion and fatigue last long after the storm and can shape how people view the government for the rest of their lives. Just ask Hurricane Katrina survivors.

Talbert says the fallout of Helene has also made racial inequities more prominent in eastern Georgia. The day after the storm, she said she had to wait hours just to get snacks from the gas station because there were no full service grocery stores within accessible distance of her majority-Black community. As people struggled to get food and gas because of price-gouging, chaos ensued. She witnessed a shooting, as well as a woman that was beginning to give birth in a car because the hospital was inaccessible.

"There was no plan in place for this, and it was obvious," she said. Talbert said she believes the aftermath of the storm, in addition to both Democrats and Republicans not being proactive in the community before the storm, will make it easy to ignore the election.

The false promise of a "climate haven"

As much of western North Carolina slept in the early morning hours of Sept. 27, Hurricane Helene had done the unimaginable by overtopping rivers in the mountain region.

Last year, Asheville ranked second in the country for the most move-ins from new residents compared with residents moving out. A lot of the growth, residents and researchers have explained, was due to the city's designation as a "climate haven" for its mild temperatures, low wildfire and drought risk, and its distance - 300 miles - from the coast, and the storms and sea level rise that brings.

In the area around Asheville, rain swelled the watershed that twists and turns for almost 1,000 square miles, running water off the natural mountainous terrain into the paved and quickly growing city of 95,000. Because the situation developed overnight, Lisa Whittenburg, a mother of three, had no time to evacuate. At more than 400 miles wide, Helene was the third-widest storm in recorded history. Even as the storm battered Florida and Georgia the night before, most residents in the area had no idea of the storm's historic length and ability to turn Asheville into a raging river. There was nowhere for the water to go but up.

After watching the floodwaters rise and swallow the first two floors of her apartment complex in the early hours of Hurricane Helene, Whittenburg accepted her fate: "It got to the point where I had just accepted it, like, 'God it is your will. If I'm not supposed to be here, I won't be.'"

So, by early morning, the family and more than a dozen other residents sat trapped on the third floor of their subsidized housing complex. There wasn't much up there with them outside of an inflatable air mattress that the family brought up in their quick thinking as they evacuated their apartment. One issue: there wasn't a pump. It did not stop Whittenburg's adult daughter Cynia from using all her might to blow up the mattress with her mouth.

"'Mama, we getting out of here,'" Whittenburg recalled her daughter saying.

But Whittenburg wanted to take her chances on the roof. She didn't know what was in the floodwaters, which are known to be full of toxins, sewage, and bacteria, and she thought to herself, "I'm gonna sink, right?" So, she waited, even as the waters threw a tractor-trailer into her apartment complex and the stilts it stood on began to crack.

Two weeks later, she is still fighting for more concrete answers from FEMA. She applied for funding and said she was approved, but the total amount and details have been confusing. Whittenburg said she no longer has anywhere to stay with electricity in the area. Sleeping or staying in her apartment, filled with muck and debris, is akin to staying in "quick sand."

"I just need to be somewhere where things are functioning," Whittenburg explained as she was packing up to leave Asheville to stay with her sister in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Tuesday. "People like me don't have anything. ... I've never had to do nothing like this before."


This story was originally produced by Angela Dennis and Adam Mahoney of Capital B News as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.

By Rebecca Randall for Sojourners.
Broadcast version by Chrystal Blair for Missouri News Service for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration.

A couple years ago, urban farmer DeAndress Green drove Uber and DoorDash for 10 hours straight and then returned to her home on the southside of St. Louis struggling to breathe.

“I thought I was having an asthma attack,” she said.

She tried drinking coffee, her family’s quick trick for calming wheezing. She found her nephew’s inhaler and took that, which helped. She went to the hospital, where medical professionals tested for asthma. It wasn’t her first asthma test or emergency room visit due to breathing difficulties, and the results hadn’t changed: She didn’t demonstrate the right characteristics for a diagnosis.

“They’ve never learned why I’m wheezing,” said Green. “They’ve only said it’s probably environmental, which makes me very angry because I don’t know when it’s going to happen.” It also means doctors have been unwilling to prescribe her an inhaler.

