good evening i'm a fan stat for science for the public and i welcome you to the third science civic media literacy series it's a joint project of science for the public in the belmont public library  and the media center and let me praise to begin with mary carter where she go there she is the librarian who has been so important in all of this so this work so closely with us for the series tonight our guest is windy jacobs of harvard law school and professor jacobs is the emmet clinical professor of environmental law and director of the harvard law school the the environmental law and policy clinic there she's also on the faculty of the harvard chance school of public health and the center for health and global environment there and she's a special advisor to the harvard law school dean on learning and practice and she is also a member of the american college of environmental lawyers and the list goes on and on so i refer you to her website which is quite an extensive list and professor jacobs received her j d with honors from harvard law school and then she became an editor she was an editor there of the harvard law review then she followed that with a career and amazing career and which included the department of justice and then private law and then in a boston law firm prominent boston law firm and she could have relaxed at some point but in two thousand and seven back to harvey to set up and direct the environmental law and policy clinic a very innovative place indeed for training law students and for dealing with environmental problems she is going to tell us about this innovative training ground for students of environmental and energy law and again there's a great deal of information on the website so on our event page for this and for the handouts as well there is plenty of information her concern tonight is to help us understand how we can use the law to protect the environment and clearly the need is quite urgent at this time when protections of the environment are being abandoned and scientific evidence and efforts are under attack professor jacobs is providing both advice and resources so we can develop the defective strategies in the public and she is especially concerned to answer your questions so we will be  having time for q and a right after this and we are in the meanwhile very honored to welcome wendy jacobs only introduction it's really a pleasure to be here good evening so iran asked me to tell you a bit about my background in the work i do to set the context for our discussion tonight about how ordinary people can use science and the law to protect the environment so she gave you a wonderful introduction but i'm going to go back a little bit farther and tell you that my professional interest in environmental law began in my second year of law school way back the reason my list on  resume as long as i'm old so my second year law school was back in one nine hundred seventy nine and i did not go to law school to protect the environment i wasn't very conscious of the environment you know we had had earth day and i didn't litter but i really went to law school to practice international law but my second year of law school i learned about love canal new york and i don't know if any of you some of your way too young to know about love canal and i don't know if anyone else remembers it but it was a hugely polluted community in upstate new york not too far from niagara falls somebody recognizes it what had happened was her chemical and other chemical companies had operated in this area and head as many industries did way back when dumped their liquid and solid pollutants into pons outside of their operating facilities when they decided to relocate they simply covered over those plans and a community was built on top of these ponds people who moved to this community did not know that their homes schools and parks were built on this legacy of very serious contamination their children started coming home from playing outside with fluorescent sneakers which was the first clue it's like where are their shower their sneakers turning fluorescent clusters of terrible cancers began to develop and a few of the women in the community decided to take matters into their own hands so this is the type of citizen led advocacy that has inspired me for my entire career so a number of women in the community it's a fabulous story if you ever have time to to look it up but they actually they tried over and over and over to get attention from the federal government the state government and their local government they weren't able to do it you know back then women weren't taken seriously and offer all sorts of reasons they had great difficulty getting an effective response to this horrible situation from the government so at one point they manage to get some federal regulators there and they held them hostage the women took these government officials literally hostage and so now it burst out into you know the media and congress got involved and because of the efforts of these of this community and these women the citizen led advocacy group the superfund statute was passed at the very end of one nine hundred eighty and the superfund statute is designed to both create a fund and a mechanism for addressing these heavily polluted sites where there is no entity still there to take  decided that i wanted nothing more than to most of my classmates were going to clerk for judges i was so anxious to go out and begin practicing law and i wanted to develop the law under this statute because when a statute is passed you know it takes a long time before cases reach the courts before regulations are promulgated by the agencies so it's a long process before you actually see the impact or experience the impact of a new statute and that's what i wanted to do so i went to the department of justice which was the only place back then you could practice environmental law and back then now the division i was ian is called the environment division but back then it was called the division of land and natural resources so we had many sections in that group all of which were devoted to either prosecuting laws or defending the government against actions that that it had taken so i spent a number several years at the department of justice and i had no background at all in science but i understood that i could not practice environmental law without understanding its relationship to science and public health so on the job i had to start learning a lot