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Writer shares troubling story about invisible threat impacting neighborhood where she grew up: 'We lived in the shadow'
Growing up, writer Reniqua Allen-Lamphere worried about gun violence. But as an adult, she's realized that the biggest danger to her childhood was invisible — but no less dangerous.
Allen-Lamphere shared her story in The Guardian. Growing up in a peaceful community in Englewood, New Jersey, she spent most afternoons playing in a local park, where she would splash in the brook and enjoy the sunshine. But just beyond, the threat lurked.
"We lived in the shadow of factories bordering our beloved park," she explained. "Companies such as the LeDoux Corporation, a chemical testing company that had worked on everything from the Manhattan Project to the moon landing, were just steps from the swings."
And as more people began to suffer from seemingly unrelated, mysterious health issues — from endometriosis to diabetes — people began to wonder if those factories had something to do with them.
One family friend of Allen-Lamphere's shared: "As kids, we always played in the brook and thought it was fun when the water changed colors and stained our hands. … Our neighborhood smelled like rotten eggs every day when we came home from school, which I now know was the smell of sulfur. I can only imagine the toxins we were exposed to."
Nowadays, scientists have a better idea of the links between environmental pollution and health. Air pollution is now known to be linked with a plethora of issues, from respiratory illness to dementia, certain cancers, and cardiovascular issues, per the National Institute of Environmental Health.
But Allen-Lamphere had personally suffered from severe menstrual pain and endometriosis, and a recent study from Human Rights Watch found that this, too, may have been exacerbated by the pollution.
Researchers found links between air pollution and gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, and fibroids. And other common toxins and contaminants, including heavy metals and industrial chemicals, have been linked with infertility and endocrine disruption, leading to pregnancy complications.
And unfortunately, people of color are disproportionately affected by this. Black people are 75% more likely to live within close range of industrial facilities, meaning that the air they breathe is, on average, 38% more polluted than the air in majority-white communities, per the Climate Reality Project.
Researchers are looking into ways to reduce air pollution while simultaneously contributing to a greener future. From a team looking to convert methane into airplane fuel to another team reverse-engineering real dairy butter out of air-based carbon molecules, the potential solutions are vast and varied.
But at its root, reducing air pollution means reducing it at the source and decreasing the amount of toxins and emissions generated in the first place. Both governmental regulations — such as the EPA's recent closing of loopholes on highly polluting steel plants — and initiatives by corporations, like transitioning shipping fleets to clean fuels, will be necessary for this. And as a citizen and a consumer, you can use your voting power and your money to contribute your own power to this effort.
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