Good afternoon, Solmsted Community.
My name is Morelia Morel Diaz and I'm the President of the newly founded Salem
State Sagness chapter.
I have the honor of introducing Dr.
Mikaela Martinez.
Doctor Mikaela is a proud Chicana ecologist and justice advocate.
Doctor Martinez is the Director of Environmental Health at We Act for
Environmental Justice in New York City, where she's responsible for advancing
efforts to improve environmental health in communities of color,
low income communities by conducting research promoting public health
awareness, education, and advocacy.
Dr.
Martinez and her PhD in Ecology and Evolution at the University of Michigan
and completed her posterioral training at Princeton University,
Previously serving as the Assistant Professor at Columbia University,
Melman School of Public Health, and Emory University from 2017 to 2023,
Doctor Martinez was was supported by the prestigious NHI Directors Early
Independence Award.
Her research has focused on infectious diseases, ecology, social justice,
climate change, infant health, and environmental impacts on health.
Her work has been fit.
Doctor Martinez has also worked with various environmental health committees
to advocate for social justice and environmental health.
Doctor Martinez is currently leading the We Ask Beer Inside Out campaign and she's
on the Advisory Board committee for the Black Beauty Project.
Both projects cease to address the problem toxic chemicals and beauty
products, particularly those that enforce Euro
Secretary Peter Sanders and are marketed towards women of color.
Her talk today will be discussing how structural racism impacts environmental
exposures and health in the United States and how we can center social justice to
address climate change in other environmental crisis.
On that now, I'll pass it after Martinez.
Thank you, thank you.
Great.
Thank you for having me and for that very kind introduction.
I appreciate it.
This is actually my second time getting to visit Salem State.
I got to speak at the Darwin Festival back in 2020,
and I was delighted to see that I was getting very invited.
And this campus is very heartwarming to me because it reminds me a lot of my
undergrad campus, which was the University of Alaska
Southeast.
And I'd really just, I love the environment of, you know,
more intimate undergrad settings where you have faculty who know their students
very well.
I just find it to be very enriching and I'm happy that I had that kind of
undergrad experience.
And so today I wanted to talk about some of the work that I've been doing since
I've started working with We Act for Environmental Justice.
So as Marilia mentioned, I used to be an academic scientist.
And then quite recently, and also for all of the young people in
the room, sometimes you never know where your
career is going to take you.
If you would ask me two years ago if I would ever leave academia and be working
for a nonprofit organization, I would have been like, no way.
I could never even imagine such a thing.
But life takes its turns, and I had this opportunity to come and
help expand out the research program for an environmental justice organization
right at the time where my lab was really trying to expand their work on
environmental justice.
And I've made this transition and it's just been such an amazing experience.
So just want to talk to you a little bit about the work that I've been doing at We
Act for Environmental Justice.
And first, before we can start talking about
environmental justice, we kind of have to build up to
understanding what justice is.
And I really love this illustration that's based off the the Giving Tree.
So you see this tree here and you see the two children that are standing under the
tree and the child to the left has more access to the fruit on that tree.
That tree is leaning over in that child's direction.
There's more fruit growing on that side of the tree.
So you have one child who has this opportunity to get the fruit and then the
other child who is not having that same opportunity.
So this is what we call inequality.
So there is unequal access to a resource.
And then when we talk about equality, equality at using this example would be
if we recognize while these children need to have access to this tree.
So let's give them a tool to to increase, allow them to increase their access,
but we give them the same tool.
So in this case, you give them the same height ladder,
which, yes, that increases the access, but it doesn't fix the inequality because
now the child on the left is easily able to grab the apple.
It doesn't have to wait for it to drop.
But then the child on the right still has the unequal access,
even though they've been giving that, given that tool.
And then now this takes us to equity, and especially on the college campuses,
we hear a lot about diversity, equity and inclusion.
When we talk about equity, then the equity framing says, OK, well,
you acknowledge the fact that there was unequal access and you make your tools to
try to address the fact that there is unequal access.
So now in this case, and if there was equity,
we would give the child on the right a taller ladder,
acknowledging that they have to reach higher for that apple.
So that starts to fix the problem.
But if you notice, this tree is still bending over to the
left and there's still more fruit growing on the left.
So even if you have an an equity kind of framework and are adjusting your tools,
it still hasn't fixed the root of the problem.
And that's where justice comes in.
So justice is really focused on the broken system.
So in this case, if we were to have a justice framing,
then we would say, well, that tree is bent over,
the fruit is unequally distributed.
So let's actually do some work on fixing that tree.
And so now you see in this case where that tree has been fixed and now you see
the that inequality has been addressed, but not by giving using tools in terms of
the different ladders, but actually trying to fix the root cause.
And so to be able to understand environmental justice and actually just
social justice in general, we really have to think about structural
racism, because structural racism is that broken
tree, it's that broken system.
And so the definition of structural racism that I like to use is the totality
of ways in which societies foster racial, racial discrimination via mutually
reinforcing inequitable systems.
And I underlined that part that says mutually reinforcing inequitable systems.
And the importantly, and especially for any of you who have
taken ecology classes, how many of you have taken an ecology
class?
Raise your hand.
OK, many of you.
So in ecology, we're used to thinking about how,
let's say organisms or different aspects of ecosystems influence one another.
And sometimes those influences are in non linear, non additive, not simple ways,
but you can kind of have roundabout ways that different species can influence each
other or different components of the ecosystem.
And you can have systems that are enforcing each other.
So now kind of take those concept that you concepts you've learned in biology
and think about social systems, how they can actually be impacting one
another.