about science and public health but i have no training no formal training so i'm here to tell you we can do it without being scientists ourselves i had a marvelous time in the department of justice a story for another day i did a lot of very important work because the government is a great place for young lawyers to go and be do important things because the government is always under resourced so i had an amazing experience then took a very short break and went to seattle washington to learn to be a trial attorney so i did commercial indication and first amendment litigation but my heart was really an environmental law and i was very anxious to resume a practice in environmental laws so i came back to boston and i joined the law firm foley hallway and was there for about twenty years most of them as a partner where i worked exclusively on environmental land use an energy projects and again that experience informed my own understanding that lawyers can not do effective work in this area without the benefit of other experts weighing in whether they're scientists doctors engineers economists technologists we need their help lawyers do not work effectively in a vacuum i had another very early appear fanie at the law firm i was representing the city of cambridge which was an early advocate for reducing its impact on the environment so i was tasked by the city of cambridge to develop a vehicle trip reduction ordinance a law that would restrict people from coming driving in and out of cambridge basically because they wanted to hop on t to go to jobs in boston but in so doing they were polluting the air in cambridge and causing congestion in the streets of cambridge we wanted to get police out of their cars and to buy which they vehemently protested back in the day but now they seem to love doing so we got police off there out of their cars and on to buy created bike paths we reduce the number of parking spaces available is a very complex ordinance and i had to testify about the ordinance to the city council in cambridge most of the city councillors are not lawyers and the mayor at that time was not a lawyer so here was my pitch any i'm testifying about this ordinance and the complex relationship between transportation policy and the clean air act and the clean air act as one of the most of two several environmental statutes on the books and i i'm making you know presenting my testimony and at the end of it the mayor said to me i just want you to know you are the first lawyer i've ever had to listen to and i understood and the epiphany he for me was wow it really is important that we translate kime plex sort of mystical legal jargon into plain english for people and that was the lesson i took with me so now we fast forward a decade to two thousand and seven when i was invited to create the first ever environmental law and policy clinic at harvard law school i had a three pronged mission for this clinic the first pron mission was to teach law students not only how to practice law but how to translate these mysterious legal concepts into plain english so that they could make their analyses accessible to ordinary people and you know it's kind of funny because last students come to law school speaking english they leave speaking legally is and it's really hard for them to learn to speak english again and to write in english that my second goal was to teach students how to work in collaborative multi disciplinary teams in order to solve problems because again a lot of lawyers think that they're the be all and end all and we're not we're not  sometimes where the lead player in a project but most of the time we really need to be in the background supporting others the third point that i wanted to emphasize for my clinic and goal for my clinic was that harvard attracts the best in the brightest yale might disagree but you know i would say harvard gets the best and the brightest students and i thought i'm not going to waste that brainpower let's take on not routine matters but v a thorniest the hardest the most challenging problems of our day we will try to tackle in this clinic and make it try to solve problems that will help ordinary citizens that will help the environmental community the nongovernmental organizations that dedicate themselves to this work but are under resourced and to help and to help  federal state and local governments so that's what we do in the clinic and i thought i would give you a couple of examples to make it concrete you may know about or you may have heard of hydraulic fracturing so this is a way of extracting oil and gas from very deep beneath the ground surface so that we can continue to burn fossil fuels our brilliant engineers came up with a mechanism for drilling vertically and then horizontally to get to material that previously was not accessible well this fracking took off very quickly in the mid two thousand and it was causing a lot of property damage a lot of personal injuries and god only knows how much natural resource damage was resulting from fracking but a lot of people realized they could make a lot of money by renting their property out to the frac years so i thought ok they're doing this but they don't understand the consequences to their own health to the environment of doing this it's not my place to say you can't you shouldn't be using your property for this purpose but i thought it is my place to say if you're going to do this let's be sure you understand what you're getting into and be sure that you build the inappropriate protections in your agreement because you're an ordinary property owner if you're considering doing this it probably means you don't have the luxury of a lot of money in the first place so you probably don't have a good legal team the gas companies have very sophisticated lawyers so that the balance is very skewed so in the clinical i had our students first do very careful legal research and write traditional legal memos about these issues and then we translated them into a very simple handy dandy guy for property owners who are considering leasing their property to gas companies for hydraulic fracturing and our guide walks them through what it means what kind of equipment the use what kind of impacts can result to the environment to their property to public health and what kinds of mechanisms they could insist on in their leases to protect themselves down the road i'll tell you something fairly shocking which is people who are very unsophisticated signed these