Our Fellow in Residence Timnit Kefela is an environmental scientist who has spent a decade studying microplastics and the communities who bear the cost of a pollution crisis they didn't create. In this guest essay, she turns a rare diagnosis into a reckoning with everything her field already knows — and refuses to do.

What the body holds

(how to carry a dimming light)

A dwindling sight showed a microplastics researcher that a vision for our future was never only about the evidence in front of our eyes.

It felt insignificant at first.

A pain that lived somewhere behind my eyes since I was eleven – dull, then sharp, then gone – that every doctor I had seen quietly handed back to me, unexplained or dismissed as stress or lack of sleep. I chalked it up to the microscope hours, the new lab, the long days counting small colorful bits of plastic. The sharp lines felt softer. The blur must have been exhaustion.

I have spent the last decade trying to understand how plastic, the material that builds our homes, wraps our food, runs through our infrastructure, breaks down into small particles that nest in lung tissue and makes homes in the stomachs of birds. Microplastics are almost everywhere now, in our soils, waters, air, fellow organisms. In us. But their scale is an excellent hiding place. We measure impact in our tissue samples, sediment and soil cores using the sanitised language of accumulation like parts per million or mass per mass. Our words obscure the experiences of communities who live inside those numbers, that the data we analyze circles without saying it directly: this is not happening equally. The places absorbing the most impact from a plastic’s lifecycle are rarely the places that profit from them.

Take synthetic textile waste, which are primarily plastics. Countless stories have been written about how microfibers rain on national parks, how dryers and washing machines shed pounds and pounds of these plastics into our waterways and soils. But few have been written about places like the Dandora dumpsite in Kenya, where waste management is primarily open burns of accumulated layers of materials that originated elsewhere and can neither be separated nor repurposed. The air is almost always acrid, thick and lingering – an end-of-life fate that for many is unfathomable of the original wearers of the clothing, begging the question why do certain places become the recipient of another’s consequences?

I have lived inside this question for a long time. It is how I became an environmental scientist who spends hours pressing my eyes to the lens, learning to understand what people cannot easily see. There is an intimacy in studying what is invisible but felt. You train yourself to slow down, to look longer, to steady your hand and trust what the instrument shows you even when it defies your expectation. I have spent the last ten years training my eyes to find what cannot be easily seen.

But now my sight is leaving me. In 2024, I was diagnosed with Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada Syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that causes, among other things, temporary –and, if left unaddressed, potentially permanent– loss of vision. After it first happened, I was terrified. But with time, I started to look closely at this cryptic, invisible force guiding my body to attack itself. And I’ve found intimacy here, too. I’ve seen a world of metaphors unfold.

What I’ve seen is how vision has never truly been only about eyes. It is about what a society deems is worth witnessing, who it trusts to look, and what it does with what it finds. We have built entire systems, be it regulatory, economic, political, that are structurally oriented away from evidence. It is not because the evidence is weak, but rather looking directly at the barrel of guns would require changing everything upstream of it – which is hardly profitable or convenient.

A chosen blind spot

Spending extensive time in ophthalmology and rheumatology waiting rooms, I learned about a word that I feel best describes our reaction to the rate of policy formation and governance around plastic pollution – a scotoma. A blind spot, which occurs not because of an absence of light but a failure of the brain to process what the eye is receiving – the signal arrives, the images do not form.

I think about my own diagnosis often in relation to this type of blindness. The pain was there for decades before anyone took it seriously. It was often written off as I had not slept enough. Or to the chagrin of a former partner, maybe it was in my head, maybe I could think it away. My symptoms were documented, handed back and filed away. The system was not necessarily lying to me, but it just was not looking. There is a difference between the absence of answers and the absence of attention, because I would not say that my doctors were malicious per se, they were busy, likely undertrained in what they were seeing, and shaped by a medical culture that prioritizes addressing symptoms efficiently (this is not an episode of “House” after all, but it is a rare disease that would have made for a fascinating episode).

Likewise, our inaction towards plastic pollution is not because of a failure of information, or hidden evidence. It has been published, presented, submitted and testified with. My colleagues who study endocrine disruption have been publishing findings on the hormonal impacts of plastic-adjacent chemicals for over two decades. Researchers tracking microplastic concentrations in freshwater systems have watched the numbers climb in a nearly unbroken line. Pediatric health scientists have been raising alarms about early childhood exposure before I entered this field. It is a growing mountain that we are patiently waiting for consensus to summit, with a need for more data or better measurement techniques, which, sure, we can always have more and better.

Our regulatory bodies are no different, responding at a pace that does not match the urgency needed. The Global Plastics Treaty, which should have established a binding international cap on plastic production and pollution, has stalled in negotiation cycles while industry representation outnumbers environmental delegates and concerned observers at the discussion table. Voluntary pledges from major producers promising to reduce single-use plastics, invest in environmentally sound alternatives and clean up supply chains have largely gone unmet or unmeasured. The promising intergovernmental and science panel on chemicals, waste and pollution (ISP-CWP) still lacks the foundational aspects to be a functioning international governance body.

People often ask what I can no longer see. I tell them at first it is the edges of things. The periphery goes first; the color fades and the center slowly follows. It feels like a metaphor for those of us who are left in the margins of plastic pollution conversations but bear witness to the heart of its impact. The communities most burdened by plastic pollution have always understood that this is not a knowledge problem. It never was. It is a question of who is considered worth protecting, whose future counts as a future worth preserving, whose body is treated as a threshold worth defending. Fenceline communities have been documenting changes in their waters, fish, bodies, for generations through oral histories tinged with tonal grief of the land being corrupted. The data is not lacking, but rather the audience that is willing to receive it as legitimate embodied knowledge is. This is what it means to choose not to see. It’s a particular kind of blindness that is intentionally chosen and hardly medical.

What is missing is the willingness to disrupt using that data. The problem has been a profound, practiced, institutional refusal to let what is seen become what is acted upon. In part, that’s because as a scientist, you are trained to sit with uncomfortable findings and resist the instinct to explain them away. But this moment requires something different of all of us. It asks us to commit to community care, to a livable future, and look at what is already here and stop rationalizing the blur.

My sight is leaving me. But the urgency to address what it has shown me does not leave with it.

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In 2025, my professional world was on the verge of collapsing.

The new administration launched a fierce attack against public health. We saw the dismantling of important federal public health programs such as the Office of Research and Development, and the Office of Environmental Justice at the US EPA. Nearly 100,000 scientists left the federal government. The Federal government froze or cancelled $400 million in research funding for Columbia University, my institutional home. I was not spared: I lost all my federal grants. In my classroom and office, I saw students questioning the value of a career in environmental public health. I also saw how society at large increasingly questioned the value of higher education altogether.

It was an existential crisis. I felt anxious, defeated, and nervous about the future.

So I began to ask myself, how did we get here? How is there so much distrust in public health and higher education? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

As I looked for answers and fresh voices, I stumbled upon a podcast called “Why Should I Trust You?”, where journalists, clinicians, and scientists meet supporters of the Make American Healthy Again movement and mainstream medical experts to examine the declining trust in public health. I was immediately hooked. So I did the next logical thing: I started mildly stalking one of the hosts, Brinda Adikari, on LinkedIn. After learning that she also lived in New York and even shared a few mutual connections, I sent her an invite. To my fangirl delight, she accepted! We set up a phone call under the most logical circumstances – while she was walking home from grocery shopping.

During the call, I shared my enthusiasm for the show, but also my belief that they could better tackle my area of expertise and a top priority for MAHA: everyday toxic chemicals like PFAS and phthalates. She appreciated my feedback and even invited me to collaborate on a podcast episode. That was Fall 2025. Then life got busy. But in March 2026, I got an email from her asking me to spend a day and a half in Columbus, Ohio, surrounded by MAHA advocates and public health experts. I took a leap of faith and said yes.

A meeting unlike any I’ve attended

This was a tiny event: only 30 people were invited. The organizer, The States Forum, wanted to bring together diverse voices to think through how states can address the health problems that federal gridlock is leaving on the table. We would focus on glyphosate and chemicals in food, chemical accidents like the East Palestine train derailment, and data centers — issues many Americans across political lines identify as important, but have been poorly handled at the federal level.

As I received more information about the meeting, I began questioning my decision to go. I wasn’t going to know anyone. What would I do if a shouting match broke out over whose facts were more credible? Imposter syndrome kicked in. But I resolved that my main role was to listen and to be an empathic human.

When I finally met Brinda in person at the reception, I told her how I was feeling. She reminded me to bring both my expertise and my curiosity — and that while I might not agree with everything, it was important to find common ground.

That evening and the next morning, I had brief one-on-one conversations with almost everyone — community activists, farmers, public health researchers, state lawmakers, tribal council representatives, and MAHA supporters. Unlike the spaces I typically inhabit, the people there were very committed to fixing problems in Ohio and in rural America. They all cared about toxic chemicals and held a range of perspectives on the government’s role in solving these problems.

Several realizations hit me as the meeting progressed. The MAHA-friendly crowd is not a monolith, even on issues like glyphosate use. I also watched confirmation bias unfold in real time: almost everyone used facts and science to support viewpoints they already held, and data rarely changed anyone’s mind. And when someone started talking about p-values to make a point, I realized how much the media has distilled complicated science down to a single statistic — and how little we, the scientific community, have done to show people how science actually works.

In the afternoon, one of the organizers asked the group who each of us would trust to make decisions about the issues we had talked about. Through that conversation, I saw that although most people have had negative experiences with experts or officials, they can still trust specific policymakers or scientists. People in the room weren’t ready to burn it all down, but they wanted more ways to hold the government accountable to regular people.

The bridges we must build

At the end of the day, most people want a chance to have their voices heard and be part of the process. Several folks from MAHA Ohio told me they’d been focusing their advocacy on stopping the dismantling of the Toxic Substances Control Act by Congress. I told them I’d been in Washington earlier that year speaking to decision-makers about the same thing

I won’t pretend that we came up with radical new policy solutions that will save the world. But I came out with new relationships, new ideas, and a renewed sense of energy — especially about what we’re building for the next Agents of Change cohort, and how we plan to embed fellows in locally-oriented ecosystems of doers and influencers. Showing impacted communities and decision-makers how scientists can be part of the solution will help rebuild trust in science and higher education.

The bigger takeaway was this: we’re not going to find answers by going to more academic conferences and talking to people who are trained like us. We must physically show up in new and different spaces. As scientists, we need to go to community meetings where local issues are being debated. Folks who feel safe to do so, should consider attending MAHA or other coalition events — if not to participate, at least to listen. We must take more risks and consider what collaborations with farmers, podcast hosts, and MAHA moms might look like.

We must build bridges, big and small.

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Roxbury and Beacon Hill sit a few miles apart in Boston. But a few miles can change everything: while the mostly white residents of Beacon Hill’s brick row houses live on a median household income of around $147,000, the mostly Black and Latino residents of Roxbury make roughly a third of that. Walk into their beauty supply stores, and you’ll spot the difference even on the hair care products on the shelves.

A new peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Epidemiology shows that in Boston, where you live — and specifically, the history of investment and disinvestment in your neighborhood — is a powerful predictor of whether you can easily find safer, low-hazard hair products nearby.

“The main finding from this paper was the fact that we saw differences in access to safer hair products when looking at areas that were historically redlined and gentrified,” says Dr. Marissa Chan, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and lead author of the paper. The research builds on her earlier work exploring how socioeconomic and racial disparities shape the personal care products available in Boston neighborhoods.

What are redlining and gentrification?

Decades of research show that neighborhood-level forces shape what goods and services are available to residents — from the supermarkets in your area (or the lack of them) to the green space nearby. In the United States, two of the most powerful forces shaping cities are redlining and gentrification.

Both, Dr. Chan explains, are resource allocation practices. That means they’re “decisions that were or continue to be made by both public and private entities in terms of what communities should or should not receive certain investments or resources.”

Redlining was a legalized form of structural racism in the 1930s, carried out by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). Neighborhoods predominantly made up of lower-income residents, communities of color, and immigrants received a grade of “D” — labelled “hazardous” on maps and shaded in red. Wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods got an “A.” As a consequence, redlined communities were cut off from access to lending, homeownership, and wealth-building for generations.

Redlining also impacted a neighborhood’s access to quality products. Things like quality grocery stores, pharmacies, and diverse retail were limited, and the legacy remains. Today, even when chains do open in previously redlined areas, their stores are dirtier, have fewer staff, and disorganized inventory. And, as Marissa’s research found, it also defines the products available on the shelves.

Gentrification is a more contemporary process. As Chan describes it, is when “typically higher income and predominantly younger folks move into lower income areas, and through reinvestment and rising housing prices, the original lower income communities may be displaced.” You might recognise it as the fancy coffee shop in the corner that used to be a bodega.

These two forces don’t operate in isolation. Some neighborhoods were redlined decades ago and are now gentrifying. Others have experienced what Chan calls “prolonged resource deprivation” — historically redlined and still not gentrified today.

And both forces are present in the results.

