February 2023 Networker: Roadmaps from Voices Both Familiar and New |
| Volume 28 (2), February 2023 |
| In this month’s Networker, we have pieces that—in the case of two of the articles—treat us to the work of two SEHN colleagues who have long labored to expose and respond to the threat of chemicals and pollution in our environments. We also feature an exciting voice that’s new for us, that of Kelsey Breseman, Civic Science Fellow at the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI). Finally, you’ll enjoy meeting my longtime Concerned Health Professionals of New York collaborator, Dr. Larysa Dyrszka, featured in our second Celebrating our Colleagues column.
In my interview with SEHN’s science director, Ted Schettler, we discuss the remarkable project of a large interdisciplinary group of experts who recently published five interrelated papers, coupled with a public education campaign, on how science should be used to strengthen and focus the existing chemical regulatory system in the United States. So that it actually protects the full diversity of real people and communities. As Ted says, we should not expect less.
In her now-regular column, newly named the rePercussion Section (see her piece for the delightful explanation of this choice!), SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber returns to her widely known expertise on both the science and human rights dimensions of exposure to carcinogens in the environment. February is both National Cancer Prevention Month and Black History Month, and Sandra does the necessary work of focusing in on the unconscionable—and very real—existence of a Black Cancer Alley along the lower Mississippi River.
I met Kelsey Breseman when many of us started thinking about whether to abandon Elon Musk’s Twitter (we’re still deliberating!). Kelsey had reached out to folks from environmental nonprofits, offering a personal tutorial on how to migrate our followers and tweets over to the grassrootsy platform, Mastodon. I took her up on that for SEHN (in case SEHN does eventually leave Twitter), and before Kelsey and I signed off from that unexpectedly fun hour together, I had no trouble using my chutzpah to ask if she’d write a contributed article for the Networker. I’m so happy she accepted. In it, she writes personally, beautifully, and informatively about the work EDGI does “advancing a modernized Environmental Right to Know.”
We have a long way to go before we truly have the “right to know, participate and decide” (Louisville Charter). But, even if you, like Ted and Sandra, have been focused on these problems for decades, the kinds of revelations, analyses, and roadmaps you’ll read in this edition will give you renewed energy for the fight. Let’s make it an especially meaningful National Cancer Prevention Month and Black History Month.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN |
Celebrating our Colleagues, February 2023: Dr. Larysa Dyrszka |
| By Carmi Orenstein, Editor |
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Dr. Larysa Dyrszka, co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY)
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| Not much time ever passes before I again think about how privileged I am to have Dr. Larysa Dyrszka as a colleague. Deeply informed and committed, thoughtful and eloquent, and so generous with her time, Larysa is a retired pediatrician and co-founder of Concerned Health Professionals of New York (CHPNY), since May 2021 a program of SEHN. CHPNY would not be what it is, would not have accomplished what we have to date, without her. After receiving her medical degree from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Larysa began a career that included serving as Director of Pediatrics at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. Along with her longtime work as a physician, she has been a United Nations representative to the Economic and Social Council with the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations, focusing on the rights of children, particularly with regard to health. She was a member of the State University of New York Sullivan Community College Board of Trustees from 2009- 2018 and served on the Sullivan County Health Services Advisory Board. It is our own great fortune that Larysa became an advocate for public health as it relates to oil and gas exploration, production, and its infrastructure. She says, |
| Having just retired from the practice of pediatrics, and living over the Marcellus shale in New York State, I became concerned that children would be impacted by hydraulic fracturing for gas. Together with some like-minded colleagues, we founded CHPNY.
Over ten years ago, when health impacts of fracking were first recognized, our small group of physicians and scientists were at the fore, addressing this emerging harm to human health. We organized the information we had, shared it at hearings, spoke at forums and rallies. Our expertise evolved into the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking and Associated Gas and Oil Infrastructure. Now in its eighth edition, the Compendium warns that the harms of fossil fuel extraction continue unabated. |
| Larysa is also a founding member of Sullivan Area Citizens for Responsible Energy Development and on the Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility - New York. She has provided testimony at government hearings (see photo) and countless community education forums.