agreements without understanding them and the agreements are have some shocking provisions such as the sign or the property owner a green is not to share any information about the fracking activity whatsoever even to his or her own doctor they signed confidentiality clauses that have that turned out to have prevented doctors from being able to treat people who are sick as a result of these activities so we in our god alert people to this practice and say look here are and i'm not going to bore you with all the details but here are a list of things that you should be insisting on if you're going to enter into one of these leases so that's the kind of work we do and another example of the work we do is in the last ten to fifteen years more and more cities and towns have come to understand that they not only have to make efforts to mitigate their own impact on the environment and particularly on climate change but they need to figure out how to adapt and how are they going to pay to adapt their communities you know boston has considered for example massive seawalls well who's going to pay for those sea walls what's going to happen when the buildings that are built right on the waterfront are drowning are sinking into the water and the property owners disappear who's going to take care of those buildings who's going to protect people from the degradation of those buildings all sorts of issues are being confronted for cities and towns are confronting all of these issues so we have helped a number of them by preparing white papers and tool kits to help them think about what are the easy legal mechanisms available to them what are the more difficult legal mechanisms to attain and then what are they really have to coordinate with the state and federal governments to do and what are some of the policies out there that either impede or help their their efforts and where do they find money to do the work they have to do so we've done kits like that for newness apologies and for and for some state governments actually as well and of course most recently since the election in two thousand and sixteen we have been inundated with requests for help fighting back on the trump administration's attacks on science attacks on the environment attacks on our national monuments so we're very very very busy originally it was for us not for everybody in the country but for us it in my clinic it was very depressing the results of the election we moped around for a few months and then i realized you now there's always a silver lining and the silver lining here is that we get to think about innovative strategies for solving problems that we never had to think about before because the problems point there before so it's actually been a fabulous pedagogical experience you know in retrospect i wish you know the election to come out differently i do but we're you know we got to play the hand we're dealt so this has been an incredible opportunity for us to deploy very innovative strategies to fight back so if we were actually having some fun along the way the university harvard university began to think about its own impact on the environment or a big university we have a lot of real estate we have a lot of laboratories we have a lot of dormitories we have an enormous impact on the local environment so the university began to think about what can it do to reduce its own impact and i sat on a number of the committees that the president of the university convened and as i listened and thought and brainstormed about things the university could do it occurred to me that one of the best things we could do is bring  together students from across the campus from the business school the policy school the school of public health engineering design law and faculty from these schools to work together to design projects that the university could sponsor to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to serve underserved populations and take the credit you know assign those offset credits to its own portfolio so and i and i realized at the time that it's not just universities that want to do this but there are many four and nonprofit organizations that have set very aggressive goals for themselves can't meet their goals on their own property as you know we can't shut down the labs and tell the students to go home so we can never become zero  emitters but we want to make a real difference so we can make that difference off of our own properties create these were duction zz somewhere else and then take the credit for them which is the way the offset markets work so i propose this course and for the last time i'm moving into the third year now of teaching this course called the climate solutions living lab and it's been a fabulous experience the students just love working with each other learning about each other's disciplines and developing projects that we fully intend to try to bring to fruition so i'll just give you one example and i always try to focus on underserved or low income communities so puerto rico devastated by two hurricanes in a row and we do very little on our and to help there are communities rural communities in the mountains that have still not recovered their electricity and when you lose electricity in these places you lose clean drinking water supplies because you need electricity to pump the water and treat the water so there are communities that almost a year later still have no electricity and no clean reliable clean drinking water supply so i tasked a group of students to find a solution and the solution had to be based on renewable energy they had to use that because puerto rico historically was fueled by the utility ran on fossil fuels so i said no more your idea has to be somebody will invest in creating renewable energy for these communities and create a steady reliable stream of clean drinking water but you have to do it with renewables so this team of students came up with a brilliant idea they did their research and you know we needed an engineer to help figure this out they found in one of the communities that there were some old hydroelectric dams that had not been maintained over the years that word degraded but still existing and they said aha one idea would be to rehabilitate these hydroelectric dams we're not creating new pollution because we're not doing any new flooding you know creating  reactivating these facilities and by doing so they could not only power the communities in the immediate area but they could sell