InnerSelf.com

Children for a Safe Environment

by Kory Johnson

Continued from Page 1

 

And What Comes Next?

Later, we began to receive calls from children from all over the country who wanted to organize children's environmental groups. Since I had founded Children for a Safe Environment, whose membership had grown to three hundred, they wanted my help. I was interviewed often and I was on the Geraldo Rivera Show for being a hero. 

My teachers were proud of me, but a few said I shouldn't protest. One told me that if I kept protesting, there wasn't a college in the country that would take me. Some of my other teachers whispered in my ear, "You're doing a great job. Keep up the good work." I wondered why, if I was doing such a great job, they whispered.

Over the next couple of years, we prevented two toxic dumps from being built and helped people organize recycling groups and neighborhood cleanups. I also spoke at Earth Day gatherings and rallies. Unfortunately, people would buy T-shirts and recycle a little and then forget until the next year. It's hard to make people realize that recycling, reusing, reducing; hazardous waste; and toxic issues are important and, if we want to save the planet, we have to make changes. 

Teaching little kids about picking up trash and planting a tree is fine, but we have a long way to go. For example, when I won an award from our mayor for getting the city to stop using Styrofoam, I was really upset that they had mounted it on Styroboard. When the media at the ceremony asked me why I was so unhappy, I said, "I guess the mayor didn't take me seriously." I didn't get any more city awards.

During my years of activism, one of the tough things was losing friends. Friends whose fathers worked for polluting companies weren't allowed to play with me anymore. People would yell things at me and my family. My aunts, uncles, and grandparents got harassed. My mother was arrested several times for trying to keep dirty industry out of poor neighborhoods and for protesting nuclear testing.

The first time she was arrested, I was scared, because I thought being arrested meant you had done something bad and wrong. But when I heard that Martin Sheen had been arrested too, I relaxed a little, knowing he was a movie star and definitely not a criminal. Mom made collect calls from jail to radio stations to bring attention to the issues. She was in the news often and lost her leadership of a Girl Scout Brownie troop. She was also asked to drop out of my school's PTA because she wasn't a good role model. At first, I was embarrassed. Mom said it would just give us more time to work for change so other children didn't die.

But it seemed to me that people didn't care that our water was contaminated, that thirty-one children in our neighborhood had died, that a brown cloud hung over us during a weather condition called an inversion. The fact that my mother got cancer, that my grandmother died at fifty-three of cancer, that my sixteen-year-old sister died, all while living in this area, none of that mattered. What mattered was property, and reputation, and money.

Is It Worth It?

Sometimes, I just want to quit. But then, the phone rings or a letter arrives, and a kid somewhere wants to know what they can do to help. And before you know it, I'm making copies and mailing out information.

Once you're in this, you're in it for life. You look at things differently. You question authority. You get in a few arguments with teachers and friends and family. But you speak up for what you believe in, even if it costs you a friend or good grades or makes you the conversation of the town. I don't mind.

I don't mind what it has cost me to do this work because my sister died and I don't have her near me to laugh with, to stay up late with, to watch scary movies with, to boy talk with, to dance with, or to do volunteer work with. I know she's watching over me. I know she's proud. But I'd rather have her here with me.

I'm a sophomore in college now. In spite of what my sixth-grade teacher told me, a couple of summers ago, I attended the University of California at Berkeley on a science and math program scholarship and spent an August working in the Raul Julia Mountain Rainforest in Puerto Rico. Like I said, once you're in it, you're in it for life.

This article is excerpted with permission from

"Women of Courage - Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them:
by Katherine Martin.
Info/Order this book.

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About The Author

In 1998, Katy won a prestigious Goldman Environmental Award, which is called by some the Nobel prize of the environmental movement and is given annually to six people around the world. That took her to the White House, and led to a whirlwind of interviews and speaking invitations from around the country. She also received the first John Denver Windstar Youth Award for being the most environmentally active young person in the country. In addition to working for the environment, she does volunteer work with sick children, hurricane victims, and the homeless, as well as with AIDS groups. In September of 1996, she took part in a protest, along with Greenpeace and other environmental justice groups, at a railroad spur in Mobile, Arizona, to stop the arrival of forty-five train-car loads (about 80,000 tons) of DDT-contaminated dirt from a California Superfund site. It was Kory's first arrest.