What the paper found

Chan and her colleagues visited 117 stores across all 24 Boston neighborhoods, cataloging nearly 40,000 hair products and rating their safety using the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, which scores products on a hazard scale from low (0–2) to high (7–10) based on the presence of chemicals like endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), formaldehyde, and other compounds of concern.

They found areas experiencing prolonged resource deprivation — historically redlined and not currently gentrifying — had significantly more high-hazard hair products on shelves and fewer low-hazard ones when compared to historically wealthy areas and gentrified ones.

The researchers also found differences in product safety across locations of the same pharmacy chain operating in different neighbourhoods — a pattern researchers call “retailer redlining,” where stores stock and market different products depending on the community they serve.

Some might ask: can’t people just buy products online? Chan pushes back on that.

“Even though there has been a large shift towards purchasing products online, research is really finding that around 60% of folks are still purchasing their products in stores.”

Moving toward solutions

Hair products are a documented source of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and Black women face disproportionate exposure because of higher use of leave-in products, hair oils, and relaxers that are more likely to contain EDCs, which have been linked to increased risk of adverse health outcomes, including reproductive impairment and cognitive issues in children.

For Chan, the deeper point of this work is about where we place responsibility.

“This really illustrates how we need to move upstream, away from individuals and consider how retailers, how other neighborhood-level characteristics, and even beyond that, how societal norms and policies may impact product use and health. And so when we start moving upstream, we have the potential to impact more populations at risk,” she explains.

She’s also clear that solutions have to be built with communities, not just for them. “It’s also critically important that we ask our community members and ask the folks that we work with at the community level what they view as important in terms of solutions.”

Dr. Chan’s research makes the case that unequal access to safer hair products is the result of decades of policy decisions. Fixing it will require just as deliberate decisions.

You can read Dr. Chan’s paper here: Clean beauty gentrification: The role of historic and contemporary resource allocation practices on hair product safety in Boston, MA

This work builds on her first paper exploring hair product safety across Boston neighborhoods: Evaluating neighborhood-level differences in hair product safety by EWG ratings among retailers in Boston, MA

Like them, there are millions in the U.S. living in limbo: priced out of the rental market, they’re forced to stay in extended-stay hotels.

“I think The Florida Project was a really good representation of the issue,” says April Ballard, an assistant professor at Georgia State University. “And interestingly, most of the research on this has been conducted in Florida and Georgia.”

April co-leads GSU’s Center on Health and Homelessness, and is deeply aware of this hidden crisis. Earlier this year, she co-wrote the release of a landmark report documenting exactly the kind of crisis Baker portrayed: more than 4,600 people in DeKalb County, including 1,635 children, living in extended-stay hotels and budget motels because the rental market has locked them out entirely.

A never-ending cycle

The people in this situation are working. In fact, her research found that

• Seventy-eight percent of households surveyed had at least one person with a job

• 24% had someone working multiple jobs.

Problem is, they don’t make enough money to clear the bar the rental market has set. But they aren’t considered experiencing homelessness by federal definitions because they live in hotels. “The cost of [a hotel] is eating up most of people’s income, and so they then get kind of stuck in this cycle,” she explains.

In fact, the average monthly hotel cost was $1,852, actually more than the average rent of $1,789 in DeKalb County.

But a hotel room doesn’t count as a lease. You can’t build credit there, and since their income is going to pay for shelter in a hotel, they can’t save for the $3,000 upfront cost of renting an apartment. And at the federal level, they aren’t even counted as homeless — which means housing authorities relying on federal funding can’t spend money on these families.

“If you were in your car or on the street, you would be eligible,” April said. “But do you really want to sacrifice your child’s well-being and subject them to that just so you could get services?”

As a result, people are stuck in a seemingly never-ending cycle: More than 16% of residents had lived in extended-stay hotels for over five years. Another 45% for one to five years. And yet, officially overlooked and unrecognized.

Behind closed doors

To conduct the study, April and her collaborators mobilized over 50 volunteers who knocked on 3,500 doors across 42 hotels over three months.

For some of those who opened their doors to April’s team, there was palpable relief at being asked at all. Others didn’t want to talk at all. “Sometimes, within the first 10 seconds, someone would start sharing their experiences of how they ended up there,” she told us. “To bear witness to people’s hardship is, I think, really special, and a really vulnerable thing for people to be willing to do.”

Inside those rooms, 33% of residents reported mold and half reported insects or rats — conditions that drive chronic stress, respiratory illness, and infectious disease risk. And yet, complaining about any of it is its own trap. April found that in DeKalb County, when inspectors have been called to a hotel and found violations, the costs of fixing them have been passed directly to the residents. “There is a real challenge of how do you hold hotels accountable, while also making sure that those costs aren’t passed on to the people who are living there,” she said.

For families already spending 80% of their income on a room, a rent hike to cover repairs could push them out entirely — and onto the street, the very outcome they’ve been working so hard to avoid.

But April also found something she didn’t expect.

Just like in The Florida Project, where Moonee develops deep friendships with her neighbors, “there is, like, real deep community in some of these hotels that people have formed,” she said. “The demand to be resilient, but also to build community, even when you’re dealing with such hardship, was really great to see.”

A way out

April and her team point toward exits. One concrete lever: the hotel-motel tax, which generates billions annually and flows almost entirely into tourism. “People who live in hotels are probably paying the majority of those taxes, and they get no benefits from them,” April said. She argues that redirecting a share of that revenue toward housing services would be both fair and feasible.

The report also identifies a more immediate fix: one-time deposit assistance could unlock permanent housing for hundreds of families right now. And while changing the federal HUD definition of homelessness is a long fight, April sees a real opening at the state and local level, especially as federal responsibilities continue to shift downward.

The Florida Project ends with a dream sequence (Spoiler alert!): Moonee running toward Magic Kingdom, as if imagination is the only escape the film can honestly offer. It’s beautiful and devastating in equal measure.

April’s report ends differently: with a spreadsheet, a tax code, and a deposit check. With the argument that a few targeted policy fixes could move hundreds of families out of hotel rooms and into stable housing.

Somehow, that feels more hopeful than the dream.

April Ballard is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University School of Public Health and co-leads the GSU Center on Health and Homelessness. She is a 2025 Agents of Change Fellow in Residence. You can read the full DeKalb County report here.

It’s the beginning of the year. You’ve probably made (or at least considered) a few professional resolutions. Submit that paper. Finish the analysis you’ve been avoiding. Write more. And maybe, quietly, in the back of your mind, get your ideas out of the lab and into the world.

If pitching your work to editors is on that list (or hovering somewhere near it), we wanted to help.

Last year, we sat down with three editors who spend a good chunk of their lives reading pitches from researchers:

• Amanda Mascarelli, Senior Health & Medicine Editor, The Conversation

• Lucy Odling-Smee, Senior Comment Editor, Nature

• Corinna Wu, Senior Editor for Opinions & Features, Undark

They were candid about what makes them pause, lean in, and hit reply—and just as clear about what doesn’t. What follows is a TL;DR version of that hour-long conversation. It isn’t a masterclass or a magic formula. But it will improve your odds the next time your pitch lands in an editor’s inbox.

1. Is the idea genuinely fresh?

Freshness isn’t about novelty for novelty’s sake. It’s about framing a topic in a way the editor hasn’t already read six times this week.

Lucy Odling-Smee said she’s looking for something she’s “really not thought about before,” even if the topic itself isn’t new. What gets rejected most often? Pitches that summarize a debate without offering a new angle, takeaway, or lens.

This is where your own lens matters. Not because it’s technical, but because it helps you see patterns, tensions, or implications others miss.

“I look for topics that are at the intersection of science and society. Ideas that are very much rooted in science, but also touch on how it impacts politics, economics, culture.”

— Corinna Wu, Undark

2. Why now?

Timing came up again and again—and not just in the obvious, breaking-news sense.

Editors are always asking why a reader should care this week or this month. That urgency might come from a policy decision, a conference, a new report, or a long-running issue that suddenly feels unavoidable.

So-called “second-day stories” are especially relevant for op-eds. They don’t react to the headline; they help readers make sense of it.

If you can’t answer why now in one or two sentences, the pitch isn’t ready yet.

3. Who is this for—and how wide is the appeal?

Audience mismatch is one of the fastest ways a pitch fails.

Unlike your research, which comes with a built-in audience (hello, peers!), an op-ed needs to earn attention. Your pitch needs to clearly signal why someone outside your bubble should care enough to read.

At Nature, editors want work that speaks beyond a niche. “We’d really want something that appeals to the entire scientific community,” Lucy said. “If something is a burning issue in one country or one field, it needs to be really clear what the take home lesson is for the much broader world,” she added.

At The Conversation, the filter is even sharper: “Why do everyday people care?”

“What is the universal message that someone who has no background or investment in this topic is going to care about?”

— Amanda Mascarelli, The Conversation

4. What do you bring that others can’t?

Editors aren’t just commissioning topics. They’re commissioning perspectives.

Editors emphasized that they’re interested in what the researcher sees that others don’t, especially when that perspective helps readers understand implications, trade-offs, or consequences.

One example stood out. After the White House updated medical guidance for pregnant people following studies suggesting an association between Tylenol and autism, a statistician reached out to Amanda. He also had a child with autism. His pitch focused on explaining the difference between association and causation.

For Amanda, it was an immediate yes:

“That’s the angle that’s going to add to this ongoing controversy in a way that enlightens, empowers people to understand the research better, and unpacks multiple studies.”

Are you enjoying this read? Tell us if you have any ideas about what content you’d like to see in your inbox!

5. Can you state your argument clearly—and briefly?

This is where many pitches fall apart.

Your idea can be brilliant *and* unreadable in a pitch. Many times, editors don’t reject pitches because the science is weak, but because the point is buried. Their logic is simple: if they have to work hard to find the argument, readers will too.

Lucy’s litmus test was blunt: “Being able to sum up the key argument in two sentences.”

“People tend to want to tell you how much they know rather than why I should care about this issue right now and why you’re the best person to tell me about it.”
— Lucy Odling-Smee, Nature

Long explanations don’t signal rigor. They signal uncertainty.

6. Is it evidence-based—and transparent about it?

At Undark, Corinna noted that pieces go through “a pretty thorough fact-checking process.” Claims need to be grounded, and sources need to be explicit.

At The Conversation, opinion isn’t even the point. Amanda explained that their pieces are “research-based explainers”—richly cited and grounded in the most up-to-date science, with a focus on clarity over persuasion.

7. A Team Sport

Once a pitch is accepted, the work has just started.

At The Conversation, scholars write pieces that are then edited by journalists who ensure the evidence is not only solid, but explained clearly for non-experts. The process can take weeks—or longer—and involves editing, fact-checking, and back-and-forth. Similar workflows exist at Undark and Nature.

Some writers are surprised by this. Most end up appreciating what Corinna called “the synergy and the collaboration.” Publishing for broad audiences is a team sport.

Data from across the country show that encampment removals have surged dramatically: Phoenix saw more than 3,000 sweeps last year, up from around 1,200 in 2019, and Las Vegas cleared roughly 2,500 camps. Even leaders of supposedly liberal states, like California’s Governor Gavin Newsom have encouraged cities to adopt ordinances restricting camping on public property, while cautioning that such rules must be paired with shelter and services to avoid harm.

This backdrop of intensified enforcement, punitive ordinances, and public controversy matters because it shapes how homelessness is talked about and addressed in policy, research, and everyday life. It raises urgent questions about not only where people experiencing homelessness can sleep or find resources, but whether dignity, autonomy, and human rights are part of the equation at all.

In the last essay of our “From the Vault” series, April Ballard traces how her own struggle for dignity as a queer woman in rural Kentucky became inseparable from her work on homelessness, particularly when it comes to rethinking public health approaches that position dignity and human rights at the center of research and outreach.

Subscribe to hear from emerging researchers whose overlooked perspectives are reshaping science — and reimagining solutions for a planet where everyone can thrive.

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Striving for dignity in homelessness research and outreach

I was stigmatized as a queer female in rural Kentucky. My personal quest for equal rights now informs my push for a revamped public health approach to homelessness.

By April Ballard

There is nothing quite like the beauty and comfort I find in my home state of Kentucky: from the state’s signature bluegrass and stunning Red River Gorge canyons to the “Bourbon Capital of the World” sign that signals I am nearly home when back for a visit.

These places represent my roots and growth, where I evolved into my authentic self.

I grew up on a farm among the rolling hills and world-renowned bourbon distilleries of the Kentucky Knob Region and couldn’t wait to move to the city (Lexington, Kentucky) after graduating high school. I spent eight pivotal years among the horse farms and bluegrass of Lexington, completing both my undergraduate and master’s degrees.

As I reflect on this pivotal period of my life, the steep terrain and unbridled horses remind me of the obstacles I overcame as a first generation female academic and the passion that fuels me (almost) every day. As I discovered more about my identity in those years, the intricate canyon system of Red River Gorge with its enormous rocks, sandstone cliffs, and waterfalls have come to exemplify my journey to uncovering and accepting my queerness. Each step and breath taken amongst the leaves and water representing new, exciting spaces that I am continually exploring and understanding within myself.

