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Interview with CHE Partner, Phil Brown, PhD
Professor of Sociology and Environmental Studies, Brown University
http://www.brown.edu/contestedillnesses Steve Heilig: What first brought you into environmental health work?
 I began my career studying mental health policy and the mental patients’ rights movement. During a two-year research leave in 1984-1986 at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, I was involved with the Program in Psychiatry and the Law. In our weekly meeting, psychiatrist Edwin Mikkelsen reported on his interviews for the lawsuit by Woburn families who were suing W.R. Grace Chemicals and Beatrice Foods for contaminating municipal water wells, leading to a large number of leukemia cases, mostly in children. The story went beyond medical interviews and exams, extending to a series of public health investigations prodded by local residents who had discovered this disease cluster.
Armed with a background from patients’ rights activism, I was ready to study toxic waste activism, which led me to write a book, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action.
With no history of activism or public health knowledge, the Woburn residents were amazing at educating and organizing themselves, putting Woburn alongside Love Canal as a key example of toxic waste organizing and of community-initiated research. I recalled then a book I read some years before, Adeline Levine’s Love Canal: Power, Politics, and People. I was amazed at Love Canal residents’ efforts to study environmental health effects and trace them to specific contaminants. My first impulse on reading Love Canal was to call this approach popular epidemiology, though at the time I knew of no other situations to which this applied. Looking at Woburn, I immediately understood that this concept could explain a new approach to environmental activism. In the process of writing the Woburn book, I found support from academics who were studying other communities facing toxic waste contamination, and from the burgeoning toxic waste movement.
It was exciting to be an environmental activist and activist-scholar living in the highly organized Boston area, where the National Toxics Campaign, Toxics Action Center (then called the Massachusetts Campaign to Clean up Hazardous Waste) and MassPIRG created a major center for toxic waste activism and environmental health concerns. I came to know many local movement groups through the annual Toxics Action Center conferences that brought together hundreds of people from toxic waste and other environmental groups around Massachusetts, and increasingly from around New England. The more I studied environmental health activism, the more I became involved with the groups I was studying, leading to participation with and collaborations with organizations like Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE) in Boston, West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT), Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow and Silent Spring Institute.
This background has enabled me to write my latest book, just out in June 2007: Toxic Exposures: Contested Illnesses and the Environmental Health Movement. (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/978023112/9780231129480.HTM)
What is the primary goal/mission of your work?
With my colleague, Rachel Morello-Frosch, I direct the Contested Illnesses Research Group (CIRG), which I established in 1999 with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson and the National Science Foundation. We have had a good number of faculty, graduate students, undergraduates doing many research projects and engaging in activism in the Boston and Rhode Island areas. We began by studying controversies over contested environmental illnesses, characterized by extensive public and scientific disputes over the causes and treatment of asthma, breast cancer, and Gulf War illnesses. We also studied toxics reduction approaches that could protect us from environmentally induced diseases. Stemming from this, we have also crafted a general approach for studying health social movements (HSMs), and written extensively about that. In particular, we have examined “embodied health movements,” which involve people’s direct experience with disease and chemical exposures, and how lay activists leverage that experience to challenge science on etiology, diagnosis, treatment and prevention. A second outgrowth of our work on HSMs was a research focus on coalitions among activist groups concerned about health and the environment, particularly between the labor and environmental movements. As an outgrowth of this project, we helped a Massachusetts-based coalition of labor and environmental groups evaluate their campaign to introduce environmentally-friendly cleaning products into the Boston public schools. The CIRG team generated a report used by these activists to help other communities adopt safer cleaning methods in public school systems.
More recently, our work on contested environmental illnesses and citizen-science alliances segued into a novel research collaboration among environmental health and justice activists, environmental scientists and social scientists. Two concurrent projects on linking breast cancer activism and environmental justice (funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and NSF) break new ground in both environmental health science and the social and ethical implications of such research. In the first project, we partner with Silent Spring Institute (the nation’s leading research center on women’s health and the environment) and Communities for a Better Environment (a major environmental justice group in California) to conduct environmental exposure assessments of what pollutants are found in home environments, a novel step to better characterize pathways of human exposure to environmental pollutants. This research follows a community-based participatory research approach, which means we collaborate with community members on the design and implementation of the study and report our findings back to participants and the community. Community activists have been trained to collect air and dust samples to assess indoor levels of pollutants, especially endocrine disruptors, which have been potentially linked to breast cancer, reproductive and neurological anomalies, and other health outcomes. A companion research project broaches the ethical issues associated with this novel science and practice of reporting environmental study results. As part of this work, we organize workshops and conferences on breast cancer, the environment and women of color. Most recently, we are also studying the spread of human biomonitoring, both by government agencies and scientific researchers, as well as activist groups, with a focus on scientific, ethical and public policy implications of this science.
