Using EPA Tools in the Fight for Environmental Justice in Philadelphia

Brian RatcliffeSUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

Final Report to the Edna Bailey Sussman Foundation, 2017

Introduction

Poor air quality resulting from fossil fuel combustion is responsible for ~200,000 premature deaths each year in the United States, with industrial emissions accounting for approximately one fifth of that total (Caiazzo, Ashok, Waitz, Yim, & Barrett, 2013). The health burden is not distributed equally––race is the strongest predictor of toxic environmental exposure, with African Americans being 79 percent more likely than white Americans to live in neighborhoods with dangerous levels of industrial pollution (Bullard, Mohai, Saha, & Wright, 2008). The oil and gas industry, in addition to being a large source of harmful air pollutants such as benzene, formaldehyde, and hydrogen sulfide, is also the leading emitter of methane, a formidable greenhouse gas that traps 87 times more heat than carbon dioxide does (Fleischman & Franklin, 2017). Hence, the oil and gas industry is at the epicenter of the struggle for Environmental Justice and the fight against climate change.

The predominantly black neighborhoods of Wilson Park and Point Breeze in South Philadelphia are across the fence-line from the largest oil refinery on the east coast, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES). PES is responsible for nearly two-thirds of the air pollution from point sources in Philadelphia, contributing to a citywide childhood asthma rate that is twice the national average (Fleischman & Franklin, 2017). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repeatedly found the facility to be in “significant noncompliance” with the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act (“Detailed Facility Report”, 2017). Philly Thrive is a grassroots community organization that raises public awareness about PES, advocates for clean air and Environmental Justice, and opposes the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure in the name of mitigating climate change.

I spent my Sussman internship in Philadelphia, PA working for Philly Thrive. As an intern for a young and ambitious organization, I was able to play many roles over the summer. My primary obligation was to conduct background research with the goal of finding tools and resources that could inform Philly Thrive’s campaigns, and data that might help them communicate their message to the public. I proposed to use EPA tools to document the nature and extent of toxic emissions from PES, and to investigate the degree to which minority populations on the fence-line are being disproportionately impacted by air pollution. A secondary goal was to educate Philly Thrive members and the public about my resources and methods so that anybody could perform similar analyses in the future. Lack of time and access to data restricted my ability to accomplish my third proposal, which was to document the prevalence of negative health outcomes such as asthma and respiratory cancers within the fence-line communities, although Philly Thrive’s ongoing #WeDecide campaign is in the process of gathering that data.

My efforts culminated in my presenting at a large community workshop on air quality and public health, which I also helped to produce. Later in the summer, I participated in various movement-building activities like door-knocking, I mentored younger researchers, and I co-wrote an Op-Ed in a state-wide periodical, City and State PA (Ratcliffe & Hyun, 2017). Philly

Thrive is a small organization with no extra funds to support someone in a role like mine, so none of this work would have been possible without the support from the Edna B. Sussman Foundation.

In this report, I summarize the work I performed for Philly Thrive during the summer of 2017, focusing on the organization and execution of the air quality workshop. I include several figures that I generated for my presentation (Appendix). I conclude with lessons learned that I will take with me into my future career.

Work Completed

In the spring of 2017 I was invited by Dr. Pouné Saberi of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) to speak at an upcoming workshop that PSR was planning in conjunction with Philly Thrive. The workshop, entitled “Perspectives on our Right to Breathe: A Workshop on Health, Air Quality, and Philly’s Energy Future” (Fig. 1), was intended to begin to bridge the gap between fence-line community members and public health professionals. By providing at-risk communities with health resources, PSR was hoping to empower people to be better-informed advocates for their health and safety. The event was a hybrid between a colloquium and a town hall, a space where academics and organizers and community members met to discuss air pollution, asthma, climate change, and environmental racism.