I would be lying if I said that I have always felt this way about Kentucky. My love is the kind that has evolved overtime, requiring me to move away and realize that the relationship status “it’s complicated” can apply to more than just a romantic partnership.

Unfortunately, as a queer female, this state and its people have not always been kind to me. I grew up in an environment that made me ashamed of who I was, an environment that refused to recognize me or my basic human rights.

From an early age, I was told being gay was wrong. I never saw same-sex couples. And queerness was spoken about in whispers with discomfort; people at barbecues gossiping about this person’s cousin’s best friend, or that neighbor who keeps to themselves.

I have struggled to feel dignified because of queer guilt and shame, because so many of my loved ones have and continue to erase my identity. They distill me down to just being “liberal.” They have never asked about my sexual identity, but love to ask where my friend is during family gatherings. They leave me with feelings of guilt for being the “problem” child.

Being in such an environment made me hide parts of myself. I tucked pieces of myself away, hiding them so well that even I forgot they are there. Then I spent my adulthood in search of dignity. I had to uncover my true self, to decipher between the parts I created to make the world happy and those that are truly me. Queer readers out there know exactly what I am talking about.

This essay is also available in Spanish. Una versión de este ensayo también está disponible en español.

My personal quest for dignity and equal rights connects me to those who often experience stigma and are stripped of their dignity. It shapes and drives my work as an environmental health scientist as I seek to address the environmental and social conditions that impact an individual’s ability to access water, sanitation, and hygiene while experiencing homelessness. Because of my struggles and experiences, I now actively and intentionally ground my work in dignity and human rights. Just as I have been afforded the opportunity to feel prideful in my queerness, people experiencing homelessness deserve to feel respected, valued, and seen regardless of their housing status.

Beyond the basics

Homelessness is an ongoing national crisis, affecting 2.3 to 3.5 million people in the United States (U.S.) each year. Economic conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic may leave hundreds of thousands more homeless: 85 million households struggled to pay for their usual household expenses in the past week and 14.3 million adults living in rental housing are not caught up on rent, according to data collected in December.

When discussing the struggles and needs of people experiencing homelessness (more on the importance of people-centered language can be found here), we often drift toward “the basics:” food, water, warmth, and clothing. And while it is true that these are essential to survival, this approach defines our needs as humans too narrowly and fails to include dignity. We fail to ask:

Where can people experiencing homelessness get drinking water?

What else do they need water for (personal hygiene, handwashing), and where can they get this water?

Is clothing alone enough, or do people need to bathe regularly and have clean clothing to meet their basic needs?

Where does sanitation (or bathrooms) come into this? Where do people experiencing homelessness urinate and defecate? Why do they use these places?

And what are the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of all of this?

Dignity for people experiencing homelessness in relation to water, sanitation, and hygiene is rarely discussed in the U.S. This is because national estimates indicate that U.S. citizens have near universal (>99 percent) access to basic water and sanitation, and because we rely on bathrooms and laundry facilities mostly inside our homes: a one-stop shop.

Like many of you reading this, I wake up every morning and walk across the hall to brush my teeth in my bathroom. I drink water from the faucet in my kitchen. I urinate and defecate using my indoor, private flush toilet and wash my hands in my bathroom. And I shower at night in that same bathroom before I go to bed. All of these movements are done without thinking, other than being burdened with expensive period products (the “tampon tax”) and procuring toilet paper (#thankscovid19).

This is not the reality for people experiencing homelessness.

Instead, those living in encampments in Fresno, California, walk a mile and a half to access the nearest drinking water fountains. They are forced to urinate and defecate in public because there are no public restrooms nearby and they are denied access to facilities in local businesses.

Women living in shelters and on the streets of New York City deal with an insufficient number of clean, functioning, safe, and private toilets and an inadequate stock of items such as toilet paper and period products. They also report a loss of dignity because they have to wash their bodies in bathrooms at places like McDonald’s. They experience stigma and feelings of shame because of the possibility of period blood leakage and odor resulting from inability to change and bathe as needed.

And these struggles extend beyond city limits, impacting the rising number of rural people experiencing homelessness though limited research has focused on homelessness in rural communities.

Whether in large metropolitan areas or the mountains of rural Appalachia, too often we fail to consider the circumstances that people experiencing homelessness deal with every day and how our research, programs, and policies may contribute to such circumstances. We assume that if we build facilities, they will come but, the result is ineffective approaches that contribute to diminished self-worth and self-esteem among people experiencing homelessness.

But there is a path forward. By using harm reduction approaches, grounded in justice and human rights, and centering those experiencing homelessness in our decision-making and policies, we can create humanistic and equitable approaches to address the water, sanitation, hygiene needs of people experiencing homelessness and related emotional, mental, and physical health outcomes that result from unmet needs. My early work in Appalachia helped me re-imagine what good public health work can look like.

Reflections from Appalachia

My journey in water, sanitation, and hygiene among those without stable housing began amid the mountains and hollows of Central Appalachia where the opioid epidemic has hit hard and there are scant social, economic, and healthcare resources.

After graduating from my master’s program, I began working as a research assistant in Appalachian Kentucky. While working on projects focused on substance use, I spoke with many people experiencing homelessness and later conducted a study to understand their experiences with water, sanitation, and hygiene; the first of its kind in rural America.

I was also charged with co-hosting community cookouts to engage with and recruit participants. People would stop by for free food and stay for quick banter.

It took some time for people to open up and overcome their skepticism. After all, I was handing out free food in random parking lots. But over time my relationships with people grew as did the depth of our conversations.

Eventually, I heard many stories from people experiencing homelessness and people who use drugs. I listened as people described their deep-seated need for worthiness and respect; I noticed their need for eye contact, for remembering their name, for just being treated like a human.

One woman’s words in particular stuck with me. She explained the impact that other people’s harmful words had on her, saying that once you hear something enough, you start believing it. “They look at you like you’re crazy or you wouldn’t be in the situation you are, but you don’t have to be crazy to be poor.”

It was through these stories and navigation of my own identity that I realized the importance of dignity. I realized the importance of listening to the people that I wanted to help.

Now, as an environmental health scientist and practitioner, I seek to develop public health strategies that reduce the harms associated with homelessness such as providing soap for handwashing to prevent the spread of coronavirus, or providing a sufficient number of period supplies to menstruators to care for their health and hygiene and prevent reproductive tract infections and period stigma. I strive to place dignity at the center of what I do by asking people questions like “what do you want?” and “how do you want it?”

Reimagining public health approaches to homelessness

I have integrated these principles into my own work now in Atlanta, Georgia, a city with the highest income inequality in all of the U.S. and a growing homeless population.

During the pandemic, I have been handing out hygiene supplies, period products, and contraceptives to people experiencing homelessness with my colleagues, what we call “Dignity Packs.” Products provided allow people to meet their needs, prevent the transmission of coronavirus, and promote sexual and reproductive health. Our research team collects feedback via interviews, and we adjust contents and our approach week-to-week based on guidance from people experiencing homelessness. This approach allows those experiencing homelessness to dictate what products are available to them and how they receive it.

Direct feedback allowed us to veer away from traditional hygiene kits that are standardized and pre-packed. Instead, we set up a table where local organizations are providing food. We let people select the items they want (humanism) to meet their acute needs (pragmatism), like grabbing a few bars of soap to wash their hands and body. We let anyone (human rights) take any item with no requirements, no questions asked (autonomy).

We are proud of our efforts, but across the U.S. there is still so much work to do. Shelters and privately owned businesses overwhelmingly struggle to support the water, sanitation, and hygiene needs of those experiencing homelessness; both failing to meet critical human needs due to conditions that inadvertently perpetuate stigma.

Shelters are necessary and often well-meaning, however, limited capacity and scant resources allocated to them lead to conditions such as broken and dirty toilets, inadequate stocking of bathroom necessities, and lack of privacy that make those trying to access services feel demeaned and devalued. Requirements to access resources and facilities, such as “a desire to stay clean” and to “actively be working to end homelessness,” publicize and perpetuate stereotypes. And businesses screening those who ask to use the bathroom and denying access to those deemed unacceptable contribute to the extreme marginalization that those without homes experience.

As public health professionals and researchers, it is our job to both do and demand better.

We need to demand government support and funding to secure water, sanitation, and hygiene access for people experiencing homelessness. We need to broaden existing approaches to reduce the burden shelters and privately owned businesses face. And we need to reimagine our strategies; we need to focus on dignity.

This means using pragmatic approaches – seeking to reduce harm (infectious disease) as people continue to experience homelessness, recognizing that the elimination of homelessness may not be attainable or desirable.

This means employing humanism – leveraging approaches that value the respect, worth, and dignity of people experiencing homelessness. People should be met where they are and stigmatizing language and policies should not be used.

This means allowing for autonomy – respecting the decisions made by people, even if those decisions may cause harm to themselves. Preconditions should not be required to receive services and behaviors should not be prevented (drug use) as they may take away the person’s autonomy and cause distress.

This means protecting human rights – providing equitable, non-judgmental, and evidence-based services with no conditions. No person should be excluded because of their homeless status, drug use, sexual orientation, or race.

My quest for dignity that began within the borders of the Bluegrass state - the rolling hills of the Bluegrass Region, the cliffs in Red River Gorge, and the Appalachian Mountains - have helped to shape me as a public health professional and reimagine what dignity-centered public health work looks like. By leveraging harm reduction principles (pragmatism, humanism, autonomy, and human rights) and placing people experiencing homelessness at the helm of decision-making, we can create equitable and effective public health interventions that empower the people we are trying to help.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship, and was originally published in Environmental Health News. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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The paper documents what the program has meant, how it has functioned, and why programs like this matter, especially in spaces where their value is often overlooked. It’s the first time Agents of Change has been formally examined through an academic lens. And, fittingly, the paper is less about metrics alone and more about meaning.

🔗 Read the paper in Environmental Justice, here1.

Why turn Agents of Change into a paper?

For Yoshira Ornelas Van Horne, PhD, AOC’s assistant director and a former fellow herself, the motivation for writing the paper was twofold. One reason was about record-keeping and documenting, as she put it, “the magnitude of the importance of the program.”

The paper positions Agents of Change as something that doesn’t fit neatly into existing institutional boxes. It’s not a research training grant. It’s not a traditional education program. Instead, it sits at the intersection of areas that are often treated as peripheral, even when they are essential.

The second reason was outward-facing. “If other people, other groups, other institutions are looking to build a program,” Yoshi said, the team wanted to make sure that “they would have information on what all goes into creating and sustaining a program like Agents of Change.”

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What the paper found

Drawing on five years of internal data—including anonymous fellow evaluations, cohort demographics, program outputs, and comparisons with similar fellowships—the paper documents both reach and depth.

Among its findings:

• Agents of Change supported 56 fellows across multiple cohorts, producing podcasts, essays, and public scholarship viewed by wide audiences.

• Fellows consistently described the program as meaningful for both professional and personal growth.

• The program intentionally centered fellows from historically excluded backgrounds in environmental science and policy.

• The program trains researchers in skills vital to their work but rarely included in formal training: science communication, translating complex research for diverse audiences, and building networks of support.

• Sustaining AOC requires significant, often invisible labor. Staffing, mentorship, logistics, and emotional work: all of these are necessary to keep the program running.

As Yoshi put it:

“I think a lot of the times with some of these programs, people are like, oh, like, it’s so easy… and then when you’re actually doing it, you’re like, ‘actually, this is a lot of work’.”

Looking back, personally

For Yoshi, writing the paper was also a moment of reflection. She joined Agents of Change fresh out of her PhD as a fellow and later joined the leadership team. Now, she’s an assistant professor at UCLA.

What stood out most wasn’t just what skills she gained during the program, but what it made possible overall:

Why this matters now

As we move into a new year, the paper serves as both a record and a reminder: programs like Agents of Change don’t just teach skills. They create platforms, relationships, and futures that many institutions still struggle to value.

“It sits in this very important, but undervalued space.”

That struggle exists in a broader context that weighs heavily on emerging scholars today. In the United States, scientific research and academic freedom have come under sustained pressure from policy decisions that have included deep funding cuts, freezes on federal research grants, and other actions critics say threaten the foundation of academic science. In an open letter this year, nearly 2,000 of the nation’s top researchers described what they called a “wholesale assault on U.S. science,” warning that these actions have undermined research independence and threatened the stability of the scientific enterprise.

These pressures — including disruptions to funding pipelines, administrative uncertainty, and the chilling effect of politicized oversight — can make long-term planning harder for early-career academics and deter people from pursuing research paths.

In an era when academic freedom and scientific funding face political headwinds, nurturing spaces that bolster the capacity and resilience of young scholars become even more vital. Looking back, then, doesn’t mean standing still. It means grounding what comes next in what we already know works: community, connection, and long-term investment in people.

Thank you for being part of this community, and for helping build what comes next.

