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.
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.
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.
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