Amid the gravity of researching and writing each edition of the Compendium, working with Larysa is a delight. I’ll always remember the summer that she drafted her sections while working as a sleepaway camp nurse. I received entertaining camp updates (as well as the not-so-fun news of various summer camp health afflictions!) alongside her good writing about, for example, radioactive releases from fracking and its infrastructure, the impacts of pipelines and compressor stations, gas-fired power plants, and gas storage, and so on. I’m happy to share with our readers the contributions of Dr. Larysa Dyrszka to vastly expanded frontline community knowledge about the risks and harms of fracking and its infrastructure. |
Incorporating the Best Available Science in Chemical Regulation: We Should Not Expect Less |
| SEHN’s science director, Ted Schettler, MD, MPH, is part of an interdisciplinary group of experts recommending specific improvements in how science is used to prevent harmful chemical exposures and to strengthen the current chemical regulatory processes. Five open-access academic papers, including one which puts forth an overarching consensus statement, together with lay summaries and infographics, create a springboard for action. The Networker’s editor, Carmi Orenstein, speaks with Ted about his involvement with this vital, expansive effort, and his thoughts about what is possible in moving forward chemicals policy. |
| Editor: Ted, your influential work on chemicals and health goes back decades. The papers resulting from this new effort reflect evolving ways of thinking about human health and the environment, now well recognized within the scientific and public health communities, but often poorly integrated into policies and practices. These include the different ways chemical exposures impact different people and populations, how to effectively address the hundreds of thousands of chemicals and chemical mixtures in use, and better understanding exposure levels that can result in a diverse range of health impacts. What are some examples of how these papers reflect this evolution?
Ted: This project brought together toxicologists, epidemiologists, and others from academia, the non-profit sector, and government representatives who have expertise in evaluating and understanding health risks associated with chemical exposures in the real world. We thought that identifying some of the basic shortcomings of chemical safety evaluations by regulatory agencies and product manufacturers in the United States, along with providing policy recommendations, could spark efforts to address those deficiencies and improve health protection.
It’s important to recognize that regulation of chemicals in the United States is spread across various agencies. Their legislative mandates and approaches differ. For example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates pharmaceuticals and requires extensive safety assessments before a new drug is considered for the market. The FDA also regulates cosmetic ingredients, but their oversight of those chemicals is far less rigorous. One division of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for regulating pesticides and is supposed to require a battery of studies performed in prescribed ways in order to evaluate their potential toxicity. But the agency not infrequently waives those requirements, allowing inadequately studied pesticides onto the market. Another division of the EPA regulates chemicals used in industrial processes or various consumer products. Some of these chemicals show up in communities as drinking water contaminants and air pollutants. By law, the EPA is supposed to use the best available science when performing chemical safety and risk evaluations. Our project calls out and updates some of the important ways that regulatory agencies and businesses making materials and products could improve their risk evaluations and decision-making by using updated approaches that incorporate the best available science. We should not expect less. |
EDGI and the Right to Trust our Environmental Health |
| by Kelsey Breseman, Civic Science Fellow, EDGI |
| I grew up in unincorporated Snohomish County, Washington—an area I often characterized, at the time, as the kind of place where people have guns and horses. As a kid, the woods behind my house felt like an endless adventure: a massive Pacific Northwest wetlands, where beavers would build ever-changing dams you might cross on foot (if you didn’t fall in), where stickerbushes grabbed at your clothes, and dripping thick underbrush would open up into spacious cedar groves that, even to a child, felt sacred. I drank tap water, danced in rainstorms, ate nettles and fiddleheads, blackberries and huckleberries from nearby roadsides. I didn’t discriminate between playing in a stream, and playing in a roadside ditch.
Only as an adult have I started to suspect the environment around me: the natural gas stove in the kitchen, the changing flavor of the water in the sink. I get short of breath since I had COVID, and I keep two air purifiers in different parts of the house for wildfire smoke season. I’m still eating nettles and blackberries from beside the road, but I’m always wondering: what’s on these? Have these been sprayed?