And so now I've included some of those here.
So community disinvestment.
Community disinvestment is if you have, let's say a city governance or a federal
government that will invest more in one area and not invest in another.
So that one place has been disinvested in differences in the criminal legal system
depending on race and ethnicity and poverty.
So you have over policing of communities of colour and low income communities in
the United States.
You have bad and now hopefully illegal lending practices from banks that can
discriminate against people of colour in terms of home loans and can has helped
generate this home ownership gap.
So you can think about all these different ways that racism can come into
play in society, whether that's through healthcare,
policing, housing, education, but none of those things are operating by
themselves.
It's like an ecosystem where they can reinforce each other,
whether directly or indirectly.
And so now, so that's what thinking about structural
racism as a whole, but environmental racism is the aspect of
structural racism that's really manifesting through our environment.
And just to give you an A couple examples of environmental racism in the United
States and, and we could spend all day coming up with
examples both here in the US and also internationally.
But people of colour in the United States are 61% more likely to live in a county
with at least one failing grade for air pollutant.
So the EPA set standards to say what the levels of air pollutants that air
pollutants that are acceptable.
And if you're a person of color, you're more likely to live in a place
that is going to have bad air.
And then one of the most kind of shocking statistics and most,
some of the most shocking statistics often come from asthma,
childhood asthma particularly.
And so as of 2020, black children are 7. 6 times more likely to die of asthma
compared to white children.
Where I live in Harlem, which is the upper part of Manhattan,
and New York, a predominantly black community,
we have childhood asthma hospitalizations that are over 20 times higher compared to
the white affluent neighborhoods that are, you know,
just a mile away from us in lower Manhattan.
So you see these really stark disparities when it comes to health.
And a lot of these things have to do with the differences in the environments that
we live in.
And one thing when you start talking about environmental racism,
people will often think, well, doesn't this have to do with poverty?
People of colour in the United States tend to have lower income compared to
white communities.
That's because of pay gaps.
That's because of all kinds of racist practice and education and labour and
workforce development, etcetera.
But there have been a number of studies to date and it's very consistently been
found in the scientific literature that even if you look at environmental
conditions and compare Black and Latino communities with white communities in the
United States, even if you control for income,
like income differences, you still see that communities of color
are not experiencing the same environments as their white counterparts
that are economically matched to them.
So if you're a Black or Latino person in the United States,
and there's even more and more research on this,
also expanding to other communities, Arab communities,
AAPI communities in general, communities of color,
even if you make the same amount as a person in a white community,
your environment that you experience will tend to be more degraded and more
unhealthy.
And so I mentioned to you about childhood asthma and some of the work that we've
been doing in New York is really to look at and quantify what,
what are the actual differences in terms of the rates of various health outcomes
across communities when you look based on race and ethnicity.
Because currently in the scientific literature,
usually what you'll see are data like let's say for asthma, you would compare,
well, here's the prevalence of asthma among
black, Latino Americans, white Americans, and you can just see the differences in
rates.
But one thing is an ecologist, and I think many of you can appreciate,
is that it's also really to look at things spatially and how things play out
over space and across communities.
And we're really used to doing this among like animal and plant communities,
but more and more trying to apply these kinds of ideas to also human health.
So what I plotted here on this X axis is I've taken every neighborhood in New York
City and I've plotted them based on the percent of that community that's non
white, so essentially the percent of people of
color in that community.
So if you're here at 20, then that means that this is a 80% white
community, 20% people of color.
And then as you go all the way over here to 100,
these are communities that we have in New York City that are over 90%,
close to 100% Black and Latino predominantly.
And then on the Y axis, what I'm showing is the childhood asthma
emergency room visits.
And this is also taking into account the number of children.
And So what you see as you move from the predominantly white communities to the
predominantly communities of colour, you have an exponentially higher rate of
childhood asthma ER visits.
And there's some points in there that are in black and some that are in red.
Those are just showing two different years, 2018 and 2022.
There had been a thought for a couple of years that maybe the pandemic was going
to, you know, solve some of the childhood asthma issues,
but it definitely did not.
So we see this pattern is still holding up.
And one thing that's really important to know is these health outcomes that we can
see that are related to racial demographics,
this plays out all across the lifespan.
So what I've done is I've plotted other health outcomes and kind of put them on a
timeline based on life stage.
So what I have here on the left is the infant mortality rate.
And you can see that significant increase when you with significant increase in
infant mortality in communities of color.
I have childhood obesity who have higher rates in communities of color,
diabetes and then premature mortality.
So what this is to show you is that no matter if it's from birth all the way to
death, that we have these disparities in health
outcomes.
And that these disparities for all of the diseases that I've shown you so far,
these are all health outcomes that are highly influenced by the environment that
we live in.
When we're talking about asthma, childhood asthma is highly affected by
exposure to pests.
So if you have like mice or cockroaches in the house, exposure to mold.
So for homes that have water damage and mold,
exposure to air pollutants both inside the home.
If you have a gas burning stove in your home that releases air pollutants or you
live in a neighborhood that has high outdoor air pollutants because of
trucking traffic, all those things come together and they
are driving these these very high rates.
And so when I think of health disparities such as the ones that I've shown you,
the way that I really like to conceptualize them is thinking about an
oil rig.
So here's a picture or illustration of a oil rig.
And so an oil rig, if you look over at a ocean and you see
where they're drilling for oil, all you're going to see is like the rig
at the top.
And what you don't see, and it's like this very ugly man made
thing, right?
But what you don't see is underneath the ocean,
there's all this infrastructure for doing that drilling and extraction.