extra electricity to other communities to help pay to put the transmission lines underground so that in the next hurricane they won't lose power and they'd be able to supply a clean steady energy drinking water supply brilliant idea and we're now in the process of trying to figure out how to get the fun because it's always the money in the money is our quiz the problem so we're trying to figure out where do we get the money to make this project happen and there are actually a couple of my colleagues are in puerto rico today in meetings with people to try to set up a cooperative they could tap into some federal funds to help make this a reality i have lots of other examples from the class but that's the kind of work that we do it's in it's creative it's unusual and it's a lot of fun so and it reflects my interest in bringing professional disciplines together to solve problems and to help ordinary people use science and the law affectively to protect their communities and the environment more broadly so that brings us to the focus of tonight's discussion which is overcoming the paralysis and despair that we often feel about the environmental situation today and it's not just climate change it's the attacks on our national monuments the attacks on science the rollback of protections under many of our environmental standards and statutes and where what i want to leave you with tonight are some practical steps that anyone can take whether it's as an individual or in a group to protect your community and the environment so you see so this is what i often hear about the paralysis people will say to me well you know i can't really do anything about these problems my behavior is too trivial to be of any real consequence climate change is a gigantic global problem there's nothing i can do about it it's really depressing or i hear well i'm not a scientist i'm not a lawyer i'm not an expert an environmental contamination can really only be understood in addressed by these experts so i don't see a role for myself or i hear people say i don't have any influence on the government it's way too big and unwieldy to listen to me or act on my concerns and demands so i'm kind of helpless here or i hear i'm worried about pollution i'm really worried about my ear or water and soil and i'm really worried about climate change but i don't have a clue what to do about it so i want to sympathize first of all because i feel that way sometimes too that is sure one person alone is not going to undo climate change or undo the pollution that's out there but each of us if we work together can do it so if you just think about yeah i'm one person i can't do it but if i get ten million or one hundred million or a billion other people to do it then we've made an enormous difference so it really does start with one individual and i wanted to offer now for you good with this little blip or think ok i want to offer five easy ways to begin and the first one is to vote it's really easy but in fact not enough people vote that's why we have the president we have you know environmental protection is local it's state it's federal and it's international we have to vote at all of these levels and we don't vote internationally but we do in the sense that when we vote senators in there are the ones who write our international treaties so if we don't get out and vote and if we don't push our friends and family and colleagues to vote to forget it go home and stay in bed so yvonne asked me to think about well you know we all vote and we have this president and this president pruitt to run the department of the interior in the environmental protection agency and some people think they're utterly incompetent how can the president appoint these incompetent people well the president has legal authority under our constitution to appoint anybody he wants to these positions yes our congress reviews appoint certain appointments not all of his appointments but those to the cabinet as these two are get reviewed but you know there has to be something really really really major for an appointment to be turned down by congress so it's not unusual even if we'd had a democratic congress well i don't know what the outcome would have been but  there's nothing on lawful about president trump appointing people we think are despicable to run these agencies he's allowed to do that the only way we can undo it is to vote these guys out we have to vote the trump administration and we have to vote out the senators and congress people who approve these nominations so voting is hugely important and the second thing that's hugely important is we each have a lot of power in our pocketbooks right that every day we're making purchasing decisions and when we make decisions carelessly we're subsidizing the fossil fuel industry so for example if you're constantly running your heat and your air conditioning and you're not home you're subsidizing the fossil fuel industry even massachusetts runs on gas used to run on co we run on gas i used to represent some of those coal stations and they were great people but it's not a great product so we have to use our purchasing power and we have to use it wisely if more of us demanded that our utilities supplied us with renewable energy it would happen we may have to pay more for it initially but it would happen we don't make those demands and they don't make it easy for us to make those demands  if more of us demanded electric cars the industry would produce more electric cars more cheaply but not enough of us make these demands so we each need to be thinking about what we're purchasing where we're sending our dollars and how we can redeploy our money to get what we need but in different ways and we have to apply peer pressure to everyone around us i've done a lot of reading of the social literature behavioral economics literature and it turns out that education is not a determine in behavior change we can teach climate change till we're blue in the face and if your peers deny it you are lightly to deny it no matter what you learn in school and of course in some states now the legislators are trying to passed laws that would prevent from even teaching about climate change so it but it turns out that you know because i often wonder why are so many smart people denying climate change why are they skeptical there's no dispute among the scientists so where do we get this idea that there's a dispute and there are two problems one is the media the media always things they