For years, researchers and frontline communities have said it: the harms they experience don’t come one at a time. From Cancer Alley to Colorado, pollution, unsafe housing, unemployment, lack of health care, climate-driven disasters stack, compound and collide. Yet, until now, there wasn’t a comprehensive framework to evaluate cumulative environmental harm.

A new National Academies consensus report changes that. Commissioned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, State of the Science and the Future of Cumulative Impact Assessment lays out the most comprehensive roadmap to date for how governments, researchers, and communities can finally assess environmental and social burdens the way communities actually experience them: everywhere all at once.

Our assistant director, Dr. Yoshira Ornelas Van Horne, was one of the report’s committee members. She says the goal wasn’t to reinvent cumulative impacts — a concept that’s been around for decades — but to create consensus around what it means, synthesize the sprawling science, and translate it into guidance that’s actually usable.

What Makes a Consensus Report Different?

Many research syntheses are narrow or purely quantitative. This was not that. Ornelas Van Horne explains that consensus reports bring together experts across disciplines to agree on definitions, methods, and recommendations.

“The beauty of the consensus report is that there’s so many scientific and professional voices that are represented, and also communities: we had a community liaison group, and an Indigenous liaison group that were part of the process. We leaned heavily on them for their expertise”, she said.

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The report was the result of years of work between around 100 environmental scientists, sociologists, economists, epidemiologists, exposure scientists, community-engaged scholars, and community leaders, including Indigenous peoples across the U.S. they held in-person and virtual community visits in Colorado and Louisiana.

That diversity matters. As she pointed out, even basic terms like “stressor” mean different things in different fields: it may be an air pollutant in environmental health, a the cause of a cortisol spike in psychology, or a policy barrier in sociology.

“At the end of the day, everybody valued their expertise and put forward in the report and recommendations that we make,” she added.

Why Context Matters: From Cancer Alley to Colorado

The report pushes to broaden its understanding of what shapes health. Stressors can be environmental, political, economic, historical, or cultural. They operate at multiple scales—from global dynamics to the block where someone grows up. And they may be rooted in the past but still driving harm today.

Case studies in the report—including Cancer Alley, the East Palestine derailment, and Los Angeles wildfires—show how a cumulative approach changes decisions. For example, wildfire assessments in LA traditionally focus on immediate air pollution and property loss. But digging into what happened next, something else came up: the cumulative impacts were also influenced by the ability of different neighborhoods to recover based on access to resources, healthcare, and social support. Communities with fewer resources face deeper long-term harm—even from the same event.

“I started to recognize that there is a role for factors that would improve lives, or resilience factors, that should be included as part of the methodology,” Ornelas Van Horne said.

In Colorado, Indigenous leaders emphasized how historic trauma, forced relocation, and federal definitions of Indigenous identity still shape who can access services today. Those structural stressors, she noted, deeply influence health and must be part of any meaningful assessment.

When you only consider what’s easiest to quantify, you miss the realities communities are actually living, she said.

So Why Should the Public Care?

Ornelas Van Horne knows most people won’t read this 140-page report. But its ripple effects will touch their lives.

Zoning decisions. Industrial permits. Chemical safety rules. Infrastructure investments. Climate adaptation plans. All of these processes affect the health of communities, and cumulative impacts should be part of every one of them, she said.

If implemented, this framework could reshape environmental decision-making in the U.S.—moving us toward a system that not only measures harm, but actually reduces it.

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Behind every “deal of the year” lies the packaging that cushions our deliveries, the synthetic fibers woven into gift sweaters, the gadgets built from petrochemical parts, the bubble mailers piling up at our doors. By January, much of this seasonal abundance becomes waste.

During the holidays, we participate in the acceleration of a global microplastic pipeline. And yet, the burden of that pipeline is not shared equally. It accumulates in the neighborhoods least equipped to bear it, in communities with the least access to safe infrastructure, and in places like Camden, New Jersey, where this week’s essay begins.

Before there were shopping carts and tracking numbers, there were seedlings. In a greenhouse on top of a school building, a group of students reached into a bag of soil and discovered microplastics with their own hands—tiny fragments that revealed a much bigger story about environmental health, structural neglect, and the limits of consumer-based “solutions.”

In a season defined by consumption, this week’s From the Vault essay asks us to look more closely at what our purchases leave behind—and to reimagine a giving ethic rooted not in buying, but in collective care, accountability, and healing.

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Putting communities at the heart of plastic pollution initiatives

From the production of plastics to their fates as waste or microplastics in the environment, marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by them.

By Timnit Kefela

It was planting day. In prior weeks, our students voted on the vegetables they wanted to grow and began preparing for that day.

We left the seeds to germinate in old egg cartons filled with soil and created colorful popsicle stick labels as we waited for the seedlings to grow enough to take root in their new homes in an old greenhouse at the top of the school building in Camden, New Jersey. As Denise, my co-instructor, and I tore open the plastic bags of soil and poured them into the planters, our students squealed with joy as they picked up the soil and let it pass through their fingers.

“Doesn’t it feel super nice?” I asked, to which one of our students replied, “Yeah! I did not know this is what soil felt like!”

I still think about that moment a decade later – almost feeling the gut punch I felt back then when I heard those words. At the time, I was co-leading our urban gardening afterschool program, trying to mend my own fragmented relationship with the environment. Like my students, I lived in cities for the bulk of my life. My physical environment was something I rarely reached out to touch and feel, because as long as I could remember, I was told it can make me sick. In fact, it had made me sick multiple times, from the water that flowed out of our faucets to the air I breathed.

To read a version of this story in Spanish click here. Haz clic aquí para leer esta columna de opinión en español.

This reflection later became the reason I wanted to become an environmental scientist. I wanted agency over problems that affected my community, my students and myself. I wanted to develop solutions that housed our joyful moments beyond the walls of our homes. Denise, our students and I sought to develop our urban gardening project for that very reason. Camden has been subjected to food apartheid for decades with limited access to nutritionally dense foods across the city, which we all felt and wanted to challenge. However, as we tended to the soil to plant our seedlings into, we often found small pieces of plastic, which sparked my curiosity. How did they find their way there and what did their presence mean for environmental health?

Microplastics are a gigantic problem, representing harms for all forms of life, including humans. Yet most solutions have been consumer-centric, leaving regulatory entities and producers off the hook. To truly chart a just future without plastic pollution, we need to consider equal access to public services and facilities, regulation and accountability of plastic production and waste management, and, most importantly, use the voices of those most impacted as a guiding design for solutions.

The not-so-micro issue of microplastics

While in graduate school, I learned that the small pieces of plastic we found in our soil are named microplastics and were hardly a new phenomenon. Study after study emerged about them in our ocean, rivers, soils, air, andus—they are everywhere. They are in the buildings that house us, the vehicles that move us, the clothes we wear, the packaging that carries the food we eat, the devices that connect us with our digital worlds, just to list a few. Since plastic’s mass commercialization in the 1950s, we have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of it, with 6.3 billion becoming waste and 79% accumulating in landfills and the environment.

Researching the omnipresence of microplastics also brought a sobering reality: these contaminants can harm us in myriad ways. Microplastics have been linked to higher incidences of cardiac events, infertility and neurodegenerative diseases in humans, although we’re just starting to understand why.

Because of their small size, microplastics can carry different contaminants they encounter. They are also chemical contaminants themselves, as plastics are sourced from fossil fuels, and have different chemicals added to them to make them moldable or ensure they do not break down easily. These added chemicals can account for up to 50% of their total weight. Some of them are known endocrine-disrupting chemicals like phthalates and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals.” Endocrine-disrupting chemicals mimic the hormones in our bodies, interrupting their ability to do their jobs. Hormones are crucial to coordinating our bodily functions from growth to metabolism. Microplastics can also act as physical contaminants, accumulating in the digestive systems of animals that mistake them for food, causing intestinal blockages, which result in their early deaths.

Learning all of this felt damning because plastic waste has been a big part of my life’s backdrop. I grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and as long as I can remember, plastics floated on the Nairobi River, plastic bags would float in the air with wind gusts, plastic bottles framed the roadways and, in a pinch, an old juice bottle would work great as a soccer ball. I’d never considered this pollution as out of place and harmful.

A reusable water bottle will not save us

From the production of plastics to their fates in the environment, marginalized communities are most impacted. Petrochemical industries, which manufacture the building blocks of plastic, are disproportionately located near Black and Brown communities. Lower income areas within cities are more likely to face higher exposure to microplastic pollution, largely due to the density of less effective waste management systems, the omnipresence of plastic infrastructure in our built environment and reliance on plastic product use due to the distrust of the physical infrastructure that delivers environmental goods, like potable water.

When thinking about how to mitigate the harm from microplastics, I found that proposed solutions were always at the discretion of the plastic consumer, rarely the producer or regulatory entities, with messaging like using a reusable water bottle, eating less processed food or buying clothing with natural fibers. But a lot of reusable alternatives or solutions are suitable for people who can afford them and trust the delivery of public goods.

They leave out the disabled community, for example, who are last considered when designing reusable alternatives for things like metal straws and reusable water bottles. Pre-packaged foods encased in non-plastic packaging usually come with a price tag that’s inaccessible for many who live with disabilities, as their cost of living is typically higher than non-disabled communities. Even when creating systemic approaches like production caps for non-essential plastics, we should center the needs of disabled people to have a fraction of plastic available without stigma, until substitutions are designed with their needs in mind.

More so, we need to recognize that fully divesting from plastic use in our daily lives is a privilege that requires trusting the physical infrastructure around us, which many marginalized communities cannot do. In cities, with vast amounts of pavements and roads, plastic deposits on their surfaces can be carried away through stormwater runoff into water systems, polluting the water of nearby communities. Rivers, lakes and canals in urban areas typically receive higher loads of microplastics due to stormwater runoff, wastewater effluent and sewer discharges. A reusable water bottle will not save us if we cannot trust the water coming from our taps.

Maintaining consumer-centric “solutions” places the brunt of plastic pollution on the backs of communities who are never considered in their design of these solutions in the first place. This consumer-centric approach also ignores the fact that all communities deserve environments to thrive in, not only interventions that allow their survival.

We need a collective action toward a plastics-free world

The scope of plastic pollution is so large, we need producers and regulatory entities to get involved. Utilities such as waste management and potable water distribution should play a significant role in reducing and managing plastic waste, especially with projected plastic production tripling by 2060.

Producers should consider plastics’ burden of harm, specifically considering the entire life cycle and transformation of a product once it leaves the supply chain. Regulatory bodies and governments should hold them accountable by limiting the externalized harm that plastics bring with them.

A global plastic treaty organized by the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) recently failed due to certain nations that heavily benefit from fossil fuels, including the U.S. Scientists who attended the most recent rounds of treaty talks note that science-backed evidence remains ignored, heavy industry fossil fuel and chemical industry lobbying took center stage and voices of the marginalized communities most impacted were hardly a whisper.

Addressing plastic pollution requires more than a scientist who feels things too deeply and is eager to find answers. It requires medical professionals to identify the contributions of microplastic pollution in human health, epidemiologists to find patterns of illness and design public health interventions, engineers to develop accessible and justice-centered infrastructure, regulatory bodies to hold industry accountable. Most importantly, it needs to center the needs and impact of the communities facing the brunt of the plastic life cycle and its impacts.

Black feminist scholar bell hooks said, “healing is an act of communion.” Microplastic pollution and its impact is no exception. Only through a collective effort, driven by empathy, justice and a commitment to healing, can we hope to create a world where if we chose, we could freely run our fingers through running water, take deep prayerful breaths and touch soil every single day.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship, and was originally published in Environmental Health News. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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You might not know this, but today’s World Toilet Day, which is meant to draw attention to the fact that 3.4 billion people still live without access to safe toilets. The world sanitation crisis is an often forgotten issue impacting the poorest people, especially women and girls.

To mark this day, we’re returning to one of the most striking essays from our archive — a piece that begins on the streets of downtown Atlanta, where hundreds of people gather each weekend to share food, clothing, and care. What they can’t share, as our fellow April Ballard witnessed firsthand, is the one resource everyone needs to survive with dignity: a clean, safe place to use the bathroom.

In this From the Vault essay, Ballard exposes a reality that rarely makes headlines but shapes daily life for millions of people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. Long before the pandemic closed libraries, restaurants, and public buildings, restroom access was already shrinking — replaced by “no public restroom” signs, locked doors, and policies that criminalize the simple act of relieving oneself.

As we mark the day, we revisit Ballard’s call to see sanitation as a human right — one that no one should lose because they don’t have a house key.

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World Toilet Day: Housing status should not determine access to clean, safe bathrooms

Bathrooms, when sufficient, provide us the space to care for ourselves and have dignity. We need to extend this right to people experiencing homelessness in US cities.

By April Ballard

ATLANTA—It is a typical Saturday morning in downtown Atlanta. On one block, I see about a hundred people sitting on a wall and staircase across from Hurt Park, eating meals provided by community members and organizers; perhaps the only meal many will eat that day.