And so this is how I think about these health disparities we see at the top,
these man made health disparities like these extreme rates of childhood asthma
and premature mortality.
But what's actually under the surface and driving those is that environmental
racism and those disparities and the differences in our Environmental Quality.
But just like an oil rig, I think it's really important to note
that these are man made things.
And so the difference is in our Environmental Quality.
That is something that is man made.
It's construction constructed by our societies and our policy.
So therefore, that means it's something that can be
addressed, right?
And I'm actually going to skip through that slide because I feel like it'll take
me a little too long to get through.
But so two of the things that I wanted to talk about today that I've been working
at in my new position at We ACT is how we're addressing racism in the beauty
industry.
And then also some work we're doing around community air monitoring and
trying to help address some of the issues with air pollution that we have.
So let's get into it.
OK, so Beauty Justice and the name of the
campaign that I run is called the Beauty Inside Out Campaign.
And if any of you are interested, we have like publicly open meetings once
a month at over Zoom, which you're all welcome to join.
And so when it comes to beauty Justice, so beauty Justice is really addressing 2
health harms that are done by the beauty industry.
One is like physical, biological harm to our health that
happens from exposure to toxic chemicals that are in beauty products,
which is very rampant in the United States because we have very little
federal regulation over the use of toxic chemicals and cosmetics and beauty
products.
So when I talk about beauty products, I'm also referring to personal care
products.
So things like soap, lotion, shampoo, hair conditioner,
there is very rampant and widespread use of toxic chemicals in all these product
classes.
And then when it comes to racism in the beauty industry,
the beauty industry in the United States, and that I would say actually just
globally has really been embedded in Eurocentric white based beauty standards.
And there are a lot of white supremacist ideas that are very deeply embedded
within the beauty industry.
And I'm going to talk about a couple of those that we're working on.
So when you have racialize and racism within beauty and beauty norms,
that does psychological and societal health harms to us,
whether we are aware of it or not.
And a lot of this is through targeted marketing and advertising.
And so the way that we're trying to address this problem at we act and as
part of the Beauty Inside Out campaign is we have two approaches.
We have a top down approach where we're working with regulators to try to improve
policies.
I've been working on this both at the level the international level with the
United Nations federally trying to get bills passed in Congress,
and then locally in New York State.
And then we have a bottom up approach as well,
which is really trying to foster social movements and awareness of this issue so
that we can start to address the these beauty norms and put pressure on
companies.
And so when it comes to the racism and white supremacy within the beauty
industry, two of the most striking examples of this
come from skin lightening products and also chemical hair straighteners.
And so skin lightening products, even though we don't talk about them all
of all that often, it is a bit like publicly.
It's not something that, you know, you see a lot of advertisements for on
the television in the United States or in social media, but it's a really,
really big industry here and also globally.
And so skin lightening products are really based on this idea that having
white skin or lighter skin is preferable rather for beauty reasons or for more
like societal reasons in terms of class, class structure and such.
And then when it comes to chemical hair straighteners,
chemical hair straighteners, you know, the existence of this as a beauty product
is really a also based on racism, because hair straighteners have been
marketed to women of color for decades and decades and decades to try to promote
this idea that having straighter hair is preferable or more beautiful.
But the so that's like the societal kind of a piece of it.
But the other side of this is both of these product types have some of the most
dangerous chemicals that are even present in beauty products.
So in skin lightening products, and I'll show you some data that we have
on this.
Skin lightening products tend to have mercury in them.
So mercury is a really dangerous neurotoxin that is actually illegal by
international treaty, by federal law, by state law.
But companies continue to put mercury and skin lighteners because it makes them
work really well.
Mercury, when it's applied to your skin, will prevent your skin cells from
producing melanin, which is that pigment that gives us a
darker skin tone.
So if a person is regularly applying mercury to their skin,
they actually will have lighter skin and will result in a skin bleaching.
And then when it comes to hair straighteners,
hair straighteners tend to have a really high level formaldehyde.
How many of you ever heard of formaldehyde?
Most of us probably have, yes.
It's the same chemical that's used in embalming fluid.
It's like really nasty.
It's a known human carcinogen.
It also is known to have reproductive health harms like exposure to pregnant
women being exposed can cause spontaneous miscarriages, birth defects.
Formaldehyde is a really nasty chemical and also can increase your risk of
uterine cancer.
And so the long and the short is these products are everywhere,
especially if you live in a community of color in the United States like I do here.
This picture here in this corner, I took this picture.
This is a beauty supply store just three blocks from my home in Harlem.
And what you see in the front window, I took this from outside the store in the
front window is 3 full shelves of skin liners.
So these are like hidden in plain sight.
If you go to New York City, I'm sure if you go to any of the
communities of color in Boston and go even look at like your Rite Aid or CVS,
you're also likely to find them at major chains too.
And then if you just Google or not Google, do an Amazon search.
I just did a screen cap from Amazon Hair relaxers.
This is what you'll get at the top.
One thing I really want you to take away from this photo of hair relaxers is all
of the models in these photos in these covers of the boxes are all women of
color.
So what this is showing you is that these products are being marketed directly to
women of color and these products are very dangerous.
And one other very disturbing thing when it comes to hair relaxers,
they're a whole hair relaxer brands and companies that are targeted to children.
And so this is a very problematic product type.
So these things are everywhere and then we know that they're everywhere,
but we did it really have a sense of how often people use these products.
So before I had come to we act, we act this did a survey about a year and
a half ago of 297 women and them identifying individuals in Northern
Manhattan to ask them do they use these products because we see that they're
around in the stores, but what's the actually frequency or
prevalence of use?
