U.S. Environmental Safety Company workers gathered in downtown Chicago this week to protest plans to chop its employees and funds as a part of the Trump administration’s efforts to scale back the scale of the federal authorities.
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, has mentioned he needs to chop the company’s funds by 65%. “We don’t want the cash,” he mentioned in an interview with Fox Information.
A number of information organizations have reported the EPA plans to get rid of its scientific analysis workplace, which might imply a minimum of 1,000 chemists, biologists, toxicologists and different scientists might be fired.
The company additionally introduced plans to slash its environmental justice applications, which assist defend the communities most affected by issues like air pollution and local weather change.
Some EPA workers fear the cuts may compromise elementary features of the company tasked with defending the air, water and well being of the nation.
WBEZ’s Juanpablo Ramirez Franco sat down with Ellie Hagen, an environmental scientist within the environmental justice program on the EPA’s Chicago workplace. Hagen says she’s working and continues to be getting paid, however she believes her job goes to be eradicated. In her interview, Hagen acknowledged that she was representing herself and her union and never the EPA.
This interview has been flippantly edited for size and readability.
You assist do group outreach work on the EPA. Inform us somewhat bit about what drew you to this job.
I used to be actually fortunate to develop up in a household who cared so much about nature. I grew up exterior so much. Later in my life, I noticed the affect that the setting has on individuals’s well being. My mother obtained identified with breast most cancers after I was very younger, and he or she ended up passing away from a uncommon and severe type of breast most cancers known as inflammatory breast most cancers. Once I graduated, I began engaged on a website in a rural city, in Portsmouth, Ohio, and I came upon that my mother had really labored [at the same site].
My mother was one in all three geologists who was taking samples at a website the place there was a plant that produced uranium for the Chilly Struggle. So, it was contaminated with a whole lot of nuclear contamination and chemical compounds like trichloroethylene, or TCE. [The geologists were] taking a whole lot of the samples to characterize the extent of the contamination, and all three of these geologists ended up getting uncommon and severe types of most cancers, and two of them handed away. So, that’s the place my ardour for environmental well being and environmental justice was born.
The Trump administration has introduced plans to get rid of the environmental justice program on the EPA. That program was began in 1992 underneath President George H.W. Bush, a Republican. Why is that this explicit program being focused for cuts?
I feel there’s this narrative that environmental justice is a political challenge or a partisan challenge, however it’s not. I feel no matter what facet of the aisle you’re on, everybody deserves clear air, everybody deserves clear water, everybody deserves clear land to stay on. That’s not a partisan or political challenge.
Are you able to give us an instance of how these proposed cuts would possibly have an effect on the general public?
The Midwest has a whole lot of Rust Belt cities the place there was historic air pollution from issues like mining or smelting actions, and that may trigger lead and different heavy metals to build up within the soil and simply sit there. So, there’s a whole lot of legacy air pollution.
I’ve a reminiscence from a city in Ohio: A mom got here in together with her youngsters and a soil pattern she collected the place her children wish to dig and play. I screened that soil pattern — the outcome was round 1,000 elements per million of lead, and for context, the nationwide common [for lead soil levels] is round 30 elements per million of lead.
I bear in mind seeing the devastated look on her face [when she learned] that her children have been probably uncovered to [lead]. With the ability to reply on to group wants and group issues to assist hold individuals protected and hold individuals’s environments safer is what the environmental justice program does. With these cuts, I don’t assume there’s anybody who’s going to be prioritizing these communities anymore.
Do you assume the company will have the ability to perform its job, together with issues which are required by regulation, amid all these cuts?
Administrator Zeldin has mentioned, ‘We’re driving a dagger straight into the center of the local weather change faith … unleashing American vitality and bringing again auto jobs to the U.S.’ Bringing again auto jobs to the U.S. will not be a regulation that we have now. It’s exhausting to know how we’re anticipated to implement that when our mission is to guard human well being and the setting.
I feel what we’re seeing is this sort of false assertion that we have now to decide on between a affluent financial system and a affluent setting. We’re the richest nation on this planet. We don’t need to make that selection. I feel deregulating and degrading our surroundings doesn’t make us extra environment friendly. It doesn’t make us stronger. It solely makes us sicker and it makes us weaker.
Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco covers local weather change and the setting for WBEZ and Grist. Observe him on X at @__juanpab.
