Book Review of: Poison Spring – The Secret History of the EPA

By Carol van Strum

Ever since its creation in 1970 the US-EPA has been a failing organization, writes Carol Van Strum in her review of ‘Poison Spring’ – serving the corporations it was there to regulate, falsifying data, suppressing the truth about pesticide toxicity, and crushing whistleblowers.

EPA officials know global chemical and agribusiness industries are manufacturing science. They know their products are dangerous … This entire book is, in a sense, about a bureaucracy going mad.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”, Richard Feynman famously declared in 1966. Ever quick to challenge accepted wisdom, he distinguished the laudable ignorance of science, forever seeking unattainable certainties, from the dangerous ignorance of experts who professed such certainty.
Twenty years later, he would drop a rubber ring into a glass of ice water to show a panel of clueless rocket experts how willful ignorance of basic temperature effects likely caused the Challenger shuttle disaster [1].
Experts with delusions of certainty create imitative forms of science, he warned, producing“the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisors.” [2]
Feynman’s warning against faith in the phony trappings of“cargo cult science”fell on deaf ears. Policies affecting every aspect of our lives are now based on dangerous forms of ignorance.
A prime case in point is the noble edifice of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where a high-ranking EPA official was recently jailed and fined for collecting pay and bonuses for decades of non-existent work while he claimed to be working elsewhere for the CIA.
Rubber stamping pesticide industry approvals
Such long-standing fraud would hardly come as a surprise to Evaggelos Vallianatos, who toiled for a quarter of a century in the EPA’s Pesticide Division, ostensibly responsible for protecting human health and the environment from commercial poisons.
His new book, Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA, documents a culture of fraud and corruption infesting every corner and closet of the agency.
The EPA, created with much fanfare by Richard Nixon in 1970, was an agency crippled at birth by inadequate funding, political hypocrisy, and laws protecting industry profits above all.
Vallianatos points out that one of the fledgling agency’s greatest handicaps was its initial staffing with personnel from USDA, steeped in the religion of corporate agriculture and lethal technologies.
With USDA staff came also USDA’s outdated pesticide registrations, which were to be reviewed and reregistered by EPA. In addition, hundreds of new pesticide applications accumulated every year, each supported by industry-produced safety studies to meet new federal requirements.
Hired as scientists, EPA staffers spent their time cutting and pasting industry studies and conclusions into rubber-stamped registration approvals. Under industry-crafted laws, once a pesticide was registered, it could never be unregistered without massive, unequivocal evidence of harm.
Fraud? Non-existent data? No problem
As if such misuse of science weren’t bad enough, audits by FDA and EPA soon found that most of the thousands of industry safety studies used to approve pesticide registrations were fraudulent.
Alerted by FDA scientist Adrian Gross, EPA had discovered in 1976 that Industrial BioTest Laboratories [IBT], which had conducted many of the pesticide safety tests submitted to EPA by manufacturers, had been routinely faking tests, falsifying data, and altering results for years.
Subsequent investigations of other testing laboratories found similar practices in more than half the labs whose tests supported EPA registrations of pesticides.
“IBT was not a unique case of scientific fraud”, Vallianatos writes, “it was emblematic of a dark and deviant scientific culture, a ‘brave new science’ with deep roots throughout agribusiness, the chemical industry, universities, and the government.” [3]
In 1979, during the seven years of EPA dithering over this scandal, Vallianatos came to work at EPA. He soon learned that not a single pesticide registration was to be canceled due to fraudulent or nonexistent test data.
Instead, he notes, EPA’s reaction was to outsource science. It shut down its own testing laboratories, closed its own libraries of toxicity data on thousands of chemicals, and outsourced all evaluations of industry-sponsored studies.
“The unspoken understanding in this outsourcing of government functions has been the near certainty of finding industry data satisfactory – all the time.”
Old habits die hard – if at all
This issue is relevant today, given that chemicals such as 2,4-D and glyphosate (Roundup TM), whose uses have been vastly increased by GMO practices, were originally registered on the basis of invalid IBT studies.
During Vallianatos’s first year at EPA,1980, some 1.1 billion pounds of pesticide active ingredients were applied to US food crops, a number that does not include home and garden uses, parklands, golf courses, playing fields, and municipal landscapes. In 2011, two billion pounds of pesticides were sold in the US Most if not all of those pesticides lacked valid testing data then, and still lack such data today.
Furthering the fraud, Vallianatos points out, the active ingredient is only the tip of the iceberg, being as little as one percent of the product; the remainder is a trade secret stew of untested, unknown ‘inert’ ingredients that are often more toxic than the active ingredients. What he calls“the big business of fraudulent science”has replaced even the semblance of environmental protection.
Poison Spring chronicles some of the consequences of that fraud in an agency snared in its own tangled lies: cover-ups of dioxin levels in drinking water and in dead babies; routine suppression of data linking pesticides to soaring rates of cancer, birth defects, and chronic disease; industry access to everything; ‘revolving door’ administrators serving corporate bosses; political appointees dismantling EPA labs and data libraries to dispose of damaging evidence; the cutting of research funds for nontoxic alternatives; the harsh retribution visited on whistleblowers; and ever and again, bureaucrats, with full knowledge of the consequences, setting policies that result in death and suffering.
For 25 years, Vallianatos saw and documented it all. “EPA officials know global chemical and agribusiness industries are manufacturing science”, he writes. “They know their products are dangerous … [EPA] scientists find themselves working in a roomful of funhouse mirrors, plagiarizing industry studies and cutting and pasting the findings of industry studies as their own … This entire book is, in a sense, about a bureaucracy going mad.”
Scientific silence, public indifference
Bureaucracy does not go mad by itself, however. Public indifference to the ignorance of experts and public tolerance of lies are what allow such madness to flourish, enabled by the scientific community’s silence.
Inexorably, Vallianatos found,“science and policy themselves have been made a prop to the pesticides industry and agribusiness.”
Such monumental fraud demands drastic remedies, which Vallianatos bravely urges: rebuild an EPA completely independent from industry and politics, remove incentives for huge scale, chemically-dependent corporate agriculture, and address the underlying problem by encouraging small family farms and agriculture without chemical warfare.
“Traditional (and often organic) farmers – until seventy-five years ago, the only farmers there were – are slowly beginning to make a comeback. They have always known how to raise crops and livestock without industrial poisons,” Vallianatos points out. “They are the seed for a future harvest of good food, a healthy natural world, and democracy in rural America – and the world.”
These are facts, and this is a book that scientists and citizens alike ignore at great peril.