Green wonders what toxins she’s been exposed to all her life. She gets nervous when she goes to north St. Louis, or commutes through Sauget, Ill., where a hazardous waste incinerator is located. Growing up, she recalls an odd, sweet smell while playing sports in empty lots in her neighborhood. Her mother Clye James Verde, who worked as a residential manager and groundskeeper at a housing project, received an asthma diagnosis after using an industrial strength oven cleaner during a shift — Verde didn’t know they should have worn a mask and gloves.

Green and Verde’s story is similar to many others who share their demographics: Black St. Louisans are more likely to live near major highways and interstates and known polluters, and Black children and youth are 10 times more likely than white counterparts to visit emergency rooms for asthma treatment, according to the Missouri Department of Health and Social Services. 

Black residents have been at the forefront of the fight to address air quality for decades. Green remembers her mother advocating to ensure her kids’ access to their inhalers and other asthma management in schools. But now, Green said, Black St. Louisans aren’t the only ones raising their voices on air quality. Green joined Metropolitan Congregations United, a local faith and advocacy organization.

“For once in my lifetime, we have people who don’t look like me speaking about this,” she said. Over 2022-23, MCU organized 15 churches to help researchers better understand air quality in St. Louis.

“This is a way to put your faith into action. If your faith teaches you to care for creation, what does that ministry look like?” said Beth Gutzler, lead environmental justice organizer at Metropolitan Congregations United. “It’s a little different than other ministries look. Some people do food pantries, some people fight food injustice.” And more frequently, St. Louis churches are prioritizing tackling air quality.

Using air monitors as a tool for action

Currently, Missouri operates eight Environmental Protection Agency air monitors across St. Louis city and St. Louis County — only one of which provides a comprehensive screening of pollutants. The data is not granular enough to illuminate neighborhood disparities on local air pollution, so, advocates for air quality improvements have little information with which to petition decision-makers.

The Jay Turner Group, an energy, environmental, and chemical engineering lab at Washington University in St. Louis, received a community grant to pursue a slice of this problem and installed QuantAQ monitors. The low-cost sensors track particulate matter, which comes from car exhaust, fossil-fuel power plants, construction dust, industrial activity and other sources. Particulate matter can vary depending on weather and the built environment, which is why neighborhood-specific data would help address clean-air disparities.

The Group worked with Metropolitan Congregations United, who recruited 15 congregations across the city to install the monitors. MCU is a regional organization that helps congregational leaders build collective power to address racial inequities. Churches offered a good location for consistent monitoring, whereas monitors at park locations tend to get unplugged, said Gutzler.

At $1,250, the monitors are vastly cheaper than EPA monitors, which cost thousands more. The sensors report data to remote servers via cellular connection, making them more accessible than Wi-Fi. The project measured at each site between 2022-2023.

Tyler Cargill, a doctoral student who helped churches understand the data from the monitors, said MCU’s community engagement played a role in the research.

“One of the main reasons we do this is to help people to understand what they can get out of these sensors,” he said. “We test them to be able to understand: What are their limitations? What are their strengths?”

Spurring community engagement

For Beth Gutzler, lead environmental justice organizer at Metropolitan Congregations United, a major success of the project is the new and renewed engagement of churches in air quality issues.

For New Northside Missionary Baptist Church, one of the churches that installed monitors, clean air has been on their radar for many years now, said Rev. Rodrick Burton. During a campaign to support the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, Burton recalls a church event where he asked his congregation to raise their hand if they or a family member had asthma. He recalls about 40 percent of attendees lifting a hand. “That kind of got everyone’s attention,” he said.

Since then, the church has installed solar panels, held a Green the Church summit, helped members access inhalers for asthma, and hosted EPA administrators. As a church leader, Burton has participated on local clean air advisory committees and attended national conferences with organizations like Moms Clean Air Force.

“Our belief is that as Christians we are to be good stewards of the resources that God has provided. It would be sinful for us to take what has been provided for all and not protect the universal use for everyone,” Burton said. He views clean air as a justice issue — “a universal right.”