I walk a block up the street to find a hundred or so more people lined up on the sidewalks surrounding Woodruff Park where food, clothing, toiletries, and other essential items are given out to those who need it. People have come from all over the city to the well-known area where speakers are set up playing a mix of music and voices speaking about Black Lives Matter; Saturdays being a demonstration of Atlantan’s community and care for each other. The streets and community have responded to the increasing number of people experiencing homelessness and the heartbreak of the pandemic with persistence, love, compassion, and collaboration.

Scattered amongst the busy-ness of individuals serving and receiving resources are businesses in the heart of Georgia State University’s campus, some of which have not survived the pandemic. Of those that remain, access to the one thing that community members cannot handout is denied: clean and safe toilets.

I look at the sidewalk and note a pile of human feces 50 feet from the sole public restroom in the area. I walk the perimeter of the park and see “no public restroom” signs in almost every window. A colleague enters various businesses for a bathroom break and finds that access is even restricted for paying customers.

This essay is part of “Agents of Change” — see the full series

It becomes clear that hundreds of people are left to openly urinate and defecate or use one single-user public restroom on the corner of Woodruff Park, an automatic public facility that opens the stall door after a certain amount of time has passed. As I walk by the restroom, the smell of urine and feces spills out onto the street despite the facilities’ closed door, likely due to uncleanliness from the sheer volume of users, far exceeding the United Nations recommendation of no more than 50 users per toilet in an emergency setting, and 20 users per toilet post-emergency.

This is the reality for the millions of individuals who experience homelessness each year in the U.S. Increases in restrictions to restrooms and policies policing homelessness generally have converged to limit access to bathrooms well before the pandemic in 2020, evidenced by the multistate Hepatitis A outbreak that began in 2016 largely among people experiencing homelessness. Hepatitis A is commonly transmitted through accidental consumption of small amounts of feces, which is more likely to occur when a person must defecate in non-bathroom settings and is unable to wash their hands. Inadequate bathroom access has been exacerbated during the pandemic as restaurants, libraries, public government buildings, and shelters have closed or changed operating policies, all amidst an increase in evictions and in the number of people experiencing homelessness.

Today, on World Toilet Day, I call us to reflect on this escalating public health crisis in the U.S. as lack of sanitation adversely impacts health, and sanitation is a human right that every person deserves no matter their housing status.

Toilet access in the US

Lack of toilet and bathroom access is dehumanizing. Bathrooms are where we care for and perform some of our most intimate needs and behaviors. Obviously, we defecate and urinate. We also manage menstruation and other biological needs. We wash our hands, maybe change our clothes, and check our appearance, helping us prevent disease and gain confidence and self-esteem. We have privacy to just take a breath and be by ourselves, adding to our emotional and mental well-being and our feelings of safety and security. Bathrooms, when sufficient, provide us the space to care for ourselves and have dignity, to feel human.

In urban areas throughout the U.S., close to a million people experiencing homelessness are without access to even the most basic sanitation services. It is estimated that at least 630,000 people experiencing homelessness do not have sustained access to a flush toilet in urban areas, and at least 300,000 others rely on shared bathrooms, a concern because use of shared facilities increases the risk of diarrhea, enteric infections, and other health outcomes. During the current pandemic, shared facilities are a major concern as they can become sources of both airborne and contact exposures to SARS-CoV-2. Conversely, for many people experiencing homelessness, an inadequate shared facility may be the only option aside from the great outdoors.

The sheer existence of shared facilities is not sufficient. We must also consider:

• The number of people experiencing homelessness using each facility;

• Hours and days of operation, including seasonal access;

• Location and distribution of facilities;

• Cleanliness of facilities and available resources inside;

• Access requirements (e.g., does an individual need a key, identification, or entrance to a facility like a government building);

• The policing and other related context surrounding facilities.

Pre-pandemic (2017), prior to any public space shutdowns, the ratio of bathrooms to people experiencing homelessness was insufficient in major cities across the country. Cities with the largest numbers of people experiencing homelessness (New York City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., among others) failed to meet either of the United Nations recommendations regarding bathroom-to-people ratios in emergency and non-emergency settings. The ratio of bathrooms to people was most egregious in New York City, with one toilet for every 105 people experiencing homelessness; and in Los Angeles, with one per every 126 people.

Menstruators experiencing homelessness have additional needs including bathroom access for changing and disposing of period products, self-cleaning, and changing clothes to maintain dignity and prevent conditions like urinary tract and yeast infections. A recent study in New York City found that public toilets did not meet the menstrual health needs of women experiencing homelessness in terms of accessibility, cleanliness, privacy, and resources. The vast majority of audited public toilets were not open overnight and sometimes access included hidden costs or location-specific permission (e.g., public bathrooms inside the subway require payment, public museum bathrooms require attendant permission).

Additionally, higher quality public toilets that offered menstrual resources were more prevalent in higher income and higher rent areas, and less common in areas with higher proportions of Latinx residents, lower educational attainment, and people living in poverty.

In addition, public urination and defecation has been criminalized across the country. Such ordinances make public urination and defecation a citable offense, resulting in fines ranging from $50 to $2,000. In some cities, fines are required to increase for repeat public urination and defecation, and in many cities prosecutors are allowed to pursue incarceration ranging from one day to six months. Unpaid fines can also result in incarceration, all because an individual simply performs a bodily function they cannot control in the only location available to them.

Data, funding, and decreased stigma

World Toilet Day is about celebrating toilets and acknowledging that 3.6 billion people live without access to adequate sanitation globally. It is about achieving the United Nations goal of water and sanitation for all by 2030. However, people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. are not even included in this estimate.

Currently, data on sanitation from the U.S. that are reported to the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund Joint Monitoring Programme do not include people experiencing homelessness. The U.S. does not collect such information, nor do they include those experiencing homelessness in estimates per (justifiable) speculation that those without stable housing struggle to access any sort of bathrooms.

In the absence of data and support at a national level, public health researchers, practitioners and advocates are left on their own with limited funds to identify solutions. We have identified the need for female-friendly toilets that should be strategically located near those experiencing homelessness, toilets that are clean, feel safe, are easy and free to access, and have needed supplies and features to promote dignity including soap, water, mirrors, and disposal bins in stalls for menstrual products. We have identified that we can no longer rely solely on businesses and the limited number of public toilets to provide what those experiencing homelessness need. We have identified the need to expand beyond relying on shelters as more and more individuals are living completely unsheltered.

We will need national support. We will need data. We will need money. We will need prioritization of this issue.

In the meantime, we need decreased stigma and acknowledgement that housing status shouldn’t determine your bathroom access. We need removal of ‘no public restroom’ policies and ordinances that punish individuals for performing a bodily function the only way they can given the (un)available resources.

We also need you! Join me in raising awareness of this issue today on World Toilet Day. Have an X, BlueSky or Instagram account? Snap a picture of the ‘no public restroom’ signs in your neighborhood or a public toilet near you. Feel free to provide any relevant context in your tweet or Instagram post and use the hashtag #WorldToiletDay and #ToiletsforPEH. And feel free to tag @April_M_Ballard (X) or the Dignity Pack Project (@DignityPack on X or Instagram).

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship, and was originally published in Environmental Health News. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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To mark this new wave of housing-centered leadership, we bring you Mỹ Dzung Chu’s essay from our archives. Writing from her experience as a PhD student and community organizer in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Chu, who’s an Agents of Change Fellow in Residence, explores how housing insecurity is not only an economic issue, but a public health crisis.

Like all pieces in our From the Vault series, its message feels as urgent now as when it was first published: a clear-eyed call to see housing as a human right. As Chu writes, the fight for housing justice is about more than keeping people in their homes. It’s about ensuring that everyone, regardless of income or background, has the right to live and breathe safely where they belong.

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Why housing security is key to environmental justice

Housing is crucial for good health, but it’s not just what’s inside the home that matters.

By Mỹ Dzung Chu

Since 2018, I can often be found at our local community center—listening, learning, sharing, and strategizing around the table with community members on ways to push the city for more affordable housing and prevent the displacement of neighborhood residents.

We are members of Dorchester Not for Sale (@DotNot4Sale), a grass-roots alliance of more than 100 residents organizing for a community vision that protects residents most at risk of displacement; prioritizes affordable housing, good jobs, and community safety for current residents; and preserves ethnic-specific services that make our community of Dorchester, Massachusetts, home.

I am passionate about housing security because it determines where we can afford to live and the quality of housing we can live in— all of which affects our health, the health of our communities, and of future generations.

As an environmental health PhD student studying housing and health, and as a renter in Dorchester, I joined DotNot4Sale. I wanted to better understand if and how my research mattered on the ground, and in my own neighborhood. I wanted my home to not just be an address but a community, and through DotNot4Sale, I found it.

After attending several community dinners hosted by DotNot4Sale, I learned that the diverse fabric of our community was threatened by massive incoming developments.

The city plans to rezone an 86-acre area for residential and commercial development, called PLAN: Glover’s Corner. Rents for the proposed housing developments, most of which will be luxury condos, will be unaffordable to most Dorchester residents.

Dorchester is also a neighborhood of families and multigenerational households. Yet most proposed developments are studios, compact units, or one-bedrooms—too small to accommodate existing residents.

Seeing these proposals flood our neighborhoods, we ask: Who is the city building for?

This essay is also available in Spanish

The housing crisis and threats of displacement affect not only Dorchester but neighborhoods across Boston and in many parts of the U.S.—as previously discussed in a prior Agents of Change essay.

According to the recent national housing report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies,

• More than 550,000 Americans were homeless in 2018.

• More than 805,000 renters were threatened with evictions in 2017.

• From 2010 to 2017, about one-third of the country, or 37.8 million households, paid more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs like rent and utilities.

And guess what? These hardships continue to disproportionately affect minority, Black, Brown, and immigrant households at a higher rate than White households.

Throughout the country, access to affordable housing is under threat. There is a severe shortage of affordable housing supply that is driven by compounding factors, such as increases in real estate speculation, construction and land costs; stagnant federal funding for affordable housing programs; loss of existing affordable housing stock; and slower production of new housing since the 2008 recession—all of this coupled with sluggish wage growth in the past few decades.

Also, let’s not forget about the U.S. history of redlining, predatory lending practices, and refusal of federal housing loans to millions of Black, Asian, Hispanic, Jewish, and immigrant families. These racist policies, many of which were instituted by the federal government, robbed Black and Brown families of the opportunity to own a home, decide where they want to live, and create intergenerational wealth.

Following redlining were government urban renewal programs that targeted communities of color, designating them as “slums” and “blighted” to justify new housing and construction projects. In turn, these programs led to the mass displacement of thousands of Black and Brown families.

Simply put: Black and Brown families were forced to live in undesirable areas. Years later and still today, especially as land becomes scarce, families are now being forced out of their homes for capitalist interests. This is what DotNot4Sale organizes against.

Inequality and evictions

The impacts of institutional racism prevail today in Boston, where the median net worth of Black households is $8 compared to $247,500 for White households.

Dorchester, one of Boston’s neighborhoods that experienced redlining, is home to a diverse and working class community with the highest number of immigrants and non-English speaking households in the city. About two-thirds of residents are renters, and the average income for workers is $41,000 a year. The increase in large-scale and luxury housing developments throughout the city and the speculation of development have driven up housing prices and living costs. As of right now, the average rent in Dorchester is $2,894 per month—or $34,728 a year.

Residents are feeling the harm.

One DotNot4Sale member shared with me (translated from Vietnamese):

Many residents have already left. Since 2011, the number of eviction cases filed to the Boston Housing Court was approximately 5,200 per year, or 14 cases per day. While alarming, we know this number is likely underestimated. Many families that are displaced don’t make it to housing court out of fear of retaliation from their landlord and/or lack of legal support.

“I get sick a lot”

In areas of high housing demand, several community residents have shared that landlords have ignored making housing repairs in order to drive tenants out more quickly and resell or re-lease the property for a higher profit.

As one DotNot4Sale member shared with me (translated from Vietnamese):

Imagine you are a single parent of two children, making $40,000 a year and paying $1,600 a month, or almost 50% of your income a year, for a one-bedroom. With the surge of luxury condos in your neighborhood, there are few places that you could afford in decent enough condition for your children.

You worry about making ends meet in the short-term, like paying for groceries, daycare, utilities, and bus passes.

Your apartment is owned by a slum lord who has not repaired the holes in the walls, the broken windows, nor addressed the mold and pest issues that were there when you moved in. Money-strapped and not able to take time off work, you cannot make these repairs on your own.

You are afraid to ask your landlord to fix these issues for fear they may increase the rent or kick you out and find other tenants.

These unaffordable and unsafe living conditions are causing you stress and taking a toll on yours and your children’s mental and physical health- their ability to focus in school, your ability to sleep.

You and your children live in constant fear of having to move again.

Now take a deep breath.

While this may be an exercise for you, millions of Americans are in this situation right now.

What has been done?

Currently, there are three main forms of governmental housing assistance in the U.S.: public housing, income-restricted units, and Section 8 housing vouchers. All are for low-income tenants and require a home inspection, but they vary in the type of housing, who manages them, and levels of income eligibility. Public housing is government-owned, while income-restricted units are privately-owned and rent is subsidized by the government. The Section 8 voucher program leaves it up to tenants to find their own housing that accepts vouchers.

