Fresh Takes: Putting Down Roots
- Endowment for Health
- Jul 1, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
Summer 2024
Melina Hill Walker: A More Equitable Future
In a Manchester neighborhood, children live in housing with lead paint, with poor air quality, with ancient pipes. Cars race down the two-lane, one-way ‘neighborhood highway,’ making the walk to school unsafe. Their neighborhood lacks tree cover: in summer, it’s hotter there than in leafier parts of town, and the children don’t have access to space where they can safely take their shoes off and feel the grass beneath their feet.
The environment these children live in is so different from the pastoral mountains, lakes, and forests of New Hampshire's image.
People in low-income communities, communities of color, and people with limited English proficiency often suffer first, and worst, from climate and environmental perils. New Hampshire is no exception to this unfair environmental burden, and many New Hampshire communities lack resources to help prevent negative environmental impact, build resilience, and improve quality of life. And environmental hazards do not only affect children in Manchester, nor do they only affect cities. For-profit companies are more likely to place landfills – and all their associated dangers – in rural, low-income communities. Water pollution affects fish spawning grounds in the White Mountains and in coastal estuaries.
"Environmental justice” is the condition of fair, equitable access to environmental benefits – like clean air and water, safe housing, shady streets, and green places to play – and freedom from the burdens of an unhealthy environment. In New Hampshire, a growing movement is working to ensure that everyone – regardless of race, income, or social status – has access to a healthy environment.
Communities are organizing, building power, and putting down deep roots of self-determination. In Manchester, communities are tackling unsafe street designs in the urban core and working with the city on an urban forestry program so that everyone can share the benefits of trees and green spaces. Nashua communities have organized to fight the placement of an asphalt plant in a residential neighborhood, which would cause noise and air pollution and increase traffic tenfold on residential streets. In the Upper Valley, church communities frequently provide food programs for elders and for residents in rural areas affected by flooding.
Ensuring environmental justice for our New Hampshire community requires collaboration, dedication, and resources. As a statewide funder concerned with health and well-being, the Endowment is committed to working with communities and organizations across the state that are identifying problems and finding solutions within their communities and neighborhoods. At virtual monthly Environmental Justice Roundtables – organized by members of the Conservation Law Foundation, New England Grassroots Environment Fund, University of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and the Endowment for Health, among others – participants from across the state come together to learn from each other, share resources, and work collectively to build a statewide environmental justice movement.
Together, we are working to ensure a sustainable, equitable, and just future for generations of Granite Staters to come. Together, we can secure New Hampshire’s future as a beautiful and welcoming state, a state where everyone has an equitable share of environmental benefits, where streets are shady during a hot summer, where families in Colebrook and families in Manchester can breathe clean air. Together, we are working towards a state where all children can go outside and feel the grass between their toes.
Streets devoid of trees are almost 15 degrees warmer than their leafier counterparts. Through community advocacy and with the help of CLF, the city of Manchester received a $2.2 million USDA grant to launch an urban forestry program. In the next five years, more than 500 trees will be planted and nurtured in city center neighborhoods.
Determinants of Justice: Building an EJ Movement in New Hampshire
North of Beech Street, in one of Manchester’s more affluent neighborhoods, a city pilot project took a two-lane, one-way street – a too-fast ‘neighborhood highway’ – down to one lane with a bike path. As a result, traffic slowed. Accidents decreased. The neighborhood is quieter. South of Beech Street, in the less-affluent neighborhood, no changes have been made to address the noisy, accident-prone neighborhood highway.
Now, residents are demanding better. The Manchester Community EJ Advisory Group is working to address the environmental challenges of the Queen City, and this place-based, community-led model is creating promising solutions. Across the state, Granite Staters are organizing in the pursuit of environmental justice and addressing the issue at monthly “Environmental Justice Roundtables.”
When Marina Vaz, Nashua-based Environmental Justice Community Advocate with the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) talks about “Environmental Justice” (EJ) she’s talking about the immediate impact of people’s surroundings on their life and health. She’s talking about access to green space, clean air and water, costs of energy and food and housing, and safer streets.
“Injustice determines everything,” adds Arnold Mikolo, Manchester EJ Community Advocate with CLF. Both Mikolo and Vaz point to certain neighborhoods bearing the burden of bad planning. These are neighborhoods devoid of trees, where concrete shimmers in the heat. It is houses painted with lead-based paint, and “neighborhood highways” where cars speed through residential areas. One of these neighborhoods is city-center Manchester, where rates of asthma, occurrence of lead paint, cost of housing, and poverty level all rank in the high-90th percentile of anywhere in the United States.
Mikolo and Vaz work with community members who are addressing EJ concerns in their communities, ensuring that residents have the resources to name challenges and identify solutions. In the summer of 2023, CLF, Granite State Organizing Project (GSOP) and Plan New Hampshire held community meetings to address the lack of safety for residents in this neighborhood. The report that came from those meetings calls for reducing two-lane streets to one-lane roadways, adding bike lanes, increasing accessibility to sidewalks, and planting trees to create shade and green spaces.
That community advocacy is helping grow an EJ movement in New Hampshire. This movement seeks to correct injustices caused by decades of poor city planning and redlining, injustices built on foundations of systemic racism.
Over in Nashua, community advocates are battling a proposed asphalt plant that would be located in a largely low-income, residential neighborhood. “An asphalt producing plant would spew dangerous chemicals through our downtown,” one resident said, “contaminating our homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship.” He adds: “They can’t take our air.”
Sarah Jane Knoy, Executive Director of the Granite State Organizing Project, said that even a state-of-the-art plant couldn’t reduce the impact of hundreds of trucks per day driving through a residential neighborhood. The increase in traffic, air pollution, and fallout from trucks, she said, would be catastrophic for the neighborhood.
The affected neighborhood also has a large population of immigrants, and language barriers can limit residents’ capacity to advocate for themselves. In areas where linguistic isolation is high, Mikolo notes, many residents don’t have the luxury of calling their elected officials and having their voices heard.
Residents of affected neighborhoods “need to have a full understanding of the process in their language of choice,” says Vaz. To that end, CLF and GSOP worked with the city to provide multi-language translation for the meetings where the asphalt plant was discussed. Now, the two organizations are working on a language access campaign to ensure that everyone has their voices heard in city meetings.
Advocates statewide stress the need for policies that ensure equitable health outcomes for everyone. Tom Irwin, a vice president at CLF, notes that an EJ law would help protect communities experiencing disproportionate environmental harm. Right now, he says, New Hampshire doesn’t have a law that requires the consideration of cumulative impacts – the recognition that any one source of pollution doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The work in Nashua is one example of how an EJ law would benefit residents. A cumulative impacts law, he explains, would mean that “when the developer of the asphalt plant seeks an air permit from state, the state takes into account not just the facility itself, but other sources of pollution like truck traffic, noise, heat, and chemical pollution.” But where the rubber meets the road – decisions by regulators whether to approve projects — the state, he says, currently has no authority to consider impacts holistically.
For now, it’s up to individuals and organizations to create change in New Hampshire. The monthly Environmental Justice Roundtables – organized by members of CLF, New England Grassroots Environment Fund, University of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and the Endowment for Health, among others – allow participants to learn from each other, share resources, and work collectively to build an environmental justice movement across the state. That includes rural and urban areas, from the seacoast to the Upper Valley to the mountains.
Irwin, Mikolo and Vaz are all inspired by how committed people are to the project of environmental justice, and how powerful community self-determination and public involvement can be. There are basic rights, said Vaz, that every person deserves. “Access to a healthy environment – access to green space, and to a good quality of life – those things shouldn't be barred from anyone.”