Allowing scientists to collect data using church property was a natural fit for a Black church, he said, comparing it to Civil Rights activists who documented and demonstrated evidence of systemic racism in court cases like Brown v. Board of Education.

Air monitors were also located at churches that were not previously engaged on environmental issues. For these churches, the research helped begin a conversation about what neighborhood ministries can look like — sometimes including creation care for the first time.

“It’s different than Sierra Club,” said Gutzler, who attends Sts. Joachim and Ann Catholic Church in St. Charles. “I get to tie it to the doctrines and teachings of their faith.”

Congregations have dialogued about hosting a neighborhood lawn mower rental program to help with the transition from gas to electric, addressing indoor air quality by replacing kitchen gas appliances, and even divesting from fossil fuels in church-held investment portfolios, Gutzler said.

The air monitors also helped churches dive deeper into structural issues, moving from caring for community members with asthma to asking how they could work to improve air quality.

What to do with unexpected outcomes

The common view was that monitors would reveal higher rates of pollution in north St. Louis, which ranks high on the CDC’s environmental justice index. But Cargill said the data captured didn’t support that, with increases in PM2.5 (the particulate matter tracked) near roadways or buildings, not specific neighborhoods.

The data still proved useful for addressing clean-air access, however: Most of the monitors found PM2.5 levels near or above the EPA’s threshold for exposure, and well above the World Health Organization’s recommended threshold. This means likely all St. Louis residents are at risk for negative health impacts.

Cargill said future studies could still help address neighborhood discrepancies by measuring ozone. The monitors they used could not detect ozone, which can exacerbate asthma when it forms at ground level. Ozone develops generally on sunny, hot days, as a reaction of nitrogen oxide, from sources like tailpipes and construction, and compounds found in gas, paint, solvent, and even pine trees, Cargill said. But the current cost of these monitors likely keeps them out of reach for churches.

From knowledge to advocacy

To begin public advocacy, MCU asked for more transparency in community outreach from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, who regulates air quality in the state.

Previously the agency only allowed public involvement in construction permits related to air emissions when the public requested. In other words, projects sailed through permitting without public notice. You could not even see the permit that you might want to request a hearing about, said Gutzler. To appeal, a citizen had to make a public records request.

Now, the department maintains an automatic email list of upcoming permits, though a citizen still needs to request a hearing. Gutzler counts it as a win. It is the first step in her vision of helping congregations to engage the community and together become the watch dogs that pay attention to air quality in the permit process.

With more awareness of how to navigate the public process, MCU testified against an incinerator permit in Hannibal, upriver from St. Louis. Their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful — the permit was approved — but it gave them an idea of how to engage across the rural-urban divide, particularly as they hope to engage churches across the state.

For some congregations, the air monitors also focused community concerns on finding the right solutions. Cargill crossed off PM2.5 as the culprit causing odors that plague the Benton Park neighborhood, where Epiphany United Church of Christ placed a monitor.

At a public meeting in April, Doris McCarter, a plant scientist and congregant at Epiphany, asked Missouri regulators to use their authority to push for stricter EPA regulations and request a study that identifies the source of the odor and its potential health effects, even though it may be an Illinois plant.

Meanwhile, Epiphany member Kathleen Logan Smith formed Breathe Better STL, which meets at the church monthly to explore how to grow a movement to oppose air permits that allow exceptions for exceeding EPA emission limits.

Ultimately, community air monitors helped spur a growing interest in clean air advocacy among churches in Missouri. When the Washington University project ended, MCU helped find funds to cover lower-cost PurpleAir Network monitors for churches to “help fill out the St. Louis map,” said Gutzler. One strength of the PurpleAir Network is the open-source geographic data on air quality, but some residential areas — particularly in environmental justice communities — remain unmeasured.

The group also partners with the Heartland Environmental Justice Center, an EPA-funded research center, and the Gamaliel Network, which provides training on faith-based advocacy.

Gutzler aspires to engage the whole state of Missouri on air quality issues and help scientists and church leaders to see the potential for change that comes through working together.


Rebecca Randall wrote this article for Sojourners.


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