New research from the University of Copenhagen has found that the beneficial effects of exercise are more important for our health than the negative effects of air pollution, in relation to the risk of premature mortality. In other words, benefits of exercise outweigh the harmful effects of air pollution.

Children born to mothers experiencing economic hardship, who were also exposed during pregnancy to high levels of PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), scored significantly lower on IQ tests at age 5 compared with children born to mothers with greater economic security and less exposure to the pollutants. The findings by researchers at the Columbia University Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health appear in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
PAH are found everywhere in the environment from emissions from motor vehicles, oil, and coal-burning for home heating and power generation, tobacco smoke, and other combustion sources.
The researchers followed 276 mother-child pairs, a subset of CCCEH’s ongoing urban birth cohort study in New York City, from pregnancy through early childhood. Mothers self-reported maternal material hardship during pregnancy and at multiple time points through early childhood. Material hardship is a measure used to assess an individual’s unmet basic needs with regard to food, clothing, and housing. The Columbia researchers, led by Frederica Perera, PhD, DrPH, director of CCCEH, previously reported that that prenatal exposure to airborne PAH during gestation was associated with development delay at age 3, reduced verbal and full scale IQ at age 5, and symptoms of anxiety and depression at age 7.
At child age 7 years, researchers used the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children to assess IQ. PAH-DNA adducts in cord blood provided an individual measure of prenatal exposure to the pollutants. The researchers observed that, among children whose mothers reported greater material hardship, the group with high levels of PAH-DNA cord adducts [new chemicals created by the mixture of existing chemicals] significantly scored lower on tests of full scale IQ, perceptual reasoning, and working memory compared to those children with lower levels of adducts. Statistically significant interactions were observed between both prenatal and recurrent material hardship and high levels of cord adducts on children’s working memory scores. The same significant relationships between adducts and IQ were not observed in the low material hardship group.
The findings add to other evidence that socioeconomic disadvantage can increase the adverse effects of toxic physical “stressors” like air pollutants. The present results suggest the need for a multifaceted approach to reduce PAH exposure and alleviate material hardship in order to protect the developing fetus and young child.
“The findings support policy interventions to reduce air pollution exposure in urban areas as well as programs to screen women early in pregnancy to identify those in need of psychological or material support,” says Perera, senior author of the paper.
More on PAH and ways to limit exposure can be found on the CCCEH website.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:

1. Julia Vishnevetsky, Deliang Tang, Hsin-Wen Chang, Emily L. Roen, Ya Wang, Virginia Rauh, Shuang Wang, Rachel L. Miller, Julie Herbstman, Frederica P. Perera.Combined effects of prenatal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and material hardship on child IQ.Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 2015; DOI: 10.1016/j.ntt.2015.04.002

