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Toxic Tours

Talking about pollution problems and how to solve them is one thing. Seeing them up close and personal is quite another.

That’s why the nonprofit group Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) has started giving what it calls “toxic tours” of Los Angeles neighborhoods plagued by pollution from smokestacks, chrome-plating factories, construction debris, transportation and other industries. The free tours are popular among policy makers, lawyers and students who want to see firsthand how poor, minority populations are disproportionately affected by dirty air, chemical leaks and a host of filthy emissions.

Working on the theory that seeing is believing, and that once people see a problem in person they are more likely to act upon it, CBE and similar groups around the country have stopped waiting for solutions and started taking those who are able to provide them straight to the source of the problem.

Rick Loya, a Huntington Park (CA) city councilman, took the tour to see environmental damage caused by the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Touring the site of a mountain of concrete debris caused by freeway damage landed him in the hospital after breathing airborne debris caused one of his lungs to collapse. It also motivated him to fight for proper clean up of the area.

Perhaps if more of us toured local environmental damage, and encouraged our elected representatives to do so, we’d see a lot more progress toward improving the environment in which we live.

For more information about this story, click here. 

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org