|
|
|
Interview with CHE Partner, Neil Gendel, JD
Director, Healthy Children Organizing Project, Consumer Action  Steve Heilig: What first brought you into the environmental health movement?
I started down this path in 1974 as co-counsel in a law suit filed against Shell Oil because its refinery was polluting the surrounding Martinez, California neighborhood. In the mid-1980’s I worked as a volunteer for local groups concerned about environmental impact reports regarding the pollutants in San Francisco located developments. In addition, I chaired the City’s advisory committee working on San Francisco’s hazardous materials and wastes plan for the next ten years.
I became totally committed to the environmental health movement when I stopped practicing law and I started the Healthy Children Organizing Project (HCOP) to protect children from lead poisoning in a City literally painted with lead.
What is the primary mission of your organization?
HCOP is dedicated to protecting children and fetuses in San Francisco’s many low income communities, and their mothers and mothers-to-be of course, from exposures to the toxic chemicals in their indoor environments, both public and private—homes, schools, child care, workplaces and more.
What have been the most significant obstacles and successes you have encountered and achieved in this work to date?
Our major strategies are:
- educating low income caregivers through ethnic and language-appropriate family and children service providers in their communities about protecting children and themselves from exposures to toxic chemicals, and
- making their indoor environments toxin-safe.
The significant obstacles/challenges we meet include the fact that:
- many families and their service providers are overwhelmed with surviving from day-to-day and have little attention left for practicing prevention of any kind;
- the school district and public housing authority are under-funded and poorly managed;
- “environmentally healthy” affordable housing is not a high priority – yet;
- there is no effective “delivery system” for reaching low income caregivers with the information they need to know about the links between environmental hazards and diseases and disabilities and actions they can take to prevent exposures indoors to those hazards; and
- the main focus of most environmental justice advocates is still on the outdoor environment.
A few of our significant successes, with the help of many others, include:
- making childhood lead poisoning a household word in low-income communities throughout the City and seeing the incidence of blood lead poisoning drop significantly;
- working with landlords, tenants, unions, city agencies and other stakeholders in 1996 to prohibit unsafe work practices when disturbing paint for any reason on pre 1979 buildings in the City, long before similar efforts existed elsewhere in the US;
- implementing the Precautionary Principle by helping to pass legislation requiring City agencies to purchase environmentally preferable products; and much more throughout the past 15 years as we develop a model for making multi-lingual and ethnic low-income communities in a sizable urban city environmentally healthy.
What is the number one change you would like to see for the future of environmental health?
The creation of the sustainable consumer and business demand needed to convince toxic chemical makers and users that it is their interest to manufacture and sell environmentally healthy products.
What or who continues to inspire you in your work?
I am inspired by San Francisco’s low-income children, the incredible, collaborative family and children service providers helping those children succeed against very difficult odds, the many CHE members who are making my work possible, and many wonderful collaborators without whom I could not succeed in my work.
Do you have any comments/suggestions regarding CHE itself?
CHE’s leadership is doing a great job executing its plan to bring us together to share information about the links between environmental exposures to diseases and disabilities and facilitate efforts to improve environmental health. Thank you!
I have two suggestions for future CHE efforts.
- We have a great need for developing an effective behavior-changing information “delivery system” to provide low-income caregivers with the knowledge they need to protect themselves and their children and fetuses from exposures to toxic chemicals in their homes and other indoor environments. This “delivery system” has several phases, beginning with translating CHE Partner research findings into plain language that will teach caregivers how to “fish” and make reasonably well-informed decisions about how best to protect themselves and their children from these exposures.
Community-based family and children service providers can be trained to provide this knowledge in the appropriate language and cultural settings as part of their services to caregivers who seek their help and trust them. Community education means education by the community. In turn, these caregivers and service providers will help create the sustainable demand needed to make real and lasting change in their communities’ environmental health and the way companies and property owners do business in their communities. Anything CHE Partners can do to help in this process would be greatly appreciated by HCOP and many others operating at the “retail” level in low-income communities throughout the country.
- We need the help of CHE Partners in shining the light on the need to make all of our indoor environments healthy for fetuses and young children, along with the continuing efforts to clean up the outdoor environment. Indoor environments can often be more toxic than outdoor environments, especially for young children. In this regard, while we can educate caregivers and we can try to regulate indoor as well as outdoor pollution, we can’t create the healthy environments needed for everyone until we engage with those who control the condition of our environment, both public and private. We need environmentally healthy places to live, learn, work and play, and we need them now!
Below are the two articles by Peter Montague. He does a great job describing, from the perspective of a local community advocate, the need to organize a sustainable, nationwide, grass roots movement for change to be successful in all of our efforts to protect children and adults from exposures to toxins in our environment.
Can State Policy Campaigns Bring Lasting Reform?
Rachel Newsletter #864
So, can citizens pass state-level laws and maintain them in the face of federal preemption? Yes, definitely, but it will very likely take more than just state-level campaigns. If history is any guide, we'll also have to organize ourselves sufficiently at the grass-roots level nationwide with the aim of overcoming corporate influence ($) and power. Daunting? Yes. Impossible? Not on your life. One thing's sure: it can't happen if it isn't firmly established as a goal. Continue reading...
Why Do We Poison Our Children?
Rachel Newsletter #865
But if history is any guide, the permanent government is NOT moved by mere facts or mere multi-billion-dollar savings offered by pollution prevention. For some reason (which each of us can decide for himself or herself), the permanent government calculates that someone or something important is better-off when large numbers of children are poisoned each year, even at considerable cost to GDP.
If this is the case, then campaigns built around "more information" and "more effective messaging" -- without intentionally building the infrastructure to support and sustain a grass-roots movement for change -- are likely to have quite limited success, are they not? Continue reading...
Thanks for the opportunity to share some thoughts with all of you. Top
Posted: 12 October 2006
|