My original intention was merely to speak at the event, but for a variety of reasons (including some last-minute personnel changes), an organizational vacuum appeared and the event was without a primary producer. Consistent with Philly Thrive’s ethos of “See a Need, Fill a Need”, I stepped in to help execute the event. In coordination with other PSR members, I made flyers, put out an ad in a local paper, posted on social media, reached out to other environmental organizations in the city, and handed out flyers at churches and at community events in South Philadelphia. I also booked the space, hired a videographer, arranged for child care on the day of the event, and helped arrange transportation for Philly Thrive members with mobility limitations.

Many of the researchers and public health professionals who spoke at the workshop operated from a “knowledge deficit” frame (Brunk 2006), presuming that poor health outcomes result largely from ignorance, and that people will make better choices if presented with quality information. For instance, much advice was given on how people could improve their indoor air quality to mitigate asthma triggers. I wanted to take a different tactic with my presentation and instead provide tools to the attendees that they themselves could use to improve their collective well-being. I walked through several different publicly-available tools from government websites that I had used to find information about PES, and demonstrated how community members could use them to empower their own initiatives. In effect, I wanted to teach them how to fish rather than merely feed them. I thanked the Edna B. Sussman foundation in my report, and credited them with financial assistance.

I demonstrated how to use the website AirNow.gov to see real-time air quality data so users suffering from asthma or other respiratory ailments could make educated decisions about when to recreate outdoors.

I used a database created by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) to show the nature and extent of the chemicals emitted by the PES refinery (Fig. 2)

I explained another EPA tool called Risk-Screened Environmental Indicators (RSEI) by showing how its formula for calculating potential health risk (which combines exposure threat and chemical toxicity data) revealed the health danger of the PES facility (Fig. 3)

I exhibited some of the power of the EPA mapping tool EJSCREEN by displaying a Map Comparison that shows the income disparities between whites and minorities in Philadelphia (Fig. 4), and a figure that shows the alarmingly high EJ Indexes1 for the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the refinery (Fig. 5)

I introduced the “power research” database LittleSis.org, a free user-generated resource that details the political and financial connections of politicians, corporations, and industry lobbyists.

In addition to presenting all of the above information, I also printed out handouts for the attendees to take with them, which contained links and brief descriptions of each site for their future reference. Later, I added a page to the Philly Thrive website that linked to each site, as well as embedded a real-time Air Quality widget for ease of use. The whole intention was help individuals draw upon factual resources in their own struggle for health, justice, and social change.

In the weeks after the workshop, I joined an “action circle” (a small, autonomous organizational unit within Philly Thrive) devoted to research. I was joined by several graduate and undergraduate interns (from UPenn, Jefferson Hospital, and Dickinson College) and together we used our access to academic resources to further the aims of the organization. I trained them in the websites that I referenced above; helped edit the language of a survey that Philly Thrive will use to gather information about fence-line members’ perceptions of energy infrastructure; co-wrote an Op-Ed that was published in City and State PA about the need for Philadelphians to foreground issues of equity and environmental justice as the city charts a path toward sustainability (Ratcliffe & Hyun, 2017); and helped compile research for the creation of health-related educational documents. I also continued to build the movement by knocking on doors in Wilson Park to educate residents about the refinery and recruit new members to Philly Thrive.

Conclusion/Lessons Learned

My time with Philly Thrive was powerfully illuminating for me, and quite productive for the organization. Some of the lessons I learned were prosaic: how to better manage my time when working in a non-traditional work setting, or how important it is to have designated facilitators and note-takers during meetings so that tasks are accomplished efficiently. Other lessons were more paradigm-shifting, including my daily encounter with the harsh reality that poverty and oppression sharply limit people’s ability to advocate for themselves or their environment. Some of the most profound “environmental” work that Philly Thrive does comes in the form of offering child-care, carpools, and food at meetings—small ways of lowering the barriers to participation for a community that has been hammered by injustice, so they can

1 An EJ Index is a numerical combination of demographic and environmental hazard information. A higher value means that the area in question has a high population of minority and/or low income residents, and experiences a heavy burden of environmental toxins.

participate in the fight for their lives. Related to that, I learned that the work of environmental justice is inextricable from the work of racial justice. I admire Philly Thrive’s explicit commitment to being anti-racist in word and action, and I am a better ally for having worked with them.