THE GUARDIAN – Dec. 15, 2014
Poorer countries likely to reject agreement in Paris next year if onus falls on them rather than those largely responsible for global warming
By John Vidal
At one point on Saturday night it looked quite likely that the Lima climate talks would collapse in disarray. Instead of the harmony expected between China and the US following their pre-talks pact, the world’s two largest economies were squaring off; workmen were dismantling the venue; old faultlines between rich and poor countries were opening up again and some countries’ delegations were rushing to catch their planes.
Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
In the end, after a marathon 32-hour session where everyone stared into the abyss of total failure, a modicum of compromise prevailed. Some deft changes of emphasis in the revised text and the inclusion of key words such as “loss” and “damage” proved just enough for diplomats to bodge a last-minute compromise. There were cheers and tears as the most modest of agreements was reached. The Peruvian president of the UN climate change convention, or COP20, could say without irony: “With this text, we all win without exception.”
Not so. Countries may technically still be on track to negotiate a final agreement in Paris next year, but the gaps between them are growing rather than closing and the stakes are getting higher every month.
We have now reached the point where everyone can see clearly that whatever ambition there once was to respect science and try to hold temperatures to an overall 2C rise has been ditched. We also know that developing countries will not get anything like the money they need to adapt their economies and infrastructure to climate change and that those countries that have been historically responsible for getting the world into its current climate mess will be able to do much what they like.
As it stands, 21 years of tortuous negotiations may have actually taken developing countries backwards on tackling climate change. From an imperfect but legally binding UN treaty struck in 1992, in which industrialized countries accepted responsibility and agreed to make modest but specific cuts over a defined period, we now have the prospect of a less than legally binding global deal where everyone is obliged to do something but where the poor may have to do the most and the rich will be free to do little.
In 1992, rich countries were obliged to lead and to help the poor, but we now have a situation where those who had little or no historical responsibility for climate change are likely to cut emissions the most.
This travesty of global climate justice, say many developing countries, is largely the fault of the US, which, backed by Britain and others industrialized countries like Canada and Australia, has helped build up distrust in developing countries by continually trying to deregulate the international climate change regime by weakening the rules, shifting responsibility to the south and making derisory offers of financial help.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, made an impassioned speech in Lima warning that the world was “on a course leading to tragedy”, but inside the conference halls the US negotiators were not giving an inch during the negotiations, and the emissions cuts that the US proposed would put the world on a path for a global temperature increase well beyond the already dangerous 2C.
Countries now have little time to resolve fundamental issues, and success in Paris is not at all certain. All countries will be asked to submit their plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, known as intended nationally determined contributions, to the UN by 31 March. The UN will then crunch the figures and a few weeks before the talks open we will know just how far away countries are to limiting temperature increase to below 1.5C or 2C.
As it stands, we may be on track for 4C of warming. But with more than 100 countries supporting the ambitious goal of phasing out all man-made carbon emissions by 2050, Paris will see a massive showdown.
From now on, the stakes only get higher. Led by China, Africa and the least developed countries see weak and unjust climate targets from rich industrialized countries and, over the next year, they will exert as much pressure as they can to establish a fair and equitable way to share out what is left of the global carbon budget. But as Lima showed, they are now working together and are unlikely to sign up to what they think is a meaningless deal.
The other problem ducked in Lima was finance. Developing nations wanted rich countries to set a clear timetable to scale up the funds available to help them adapt. But the final text merely “requested” that rich countries “enhance the available quantitative and qualitative elements of a pathway” towards 2020.
Because the industrialized countries have already promised to secure $100bn a year after 2020, developing countries will want cast-iron assurances about how this will be achieved. Given that rich countries have so far pledged only about $10bn to run over the next five years, the gap may be too great and the likelihood of failure in Paris is high.
Unless the rich countries take care in the negotiations, at some point it will become clear to developing countries that no deal may prove better than any deal.
The Guardian
The Guardian UK, one of Britain’s top daily newspapers, provides coverage of international environmental issues. Earth Island Journal is a member of the Guardian’s Environment News Network.