have to do balanced reporting but you can't do balanced reporting if there is no balance in the facts so the me part of the problem because ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of scientists say there is no dispute there is no question but that we human beings are contributing to climate change and climate change is happening all around us so there really no basis for skepticism or dispute but it happens in large part because of peer pressure so we need so there's your second my second piece of advice is use your purchasing power and apply peer pressure my third is become part of the government there are lots and lots of ways in any community to join local governmental organisations there are conservation commissions there are advisor boards of appeal there are a lot boards of health there are lots of organisations in local government that are staffed by volunteers do it and encourage your friends to do it because this is where you can not only have an immediate impact on your own community but you can learn more and experience more about how government works and take advantage of that knowledge it would be a great thing for students to do young people should be joining these boards if they are able to and i want to emphasize that you know you know you may say well you know what is my concord going to do or what is my little local organising going to do well i'll tell you it's a lot because if york your community matters the same way you as an individual matters if you band together if cities band together and demand renewable energy be sold in the aggregate to a group of communities it will happen and it will be cheaper so there is a lot of power again communities can make their own purchasing decisions for the community so you could change the criteria by which the community is making decisions about its purchasing practices so there are a lot of things that can happen if we think it through and push for it so my third suggestion is to join local government organisations my fourth and fifth of the two will talk about a bit more length the fourth is learn about citizen science what citizen science boils down to is what can you do  citizen to advance knowledge about environmental conditions it's as simple as that there are a million ways we can advance knowledge about environmental conditions you do not have to be a but we surveyed the laws in fifty states all fifty states and we prepared a step by step manual to help citizens figure out how to make a difference how to collect information how to generate data and how to act on that information and data so this is a website you're welcome to go in and start using the manual we will periodic leigh update it but it's a it's really a great tool on hugely proud of it the fifth suggestion i have is to exercise your legal rights and we will talk about that this evening as well and for that i've given you a link to the clinic's website because we post all of our work that is not confidential so we don't post our litigation strategies for clients but we post all of our briefs we post our white papers we post manuals so we've post our comments on federal and state rule makings our model laws everything's up there and we'd love it if people used it ok so let's talk a bit about citizen science and you know i want to go back to what is citizen science so it has about it two hundred year history it started in the birding movement so there were organizations like audubon that were you know trying to study patterns of bird migration and they couldn't do it by themselves but they're birders all over the country all over the world and they would reach out and say let us know when you see something significant so all over the world in the country birders would send information in to these organisations and that is citizen science sort of  crowdsourcing information there was no internet back then i mean this is been going on since the eighteen hundreds when i think about citizen science today the stuff still goes on and the focus of our manual is really on pollution what can we do to collect or generate data about the condition of our environment land water soil air so that we can protect ourselves so that it's in that context that i'm talking about citizen science and in most instances the science part as opposed to the law part is focused on local pollution issues and local development activities so you know it may be that you know you observe what you think might be contamination in the neighborhood forest you see dead animals you see fluorescent material and you're wondering what is going on here this doesn't look right so that would be an example of local pollution or you've got you here that  industry would like to build a facility in your town and you're worried about what their activities will do to the task on these are perfect opportunities for citizen scientists to gather information and  generate data so what you might do is because you're always even in pollution situations in development situations you always need to have a baseline what is the natural condition of things and what is happening that's different from the natural so you're comparing what's happening now with what the baseline would be what the natural condition would be and it's not always clean your baseline is not always a clean condition so you know there could be preexisting let's say there's preexisting arsenic contamination because there was an apple orchard we used to use arsenic in apple orchards in new england so there may be arsenic all over the neighborhood that goes way back to apple orchards but now a machine company wants to come to town and use volatile organic compounds completely different that arsenic so you're going to your baseline will certainly show arsenic but you're going to want to look to see what sorts of volatile organic compounds are already in your environment and you'll compare those levels with what happens with this new industry or you'll use the existing levels to argue for permit restrictions if the agencies allow this industry to develop here so that's the purpose of gathering  baseline data and information is so that you sort of have a handle on what's going on already and some of this information by the way you'll find in government files you'll find in media reports or you may collect samples yourself now you've got to let's say you do your information gathering and you collect some samples you now have some data but you're not scientists and you don't