And the 297 individuals that were enrolled in this study were all people of
color.
And what was found was that 25% of all the survey respondents had used skin
lighteners at some point in their life.
And when it come came to AAPI respondents, it was as high as 57%.
So that means that skin lighteners are being used or being used in our community.
And then when it came to hair straighteners,
44% reported using hair straighteners.
And when it came to black respondents, it was as high as 60%.
So again, these products are available and they're
being used and we know they're dangerous.
And now thinking back to or going back to the societal pressures and the embedded
racism that exists within these products, one really important thing and maybe
unexpected thing that came out of the survey was the individuals who reported
using skin lighteners and hair straighteners were also asked about their
motivation to use them.
And what was found overwhelmingly is people reported that they use these
products not because it they thought having straighter hair or lighter skin
made them more beautiful or more desirable or professional,
but they reported that they use these products because they felt that it made
other people think that they were more beautiful, desirable or professional.
And so that really goes to show how social norms around beauty can influence
people's product use and actually people's health because it's dictating
whether or not they're getting exposed to these harmful chemicals.
I'm going to skip that slide.
And so some work that I've been doing with one of my undergraduate research
assistants, Tammy Deng, who's based at Emory University,
is we really wanted to get at how prevalent mercury was or how prevalent
mercury is in skin lighteners.
And the thing about mercury and skin lighteners, so mercury,
it's just so dangerous.
It's like such a dangerous chemical.
I remember when I was in middle school that there was a girl in my reading class
that had a mercury necklace and it broke in class and our whole school had to get
evacuated and the hazmat team had to go in.
So you can think about such a dangerous neurotoxin,
but it's actually just getting put in beauty products that are sold on the
shelves like in our regular stores.
So with mercury, a skin lightener, whether it's a cream soap,
it could even be a skin lightener that you don't know is a skin lightener.
Things that are advertised as like an underarm soap that will make your
underarms lighter or a skin evening product that's going to get rid of
freckles.
Skin lighteners come in lots of different marketing types,
but we wanted to know how common mercury was in them because they will never say
it on the label because it's illegal.
But we knew that it was present.
So what we did is we contacted groups from around the world,
but we also tried to focus on the United States groups that we knew had been doing
lab based testing of skin lighteners to see if we could actually get data on what
creams and soaps were being tested and actually the levels of mercury so we
could create a big database.
So we've been working with four groups and that includes an international
nonprofit, California Department of Health,
Minnesota Department of Pollution Control and the New York City Department of
Health.
And now we've been able to amass close to 2000 lab tested samples of skin
lightening products.
And what we found is that of those, 1900 and 6647% of them have contained a
mercury.
These are not like completely random samples.
These groups that have gone out to sample, they tend to try to prioritize samples
that they think will actually have mercury in them.
So those that might have more suspicious labeling or be from countries that we
know tend to manufacture using mercury.
But the really stark thing is, so when we look at mercury and skin
lighteners, there had previously been a threshold
that was like the threshold for kind of contamination or unintended mercury and
skin lighteners, which would be one part per million.
So one part per million was kind of like that safety threshold that of mercury and
skin lighteners.
But in the products that we have, we have some products that have as high
as 210,000 parts per million of mercury.
So these are really extreme high levels.
And just here on this plot, I'm just showing the year which the
sample is collected.
We have almost 20 years of data.
And then on the Y axis, the amount of mercury and parts per
million.
So you can see there's some really, really light high levels here with many
of them being over 50, 000 parts per million.
So these are at the level that they're so toxic that if a person,
and we've seen this from some of these samples,
so that if a person were to bring it into their home and open one of these jars and
be using them, that their children or other inhabitants
in the house could get poisoned from the vapors coming off these products,
which we've seen happen quite a bit in California.
And then we've been looking to see what, where,
what countries are these products being manufactured and shipped to the United
States.
We see that Pakistan is the country where 284 of the 600 or so products has come
from.
So we have certain countries that we see that they're manufacturing more of these
illegal products than others.
But you can even see there's some products manufactured here in the United
States and other places like the United Kingdom and France.
And so this is really going showing that this is a worldwide problem and something
that even we figured to address it here in the US that wouldn't completely solve
this problem.
We really have to take it international approach,
which is why we've been working with the United Nations Minamata Convention of
Mercury on this.
And I just wanted to check the time because I wanted to see where I'm at,
how many more minutes I have.
Miss Ryan, you got another, at least another 10.
OK, sounds good.
Great.
So then with all of this, because I would have wanted to wrap up
the beauty justice, but with this beauty justice work on
mercury, we're also doing work on formaldehyde and
personal care products in general, so like toxic chemicals across product
types.
But I think what this skin lightening story really is showing you is a couple
things that first of all, we can be exposed to highly,
highly toxic chemicals from beauty products,
things that you would assume or save, things you would never even think twice
about them harming your health.
So this is a industry that in terms of like public health professionals and also
ecologists, because mercury is a problem for people,
it's a problem in wild ecosystems, we really have to take coordinated
efforts to deal with these toxic chemicals and these big industries that
are perpetuating the use of these chemicals.
The mercury in skin light in our story also really goes to show you this
disproportionate burden that is placed on women of color when it comes to these
toxic hazards.
And really that thinking back to that giving tree example,
all of us are exposed to toxic chemicals from our beauty and personal care
products.
But there it's the exposure because of the way that the system is set up is a
very unequal in terms of this burden.
And women of colour tend to be very highly burdened by toxins because of
these racialized norms and then just these harmful practices of these
companies.
So that's something that in environmental justice we're really seeking to address.
