InnerSelf.com

Children for a Safe Environment

by Kory Johnson

It's hard to always be the minority, not because I'm Mexican and Native American but because I'm a woman willing to stand up and speak out. It's not normal in my town. I'm not sure what I want to do when I grow up, but I know what I won't do. I won't sit down, shut up, or go with the flow.

In 1988, my sixteen-year-old sister Amy died on Valentine's Day. She had been sick her whole life with heart problems. If you ask me, it was the contaminated water my mother drank when she was pregnant that made Amy sick.

Many children in our small community died from similar birth defects, thirty-one altogether. The water supply had been contaminated with chemicals from crop dusters. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said we lived in a "cancer cluster". The number of children with cancer was twice the national average. Birth defects were high; so was asthma. But, as our local paper, the New Times, said, "Although the Arizona Department of Health Services (DHS) was aware that children were dying with abnormal rates of leukemia on the west side, the state agency had refused to investigate and had, in fact, labored to suppress information on the cluster."

Six months before Amy died, she and I wrote to the New Times, because we heard that someone at the DHS had said it was just fine that they spent $128,500 to move into new offices but didn't have a penny to spend on research on the cancer cluster. "We're just a couple of kids from Maryvale, but we're scared because our town is falling apart and nobody cares... We have a big problem, and people ignore it and hope it will go away. It's not going away... We need help and we need honest answers, even if they're ugly answers, we need the truth." We enclosed a drawing of a field of tombstones with children's names on them and a blank one in the middle with an epitaph that read, "Who is next and why?" We didn't know it would be Amy.

After Amy died, my mother took me to a bereavement group so I could grieve. A lot of other kids who had also lost siblings attended and, every month, we would end up crying. I asked some of the kids if they would like to start a group to work together for change instead of crying every month.

We started very small. The five of us called ourselves Children for a Safe Environment. We heard our parents talk about a hazardous waste incinerator company that wanted to come to Arizona and burn toxic waste from all over the country. Since our parents were going to public hearings, we decided to go too. I'll never forget the first time I got up and spoke. A man set a clock at five minutes and said I was not to talk about anything personal, I was to speak on facts alone. I was only eleven years old, and I didn't know about parts-per-billion, emissions, 99.99 EPA standards, particulates, or scrubbers. What I did know was that one of the incinerators was to be built in a small minority community next to a grade school and in a flood zone. And I knew that this company had a very poor track record: In other states where they operated incinerators, a high percentage of people in the area were sick. To me, this issue was only personal.

We had a lot of work to do and, since kids always seemed to draw the press, we had to know what we were talking about. We held candlelight rallies and protests, made signs, sent out mailers, wrote our representatives and our governor. We called a press conference to bring to people's attention the fact that this company had misspelled "environmental" on its logo. We went to many public hearings to embarrass politicians who had received campaign contributions from this company. Kids can be incredibly effective when we speak, especially when what we say comes from the heart.

We finally won. The incinerator company packed up and left Arizona.

Continued on the Next Page:
* And What Comes Next?
* Is It Worth It?

 

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.