The world has changed, sure, but not as much as I have. Climate change and fires have worsened, but as far as we’ve measured, pollutants in the air have actually been on a multi-decade downward trend (EPA 2022), and though water quality is both subjective and mixed, it’s at least not obviously worsening over the same decades (USGS 2023). The trouble is this little modifier: “as far as we’ve measured.” Not every contaminant gets measured, and most that are measured, aren’t measured consistently by reliable sources (ProPublica 2021). |
| I work at the non-profit Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (we call it “edgy,” for EDGI). The project I’ve been working on at EDGI looks at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its data: how they enforce the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and others; what those permits look like, what monitoring is done, and whose voices are trusted.
The trouble is, the closer I get to the data, to the system of measurement that leads into our system of governance, the clearer it is that these systems do not keep us safe. Continue Reading |
| by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist |
| February is National Cancer Prevention Month. It’s also Black History Month. Let’s look at the two together. And let’s start with Black history.
Before the Civil War, the lower Mississippi River Valley south of Baton Rouge was lined with slave plantations and sugarcane. But with a twist. The enslaved people who lived here didn’t just labor in the cane fields. They also labored in the mills that turned the cane into processed sugar and on the transportation systems that connected the mills to the fields.
In this way, Louisiana slavery was industrial as well as agricultural. Recent reporting by environmental journalist Nick Cunningham describes how this historical anomaly set the stage for a petrochemical build-out in Black communities along the Lower Mississippi in what has been called, since the 1980s, “Cancer Alley.”
Starting in the first half of the 20th century, the industrial infrastructure that had once turned cane into granulated sugar was incrementally repurposed for the task of turning oil and gas into chemicals and plastics. After various waves of development, most recently spurred on by the fracking boom, more than 150 petrochemical plants now line the 130-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
To be sure, both Black and white communities co-exist within this sinuous river valley. New research shows, however, that cancer-causing pollution from the industrial facilities is highly concentrated in Black-majority neighborhoods and that racial disparities in emissions from these facilities are pronounced.
Specifically, communities of color are exposed to levels of industrial emissions that are 7 to 21 times higher than their white counterparts. This dramatic difference, as shown by an analysis of census tract data, is “not attributable to industrial infrastructure or labor supply.”
In other words, yes, industry clusters around infrastructure. But that can’t explain why industry in southern Louisiana congregates in predominantly Black neighborhoods within a larger group of neighborhoods that have infrastructure.
In other words, the disparity in pollution burden is not because contemporary Black communities just happen to be located nearest the industrial infrastructure. In other words, the permitting system itself is racist. Continue Reading |
Concerned Health Professionals of NY Call for Passage of All-Electric Building Act
“Governor Hochul is right: we must move away from our reliance on setting fossil fuels on fire inside our homes and buildings. The science couldn’t be more clear.” SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber’s full statement, released by Food and Water Watch, followed New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s call for a statewide ban on fossil fuels in new buildings. Washington Gas Faces Lawsuits in D.C. and Maryland Over Alleged ‘Greenwashing’
“Just because [natural gas] is invisible, doesn’t mean it’s not sinister… Anyone claiming otherwise is just engaging in disinformation.” Dr. Steingraber was quoted in Washington City Paper, addressing a utility company mailing stating that natural gas is “a clean, efficient, and reliable energy.” Biden Should Wed His Cancer Moonshot to the Energy Transition
The fracking science Compendium, produced by Concerned Health Professionals of New York, a program of SEHN, was noted as a source of overwhelming evidence on the health harms of fossil fuels in a piece urging President Biden to wed his Cancer Moonshot to the energy transition and pushing for an end to carcinogenic fossil fuel use. LA’s Long, Troubled History with Urban Oil Drilling is Nearing an End After Years of Health Concerns
“In a unanimous vote on Jan. 24, 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to ban new oil and gas extraction and phase out existing operations. It followed a similar vote by the Los Angeles City Council a month earlier.” SEHN Board member and Occidental College professor Bhavna Shamasunder and her colleague, USC professor Jill Johnston, updated their February 2022 piece for the Conversation. |
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