Were there any questions or we should wait till the end?
I have a a question in the back.
You have any names of like the brands?
Yeah, we actually have all the names.
And so that's something that we're going to be putting out.
So we're going to be making a public platform.
We're hoping to do this by this June to be able to show the names.
We have pictures of all of the boxes so that people can actually see which
products because some of these products like they're everywhere,
like you can even find some of these products on Walmart's online website like
so you know, do it something that we're really trying
to raise public awareness about.
And then so that was a beauty justice piece of it.
And now I wanted to move into talking a little bit about air pollution.
And this is really to trying to give you a sense for how research is done when it
comes to community based organization, because unlike research in an academic
setting where we often times, you know, as an individual scientist,
you have your research interests and your research agenda and you can plan and
execute those projects out over a long time horizon.
You know, you're like, over the next five years,
I want to study AB and C and you plan out your grants and and kind of carry that
all out.
But doing research in the justice space, it really is more of a reactive and also
like policy driven research because you might have a research plan for something
interesting you want to do, but then something might pop up and you
have to address that and design A research program around this new issue.
So to give you an example of this is congestion pricing in New York,
which I just heard that on the news today.
This is something Boston is also considering, so also locally applicable.
So congestion pricing, this is something that's been used in
countries around the world and Singapore was maybe the first.
London has had this for I think a couple decades now.
But the idea is, is if you want to reduce car traffic,
if you want to reduce air pollution, noise burden or noise solution,
I should say, in a particular area that's overburdened
by traffic, then what you can do is you can charge
people a high rate to drive in that area to try to reduce the demand for driving
there and reduce the congestion.
So here, this map, here is a map of New York City.
But this island in the middle, this is Manhattan.
And the bottom of Manhattan is like that's where Times Square is,
That's where the financial district is.
This is like a very high traffic vehicular area.
So what the city has proposed, and they're going to start this spring,
is to charge people really high rates to drive there.
So for most of this area, it's going to be like $23 for a car to
drive there.
So every day that a car goes into that area,
they're going to have to pay 23 bucks.
If they leave and then come back, they're going to have to pay another $23.
So the idea for the city to do this was they said, OK,
well this will reduce traffic and air pollution,
but also raise a lot of money for us to then revamp our subway system to try to
get the city to be more climate resilient and mitigate fossil fuel use by having
less cars on the road, having better transportation
infrastructure, which all sounds amazing.
And if it works well, that will be amazing.
But one problem with this is that the way that Manhattan is structured is
essentially there's a gradient, A racial gradient in Manhattan.
So lower Manhattan is predominantly white and more affluent neighborhoods,
more expensive housing and such.
And as you move farther N then the neighborhoods become predominantly black
and Latino and lower income.
So one of the concerns now is that since all of these vehicles are going to stop
driving in lower Manhattan, but people still want to get down to that
area, that this is going to reroute traffic.
So that the burden of all of that vehicular traffic is just going to move
further north and then fall upon the communities of color that are already
overburdened by the city's pollution.
So what we decided to do, and this is Jaron Burke,
he's our environmental health manager who's on my team,
was to come up with a community air monitoring project where we would enroll
community members from all over upper Manhattan.
So in our predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods and provide people with air
monitors that they can deploy outside of their home or in their neighborhoods.
And then also give them data analysis training so that we could fill a big data
gap and monitor the air as it as this congestion pricing is rolled out,
but have data that is community owned.
So that means if a person has one of these air monitors, they have their data,
they know how to download it, they know how to analyze it.
They can go to City Council if they want.
They can write our governor's office and say, look,
this is what my air looked like before this policy.
This is what it looked like after this policy.
So this is one way that you can get community members actively involved.
This is what this platform looks like.
It's these sensors will help purple air sensors and they measure particulate
matter.
But they have a nice platform where any person that anybody actually even it's
completely open to the public, like you can go and look at these data.
And then the individuals that own the sensors that we're giving to the
community members, they can download like the full data.
But any citizen can go and download like snapshots of the data.
But you can see it's like pretty user friendly.
It will tell you what the current air quality index is.
And then when you go to download the data, it will tell you the level of particulate
matter in the air pool.
And I'm actually going to skip it.
Well, this is just to show you we've deployed
10 of them so far.
And so this these are data from three of our monitors,
but they're very high resolution data.
So like every 30 minutes.
And so we'll our community members will be able to see the quality of the air
before and after congestion pricing.
And then just lastly, I wanted to say we're starting to expand.
The types of things that we measure in the air.
So when it comes to air pollution, researchers oftentimes measure PM 25,
which stands for Particulate Matter 25, which is little particles that are 2.
5 micrograms in size or smaller.
So they're so small that when you breathe the air that those particles can actually,
once they're in your lungs, escape from your lungs and get into your
blood vessels and then get into your circulation.
So This is why it's really bad for heart health,
for cardiovascular disease because you literally are getting air pollutants like
into your bloodstream.
So these air monitors measure that particulate matter 2.5.
But we also just got a grant to even get better air monitors that not only measure
those part particulate matter, but also measure different gases like
ozone, a carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide.
So these other gases that have other health harms on our body.
And I'm not going to jump into the health harms.
I'm going to skip through that.
But the last thing I just wanted to say just going back to like this justice
framework is that so we have when issues arise like the congestion pricing that we
don't know what the impact on our community is going to be,
then we have to respond research wise and like start collecting data.
But one of the things that is also really important is advocacy.
Like what are we going to do with those data?
How are they going to be used to improve the lives of people because going back to
the justice component of it.
