The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Justice has released a new environmental justice policy to prioritize racial and socioeconomic fairness in its agency practices. Environmental justice advocates and RIDEM say the policy could help hold the department accountable, as well as right past environmental wrongs.
Both the advocates and RIDEM say this policy is needed to address past and current practices that have disproportionately hurt low-income earners and Black and brown residents in Rhode Island, which are groups that have been and are being exposed to more brownfields, greater air pollution from highways, greater rates of lead poisoning, and getting less access to environmentally beneficial natural features such as trees and parks than their white peers.
In its policy, RIDEM has outlined these impacts in a map of what it calls Environmental Justice Focus Areas – areas that have been historically underserved and harmed through state policy.
The greater number of environmental hazards in Rhode Island’s poorer zip codes and counties also correlates with a disparity in ill health effects. Rates of respiratory illness and cancer tend to be higher in these communities.
These types of injustices are exactly what RIDEM’s policy aims to address, according to Chris Gaynor, the person in charge of drafting and implementing the new policy and values. He was brought on as a contract employee specifically for this task.
“It’s an accountability measure to ensure that each and every person within these offices are thinking about justice and equity, and the underserved populations that have been long neglected by state agencies like ourselves,” Gaynor said.
Monica Huertas counts herself as one of these underserved people. She and her family live in Washington Park, a neighborhood in Providence located close to the Port of Providence. Huertas says it’s a diverse, family-centered community with a lot of kids. On the other hand, she says it’s polluted with toxins from businesses at the port and nearby large roadways.
“We can’t even open the windows on a nice beautiful day because you smell the petroleum, smell the gas, you smell that, you know, the agent that they put in that smells like rotten eggs,” she said.
Huertas grew up between South Providence and Puerto Rico. She moved to Washington Park after some years renting, some years living with family, and some years being unhoused. Eventually she and her husband were earning enough to purchase a home. It should have been a momentous time in her life.
“You thought you was getting, you know, a little piece of this fake American dream. And it’s like, nope, they’re still polluting you.”
A year after moving to the neighborhood, one of her 4 kids developed asthma, and the two who already had asthma developed more severe symptoms. Huertas herself also has asthma, which she says has worsened since moving. She attributes that to the environmental hazards.
Beyond the health effects, having asthma also means you can get left behind. Asthma causes American kids to collectively miss more than 10 million days of school each year. According to the federal Department of Education, chronic absenteeism in school-aged children often leads to poorer life outcomes in health, well-being, and finances when they become adults.
Just last week, Huertas’ kids missed school due to overnight asthma attacks.
“In the night, like I kept waking up with asthma attacks, like I couldn’t breathe. And I had to take two nebulizer treatments,” Alex said.
“You were up at night getting treatment,” Huertas responded. “So it’s like you’re sleeping in the morning, and then you’re gonna go to school for what? You’re gonna be sleeping at school.”
On Tuesday, Alex was hospitalized for more asthma attacks. Her daughter, 14-year-old Victoria, had so many respiratory issues recently at school that she overdosed on albuterol, taking about 30 pumps of her inhaler in one day. Huertas’ 7-year-old son, who is in second grade, does not yet know how to read. She attributes that to his many missed school days due to complications of asthma and other illnesses she believes are linked to outdoor environmental hazards in her neighborhood. Her 17-year-old son is the only one of her children who spent a majority of his childhood outside of Washington Park, and the only one without asthma.
“It’s sad. It’s aggravating. Mainly because I know that it’s because of the neighborhood we’re in. So it really just gets me angry,” Huertas said.
She said she doesn’t have the funds to leave, either.
“We’re really stuck. We are really stuck right now,” Huertas said. 
And she’s not alone. Racist lending practices, such as the ones uncovered in a recently settled lawsuit against Washington Trust, can keep Black and brown people in lower-income neighborhoods that are more likely to have more environmental hazards, like Washington Park.
Huertas said living in the area has forced her to become an activist. Because she can’t leave, she has poured herself into trying to make her community, and other lower-income neighborhoods, a better place. She is the executive director of the People’s Port Authority, an advocacy group which aims to have community oversight over businesses and emissions at the port.
Scientists have long known there’s a connection between respiratory illness and living near a highly trafficked roadway. And there are also studies that show people who live near ports are harmed by pollutants. Studies specific to the Port of Providence have been limited, but that could soon change. Brown University professor Meredith Hastings has placed low-cost air monitors around South Providence to see if there is a link between the odors people are smelling, and the actual concentration of pollutants in the air. Part of her inspiration to start this research, she said, was a talk Huertas gave at Brown.
“Hearing her talk about her lived experience of environmental justice was really striking to me, compared to what stories the government narrative might put forward from an air pollution standpoint,” Hastings said.
She said she listened to input from community members when deciding where exactly to put the air monitors. Hastings wrote over email that “The reality is our noses are more sensitive detectors than any machine on the market.” She hopes to have early data analysis by spring 2024.
Hastings is also eagerly awaiting new data from RIDEM that will include new information about potentially carcinogenic toxins in the air.
“More needs to be done to better understand what residents are exposed to, what sources/industries are responsible and our regulatory system needs to move beyond simply expecting industry to comply by making it harder for these businesses to cause harm in the first place,” Hastings wrote in an email.
Chris Gaynor says that RIDEM’s new environmental justice policy is just the beginning. He says soon, the Department of Environmental management will go into each sub-agency to talk about implementing practices that take historically marginalized communities into consideration.
Huertas is somewhat skeptical that the policy will enact real change, but says she is glad to have a written text that she can use in her advocacy work to hold RIDEM accountable. In the meantime, she says she will continue to fight for legislation that can improve her life.
RIDEM did consult Huertas and the People’s Port Authority while drafting the policy. The group reposted the policy announcement to their website with the headline “We are Proud of the work community put into this, let’s see how RI-DEM sticks to this policy.”
RIDEM also consulted with the Conservation Law Foundation, a New England-based environmental advocacy organization. A spokesperson for the organization said they were pleased that RIDEM took so many of its concerns into account when writing the policy.
And for Monica Huertas’ kids, they say they just want to be able to all laugh together again, without any pain.
“It’s hard to see my mom have asthma, because like, after we finished laughing her face gets red. And she’s like, I need the inhaler,” her son Alex said.
“And we laugh a lot,” responded Huertas.
Metro Reporter Olivia Ebertz can be reached at olivia@thepublicsradio.org.