Common Dreams, Dec. 9, 2014
Alternative gathering outside of UN talks brings together civil societies and social movements from across the globe
By Sarah Lazare, staff writer
Social movements and civil societies from around the world are gathered in Lima, Peru this week with an ambitiousgoal: to “develop an alternative form of development, one that respects the limits and regenerative capacities of Mother Earth and tackles the structural causes of climate change.”
The “People’s Summit on Climate Change” is hosted by grassroots organizations and networks — including the Workers General Confederation of Peru, Andean Coordinator of Indigenous organizations, and Workers Autonomous Central of Peru.
It constitutes an alternative to the ongoing United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also in Lima, where government representatives and corporate leaders are holding the latest in a series of UN talks.
“We, the social movements and the progressive forces of civil society are beginning to seriously prepare ourselves for the protracted struggle to defend the people and the planet and create a just transition from the extractive and exploitative economy to a democratic economy that aligns us with the natural processes of the earth,” Kali Akuno, from the Mississippi-based organization Cooperation Jackson, told Common Dreams from Lima.
“A framework of global expropriation”
According to Akuno, who is attending the alternative summit as part of a Grassroots Global Justice Alliance delegation of U.S. communities on the front-lines of climate change, what is happening within the UN meeting is cynical: “At this moment the states and the transnational corporations are refining a framework of global expropriation that will complete the capitalist consumption of the earth. And they have become so bold as to remove any mention of human rights and protections from the framework.”
The UN conference in Lima, which takes place from December 1-12, is being publicly billed as a gathering to create a draft document that will “lay the foundation for an effective, new, universal climate change agreement in Paris in 2015.” The Paris meeting, known as COP21, “will mark a decisive stage in negotiations on the future international agreement on a post-2020 regime, and will, as agreed in Durban, adopt the major outlines of that regime,” according to a statement from the French government.
Akuno is not alone in being disillusioned with the UN process. Critics charge that the Lima meeting, in keeping with past UN talks, has been hijacked by corporations and the interests of wealthy people and nations, and as a result, will fail to deliver the urgent action needed.
Representatives from the fossil fuel industry have been holding private meetings with numerous national delegations, including a closed-door meeting between the Canadian delegation and Chevron and TransCanada, according to a report from Leehi Yona and Diego Arguedas Ortiz in Inter Press Service.
On Monday, activists, including indigenous communities in Colombia, Peru, Canada, and beyond, shut down a panel at the Conference. The panel — originally titled, “Why Divest from Fossil Fuels When a Future with Low Emission Fossil Energy Use is Already a Reality?”—which was organized by fossil fuel industry lobbyists and featured speakers from the World Coal Association and Shell.
However, People’s Summit organizers say the UN conference presents an opening to civil society and social movement groups to set their own vision for global change heading into the Paris meeting.
As world leaders draft a new climate agreement, those gathered at the alternative summit will “share initiatives, proposals and experiences, as well as define and coordinate our agendas, to bring pressure to bear on the decision makers at COP20, and demand that the official negotiators take account of the world’s citizens and peoples,” according to organizers.
Rally in Lima, Peru, in support of Maxima Acuña de Chaupe, an Indigenous woman from Peru being prosecuted for trying to keep her land. (Photo: Grassroots Global Justice Alliance)
“People from social movements around the world”
“It’s incredible to see so many people from social movements around the world coming together at this People’s Summit on Climate Change,” Cindy Wiesner, National Coordinator for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, toldCommon Dreams.
“There are mass movement organizations like La Vía Campesina, broad labor unions like the CUT-Peru (Confederation of Workers of Peru), global feminist movements like the World March of Women, indigenous alliances like Andean Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) and Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), all putting our heads together in Lima to align our community-led solutions to this climate crisis,” Wiesner added.
The summit, which takes place from December 8 to 11, is “split into five tracks which all address a piece of climate change from food to rights of Mother Earth to alternative energy and economies,” Diana Lopez of the Southwest Workers Union in San Antonio, Texas told Common Dreams. “A large percent of the participants are indigenous people from the region. Many understand and speak Spanish but it is not their native language.”
Lopez shared reflections on the opening day of the gathering:
On one level you have global funders making spaces for their grantees to speak about their work. On another there are more academic, technology and policy spaces. And finally there are the organizer spaces which are self-organized and are concentrated on front-line experience, movement-building and alignment around solutions.
People seem tired and frustrated talking about policy and what the government should be doing. They don’t want to talk about those things anymore, and while it’s important to know them and keep track of those policies that will ultimately affect our communities the most, people are passionate about shifting towards a systemic change framework. The pueblos are interested in learning how to integrate new sustainable technology into traditional farming practices while still healing Mother Earth. We are talking about fighting against the extreme corporations that continue to destroy communities while developing an alternative space where our people can thrive and begin the healing of Pachamama.
The message is clear that in order to really create solutions to climate change we must also talk about the disparities among funding, patriarchy within our own movement and the role U.S. plays in the destruction of communities.
The Summit is building towards a December 10th “People’s Climate March” through Lima, timed to coincide with the International Day of Human Rights, which marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
An announcement for the march declares, “[W]e invite you to come and defend YOUR rights, OUR rights and those of LIFE on Earth.”