So, for instance, when we have community members now being
able to do this air monitoring, then one thing that we can plan since now
is like, how are these data going to be used to
kind of hold the feet of policymakers to the flames?
Because when New York City did the ecological and environmental analysis of
this congestion pricing plan, they made claims like we're setting aside
millions of dollars for more roadside vegetation and put air filtration units
in schools that are overburdened by air pollution.
But often times to get those kinds of resources,
you have to be able to like really push on policymakers to make those things
happen.
So This is why now from the start, we're preparing, we're anticipating,
we're going to test our hypothesis that there's going to be more air pollution
Uptown because of this policy downtown.
And then we will already have in hand different things that we want to advocate
for to help mitigate this issue.
So that's really how kind of the different some of the key differences
between how nonprofit and justice research works compared to academic
research.
And it's all very important.
Both sides are important and they feed into one another.
Because we wouldn't know what air sensors to put out and how which gases are
impacting health if there hadn't already been the academic science there for us to
lean on.
So both are important, but this is how we use data for advocacy
and that's it.
And lastly, for any of you that are interested,
I know especially for the students that are interested in environmental justice,
you can become part of we Act for environmental justice.
You don't have to live in New York City.
We have, we work all over the country, but if you sign up as a member,
I think it's something like a membership fee of $20 a year.
We have like working groups on climate justice.
We have days of the year where we take our members to do advocacy,
like lobbying in DC to talk to the Senate.
We do a lot of really fun things, but we also do a lot of like really
******** advocacy that our members are able to be a part of.
Benefits from a geographic analysis like the GIS.
You probably have someone doing GIS with you or yeah, contracted out or something.
Yeah, absolutely.
So we actually have a really great geographer in our DC office who actually
came, he just finished his PhD in like snow
hydrology.
So he was a a snow hydrologist and has all of these great mapping skills that
now he's applying to environmental justice.
So when it comes to GIS, the types of things that are really
important, especially at this time because the US
federal government has now started to define environmental justice communities
as a way of determining fund allocation to counties around the United States.
So this is actually led to like a huge kind of battle among geographers of like,
how do you what are the right variables to use to determine whether a community
is an environmental justice community?
So if you want to know is a community overburdened by pollution, you know,
you'll have to look at the air, you have to look at the soil,
you have to look at what plants are there that might be giving out pollutants.
And sometimes you have to be really creative with the types of data using
like NASA satellite data for seeing like smokestacks and the the work,
the geographers kind of role in environmental justice is really big.
And yeah, that's something for any of these
students that are doing GIS work.
That's a big open area.
Thank you.
So do you feel free to ask Doctor Martinez questions.
And actually, while I walked to the front and forgot to
announce the Student BIOS Society are selling their new T-shirts.
Oh, cool.
So if you go to the back, unfortunately today, just cash,
cold hard cash, 15 bucks buys you a new.
It also happens that I'm the only one on the microphone.
My colleague Dr.
Carr is ill.
So any questions?
Oh, Nelson's going to help out.
Oh, we have a question in the front.
I can pass you the mic.
I don't know if you touched on this, but how did you kind of like fall into
like the nonprofit and how would you find that, I guess?
Yeah.
So if I'm to be perfectly honest, so my lab after COVID hit because I
infectious disease ecologist by training.
And so my lab started responding to the pandemic.
And one of the things that we saw right away is that Black and Latino Americans
were dying at a disproportionately high rate.
And within the infectious disease ecology community,
like none of us were conversant on health disparities and structural racism because
that had not been a major factor in infectious diseases until, you know,
very recently.
And so then I started doing work on structural racism,
but I honestly found that it's kind of difficult to do that kind of work within
academia.
And I had applied for a grant to use ecological food web,
essentially networks and apply them to the study of structural racism.
And I told myself, if I cannot find support within the
academic setting to take these ecological tools and apply them to studying racism,
then I know that I actually need to go to a different space and to go to the
nonprofit and be embedded in the justice space to do that research.
And that's what happened.
I like, applied for multiple grants to get
support for this.
And I was just finding it just was not, it was not very widely like kind of
embrace within academia.
So then I was like, OK, here's my sign.
And at the same time, we act was looking for a new
environmental health director.
So it ended up being a really great fit.
But I think all that is to say, like I was mentioning earlier,
you don't know where your research is going to take you.
And sometimes you have to go to the places where you will find support for
your ideas.
And it might not always be your comfort zone.
And so you might have to switch up.
Hi, thank you for the speech is really, really good.
We're going to ask because Sam State as a school is very applicated for
sustainability within campus as well as supporting the POC groups that our
community.
But I want to ask from your point of view to the outside that wrote what we as
individuals, as students can also do to further
support our POC groups.
Yeah, thank you for that.
That's really a great question.
So one thing is when it comes to structural racism,
it's something that still a lot of society is just even learning to be
comfortable with, like talking about.
I don't know if you noticed during my talk,
but I very intentionally use the word white supremacy a few times.
That's a word that a lot of people are really uncomfortable with.
But in reality, for us to be able to actually move
forward as a society, we have to acknowledge the harms that
have been done and start to normalize the conversate these hard conversations.
So honestly, it can be as easy like supporting POC
communities can be as easy as like in casual conversation,
acknowledging that like something is white supremacist or like that a system
is very intentionally set up to harm some people and then lift others.
And that's why like social movements are so important because if you think of
things like the civil rights movement or even, you know,
now with the climate movement that like these, you often think like, oh,
these are these really huge things that like me as an individual might not be
able to contribute to.
But these big movements always start with individuals like in their local frontline,
like dealing with the issue.