These programs are not enough. Some even fail to adequately protect residents. In 2017, only 37 percent of the 11 million extremely low-income renters received housing assistance. The average national wait time to get a Section 8 voucher is two years. Many landlords also discriminate against renters with vouchers.

Even with vouchers, renters are facing evictions. For example, in Boston, we still see many eviction cases involving tenants on housing assistance.

As a country, we need a progressive affordable housing agenda and comprehensive policies and programs in both public and private sectors to make a dent in the housing crisis.

In recent years, nonprofit, philanthropic and religious organizations, and hospitals have stepped up. Some case examples include:

• Community land trusts (CLT) like the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative that have been a tool for permanent affordability, equity generation through homeownership, and community-centered decision-making. As of 2018, there are more than 225 CLTs across the country.

• A $3 million Innovative Stable Housing Initiative from three Boston-area hospitals to fund policy and systems-level housing security approaches, community-centered advocacy, and cross-neighborhood organizing.

• Donation of church lands in New York City to build 2,000 affordable units in the next 10 years.

Going beyond physical hazards

It is time for the environmental health community to also step up and be at the forefront of addressing housing insecurity.

Traditional environmental health research and funding priorities have focused on making our buildings more energy efficient and/or specific physical or chemical hazards, such as air pollution, lead, pesticides, and mold.

While this research has led to major public health improvements—such as more stringent housing codes, a ban on lead-based paint, integrated pest management, and lowering energy costs—it can fall short of addressing the root causes of why low-income and communities of color continue to face homelessness, higher housing-cost burden, and poor housing conditions.

If we focus on just the physical and chemical hazards of the indoor environment, how can we adequately address and prevent the root causes of health problems associated with housing insecurity?

I believe that housing is a human right. My experience in the community has pushed me to expand my definition of environmental health and contextualize my research in the existing affordable housing crisis. It has shown me that housing insecurity is a core environmental public health issue.

Housing insecurity increases a household’s risk of living in unsafe and unhealthy conditions, their risk of being displaced, which in turn perpetuates the cycle of housing insecurity. Households experiencing evictions report worse self-reported health, higher stress levels, depression, and material hardship. They also have a greater risk of suicide. For children, evictions and having to move frequently can lead to poor mental and physical health, disrupted schooling, and a lower earning potential in future jobs.

Knowing this, I cannot turn a blind eye to the urgency of the affordable housing crisis in my own community and across the country. I cannot turn a blind eye to my neighbors who are being evicted and/or moving away because they cannot afford rent.

The role of researchers and practitioners

As environmental health researchers and practitioners, we have the responsibility to continually ask: Are we addressing the root causes of poor health?

We need to incorporate housing security in our environmental health research, funding, curriculum, and community outreach initiatives. If we don’t, we will miss key opportunities to address the health of millions of households currently burdened by unaffordable housing and homelessness. We will miss important pathways for equitable and long-term public health interventions.

So, what can we do? Some initial steps we could take:

• Lead public health research that fills the evidence gap about the impacts of affordable housing policies and programs on environmental exposure, health, and economic well-being at the household and community level. For example, important but unanswered questions include: how do gentrification and housing insecurity impact indoor environmental quality? How many pediatric hospitalizations or deaths can be prevented by investing in long-term housing solutions such as community land trusts or rent control? These data can be very useful for housing policy and programmatic decisions.

• Dedicate funding towards housing insecurity research and community engagement. Currently, priorities of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and in particular their 2018-2023 strategic plan, omit the role of housing and housing insecurity on health.

• Revamp our environmental health curriculum to better address environmental justice and the role of housing security on health. Our curriculum can benefit from more collaborations with other disciplines like urban planning, sociology, and public policy that also look at housing but may focus less on health. We need to also further engage with community partners to better understand housing challenges that they face and ways they are working to address them.

• Collaborate with community, clinical, business, and government partners to identify solutions for permanent housing affordability and for tenant support to keep and maintain their homes. Support the capacity of local nonprofit organizations and community development corporations through funding and/or technical assistance. Solidify these relationships at the institutional level so that they can sustain beyond funding cycles and/or staffing turnovers.

It’s an uphill battle that won’t be fixed overnight. But already in my almost two years with DotNot4Sale, I’ve seen the power of community residents challenging the status quo about what’s possible for our neighborhoods.

I fight with DotNot4Sale as a resident who cares about her community and its people.

I fight as an environmental health researcher and a public health advocate who believes that safe and secure housing access is a key determinant of health.

Today, I urge you to support the many housing assistance measures at the federal and state levels to ensure that tenants, homeowners, and homeless individuals can access safe housing and afford to stay in their homes during this pandemic, including:

• Emergency rental, mortgage, and eviction prevention assistance

• A national moratorium on evictions and foreclosures

• Emergency funding for homelessness service providers, housing authorities, and housing providers

• Expanding unemployment insurance, food, and fuel assistance

• Expanding paid sick leave, paid emergency leave, and health care access

National and state updates about housing assistance resources and policies can be found at Citizens’ Housing & Planning Association, National Low Income Housing Coalition, and the Health Housing Guarantee initiative.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship, and was originally published in Environmental Health News. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

We want this newsletter to feel like a community. Feel free to message us with ideas about what content you’d like to see in your inbox.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada, one of our fellows in residence, is among a new generation of researchers trying to change that. Her groundbreaking work connecting climate, incarceration, and health, made her one of this year’s Grist’s 50 Fixers —an annual list of leaders who are working on innovative solutions to our planet’s biggest challenges.

To celebrate Ufuoma’s accomplishment, we bring you the essay she wrote back earlier this year about her work. Like all of the essays in our “From the vault” series, her writing is as timely as when it was first published.

Abolition, she writes, is not about tearing down alone — it’s about building up: creating systems of care, safety, and belonging where everyone has the right to breathe freely.

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Toxic prisons teach us that environmental justice needs abolition

Prisons, jails and detention centers are placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat are the norm.

May 29, 2020, should have been a pride-filled day as I, a Black daughter of immigrants, would confer a master’s degree from MIT.

Instead, I grieved as I watched news coverage of the murder of George Floyd four days prior by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. For nine minutes and 29 seconds, Chauvin kneeled on the back of Floyd’s neck, as Floyd uttered “I can’t breathe” multiple times until his final breath. The phrase, “I can’t breathe,” was also said by Eric Garner, Manuel Ellis, and Elijah McClain under duress before being killed by police. Awareness of police violence was not new to me – years earlier, a loved one had been wrongfully tackled and jailed – but that day, something shifted in me.

Initially, this shift was limited to questioning the role of police on my campus and in cities in general. Like many of my peers, I began to embrace a stance that called not for police reform, but police abolition. We considered that given the history of policing in this country, which was developed to preserve the racial hierarchy of the slavery and Jim Crow eras, a solution to stop police violence was to reduce reliance on police by investing in public social infrastructure such as affordable housing and mental healthcare that could address root causes of crime. But proponents of abolition philosophy felt we could go even further: not only could we end police, but we could close prisons and build new justice systems and institutions rooted in care and restorative processes. I know for many, this is a shocking and extreme stance. When I first heard about it, I certainly had my doubts about whether our society could really operate without prisons. After all, I had grown up with the usual conceptions that prisons make us safer and they are ‘necessary’, ‘rehabilitative’, spaces for people who do crimes.

But then I learned about a pattern of prisons, jails and detention centers being placed in locations where environmental hazards such as toxic landfills, floods and extreme heat was the norm, threatening the health and well-being of incarcerated people and staff – a reality that counters any prospect of true rehabilitation in these spaces. I also spoke with dozens of formerly incarcerated people who explained that the physical and mental suffering they endured in prisons from both environmental and social factors left them in much worse shape than before their sentences.

It became clearer to me how, as researchers Ki’Amber Thompson, Erik Kojola and David Pellow have described, “I can’t breathe” reflects both a cry against physical police violence, but also state-sanctioned environmental injustice that limits and shortens breath in prisons and other carceral facilities. If we think about environmental justice as everyone’s right to exist in safe and healthy places, prisons in the U.S. are a direct threat to that vision and it becomes clearer why we need prison abolition alongside police abolition. After understanding the problem, we can start to imagine alternatives that keep us safe and bring us toward a world where we can all breathe.

Environmental injustice in prisons

I devoted my doctoral research at MIT to studying environmental injustice in prisons across a variety of hazards.

One prevalent hazard I studied was air pollution. Incarcerated populations may be exposed to numerous sources of air pollution, as many prisons are close to industrial activity, toxic waste facilities and places where wildfires are common. When I interviewed formerly incarcerated people about their experiences of environmental hazards, one woman who had been in prison in Pekin, Illinois, described what it was like to live in a place where at least 15 facilities in the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory pollute the air, water and land with chemicals. “We were right across the street, literally, right across the street from a power plant that was just belching this sulfurous smelling stuff. I don’t know what it was. And I know that I have asthma. And that was really aggravated there,” she said. “There were times when we just couldn’t go outside … because it wasn’t just the smell you’d breathe in—it was like your lungs would … hurt.”

This type of exposure is not pure coincidence. In certain regions facing economic hardship, land formerly used in agriculture, mining or industrial operations that have left behind legacies of air, soil and water pollution have been repurposed for prisons under the faulty premise that the prison will bring new jobs and prosperity. As I write this, Congressman Hal Rogers is championing a $500 million dollar effort to build two new Federal prisons in Letcher County, Kentucky, on a contaminated former coal mine, despite declining rates of crime and significant community opposition.

Carceral facilities are also exposed to extreme heat. On average from 2020 to 2023, prisons across the U.S. experienced air temperatures of 94°F at least 10 days of the summer. Prisons are particularly vulnerable to heat exposure due to their aging infrastructure. The majority of prisons in the U.S. were built before 2000, with some built as early as the 1800s. As a result, they often have absent or outdated cooling, heating, and ventilation systems. Several people I’ve interviewed described laying on the cell floor in pools of water from the toilet to stay cool in hot facilities without air conditioning. Climate change is only making matters worse as 70% of prisons are experiencing worse temperature extremes than before. Further, the lack of universal policies in state or federal prisons for responding to climate hazards, such as hurricanes and wildfires, makes it hard to protect those who live in them. As one interviewee remarked about a wildfire event that occurred while they were incarcerated, “the only thing that we [heard] was that in case the fire did get close, we weren’t gonna go nowhere, we were gonna be in our cells…maybe the staff was going to be let out to go home… but we in our minds knew they weren’t going to try and ship us or transport us to a different location to protect us.”

As a consequence of exposure to environmental hazards, people in prisons, jails, and detention centers can develop respiratory and cardiovascular diseases that can, quite literally, affect their ability to breathe, and even lead to premature death. The fact that environmental injustice is widespread in carceral facilities reveals that the suffocation of marginalized bodies in the U.S. behind bars is in many cases by design, not an accidental byproduct. This highlights the need for a strategy that can address such an intentionally neglectful and deadly system.

Toward a world where we can breathe

At this point, one might argue that reforms such as repairs to prison infrastructure might solve the problem. However, many formerly incarcerated have witnessed first-hand money received for building repairs that were never completed. Formerly incarcerated people also highlight the ways that ‘upgrades’ such as air conditioning that are seemingly positive can create new forms of environmental injustice in prisons. As one person I spoke to in my research explained, “I know [it] happens in Santa Fe a lot where they use air conditioning to punish people by sticking them in solitary confinement where it’s really cold cells… People actually died in those conditions.” In another case, someone recounted experiences of trying to get escorted to ‘respite’, an air-conditioned room that people are supposed to be able to access 24/7 when they feel too hot, but being denied by guards who wanted people to suffer in the boiling hot prison cells. Beyond environmental hazards, the dozens of formerly incarcerated people that I’ve interviewed also make clear that prisons in the U.S. are also toxic due to the ways that they deprive people of resources and agency, subject people to poor healthcare, and force people into low and no-wage labor.

These realities showcase why appealing to the state to address environmental injustice in prisons through piecemeal reforms such as installing air conditioning is not a foolproof solution and delays the attainment of a world where everyone, especially those at the margins, can breathe and be free from all forms of environmental violence.

What, then, can we do? As I dug deeper into this issue, I came across the work of sociologist Ki’Amber Thompson, who introduced the concept of ‘abolitionist environmental justice’. Thompson describes it as a push to replace our justice system’s logic of punishment, retribution and extraction with policies and practices that affirm the value and dignity of all human and nonhuman lives. She asserts that these kinds of practices can help us move “toward a world where we can all breathe” as a result of liberation from police, prisons, and pollution. Abolitionist environmental justice directly responds to the idea that the current prison system in the U.S. is incompatible with the vision of environmental justice as “the right to live, work, play, pray, and do time” in safe and healthy places.