Executive Order requires each Secretariat to address environmental justice
Chelsea, Mass.– Nov. 25, 2014 – Governor Deval Patrick today signed an Executive Order requiring Secretariats to take action in promoting environmental justice.
“Today we reaffirm our commitment to providing the whole Commonwealth with better quality of life through parks, open space and sound environmental policy,” said Governor Patrick. “This Order will ensure these principles are integrated into decision making across state government.”
The Patrick Administration has made it a priority to direct robust park and open space investments toward environmental justice neighborhoods and to promote programs and policies that increase park equity.
“Governor Patrick’s dedication to ensuring open space in urban areas is unprecedented,” said Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary Maeve Vallely Bartlett. “At EEA, we have worked to implement that vision with targeted investments in Gateway Cities and urban neighborhoods across Massachusetts.”
The Executive Order requires the following actions:
** The establishment of a Governor’s Advisory Council to advise the Governor and Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) Secretary on Environmental Justice Issues.
** EEA is required to update its 2002 Environmental Justice Policy within 60 days
** Each Secretariat is required to appoint a Secretariat Environmental Justice Coordinator within 30 days. The Coordinator shall review Secretariat programs to determine which programs implicate Environmental Justice issues.
** Secretariats are required to post their Environmental Justice strategies online within 180 days.
** The Director of Environmental Justice is required to periodically convene the Secretariat Coordinators to meet as the Interagency Environmental Justice Coordinating Group.
EEA Secretary Bartlett appointed a Director of Environmental Justice, Michelle Reid, as part of Governor Patrick’s Women in the Workforce Initiative in September.
“What makes this Executive Order unique is that it focuses on both substantive requirements and procedural ones.  Environmental justice in many states is focused on improving the process or ability of residents and workers to participate in decision-making without guaranteeing that such input will result in practical changes on the ground,” said Staci Rubin, Senior Attorney at ACE.  “This executive order requires the state to focus enforcement and funding efforts for environmental benefits in environmental justice communities.”
“I’d like to thank Governor Patrick for moving forward with updates to our environmental justice policy and for ensuring environmental justice for the residents of Massachusetts,” said Senator Marc R. Pacheco.
“I’m pleased to see that Governor Patrick is once again taking specific action to make environmental justice a reality for those communities that most need it,” said Senator Sal DiDomenico. “The residents of my district, which is very urban, need more access to parks, playgrounds, open space, and other positive environmental benefits, and today is another step in the right direction.”
EEA has helped protect more than 125,000 acres of land and built or renovated more than 200 parks since 2007, including projects in 310 communities and 50 cities. The land conserved and parks created are within a 10 minute walk of 1.5 million residents – about 25 percent of the state’s residents. In the Commonwealth’s 26 Gateway Cities, new conservation land and parks are within a 10 minute walk of more than 500,000 residents – about 33 percent of all Gateway City residents.
“I am very pleased that Governor Patrick has used his executive powers to improve Massachusetts through an investment in urban parks and open spaces with a commitment to a targeted environmental policy,” said Representative Frank  A. Moran.
“The actions taken today by the Governor reinforce the Commonwealth’s promise of environmental equity for every community, and help to ensure that cities and towns can provide all citizens with ample open space to live and thrive,” said Representative Frank Smizik.
“The raw truth of the matter is that we human beings, have been terrible stewards of our unique and spectacular home; pleading ignorance or personal non culpability will not reverse the damage to the earth, clean up a single poisoned river or cure even one case of debilitating disease,” said Representative Chris Walsh. “Changing the sad trajectory of this legacy will only happen when each of us gladly seeks out and accepts the shared responsibility for change. All too often the ability to move away, truck away or pipe away contamination from our daily life has led to a stunning ability to deny the reality of our acquiescence in this vandalism. Many communities and populations however have not had that luxury; communities of uneducated , poor and politically dispossessed peoples have endured living in both obvious and subtle contaminated areas and have the illnesses and poor outcomes to prove it. The Governor’s executive order to integrate the principals of environmental justice throughout the decision making apparatus of state government is the first step in owning up to our shared problems and responsibilities and it is the only path that will lead us to a future that works for any of us.” 
“This Executive Order elevates the profile of environmental justice and increases transparency,” said Representative Jay Livingstone. “As the Commonwealth transitions to a new administration, we will be well-positioned to make progress on environmental justice.  Whether it’s reducing asthma rates or increasing access to open space, our Commonwealth has a number of opportunities to make sure certain communities aren’t disproportionately impacted by environmental harms or left behind when it comes to environmental benefits.”
“We are thrilled that Governor Patrick is signing an Executive Order on Environmental Justice. The Governor’s executive order recognizes that communities like Chelsea, East Boston and Roxbury bear the brunt of impacts for regional benefits; and the order will require far more comprehensive planning and community involvement in affected communities. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly grateful to Governor Patrick, who has long been a friend to Chelsea, for ensuring that our city will be protected for years to come,” said Roseann Bongiovanni, Associate Executive Director of the Chelsea Collaborative.
The Patrick Administration has invested $10.3 million in capital funding to construct a new playground or spray park, or renovate an existing one, in each of the Commonwealth’s 54 cities. Through the new Our Common Backyards program, each of these cities is receiving up to $200,000 in state funding to support these projects. 
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NJ.com, Nov. 25, 2014
By Barry Carter
The division was clear at Newark’s Zoning Board of Adjustment meeting.
Fifty-three people, including residents, architects and planners, sat on one side of the municipal council chambers at Newark City Hall. They raised their hands, almost in unison, against plans for another surface parking lot in the city’s Ironbound section.
Across the aisle, 46 people didn’t agree with them. They supported the lot.
This was the fifth meeting about what should happen with a small piece of land between parking lots that saturate Newark streets behind Penn Station. When you add up the number of lots, including those facing the Prudential Center, there are 13.