And when it comes to things like climate change,
when it comes to things like racism, it really starts at home.
And the social, the amazing thing about social movements
is like, just like an epidemic can spread, social norms can spread.
Like information spreads through social networks very widely.
So even just like what you normalize here on campus will impact, Salem will impact,
then, you know, like it spreads.
And I think that that's a really powerful thing.
Yep.
Oh, yeah.
Who can get to 1st?
So I have a question about testing on the products that we use.
So like you walk in the target, there's a bunch of beauty products there,
whatever it is.
Is there any actual testing that happens on these products that we use?
No.
So, yeah, so there is not.
So one of the big misconceptions in the United States,
so there was recently a research study by the Lake Research Group,
which does like these massive studies of like American polling for various things
in the United States.
And one thing that they found in a study in 2022 was that like 75% of Americans
are under the impression that products are tested for safety before they land on
the store shelves.
But that's just absolutely not the case in the United States when it comes to
cosmetics and personal care products.
The federal government, the arm of the federal government that
regulates that is a Food and Drug Administration.
In 2022, they updated their regulations for
cosmetics and personal care products for the first time in 78 years.
And in fact, they rolled back a lot of the safety
standards.
So to give you an example of how bad and lacks of federal regulations are,
it wasn't only until December 2022 that now companies are required to report to
the FDA, not publicly, but reports of the FDA when there's a
serious adverse health outcome from a beauty of personal care products.
What I mean by serious is if someone dies, if a baby is born with a congenital
disease, if someone is hospitalized.
So it's only as of like a year and some change ago that companies even have to
report death from these products.
So that's how far behind we are now.
There are some really great resources for actually looking at your products.
I, I don't think I have the Internet, so I can't put it up,
but Clearia CLEARYA is an app that you can use and this is developed by a very
close colleague.
And you can, if you're, you can actually do shopping at like
Sephora Walmart through it.
And it will tell you what are the toxic chemicals in your products.
It will make recommendations for safer alternatives.
But also you can use this app and you can scan the ingredients of any product you
have and it will give you a breakdown of every chemical and it will tell you like,
oh, this chemicals banned in the EU.
It is like not allowed.
But here it is in your lipstick or, but so there are tools out there to be
able to do shopping, but it's 100% on the consumer,
like it's 100% on us, which is really unfortunate.
And it was why we're trying to pass new laws.
Yeah.
Clear.
Yeah.
CLEARYA.
Yeah, that's it.
And, and the other cool thing is if you use it,
we're about to, we're right now we're working on this,
developing a research arm for that so that when people are using it,
you can like opt in to be a community researcher so that when you're scanning
products ingredient list so that we can get the data and analyse them.
Is the EU better than the US?
Yeah.
So it's interesting when it comes to the EU.
So the EU has a has banned over 2500 chemicals from cosmetics.
The US has banned 11, so yeah.
So we're like, really bad.
But there are some chemicals in cosmetics that are still rampantly used,
like pigments that tend to contain heavy metals that are used like lipsticks and
such that the EU still has not banned.
And we're hoping that they will.
So the EU is still not perfect.
There are some still toxins in their in their products.
Yep.
In the back.
Are you sure?
OK.
Canada is also way better than us too, so if you can get Canadian products
easily, they'll be safe.
So I've noticed curly hair products and things like that that are more embracing
and I'm just wondering if there's like a correlation to some of this,
like harmful as the curly hair products become more popular,
are there similar chemical detriments in those products?
Yeah.
So this is one thing.
This this is another product class that tends to be very problematic.
Again, like we pretty consistently see that
products that are marketed to women of color tend to be some of the nastiest in
terms of their formulation.
Yeah.
So one of the big issues when it comes to curly hair products is endocrine
disruptors.
So our endocrine system is like our hormonal system and there are there's
kind of classes of chemicals that are often used in beauty products that are
particularly impacting the female reproductive hormones.
And so we see that these endocrine disruptors tend to be prevalent in curly
hair products and like certain pomades and things like that.
And so that's something that we're trying to actually expand our work on right now,
like using actually the Clearia app.
So Sally Beauty Supply, I don't know if any of you,
if there's Sally Beauty Supply in Salem, it's like a really common beauty supply
store, but they sell a lot of like hair dyes,
hair straighteners, curly hair products.
So right now we're trying to crawl every product on their website to look at all.
Are there more endocrine disruptors in those curly hair products marketed
towards women of color compared to the products that are marketed more to the
general population?
Because what we see from like the smaller studies that there tends to be, yeah,
more of these endocrine disruptors.
And it's really unfortunate because there's no regulation in terms of how
companies AD like advertised.
So you can see a product that will say all natural,
like it'll be like all natural, organic cleaned,
because those things don't have any legal definitions when it comes to cosmetics
and beauty products.
So they'll stick plaster that all over.
And then if you do an analysis of the ingredients, you're like, oh,
there's some endocrine disruptors in here.
They're like ingredients derived from fossil fuels.
Like you'll see all kinds of yeah, surprising and toxic things.
So do you see a correlation between price of the products, especially like Amazon,
it's so much cheaper to buy things on Amazon.
Anybody can sell things on Amazon, right?
So do you see like a correlation in being targeted for maybe specific audiences,
something cheap that will work right?
And if we, the community is not aware of that and
you tell me like this product here, we might have something like I grew up
with people just put it from how they had in their hairs.
And it's just a normal thing you just like.
And I go to the salons and my mom just sit.
Just close your nose.
Yeah.
And that was it, right.
So like if it says it's cheap and works, you see a correlation of those products
the best sellers to others that might be safer but much more expensive.