Enacting an abolitionist environmental justice may sound idealistic, but it’s already happening across the country. For example, the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons (FTP) is an advocacy group that connects grassroots organizers to work for the equity and safety of incarcerated people by conducting campaigns urging prison officials to prepare in advance of disasters, and working to prevent the construction of new toxic prisons that would negatively impact incarcerated populations or destroy important ecosystems. FTP also supports campaigns like #Our444million which champion the idea that communities should get to spend money on real, sustainable economic development instead of job creation based on mass incarceration.

Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) is another example of a coalition working to decarcerate, close prisons and shift spending toward healthy community investments such as workforce development, affordable housing and drug treatment programs as strategies to reduce crime. CURB takes into account environmental risk factors, prison operating costs and other factors related to prisoner’s well-being, to select prisons to prioritize for closure.

The idea of increasing investment in social infrastructure to support crime prevention is agreeable enough, but people may struggle to think about how our society will deal with violent crime that occurs in the absence of prisons. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore addresses this question with the following quote:

This means that closing and divesting from prisons must be paired with investment in restorative and transformative community infrastructure that can address a variety of conflicts and harm that arises. There are numerous examples of activists experimenting with ways to practice accountability for people who do harm in a way that preserves the dignity of both the harm-doer and the victim. This includes community service that relates to the type of harm done, facilitated dialogue between victims and offenders and family conferencing where people impacted by the harm brainstorm the resources they need and how it can be repaired. These types of practices could be particularly useful given that a significant amount of crime occurs amidst existing relationships; nearly a third of homicide victims are killed by people they know and most sexual abuse victims know their perpetrator. Part of a practice of transformative justice can also include removing unrepentant or repeated harm-doers from spaces where they have access or power to do harm. Still, in these cases, people should not be dehumanized by placing them in toxic environments where they will not actually rehabilitate into holistically better people.

While prison and police abolition may seem like a challenging and unwieldy endeavor, it’s one we must take seriously and work toward as the only way to prevent outcomes of suffocation whether at the hands of police or through toxic prisons. Environmental justice needs abolition so that we can move toward a world where we can all breathe.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship, and was originally published in Environmental Health News. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

We want this newsletter to feel like a community. Feel free to message us with ideas about what content you’d like to see in your inbox.

So today, we’re presenting our second entry in our “From the vault” series, in which we’re sharing our Fellows in Residence previous essays – most are as timely as when they were first published.

Today, to commemorate Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we’re sharing Kevin Patterson’s essay. Through memories of childhood sheep-herding in the Arizona desert, reflects on how losing access to water, heightened drought, and changing landscapes aren’t just ecological or logistical issues—they threaten the continuity of Diné identity, language, and culture.

Patterson’s essay weaves together the personal, historical, and political—reminding us that protecting land and water doesn’t just sustain ecosystems, but is central to protecting Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and the future of communities often pushed to the margins.

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Protecting Indigenous children means protecting water

We need to stop compartmentalizing the environment, family and culture as separate problems.

By Kevin P. Patterson

At the break of dawn, in the dry and sweltering Arizona summer heat, my masáni, mom, aunts and many cousins round up our grandmother’s herd of sheep.

Even at sunrise, the parched soils release stored heat into our rubber-soled shoes. We’d herd the animals from their corrals in the canyon to our summer camp on Lukachukai Mountain. We’d stop at various steel troughs connected to well water that we’d hand pump full along the way. Under the midday sun, this water was a refuge for the animals and us, as we’d drink and often play in the water. During these herding journeys, I’d learn stories of the land and the interconnectedness between all living things. I was introduced to fundamental tenets of K’é [kinship] and Diné Bizaad [language] to understand myself as Diné and my relation to the land I walked on. Thus, sheep herding was in no way secular – it became a way of being embedded in cultural practice.

In returning to these sites as an adult, I learned that many pumps have dried up. Those still providing water could be unregulated sources of elevated contamination. With growing concerns about more extended drought periods and its associated costs, my family auctioned off the last of their flock this past year – an increasingly common decision shared across the reservation, as many Diné families face similar circumstances of finding and securing water at longer distances. The gradual loss of these once-everyday practices made me appreciate even more the cultural teachings that came with them. I’ve seen how beginning as early as my generation, many Diné youth have limited experiences with our culture and language. Water scarcity, exacerbated by climate change, is creating a present and a future in which our children are on track to only hear of sheep herds as a memory. There is a cultural cost to climate change.

Sustaining our Diné identity through our youth is critical, and is a call shared across all Indigenous groups. However, the forces that have tried to exterminate us and our cultures have pulled from different directions. On one hand, Indigenous children have been forcibly removed from their communities –and their cultures – through assimilation policies. The neglect of the federal government toward tribes, especially regarding water access and basic infrastructure, has created living conditions in Native households that ultimately help to justify the removal of our children. This fractures our communities even further and weakens our sovereignty, opening Native land, resources and our children to non-Native interests. With this in mind, to ensure the continuation of our culture and our communities, we need to understand the intricate relationships between culture, language and nature, and promote policies that ensure our children can access a safe, healthy and thriving environment.

Cultural harm through laws

U.S. Native nations face an existential threat in retaining our cultural identities and sovereignty since we became nations within a nation. This long-standing genocidal project dates back centuries and has adversely impacted generations. Many of our families are still reconciling its impact through our grandparents’ generation, who were among the last to endure U.S.-sanctioned Indian boarding schools managed by Christian missionaries. Beginning in 1819, the federal government enacted the Indian Civilization Act to assimilate Indigenous children by forced removal and placement into boarding schools operated by churches until the 1960s. By 1900, an estimated 20,000 Indigenous children were taken, and by 1925 just under 70,000 were recorded. On May 11, 2022, the U.S. Department of Interior released its Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, which confirmed the experiences and testimonies of survivors decades prior. More than 500 Indigenous child deaths were identified across 408 Indian boarding schools. This sobering announcement came a year after investigators from Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, discovered more than 600 unmarked graves at a single Indian residential school.

This essay is also available in Spanish

Concurrently, tribes were being relegated to reservations that average to the present-day size of 2.6% of our historical lands. Inside these limited areas, the federal government failed to build infrastructure, such as access to clean drinking water, creating the current situation where it’s estimated that nearly half of the households on reservations do not have clean drinking water or adequate water sanitation. This past and present reality further compounded the narrative that Native children were better off in ‘civilized’ and well-resourced societies.

So it comes as no surprise that even after the closing of Indian boarding schools, thanks to the upheaval from tribes, our children were still being removed from their families and placed into foster care and non-Native adoptive homes. Indigenous children were “overrepresented in foster care at a rate of 2.7 times greater than their proportion in the general population,” found the National Indian Child Welfare Association. This prompted tribal-directed activism that led to the congressional enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978. ICWA ensures to “protect the best interest of Indian children and to promote the stability and security of Indian tribes and families.”

In spite of the recent Supreme Court ruling in favor of ICWA, cases like Brackeen v. Haaland, actualize the existential threat to our sovereignty by threatening to undo protections like ICWA. The court case, supported by Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Oklahoma and Ohio, claimed that the successful adoption of a Cherokee/Navajo (Diné) child by a white couple was hindered (a total of four months) by the ICWA process. In November 2022, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that challenged ICWA, asserting that its “classification of ‘Indian child’ is race-based and violates the Equal Protection Clause.” As a Diné trainee in environmental health, I work with census and cohort data that categorizes my community and other tribal citizens alike into a conflated singular racial group that neutralizes our politically distinct identities. I’m frustrated and disappointed that centuries of precedence that affirm our political status as sovereign tribal citizens can be discarded, effaced and ultimately overturned.

Although it might seem unrelated, the current fate of water affairs for U.S. tribal nations is intimately tied to this Supreme Court case. Not a week later, the Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation in a water rights dispute. In building on my colleague’s assessment of Arizona v. Navajo Nation, the common thread to both cases lie in their interpretation of federal responsibility to tribes, tribal citizens and resources on tribal lands. Federal ‘fiduciary’ responsibility can be concerned with the welfare of a Native child, but not with the welfare of their environment. It’s a curated paradox. They can return our children to us, but they return them to unchanged conditions and environmental contamination that may have contributed to their initial removal. Addressing water injustice on Native lands, like the U.S. government’s failure to ensure reservations have access to clean drinking water, relies on understanding water justice as tribal sovereignty. A vision that can be endorsed by non-Native researchers, scientists and everyday professionals. Our holistic welfare requires upholding all facets of tribal sovereignty that concern our children, our water and ultimately, our nation-to-nation standing.

Tribal independence and self-determination are key to saving our culture and environment

Since the first recorded treaty on a Gaswendah (Two-Row) wampum belt between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and Dutch traders in 1642, nearly 400 treaties have been signed between tribes and the United States. Under the Constitution, these treaties are legally binding contracts that are “the supreme law of the land,” confirming special rights, benefits and conditions for tribes who ‘agreed’ to cede millions of acres of land to the U.S. in exchange for federal protection, recognition, services and reserved, but limited, property rights. Yet the government has failed to comply with these treaties, leading to broken promises.

An example of these broken promises is the water crisis endured by many tribes in the Southwest and Western regions of the U.S., which only until recently saw significant investment and recognition after a decades-long struggle to establish adequate water infrastructure in our communities. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes a $2.5 billion investment toward the Indian Water Rights Settlement Completion Fund that seeks to “deliver long-promised water resources to Tribes.” Still, in recent cases concerning proposed oil pipeline construction over or near existing community water systems that predominantly serve tribal communities, federal officials fail to recognize and uphold their responsibilities to tribal governments.

Protecting our children means protecting our water

Considering all of this – the potential undoing of ICWA and the lack of water infrastructure and its impacts on water quality – we need to stop compartmentalizing the environment, family and culture as separate problems. My childhood experiences between my masáni’s canyon and her summer camp in the mountains have helped me frame environmental justice to encompass non-traditional environmental health issues, such as language and culture, as interconnected features of the environment, because these teachings come paired with cultural practices like sheep herding that rely on adequate water infrastructure. Our communities demand justice and accountability.

Our children come from powerful and resilient families that span generations of ancestral knowledge. Recent developments in federal services with Biden’s administration are not enough if our children are continuing to be removed at rates higher than any other community. We come from survivors of genocide. Now, we demand environments for us, our grandparents and our children to thrive.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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We were sitting in a darkened room when these words came out of the TV where Chef’s Table was playing. It was our program’s fourth retreat in Philadelphia, but this time, things were different. Even if these meetings have always felt like a breath of fresh air, this year, as public health researchers weather one of the worst storms the field has seen in the history of the U.S., being together felt urgent.

So when we were planning this year’s gathering, we felt we needed to commemorate the first five years of Agents of Change, and celebrate the fact that we were still here, sitting next to each other in communion. We planned a trip to Kalaya, a restaurant in South Philadelphia created by Chef Nok Suntaranon at age 50 and considered one of the best in the United States. In 2023, Nok won the James Beard award for Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic.

To hype ourselves up before our meal there, we watched Nok’s episode of Netflix’s Chef’s Table. We were hoping to meet her – we tagged her in a group photo we shared the next morning, but nothing happened (not that we were expecting it).

Looking back, it’s easy to see why parts of her story resonated so much with us.

Nok grew up in a low-income household in Yan Ta Khao, Thailand, and her work is deeply rooted in the scents and flavors of her mother’s curry paste market stall. Like her, many of our fellows feel their life’s work is an homage to their memories.

From Kentucky’s bourbon distilleries to Boston’s working-class Dorchester neighborhood, a garden in a school in New Jersey and a group of moms, cousins and aunts rounding up a herd of goats in Navajo nation, our fellows’ trajectories are deeply shaped by their history. Like Nok, who feels indebted to her mom and now wants to take care of her, our fellows feel a strong sense of responsibility towards the communities they work with.

Boldness, warmth, and care are at the center of Kalaya’s food. And they’re at the center of our program, too.

Early in our meal, our hopes to meet Nok were shattered: staff told us she was at Harvard giving a talk. We felt sad, but still enjoyed every single dish.

Nok wants to show the world the value and beauty of Thai food, which many Americans view only as cheap takeout.

Our fellows, too, wish to humanize those deemed as disposable by society: unhoused people, incarcerated individuals, Indigenous peoples. Like Nok, our fellows fight to shine a light on their value and beauty.

Nok says in her Chef’s Table episode that she knew defying expectations would be challenging. “But I want to seize the moment,” she adds. So in 2019, she opened Kalaya – a Thai word to honor her mother that means “beautiful woman.”

Once our meal ended, we ordered cars to go back to our retreat center, which is right outside of Philly. As some of us were making our way back, we received a photo we thought it would be impossible to take. Here it is:

Not all of us were there, but we all felt joy.

Towards the end of her Chef’s Table episode, Nok says:

Our night at her restaurant was a reminder that we too have stories that will be with us forever – connecting us with where we came from, the steps we’ve taken and the futures we want to build.

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You might have seen the news: BigTech’s data centers powering Artifical Intelligence (AI) are taking over vast amounts of land and using precious quantities of water all over the world. In April, an investigation published in The Guardian revealed that most of these massive data centers were sprouting in some of the world’s driest areas – including the Southwest US.