really know what it means at this point you've got to analyze it so my recommendation is go look for experts in your community right talk to the local high school teachers talk to the community college professors or a university in your community lots of people are willing to help answer questions talk to environmental organisations nearby or the board of health you know might be able to help you interpret the information that you're gathering once you have information and you understand it then you can decide how to use it and your uses my range from educating people pretty simple and straightforward informing the government maybe the your local agencies don't know about the condition that you've discovered maybe you want to negotiate with whoever has created the contamination that you're worried about or you might want to do something more formal like file a petition for government action so we're now getting more into the purely legal realm or you might want to sue and i always list lawsuits last because they're the most expensive the most time consuming the most difficult for citizens but this is what in a nutshell citizen science in is all about in the pollution context so here's an example of it applied there's a stream in your tap on and you smell something that doesn't smell right and you see a sheen any time you see if she can assume there is some contamination usually oil petroleum leaves a sheen on water so now you've got an odor and something's not right here so the first thing you need to do is document what you're observing and for that you would walk or drive around the neighborhood to identify potential sources and the way you would look for a potential source is do you see outfall you know something that's draining into the stream do you see drains do you see industrial or commercial activity you're going to want to take pictures maybe videotape maybe collect samples here's where the law comes in you can't actually trespass on any one else's property to do this so you know sometimes it gets very tricky so in wyoming for example there's actually a law a state law that was designed to interfere with citizen science so the law actually says in wyoming where it's virtually impossible to know where the property boundaries are because it's so wide open and people don't post everything's you don't see no trespassing signs everywhere in wyoming if you accidentally cross over private property with the purpose of gathering information about conditions to submit to a government agency you are subject to a criminal offense criminal prosecution in fact this whole the whole idea of the manual came to me when we got a call from a scientist in wyoming who was panic stricken and called us and said oh my god am i going to jail i'm out here collecting data on the impact of grazing activities on waters and i just was told i could go to jail for this and unfortunately the answer was get off of whatever property you're on go check g i s maps really carefully and do not trespass because even unintentional trespass results in criminal prosecution i mean some states are really bending over backwards to promote fracking and grazing and so forth  that was actually what motivated us to write this manual and we check the laws in all fifty states we've put together this comprehensive manual to help people understand what is trespass so how do you avoid it where are you at most risk wyoming is one of those places how do you take people's privacy into account if you're videotaping and so forth but in any event the first thing you do as a citizen scientist who wants to protect his or her neighborhood is to document what you're finding but to  legally you also need to be checking government websites government files media has historic media reports you might file public record requests which is a way of gathering information from the government because interestingly many industrial operations which have permits are permission to discharge pollution to the air soil or water have to take samples periodic leean report those samples to the government so in many cases you can actually get the same pulling data that the company itself collected and you never have to collect your own to establish violations that are that ought to be prosecuted and you do this through either making an appointment at the local agency that the department of environmental protection or the federal a to review the files or you submit a public record request for files you can reach out to local authorities again to gather information about what the source of the pollution might be or what the pollution is that you're finding you've got a videotape you can describe the smell you have some samples again the board of health the department of public works there are lots of local agencies that are probably quite willing to engage with you and help you understand if they are not able to and you can then turn to state authorities such as the department of public health or the department of environmental protection and there are many many fabulous environmental organizations in our communities that do this day in and day out and have scientists on staff i just named a couple of them here because i'm talking about a water example we've got the charles river watershed association the mystic river watershed the conservation law foundation and so on all of these people will either already know about the problem or have great advice about next steps and the next steps are you have to decide what you want to do now with the information you've collected or  generated you've got to evaluate your options and develop an action plan and we give you the tools to do that in our manual and this is just sort one page from the manual we present the information in text in short text boxes and in these graphics to help people understand how iterative these processes are and again this is this diagram is in the manual so what are your options you know again one of them would be to inform government agencies and there's a marvelous case out of new york in which a community another one out of new york in which a community recently was realized that they had a disproportionate number of lung and breathing difficulties in the community and they couldn't figure out what the source of the problem was so again it was local action classic citizen science they poked around they checked government files and they discovered that there were a couple of industries in town that were exceeding their permit