Yes, surprisingly there isn't actually a
straight correlation with price.
And I usually when I'm giving a tutorial on the Claria app,
I always show how I bought this like really expensive Gucci lipstick,
but I was like, oh, my fancy expensive lipstick.
And that if you actually do a chemical analysis,
it's like one of the worst lipsticks you could even buy at Sephora.
So no, actually some of the high end brands are
the worst.
And we see that actually also when it comes to pollution and climate change in
general, like high end brands like Louis Vuitton's
and such, they're the ones burning there textiles 4
* a year being some of the worst pollutants, you know,
worst pigments used in clothes and dies and such.
So no, there actually is not that, at least when it comes to like super high
end to kind of mid end brands.
But we don't know.
I haven't seen any analysis yet that's looked at, let's say, you know,
comparison of, you know, you can get, let's say a comparison of like a dollar
lipsticks to like 4 or $5 ones, that kind of thing.
But when it comes to like the mid range stuff and the really high range stuff,
now some of the designer stuff is like the worst.
But a part of this is also coming from the fact that it's,
it's just like business as usual.
Like, there's some toxins that have just been
used for so long, for so many decades that companies just
are not wanting to reformulate.
So you might have a company that's just been using the same, like, pigments and,
you know, what is it?
Preservatives for 50 years in their line.
And people always loved them and they're not going to change it.
Yeah.
So expensive isn't necessarily safer.
Oh yes.
Is there a functional reason for why you want endocrine disruptors?
No, I don't know they terms of the endocrine
disruptors, what their purpose is serving because
there are some, you know, there are some things where it's like an
obvious reason why you have this toxin.
Like some of the pigments when they're mined they will have heavy metals or like
you mind for talc you can get asbestos PFAS which is like the flame retardant
that's used a lot in like anything waterproof.
Your waterproof mascara probably has pee fast in it,
but that's because it's wicking away the water.
Or like if you have lipstick that's like smear proof,
it's going to have pee fast to keep it from smearing.
But the endocrine disruptors I honestly have not found, like,
what is the reason for that or this, you know,
because a lot of these things tend to be like mimics,
like estrogen mimics and such.
And so, yeah, I'm really not sure, but that's a good question.
I'll talk to some of my toxicologist colleagues about that.
Yeah.
Because I'm wondering, are they preservatives?
I don't know.
They might be.
I mean, so formaldehyde is like the formaldehyde
releasers are the main preservative that is found in cosmetics,
which is why we're trying to get a formaldehyde band for cosmetics in New
York right now.
But yeah, it could be.
I'll have to check into it.
All the endometric disruptors are, you know, for mite,
keep mite numbers down.
I see.
Yeah, that could be Yep.
They might just be trying to bring fungal levels down.
Yeah, Yep, that definitely could be.
Yeah.
Yeah, Because there's some things like mercury
or mercury actually is still using eye area cosmetics for a anti.
I think it's like can't remember which bacteria.
There's like one particular bacteria.
Maybe it's like staph that it's, you know, preventing.
So I think a lot of cosmetics are going to have something in there that's like
antifungal.
So I'm like antibacterial anti.
Yeah, like very.
Oh yeah, that could be.
I'm going to definitely look into that because there are yeah, yeah, yeah.
So then that's what I think about endocrine disruptors.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
And it definitely could be that there is that functional reason for it.
I have one more student, OK, we're going to do this one in the front
first, OK, just because I have the microphone up
here first.
We'll go here and then over here.
So there are like major brands and state programs that claim to clean.
Do those, Have you actually tested them and have
they come back?
Actually, yeah.
So it depends on the brand.
Some are and some aren't.
So there are brands that work really hard and have scientists like toxicologists
and stuff like Beauty Counters 1 brand Credo Beauty,
they sell several clean brands.
So they have safe chemical policies that usually are banning, you know,
banning major chemical classes from their formulations.
So you really have to look company by company what their policy is.
And sometimes you'll still find like, you know, they've banned some things like,
but not others.
So it's really, it's really hit or miss.
And again, because there's no legal definition of
clean or non-toxic, companies can say that and they can be
telling the truth or they could be lying.
You mentioned earlier about the roadside Commission.
Is the roadside Commission bad enough that if you were to use a bicycle
regularly, that would be a probably?
Yeah.
So that's an interesting question.
So there were there was a study done on this,
it's called the bicycle study by my some of my former colleagues at Columbia
School of Public Health where they put air monitors on cyclists that were
commuting around New York City.
And you know, what they ended up finding is like if
you're biking or you're running because you're inhaling like more air,
like higher volume and a faster rate, you are getting more air pollution for
sure.
But then the health benefits, because you have to like weigh the costs
and benefits, like the health benefits of doing the
cycling they're saying is probably outweighing like the,
let's say heart benefits, cardiovascular benefits of cycling is an
outweigh the cardiovascular harms from the air pollution.
But no matter what, one of the things that's important is
like if you can have mitigating strategies for yourself.
So if you can take alternative bike routes or any routes that separate you
from tailpipe emissions in any way.
So things like as simple as being separated by vegetation.
Vegetation is really good at kind of grabbing onto particulate matter and
plants can even get a get air pollutants, the gases ones like into their tissues
like right through their stoma.
So you can people who are running, cycling, and if they're aware of it,
you can take actions to try to reduce your exposure.
But I think the argument, at least for Americans, is like,
Americans tend to have pretty sedentary lifestyles.
And so we wouldn't want, it would be a public health failure if we
told people don't go biking, don't go running because of air pollution
because that would overall have more harms on our health.
So thank you very much.
Yeah, thanks.