“The question of water is going to become crucial,” told The Guardian Lorena Jaume-Palasí, founder of the Ethical Tech Society. “Resilience from a resource perspective is going to be very difficult for those communities.”

One of those data centers is Project Blue, a $3.6-billion-dollar data center that would have taken over 290-acres in Pima County, near Tucson, Az.

Communities advocating to protect their water future opposed the project. The effort was led by the Watershed Management Group, where our fellow in residence, Valerisa Joe-Gaddy, works as the community conservation director (Don’t miss our next newsletter, where we’ll dig into Val’s role in the fight against the data center). Hundreds flooded informational meetings, carrying signs and advocating to protect the city’s fragile water supply.

Their community efforts worked: in early August, the city’s Council, with the Mayor’s support, voted to end the negotiations to annex the property to the developers, effectively blocking water access to the project.

The fight might not be over – the developer, Beale Infrastructure, signed an energy supply agreement with Tucson Electric Power and insists the data center will happen – but it did highlight what Valerissa Joe-Gaddy wrote back in 2022, when she first joined Agents of Change: water access in Arizona is a life-or-death matter. And no community understands this better than the Navajo/ Diné, which she is a part of.

It’s hard to miss the throughline between Navajo/ Diné's fight for water access and what’s happening with data centers now. As Val puts it:

Water governance is riddled with injustices and needs to re-prioritize people before greed.

Below, we bring you her essay for Agents of Change, which was originally published in 2023, but is as timely as ever.

Water injustice on display in the Southwest US

While this quote from former Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater is dated, one thing holds true: water in the West is still the source of heartaches. One stark example: In 2022, Arizona experienced the worst drought conditions in more than 1,000 years, which dried up reservoirs, exposed regulatory loopholes and further exposed environmental injustice.

As a Diné water quality scientist who grew up on the Navajo Nation, which spans Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, the topic of Arizona drought is often discussed in my professional and private life. The beginning of 2023 was the 20th year of continued litigation in which the Navajo Nation is trying to obtain rights to the Colorado River in Arizona v Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation has never had the infrastructure or support to have reliable access to clean water. In fact, our tribe has as many as 60,000 members who do not have access to running water. In March 2023, the Navajos took their water rights case to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued to have the U.S. determine the Navajos water needs and rights.

However, on June 22, 2023 the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that the U.S. owes no “affirmative duty” to the Navajo Nation to secure water, reversing a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The majority ruled that the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo established no federal obligation to do so.

What does this mean for the Navajo tribe?

The federal government has decided that while the Navajo Nation does have water rights, established by Winters Doctrine, it will not help the Nation assert those rights. While this decision comes as a disappointment to many, the signing of Senate Bill 1432 by Gov. Katie Hobbs, to force the City of Scottsdale to provide water to the Rio Verde Foothills Residents has been the salt in the wound.

This essay is also available in Spanish at EHN.org

The case of Rio Verde Foothills Residents v City of Scottsdale has made international news. Due to a mega drought, in 2021 the city of Scottsdale, Arizona, decided they could no longer provide water for the neighboring community. Beginning January 1, 2023, the residents of Rio Verde Foothills no longer received delivered water from Scottsdale. Over the previous year and a half, Scottsdale had notified Rio Verde Foothills residents that they would need water from another source, but the residents did not heed the warning and now are struggling to find a long-term water solution. The signature of Gov. Hobbs only magnifies the environmental injustices that exist in Arizona.

I cannot help but draw comparisons between my tribe’s situation and that of Rio Verde Foothills. The media quickly amplified the Rio Verde situation, though there are many other communities of color in worse water conditions. Water issues on the Navajo Nation, for example, have been present since colonization.

In the U.S., if you are Black or Latino you are twice as likely to be without clean water compared to white citizens. American Indians and Alaska Natives are 19 times more likely to be without clean water than their white counterparts; but these numbers pale in comparison to the lack of access we endure as Diné peoples. Being Diné increases the likelihood of not having access to clean water by 67 times more than any other American. As the mega-drought worsens, I realize our future in the desert is marred by questions: Will Arizona recover? Will my child’s generation be climate refugees? If Diné people have it this hard now, what will the future be like? The only comfort is that Diné people continue to grow and thrive amid historical trauma, broken treaties and continued health, education and economic disparities, including the lack of safe, clean, reliable water.

Yet, the swift attention the Rio Verde Foothills community are receiving despite putting themselves in this situation by choosing to live in a desert — unlike the forced relocation of the Diné people — demonstrates that water is life, but access will never be equal.

Choice of location vs. forced relocation

The Rio Verde Foothills is an unincorporated community, meaning it is not within the boundaries of Scottsdale, the city that many residents are suing. Being unincorporated, the residents pay less taxes, since services like sewer, water and trash are not provided by the city. Instead, many of the homes in Rio Verde Foothills, with an average home price between $760,000 to $875,000, are equipped with storage tanks not connected to any water mainlines, sewers or wells; relying on water trucks from Scottsdale to fill them, on average, once a month. Many residents say contractors misinformed them but fail to acknowledge the obvious risks of buying a home in the desert during a drought. The residents also argue that they’re entitled to water service through the city’s municipal water plant under Arizona’s laws. However, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled that the statute did not apply to this community because the Rio Verde Foothills residents have not shown that they are unable to access water at all.

This plight comes in stark contrast to what my tribe has endured for centuries. Diné people have lived in conditions far worse and a lot longer than residents in Rio Verde Foothills. From 1863 to 1868, the U.S. government ordered the U.S. Army to forcibly remove the Diné people from their original homeland called Dinétah, which was within the four sacred mountains of present-day Mount Hesperus and Blanca Peak in Colorado; Mount Taylor in New Mexico and San Francisco Peaks, in Arizona. The Army forced both the Diné people and Mescalero Apaches to walk more than 300 miles to Fort Sumner near Bosque Redondo in New Mexico, which came to be called The Long Walk. It is estimated that one-third of the Diné people captured and imprisoned at Fort Sumner died. Following the unsuccessful attempt of assimilation, the Diné people agreed to return to their original homeland and cease fighting with the U.S. government, now known as the Treaty of 1868. In the treaty, the government promises land including rivers. Following the treaty of 1868, the 1908 Supreme Court ruling of Winters v United States, established that tribes have a reserved right to water sufficient to fulfill the purposes of their reservation, including the residential, economic development and governmental needs of the tribe. In spite of the historical documentation between tribes and the U.S. government, more than 30% of Diné people on the Navajo Nation live without access to clean water.

Prioritizing people over greed

Unlike the Rio Verde Foothills residents, the Navajo Nation seems to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Generations of injustices have oppressed the tribe. Navajos suffer disproportionately high rates of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, mental-illness, suicide, domestic violence and alcohol addiction. The residents of Rio Verde Foothills do not face the day-to-day challenges that the Diné people do, yet it is their story, and others similar to theirs, that become the face of U.S. droughts.

In Arizona, there are 22 federally recognized tribes, with seven of them located on the Colorado River. Not one was brought into the discussion during the 1922 Colorado River Compact Act, which is the foundation of all litigation surrounding the Colorado River, which divides the Colorado River between states. Tribal nations in the West have long been ostracized in water policy discussion. Yet, there are signs of change: the Gila River Indian community litigated and won extensive water rights to the Colorado River, and their insistence on looking at the whole picture instead of narrow view helped Arizona establish its drought contingency plan.

The trauma that the Diné people have faced has been filtered down through many generations. In my own experience, the lack of access to clean water on the Navajo Nation impacted the health of many of my family members and shaped who I have become today, an academic activist. Seeing the disparities that my tribe faces and the slow process of courts — compared to the drumbeat of potential solutions offered to the Rio Verde Foothills — only increases my passion for water research.

Water governance is riddled with injustices and needs to re-prioritize people before greed.

Disclaimer: This essay was written by Dr. Valerisa Joe-Gaddy in her own capacity. The opinions expressed are her own and do not reflect the views of the Water Resources Research Center and the University of Arizona.

This essay was produced through the Agents of Change fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

Many of you don’t know this, but this program wouldn’t exist if it weren't for the beaches of Costa Rica.

Back in 2019, our founder, Dr. Ami Zota, had packed her life away to live for a year in Costa Rica, while on sabbatical. Years before, when she became an assistant professor at George Washington University, she began asking why she was one of the only women of color scientists in environmental health speaking with the media. The question inspired her to create a fellowship to train young researchers from underrepresented backgrounds in environmental health fields. After getting a pilot grant for the idea, she met with Brian Bienkowski, senior editor at Environmental Health News, who was excited to partner on this project and encouraged Ami to think bigger and to ground the project in storytelling.

And then, in the Fall of 2019, the first cohort launched.

Being in a beautiful place with fewer work distractions and the ability to dive deep into one effort was definitely key to the success, as was the amazing group of fellows who were very open and willing to be part of this creative, exploratory effort.

In the past five years, we’ve accomplished a lot. Some examples of that:

• We have trained 57 fellows from 30 U.S. cities who have a wide range of disciplinary expertise.

• We have published 62 essays that have reached 1.7 million readers (with around 200,000 reading our Spanish translations.)

• Our podcast — where we dive into the career paths and big ideas from fellows and other leaders in the field — has reached more than 80,000 listeners annually on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and SoundCloud.

If you want to learn more, check out our Impact Report!

Now, after five years of training the next generation of impactful environmental health researchers, we decided it was time to deepen our work and reinvest in our existing community.

Why now?

Last year, we were reflecting on our accomplishments and strategizing about new ways to build on them. Then came unprecedented changes in the fields of public health, environmental protection and climate science.

Funding cuts are drying up career paths, fracturing collaborations, and stalling scientific progress.

The stakes have never been higher. Change was unavoidable.

As a result, we reimagined our fellowship and now are launching the Fellows in Residence program. We want to inject new ideas about health and environmental issues into public conversations and we’re more committed than ever to help our fellows become the next generation of thought leaders, bringing their expertise into decision-making spaces.

To achieve these redefined goals, our reimagined fellowship gathers Senior Agents of Change fellows who will participate in key networking opportunities, personalized mentorship to develop policy goals for their research, refine their science communication skills, and more.

But before we continue, let’s address the elephant in the room:

Why is this newsletter a Substack now?

We’ve been itching to communicate in a more collaborative way– especially now, when many researchers want to create a sense of community to navigate the uncertain landscape.

In this newsletter, we will dig deeper into the careers of our community. We’ll feature interviews with past fellows about how they managed major professional milestones – such as testifying before Congress or participating in investigative journalism – and share behind-the-scenes stories about their research and how they overcame hurdles along the way. You’ll hear about their views on policy, the state of environmental health research, and how they’re moving collaborations forward despite the current political climate.

You can expect to hear from us in your inbox every month.

We want this newsletter to feel like a community. Feel free to message us with ideas about what content you'd like to see in your inbox.

Now, let’s get back on track. Why a residence program?

We want to provide our community with the knowledge, skills, networks, and connections necessary to navigate this complex landscape.

This new initiative will build and strengthen alliances and collaborations with other programs, institutions and media organizations, provide support and networking to help fellows navigate opportunities where they and their research can lead conversations in their respective fields, amplify our fellows’ expertise, and help them develop community and policy resources that can be incorporated into decision-making by policymakers.

How is it different to the previous version of the fellowship?

The six fellows in residence will have the opportunity to work on a project of their choosing to broaden the impact of their research. Fellows will select projects, such as op-eds, fact sheets, policy briefs, and videos, that align with their current work and interests.

Who are the Fellows in Residence?

• Timnit Kefela (ትምኒት ከፈላ) (2024 fellow)

Timnit’s goal is to understand the sources, pathways and fates of microplastics in cities and coastal environments so we can design interventions that mitigate their impact with communities’ input.

• Ufuoma Ovienmhada (2024 fellow)

Ufuoma’s current work focuses on the environmental burdens facing communities impacted by incarceration and the climate crisis.

• Kevin P. Patterson (2022 fellow)

Kevin, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, investigates how heavy metal exposures (uranium, arsenic, etc.) in public and private drinking water supplies impact people across the US, with a special focus on historically marginalized Indigenous and rural communities.

• Valerisa Joe-Gaddy (2022 fellow)

A citizen of the Navajo Nation, Valerisa spends her days developing and validating new methods to assess microbial water quality and translating science to Tribal communities.

• April Ballard (2021 fellow)

April wants to understand how social context (e.g., stigma, poverty) and environmental conditions (e.g., resources, water quality) influence behaviors and health outcomes, specifically focusing on children, women/girls, and those experiencing houselessness.

• MyDzung Chu (2019 fellow)

MyDzung works with Asian American communities to assess their environmental risk factors for gestational diabetes, and to understand the impacts of extreme heat and air pollution in Boston's Chinatown.

Learn more about our fellows in our launch post!

Finally, if you take one thing from this newsletter, let it be this:

Did you like this newsletter? Do you have an idea of what you’d like to see here moving forward? Let us know — we really want to hear from you!

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