Nino Pereira, of Hillside, was seeking permission to operate lot No. 14 on Bruen Street – with space for 73 cars. His problem was that residents have become fed up with parking lots, especially after they couldn’t stop a large one from opening two years ago on McWhorter Street, just across from where Pereira wanted to put his new lot.
Residents are appealing the approval of the McWhorter Street lot in court, but they dug in to fight this one, too.
Experts testified for and against the proposed lot at a hearing last summer. Earlier this month, more people on both sides of the issue had their say.
They traded shots, but residents’ arguments against the plan eventually were more compelling. Parking lots, they said, stifle development and drive away opportunities for retail and housing.
Lisa Scorsolini said she moved to Newark, particularly the Ironbound, so she could walk to the deli and hair dresser, the restaurant and train station.
“This area has a potential for growth,’’ she said. “Surface parking lots do none of that. Commuters come in and they leave, leaving behind their trash, none of their dollars, and only harm to our city.’’
When daytime travelers are gone, residents said, the lots become isolated empty spaces that invite crime. Cars are vandalized and people get mugged.
David Robinson, an architect, brought pictures of several parking lots, with very few cars in them, to illustrate his point. “This is proof that no one uses the lots on weekends and at night,’’ he said.
What proved most convincing to the zoning board, however, is that parking lots are not permitted uses under the city’s zoning ordinances and its master plan.
Previously, property owners with plans for parking lots had no trouble gaining permission to open them. The zoning board routinely approved variances allowing these lots to exist in the Ironbound and downtown Newark.
The justification given to Ironbound residents was that their area is zoned industrial, not residential, and businesses they don’t like, such as a night club or lumberyard, could be approved.
Pereira was hoping the zoning board would side with him on the Bruen Street lot. But his supporters, including Makram Demian of Dayton, who owns the land in the Ironbound did not sway the board. They contended that Newark is developing, and businesses need parking for customers. And they disagreed about the potential for crime, saying parking attendants could report suspicious activity.
Fausto Simoes, the lawyer who represented Pereira, argued that a parking lot may not be ideal for his client’s property, but that it was unfair for residents to tell him how the land could or could not be utilized.
Good try, but it didn’t work.
The zoning board voted 7-0 to deny the variance, a departure from past rulings that ushered parking lots into the area. Pereira was disappointed, saying he doesn’t know what to do.
“It’s very small land,’’ he said. “There’s no space for nothing else.’’
Rosemarie Ruivo, a board member who represents the Ironbound, said Newark thrives when its people use the local business. “Not a parking lot.”
Zoning Board president Charles Auffant made it plain: The city’s new master plan does not permit parking lots.
“I’ve heard nothing that would make me believe that this application is anything but a detriment to the master plan,’’ he said.
Now, residents and East Ward Councilman Augusto Amador want Newark to follow other cities, which have development plans that support “transit villages,” creating areas where people live, shop and do business.
Amador said the goal – in an effort he hopes the administration will take the lead on – is to persuade parking lot owners to develop the land into housing and parking garages, with possible incentives from the city and state.
“We’re slowly losing against towns like Harrison, Jersey City, Hoboken to develop the area around Penn Station, so we can create the conditions to attract new people,’’ he said.
Newark has to pay attention. If not, the city will struggle to capitalize on its assets for a very long time.
Barry Carter: (973) 392-1827 orbcarter@starledger.com of nj.com/carter of follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL
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Stateline [Pew Charitable Trusts], Nov. 21, 2014
By Michael Ollove
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn.— For years, proposals to raise the minimum wage in Minnesota bogged down over economic concerns: Would a raise impel businesses to leave the state? Would it decrease employment? Would it touch off inflation?
The supporters’ main argument, that raising the minimum wage would put more money into the pockets of low-wage workers and their families, fell short.
This year, proponents seized on a new strategy: They convinced the legislature to ask the Minnesota Department of Health to analyze the health impact of the state’s minimum wage of $6.15 an hour, which is among the lowest in the country.
The department’s subsequent analysis revealed that health and income levels were inextricably linked. Whether it was rates of adequate prenatal care, infant mortality, diabetes, suicide risk, or lack of insurance, the results for poorer Minnesotans were vastly inferior to residents with higher incomes. In fact, Minnesotans living in the highest income areas of the Twin Cities region lived eight years longer than those living in the poorest.
The report virtually ended the debate. The legislature voted to phase in an increase in the minimum wage to $9.50—one of the highest in the country—with automatic subsequent increases indexed to the rate of inflation.
For at least a decade, most states have been focusing on reducing health disparities—the difference in health outcomes among different population groups, such as minorities and the poor. But Minnesota has become a model for other states by making it an overarching state priority, not only for the state’s health agency but for all departments, from economic development to transportation to housing.
Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, a national research and policy institute that tracks inequity in the United States, said, “It is truly extraordinary that a state would put a health in all policy areas front and center in this way.” As the size of minority populations in the U.S. becomes larger, she said it is essential that other states follow Minnesota’s lead.
The idea, which has gained traction among health policymakers across the nation, is that to improve population health, it is not enough to have a good health care delivery system. It’s also necessary to attack underlying social, economic and behavioral factors that contribute to poor health, such as deficient job opportunities, unsafe environmental conditions, crime, and lack of recreational outlets.
The minimum wage debate in Minnesota illustrated the power of that connection. Other states, including Kansas, Massachusetts and California, have employed similar analyses on such diverse matters as energy, domestic workers’ rights, and allowing more retailers to sell alcohol.
In the Minnesota minimum wage debate, the health argument proved decisive.
“That report created a powerful narrative for us, low-wage workers dying eight years before higher wage earners,” said Alexa Horwart of Isaiah, a faith-based organization in the forefront of the minimum wage fight.  “We thought we were going to win this year, but the question was how high would the new rate be and would it be indexed. The report had the most impact on those two things.”