Another big takeaway for me was the importance of communication. No matter how strong your data or how worthy your cause, if you cannot reach the public with your message then your fight is fruitless. On the other hand, it is not enough to merely “inform”. The assumption that people will behave differently if only you provide them with the right information is flawed; Philly Thrive understands that you must help them see the systems of oppression that have constrained their freedom to begin with, and provide an affirming community that supports individual and collective transformation.

Finally, my extensive use of the EPA’s powerful resources drove home to me the importance of that institution to our national well-being. Enforcement of pollution-limiting regulations is crucial to the health of communities all around the nation, and the large sets of public data that they manage are indispensable to researchers and organizers like me. In an era where their mission is being eroded from within, it has never been more important to fight for our right to a clean, healthy environment.

Upon graduation (with an M.P.S. from SUNY-ESF and an M.P.A. from the Maxwell School) I aim to make a career in the field of environmental protection. As such, I will be involved with interdisciplinary work on exceedingly complex systems. As distinguished environmental scholar David Orr (1992) observed, “the symptoms of environmental deterioration are in the domain of the natural sciences, but the causes lie in the realm of the social sciences and humanities”. The insights and experiences I gained working with Philly Thrive will allow me to navigate those complexities more skillfully, and will make me a wiser and more effective public servant.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Edna Baily Sussman Foundation for their generous support. At SUNY-ESF I would like to thank Professor Mary Collins for her guidance and scholarship, and my advisor Dr. Robin Kimmerer for her sustained investment in my growth as a person and a leader. I’m indebted to Alexa Ross of Philly Thrive for her vision, courage, and friendship, and grateful to Pouné Saberi of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) for her organizational leadership. Finally, I would like to express thanks and gratitude to my research peers this summer, El Hyun, Avi Kessler, Natasha Bagwe, and Yusef Dwider, and to the courageous and inspiring members of Philly Thrive, especially Zalaka Thompson-Bey, Chinara Bilaal, Carol White, andVernell Marshall.

References

Brunk, C. G. (2006). Public Knowledge, Public Trust: Understanding the ‘Knowledge Deficit’. Community Genetics, 9, 178–183.

Bullard, R. D., Mohai, P., Saha, R., & Wright, B. (2008). Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: why race still matters after all of these years. Environmental Law, 38 371–411.

Caiazzo, F., Ashok, A., Waitz, I.A., Yim, S.H.L., & Barrett, S.R.H. (2013). Air pollution and early deaths in the United States. Part I: Quantifying the impact of major sectors in 2005. Atmospheric Environment, 79, 198-208.

Detailed Facility Report: Sunoco Philadelphia Refinery. (Accessed 2017, December 5). Retrieved from https://echo.epa.gov/detailed-facility-report?redirect=page&fid=110000336994

Fleischman, L. & M. Franklin. (2017). Fumes Across the Fenceline: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil & Gas Facilities on African American Communities. NAACP and CATF.

Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ratcliffe, B. & E. Hyun. (2017, July 5) Philly's clean energy future depends on confronting its dirty past. City and State PA. Retrieved from http://www.cityandstatepa.com/

Appendix: Figures

Figure 1. Print Flyer for the PSR/Philly Thrive Air Quality Workshop

Figure 2. Toxics Release Inventory record for PES, detailing the quantity and identities of chemicals released to the environment

Figure 3. PES has a RSEI score that is several orders of magnitude higher than the industry average

Figure 4. Map Comparison showing a disparity in Per Capita Income based on Percent Minority Population

Figure 5. Table/Histogram showing extremely high EJ Index values for the neighborhoods on the fence-line of the PES oil refinery