limits for discharges and that the government hadn't acted on it not because new york didn't want to but they're understaffed they're underfunded it just hadn't come to their attention although the company kept filing its reports there was nobody reading the reports so these citizens went to new york the department of environmental conservation in new york here it's the pay and they said look you know we have all these we've documented all these illnesses we have a disproportionate number of health impacts in our little community we can see the problem we can smell the problem and we've got data to demonstrate that this is benzene coming out of some of these facilities what can you do to help us well you know in all candor sometimes the agencies say nothing we're not going to help you you know we're we're we don't believe you we're not interested whatever in this case the d e c was all over it they said this is not ok we weren't aware of it and they went out in did their own investigation the investigation confirmed what the citizens found and new york not only prosecuted the company's civil lee but they were criminally process cupid as well so this was again a community that did its homework and was able they were lucky that they were able to reach out to their local government and get a response not everyone is so fortunate so sometimes you actually have to file a legal petition asking the government to exercise its responsibility to either prepare or rule or enforce or revoke a permit sometimes the government is already in the process of these are called rule makings and it's your responsibility to participate in that rule making process if you want it changed or improved so if the government is gearing up to issue a permit to a facility and you don't like the idea that that facility has permission to operate and discharge pollution in your community it is incumbent upon you to participate and oppose the  permit or ask for special conditions to be set in the permit the third option you might have is is to engage in a media campaign or undertake other education and awareness raising activities and then last again is suing either the polluter or the responsible government agencies and i am not going to spend much time on these next two slides but i spent a lot of time in the manual indicating that if you're going to collect data generate data yourselves you need to bear in mind the ultimate use of the data because that will determine the quality of the data that you have to produce so if all you want to do is bring information to the attention of a government agency you don't have to follow super strict sampling protocols there are ways of sampling that are very very strict and then there are a little more lenient ways of sampling if you're going to go to court with your samples they have to be very high quality or they'll be thrown out so the reliability and credibility of your sampling  techniques bear on what you can do with the material so we discussed this a great length in the manual but i won't i won't spend the time now ok so we talked a little bit about what you do in your community if you're worried about pollution or development but we also have the situation where we're all worried about what's happening at the national level and these rules and decisions that are being made at the national level have an impact on us locally as well but what do we do about that this is now we're getting into big government how do we how do we deal with what's happening at e p a or at the department of the interior so the first thing that we have to do is be aware of what's happening we can't respond if we're not aware of it and although newspapers are pretty good about letting us know it's not really good enough if you want to participate in the process legally because the newspapers often don't tell us and nuff information in time so this is an example of a federal register notice the federal government can't take any action with that i mean i shouldn't say any if there are laws that define the types of action that the government can only take if it gives us an opportunity to comment on the action but if you don't know where to get the information and then you don't know when you have to comment and you don't actually participate so you have to know that the source of the information is the federal register which you can find on line it's very easy and you'd want to be looking for it comes out every single day it's a big document because the government is doing lots of stuff every single day but you know what i do is i watch for the listings for either e p a or the department of the interior those are the two agencies that have typically have the most impact on the environment although the department of agriculture does as well i tend to focus on e p a and d i and this particular rule is really important because it's one of e p a s attacks on science that just came out so we came out on april thirtieth monday april thirtieth it's a proposed rule you can see the action and if i had copied more pages for you you would see that we were given thirty days to comment so if you didn't find out about this rule before it was actually published in the federal register you didn't have much time to file comments so i threw my clinic in many other people forty eight thousand people filed comments asking for an extension that this was not a reasonable amount of time for people to sounds good doesn't it that sounds like a good thing what it really is this is what this is this administration is great with words what this rule really does is suppresses and a science any report analysis or model that is based on human health data that is protected by privacy laws so what this law really does is says if you can't turn into us make transparent all of the data underlying your report and now assists or model we're not going to consider it that would exclude so i'm writing with many of the doctors and researchers at harvard university and the harvard hospitals we just finished a draft letter that is quite long and that explains how much of their work would be completely barred from consideration by e p a so what this really does they have another one called congress has one called the honest act and the it's an acrid him that really serves to say we're going to suppress all science so this is there on a stack this is their transparency rule is for that in the name of transparency we'll just exclude everything except what industry gives us