You’re in the middle of a project now studying how people in communities educate themselves and organize on environmental issues. How did that get started?
It came out of a project we did on Cape Cod. We asked people if they understood the way we provided information—graphs that we did for them, which gave individual data on pollutants in their bodies and their homes.

This is a very new area, and people don’t often get these results back. At best, people get one result back, like lead. We were testing for 89 different chemicals and providing 20 or 30 results per person. So we asked if they understood them, and we asked questions like: Does it make them think of ways to change their exposure, if they can? Does it make them think about what the causes might have been?

They were generally very surprised to find a lot of contaminants in their homes. Sometimes they were trying to figure out where they came from. They were concerned about the uncertainty. They wanted to know, could this have caused so-and-so’s illness? We can’t tell them that these things had certain effects.


Then you took this methodology to Richmond, California?
We wanted to find a way to make our type of analysis useful in other places. Richmond, we knew, had a long history of concern about refineries and the port. It’s a very highly burdened area, mainly low income and largely people of color. This is not talked about a lot yet, but for black women there is a more virulent form of breast cancer. So we, and groups like Breast Cancer Action and the Breast Cancer Fund, were starting to think about environmental causes of breast cancer.

We spent a lot of time working with them ?on how this study should be designed, how we would all benefit from it in different ways, and building up a partnership and talking to each other a lot, meeting a lot.

They organized and went door-to-door. We trained them to do it. They put air monitors in place, and we did the analysis when the data came back and helped them figure out the best way to present it.

Was there opposition from the other side?
There’s always local opposition. “You’re going to hurt our tax base,” they say. “You’re going to give [us] a bad name. People are not going to want to move here.”

What’s your response when that happens?
I wrote in No Safe Place that one of our biggest opponents [in Woburn] was the town engineer. And then he dies from contamination. So you can’t be safe from this stuff. And you can’t even live in a different part of town or a different part of the country because this stuff is traveling. The more we learn about emerging contaminants, the more we know that you don’t have to produce PCBs someplace to have them show up in your blood. They’re showing up in the Arctic. They’re getting there by ocean currents and air currents. And by, you know, biomagnifications in the food chain [the accumulation of substances in increasingly high concentrations as larger organisms feed on smaller ones].

So that’s just going to keep happening. People are going to see, hopefully, that you can’t just live in a pure, pristine place and you can’t just buy green products and organic food. There’s still enough stuff around that’s going to hurt you.

Do you always win?
No. There were some things that we lost in Providence, Rhode Island, recently—schools being constructed on very contaminated land. Despite opposition from the community, from Rhode Island Legal Services, and from the state itself, the city still went ahead and built these schools.

What was the land contaminated with?
In the first instance it was an old Providence city landfill. In the second case it was the Gorham silver plants. Gorham was the biggest silver manufacturer in the world, and they had, I think, 12,000 workers. You can imagine how big it was. So there was a lot of old electroplating and metalwork in Rhode Island in general. And this was one of the biggest. It’s very contaminated.

What is the next step for the community groups, and how will you try to help them?
The first two schools that were built were an elementary and a middle school next to each other, the Springfield Street Schools. The residents filed a lawsuit, and the outcome of the lawsuit was that the judge said you have to monitor the place and you also have to have DEM set up a statewide panel which will have citizens and experts in government to develop a new environmental-justice approach to brownfields [polluted and abandoned industrial sites].

So I’m actually on that panel, and there are a bunch of residents on that panel too. And while not everybody is happy with how it’s going, nevertheless that’s one positive outcome of this.

What has popular epidemiology changed?
It’s changed citizens’ belief that they didn’t matter to a belief that they could matter...It has benefited many people suffering from toxic releases or from plumes of contaminants under their soil or from dumps, or proposed power plants or other plants, such as the concrete plants just defeated in Cranston, Rhode Island. It’s emboldened a lot of people to say, “We may not be the most educated, the most influential, but we can stand up and do this together.”