With help from Dianne Quigley’s Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics in Environmental Health, the Collaborative Initiative for Research Ethics in Environmental Health the Contested Illnesses Research Group also helped originate the Providence Environmental Justice Education Forum, to create a regional environmental health and justice organization. In this process we work with activists on a variety of issues: seeking redress from municipal gas waste contamination, fighting school siting on contaminated land, pushing for state EJ guidelines on brownfields use and cleaning up a Superfund site. We also work with Toxics Action Center to increase its activity in Rhode Island. The PEJEF holds regular meetings where members cooperate and support one another in their campaigns and also to share knowledge and expertise about strategies and tactics they have employed when addressing environmental issues. We also run skill-building workshops for members. For example, we invited professional activists to discuss strategies for communicating with the media and have provided counsel on grant-writing. Two of our member groups, in fact, were awarded grants from the EPA’s Healthy Communities Program this year, and we are helping them design program components for these activities.
We also run the Community Outreach Core of Brown’s Superfund Basic Research Program, in which we partner directly with local toxics and environmental organizations, and teach our scientist colleagues about how to serve the interests of contaminated communities. As well, we coordinate the Social and Ethical Implications core of Brown nanotoxicology project, in which we teach nanoscience students and faculty how to think about nanotoxicity, new forms of regulation and precautionary approaches.
What have been the most significant obstacles and successes you have encountered and achieved in this work to date?
We’ve had a good number of successes, some of them mentioned above. We were very pleased to work with the Environmental Neighborhood Awareness Committee of Tiverton (ENACT) and state legislators to craft a bill, passed in July 2006, as the ECHO (Environmentally Compromised Home Opportunity) program. It makes $500,000 available, through Rhode Island Housing, making low-interest home improvement loans of up to $25,000 for homeowners with toxic contamination, since those families cannot get even small home equity loans for roof or furnace repairs. We are now working to expand this to refinancing of first mortgages, and to get other states to pass similar programs. By helping Toxics Action Center get foundation funding and to make connections with Rhode Island groups, we have helped to increase the overall level of environmental health and justice work in the state. In our work on breast cancer, the environment, and women of color, we are glad to see increasing attention to this fruitful, but long overdue, combination of interests. In working with the state’s Department of Environmental Management and Department of Health, we have helped create environmental justice protections for brownfields use. Overall, we are happy to play a role in what has been a clearly expanding environmental health and justice network in Rhode Island.
A general success is to highlight the contributions of social scientists to the environmental health movement. Working in a social science environment, as well as in many collaborations with environmental health professionals, I have been able to show how sociological approaches can help design, carry out and evaluate community-based participatory research. Environmental sociologists have a long legacy of working with, as well as studying, toxics activism and environmental justice organizing, and increasingly I see environmental health professionals appreciate those contributions.
A big obstacle for our whole movement is that there is not enough funding for environmental justice and community-based participatory research projects. Locally, we are hindered by corporate resistance to recognition and remediation of serious problems, such as Southern Union Gas (since bought by Keyspan), which contaminated an entire working-class neighborhood in Tiverton, and also by the slowness of government bureaucracies in pursuing polluters and remediating sites.
One institutional hurdle that makes it hard for academics to be active in movement-related science is the institutional review board structure. IRBs are largely unfamiliar with how to ethically review community-based participatory research, and require much education in order to get them to approve research and to provide IRB coverage for community partners. Another hurdle is helping junior scholars and students work in an institutional environment (especially pre-tenure) that is often unfriendly to engaged/public research, since the publication requirements and professional norms for getting jobs, promotions or tenure sometimes make it challenging terrain for younger researchers to navigate. I work hard to show people how to combine journal publication and community reports, and to find ways to write about community-engaged work for a professional academic audience.
What is the number one change you would like to see for the future of environmental health?
I’d like to see a new government that would reverse the anti-science and anti-regulatory climate of the Bush administration and put large funding into environmental protection, using precautionary approaches.
What or who continues to inspire you in your work?
Rachel Carson remains a beacon. I see her legacy in the work of CHE, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice and my wonderful colleagues at Silent Spring Institute and Communities for a Better Environment. The environmental justice movement gives me hope that we can have a broad and holistic environmental health and justice approach, and I am inspired by those groups I’ve been able to work with, like ACE and WEACT and CBE. The large network of activist-scholars in our environmental health movement give me a great reference group, as do my many colleagues in the American Sociological Association’s Environment and Technology Section who combine activism and scholarship.
Do you have any comments or suggestions regarding CHE itself?
CHE’s rapid development has been so valuable to people in all sectors, and it’s commendable to see how they can bring together so many people and groups. I would like to see CHE reach out specifically to youth environmental groups and EJ groups, prepare curriculum for high school and college and grad courses, and continue to pull in and help mentor graduate students in the wide-range of disciplines that have something to contribute to this movement.
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Posted: 27 August 2007
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