because what industry gives us isn't based on confidential health data so this is a really horrific rule because it undermines not only future rule making xp but pastoral makings because every five years eve p a is supposed to re evaluate the human health standards it act the safe drinking water act what happens now when it already based decades of rules and studies that can no longer be reproduced or replicated that the underlying health data cannot be released does this mean all of our standards get thrown out the window we don't know we don't know so as a legal matter if i don't file comments now i can't participate in a judicial action and that's the thing that i want the impression i want you to really take away from this is that in terms of the legal advocacy when an agency and these registers come out at the state level too so any time massachusetts is going to take an action there's a massachusetts register so if you care about these issues and you want to exercise as your civic and legal rights you have to know to track the agency's actions through these registers you've got to read it really carefully and some of these proposed rules are hundreds of pages long but you've got or at least read the beginning to know exactly what the deadline is and where to submit your comments because if you don't participate you may not file a lawsuit and you may not i won't say you can't join a lawsuit because there are certain circumstances  but you can't initiate judicial action if you did not file a comment so you can't the idea here is that the agency has asked us for our reaction to their proposed rule we're not allowed to blindside the agency by letting them move forward with their rule making and then we sue them so it's incumbent upon us to raise our objections before they finalize the rule and then if we don't like the final rule we can sue but so this is what i'm just giving you in a nutshell a lesson on how to file comments if you want to see some go to our web site but you can you do not have to be an expert to file comments on a rule that an agency is proposing you just have to be clear about who you are why your views are important why what you have to say is reliable and relevant and how the rule affects you and what exactly do you want the agency to do so in the case of the the rule i just showed you my comments say throw it away it's a horrible rule it will it will dramatically hurt him in health in the environment there is nothing that i can agree to in this rule throw the whole thing away that's my specific request in most instances it's well you know sections a b and c are ok we can live with those but d e n after have some language that doesn't make sense here's the language i suggest you use you want to be very specific about what you want the agency to do but the important thing is that you get your comments in and it's not enough to say your rule is crummy throw it away you have to articulate why is it crummy what is unacceptable about the rule does it conflict with data doesn't conflict with the law what is it that's unacceptable and what does the agency need to do to fix the problem then you want to follow the progress of the rule making because it goes from proposed rule to final rule and sometimes there are interim developments and again you've got to watch for the deadlines if you then are still miserable with the rule you have the right to litigate and they'll be lots of other people filing lawsuits as well and you can join a lawsuit under our federal administrative procedure act and it's the same under state law the reviewing court is going to hold unlawful and set aside the agency's action if the action is arbitrary capricious and abusive discretion or otherwise not in accordance with law so these are the points you're wanting to make in your comment letter you want to demonstrate that it's either arbitrary capricious an abuse of discretion or unlawful because that's the standard the court will use ok apart from challenging rules and permits you can challenge other agency actions or failure of the agency to act most environmental statutes allow citizens to sue the government to enforce the laws or to sue the government for its failure to enforce against a polluter or you can sue the polluter directly and this is just one example that these are called citizen suit provisions because any citizen ma commence one of these lawsuits and the idea here is that congress directed e p a to do certain things is supposed to set standards for water just charges and it's supposed to enforce the permits it issues if it doesn't do that then citizens are allowed to stand in the shoes of the government and force either the government to act or act directly so typically what happens but there are very very strict prerequisites for these suits so typically what happens is the citizen files a sixty day notice letter you have to give notice to the government and to the polluting entity that you plan to file a lawsuit and they have sixty days either to fix their behavior if they're the polluter or the government has sixty days to step in and bring its own enforcement action that often happens but it's the citizen who has provoked  the compliance with the statute by the government so we're going to close by going back to citizen science and i just want to again emphasize that in order for us to exercise effectively we need to have factual support and reliable evidence to support a demand or a lawsuit we need to carefully plan to ensure the quality of the data we're collecting and again i wanted to reference both the clinic's manual and that tonawanda success story which we talk about in the manual as well these are some additional resources not only is our manual there on our website but the echo database and a p a is how you would track the sampling results that people who have permits the industries that are doing the discharges report their data to this database so this is a quick way to learn information about permit compliance i gave links to to comment letters of the clinic to give people a sense of how you write one of these letters if you want to participate and we'll turn to q and a but while we're doing q and a i wanted to put up some art that a local artist and friend of mine has done about the environment she also as an environmentalist and has done some beautiful art about natural resources and her name is karen lee sobel so with that i thank you and i hope you have some questions that i can answer for you