‘Structural Racism’

By the time the Minnesota health department weighed in, no one could have been wholly surprised. Only weeks before, the agency had submitted to the legislature another sweeping report called “Advancing Health Equity in Minnesota.”
In it, the department said it was no longer enough for the state to attack health disparities on a disease by disease basis. The report argued that inequitable policies or practices in diverse areas such as transportation, housing, education and economic development also were damaging the health of disadvantaged groups and the population at large.
Some of those inequities, the report acknowledged, resulted from what it called “structural racism,” which it defined as “the normalization of historical cultural, institutional and interpersonal dynamics that routinely advantage white people while producing cumulative and chronic adverse outcomes of people of color and American Indians.”
The inclusion of those two words surprised many. “There are terms in the report that we haven’t heard before from state government,” said Melanie Plucinski of the American Indian Foundation.
As an example of “structural racism,” Jeanne Ayers, an assistant state health commissioner and co-author of the health equity report, pointed to the department’s radon elimination program, which has always been targeted toward homeowners, not renters. But while three-quarters of the white population in Minnesota own their own homes, less than a quarter of blacks do.
“The (health equity) report illuminated that health is more than what happens in the doctor’s office. It incorporates everything,” said Kris Rhodes, executive director of the American Indian Cancer Foundation, which is headquartered in Minneapolis. “It turned everything on its head in terms of what we think about health.”
Rhodes made that remark last week during a break at a meeting at St. Mary’s University of the Minnesota Health Partnership. The group, composed of dozens of community groups in the state, meets regularly with health department officials to discuss ways of achieving health equity and to monitor the department’s progress on that issue.

Some Skeptics

Jim Abeler, the ranking Republican on the Minnesota House Health and Human Services Committee, is less impressed. He said he believes the elimination of health disparities is essential, but he called the health equities report an attempt by the health department to distract attention from its poor record to date in shrinking disparities. “It’s one thing to say you care,” he said. “It’s another to actually do something about it.”
Abeler said he was also disgusted that the department would evoke racism as an underlying reason for health disparities. “I don’t think it’s a cause at all. It’s a dodge.”
By all measures, residents of Minnesota are among the nation’s healthiest, with comparatively low levels of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. The state also has a world-class health delivery system, anchored by the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.
Yet, according to Ayers, the assistant state health commissioner and co-author of the health equity report, “We are also doing among the worst in terms of our disparities, and the disparities are in the part of the population that is growing the fastest. We are on a downward trajectory.”
Aside from health disparities based on income differences, blacks (who make up 5.7 percent of the overall Minnesota population) and American Indians (1.3 percent) experience far worse health outcomes than whites in Minnesota. Asians (4.6 percent) and Hispanics (5 percent) also frequently lag behind.
For example, the death rate for Indians between 45 and 65 in Minnesota from 2007 to 2011 was 1,063 per 100,000, compared to 772 for blacks and 434 for whites. Between 2006 and 2010, the infant mortality rate for blacks was 9.8 per 1,000 births, 9.1 for Indians and 4.4 for whites. The same was true for many other health outcomes, from rates of breast cancer mortality, to HIV/AIDS, chlamydia, stroke and COPD mortality, adolescent obesity and adolescent suicide tendencies.
Almost all states have programs designed to close such gaps. Minnesota, for example, has targeted grants toward particular diseases or conditions in particular populations. It has dispersed grants to combat teen pregnancy, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and cancer among certain selected populations. Like many other states, Minnesota also established an Office of Minority Health.
But Ayers and her boss, Health Commissioner Ed Ehlinger, recognized that clinical care plays only a small part in determining one’s health. Lifestyle behaviors, the physical environment and social and economic factors together are much more important predictors of people’s health than the health care they receive.
“Health outcomes are a physical manifestation of the inequities in the opportunities to be healthy,” Ayers said.

Extended Impact

In Minnesota, the health equity argument has proved decisive in several instances, beyond the minimum wage debate:

• When the Twin Cities were planning a new light rail line between St. Paul and Minneapolis (eventually opened this year) the original plans called for widely spaced stops through predominately black, Somali and Hmong neighborhoods, which would have forced some residents to walk as much as a mile to get to a stop. With help from the Pew Charitable Trusts (which funds Stateline) and others, community organizers arranged for a health impact study of the entire project. It showed a number of troubling consequences for lower income residents, including less access to jobs and higher housing costs, all of which would result in worse health outcomes for those populations. The report helped forced changes in the plan to mitigate those ill effects.
• After the minimum wage passed, poorly paid subcontracting cleaning crews of Target, which is headquartered in Minnesota, marshaled the same health impact report to win concessions from the company to crack down on the contractors whose practices were injurious to subcontractor cleaning crews.
• Community groups, which successfully lobbied the legislature to pass a Ban the Box law in 2013, also incorporated health arguments in their presentations. The law prevents potential employers from asking job seekers on initial application forms if they had ever been arrested. Unemployment, the organizers pointed out, is closely tied to deteriorating health conditions.

The city of Minneapolis partnered with a nonprofit to begin a free bike-sharing program in 2010 with kiosks in downtown and affluent south Minneapolis. The city health department wanted poorer North Minneapolis to have access to the bikes as well to encourage exercise, but discovered a stumbling block. Although free, members had to register with a credit card, which poor people often don’t possess. City officials and the nonprofit are trying to figure out an alternative system.
 

NJEJA Request for Proposals
Strategic Planning Consulting Services
QUESTIONS and ANSWERS
1. Is this the first strategic plan of the N.J. Environmental
Justice Alliance, or is this an update to an existing plan?
This request for proposals will produce the first strategic plan of 
the Alliance. 
2. What promoted the Alliance to start a strategic planning 
process?
The Alliance conducted a retreat in September 2014 with the intent 
to develop a 3‐year strategic plan to guide the organization’s 
future.
3. While there are 33 members of the Alliance, how many of are 
considered to be “active” members?

There are 33 member organizations of the Alliance, of which the 
most active are the 8 members of the steering committee.
4. Why was the Alliance founded and does the Alliance consider 
the original founding principles of importance today?

The Alliance was founded to give the environmental justice 
community a greater voice in New Jersey. The founding principles 
are still important to the Alliance today.
5. What are the major sources of funding for the Alliance?
The major sources of funding for the Alliance are foundations and 
private entities.
6. What is estimated annual budget of the Alliance?
The estimated annual budget of the Alliance is $150,000.
7. What is the current legal structure of the Alliance?
The Alliance is a non‐profit organization that is seeking 501(c)3 
status. The League of Women Voters – New Jersey serves as the
fiscal agent for the Alliance.
8. How many full‐time staff members are there?
There are two full‐time staff members of the Alliance: a state 
director in Trenton, New Jersey and a community organizer in 
Newark, New Jersey.
9. What are the top two challenges facing the organization?
The top two challenges of the Alliance are attainment of 501(c)3 
status and growth in active membership.
10. What does the Alliance want to be known for?
The Alliance wants to be known as the ‘watchdog’ for 
environmental justice communities in New Jersey.
11. While the Alliance serves the whole state, are there 
jurisdictions in which the Alliance’s activities tend to be 
concentrated?
The Alliance is a statewide organization, however activities tend to 
be concentrated in Newark, New Jersey and Trenton, New Jersey.