359: It’s In Our Blood: Communities vs Forever Chemicals

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): Yeah, PFOA is one type of PFAS and it was one of the original ones discovered. It's also been called C8 and PFOA was found to be, through court documents, completely toxic. DuPont knew it was toxic, but they never informed regulators of the toxicity. And so this is where litigation hit and there was a massive settlement agreement that happened. This all happened in Parkersburg, West Virginia. But while that was playing out, Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is upstream from where I live, it's about 80 miles up the Cape Fear River. They had a facility and that's where they were making PFAS that is used in non-stick cookware and in the creation of Teflon. This company, DuPont, decided, okay, you caught us. Yeah, you're absolutely right. PFOA is severely toxic. Give us a chance and let us make a replacement that'll be less toxic. The government said, okay, this was the early 2000s. We get to about 2015 and there's a stewardship agreement where DuPont decides to voluntarily phase out PFOA and replace it with a chemical called GenX. The federal government says, show us the toxicity, let's make sure it's not toxic. Turns out it's pretty toxic. The government says, fine, you can make it, but you absolutely cannot release it into anything. This is how the facility in North Carolina operates. DuPont then decides to spin off all of their PFAS-making product lines into a new company called Chemours, and they spun off all their liability as well, and they left the company pretty cash-poor. Then a scientist gets curious and decides to test the tap water in Wilmington, North Carolina, and that is when we learned that GenX was in our tap waters at very extreme levels. What we ended up learning in 2017 when we found out that we had extreme levels, of these chemicals in our tap water, is that we learned that our public trust had been broken. There were no state guidelines, there were no federal guidelines. These chemicals could exist in our tap water, and our local leaders in our water utilities could look us in the face and tell us that the water met or exceeded all state and federal guidelines because there were no state and federal guidelines. And that is what started our journey, to try and get drinking water standards created at the federal level and at the state level. And we were incredibly successful in 2024 under the Biden EPA. We were able to establish the first ever federal drinking water for PFAS, including GenX. And I had an incredible honor and privilege to introduce Administrator Regan when he came and made that announcement in North Carolina. So we have really been ground zero for a contamination problem that might feel local, but the more we reach out and talk to other people, like people in Maine, even people across the globe, when you start looking and testing and monitoring for PFAS, you start finding it.

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Christiana Figueres: And I have a question. Finding all of this out, you chose to pursue this challenge via grassroots mobilization in order to get policy in place. Is that correct? And why did you make that choice? Because you could also have gone the legal route.

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): For us, we still pursue legal pathways. But when we say grassroots, for us, the reason why we chose to become grassroots is, we knew who we were up against. We are up against a billion-dollar chemical conglomerate that knows what it's doing and was probably prepared for this and just, in our minds, probably wrote off pollution as the cost of doing business. And so we just felt maintaining our grassroots status was something that gave us a little flexibility to mobilize, but then also there's really wonderful nonprofits that are already doing this work. And we prefer to partner with them and encourage them and inspire them to keep doing that work, because there's a lot of different contaminations that can be occurring for environmental nonprofits. And we just want PFAS to be added to the plate and prioritized. And so that's really why we stay grassroots.

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Christiana Figueres: That makes sense. And Sarah, you went for the legal route. Why did you choose that?

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Similar to Emily, it is a little more complex than just the legal route in that it, because it really started with our farmers that needed the support. So when this contamination was being discovered, our farmers had no support network, no safety net. There were, you know, there were no regulations in place that initially told them that they couldn't sell their food. But our farmers did not want to knowingly sell contaminated food products to their consumers. It was their courage to basically stand up and say, we have contamination. There's no guidance on this, but we don't feel right about this. And initially, we were really worried about farms going out of business, and we didn't know the scale and the scope of the contamination. But we knew that based on where we were seeing contamination and where sludge had been spread, that it was likely widespread. And we were honestly very worried about just wide-scale farm closures and going out of business. And so, initially, ours also was a grassroots support, really with the courage of the farmers leading and sharing their stories with the public. We were able to really rapidly mobilize support behind farmers, both from a financial standpoint. So we set up an emergency fund immediately so that farms could pay their mortgage, they could pay their employees when they had no products that they were able to sell, and they voluntarily pulled all of their food products from the shelves. But then we quickly passed a number of really key pieces of legislation in the state of Maine. And one of the most, you know, just really inspiring things about this with the grassroots support is that these were bipartisan, almost fully unanimous in every vote that was taken to create a safety net to support our farmers.

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Christiana Figueres: Why do you think that, Sarah? Why unanimous? Why bipartisan?

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Well, I think there's something at the core of this, that it is about food and water. These two things.

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Christiana Figueres: Pretty basic to our survival.

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Basic things. Yes, we cannot live without them, right? And I've never met anybody who doesn't want clean water and safe food, even if they don't know anything about where it's coming from or how it's been produced or anything like that, right? Like at our core, we want clean water and safe food. And so I think with our courageous farmers being willing to share their stories and the impact of this and what was going to happen for them and our communities, right? So when a farm is contaminated, that may be the epicenter of that contamination and it doesn't stay there. PFAS moves through our ecosystem. So it moves into the groundwater. It moves into the waterways that are serving local communities, serving farm neighbors. It's moving into the food, depending on the plant or the animal that's being grown on the farm. The PFAS is actually also going into that food product at different levels. And so I think universally everybody could see this is something that affects all of us. It's not a partisan issue. It's not the fault of these farmers or communities or community members. And we need to step up and support them. So we passed this series of laws in the state of Maine to support farmers, ban the spreading of any further sludge on land, phase out PFAS and consumer products. So really trying to turn off the tap. And then also phase out the use of PFAS pesticides. And that suite of legislation, it's taken a few years to get that all in place and get it implemented and get all of those programs up and running. But they are all up and running now. And we've shown that it's possible that you can have success, that you can address this issue head on. But the legal route that we took, Maine is a relatively small state. And we are just one example of this national issue. This exists everywhere. There are communities like Emily's everywhere that have water contamination that are dealing with it. They may not know they even have that contamination or how to deal with it or what's going on. And so we really wanted to see federal action. Our federal agencies have been asleep at the wheel on this issue or willingly turning away from being able to address this issue. And so we sued the EPA along with other farmers and other local communities whose water has been contaminated by PFAS because the EPA has known since the 80s and has had a mandate since the late 80s to actually look for toxic chemicals in sludge and ensure that there were not toxic chemicals that were being land applied and spread into our communities from wastewater sludge. And they have done nothing to enforce that really. They've known since the early 2000s that there were PFAS chemicals in the sludge. And yet it's still today completely unregulated the amount of PFAS chemicals that are in sludge. So we need to see federal action. We want to see that from all the agencies. But the EPA has a very clear mandate that they're supposed to be protecting our environment and our health and they're not doing that. So we're seeking action.

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Christiana Figueres: So some winds at a state level or more local level and still a big huge gap at the federal level. Are you concerned? I mean, those of us who work on climate issues are, of course, absolutely aghast and outraged about what the current administration is doing, rolling back all of those agendas. Is this is the rollback of the EPA on global environmental issues also affecting national and local environmental issues? Is that something that you lose sleep about at night?

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): Absolutely. And one thing that we did is Comoros is trying to actively expand production and make more PFAS in North Carolina. And we reached out to the United Nations Human Rights Council to investigate our claims that we felt our human rights were being violated because of lack of accountability and action taken at the state and federal level to protect us. We had UN human rights experts call out officially DuPont and Comoros for business related human rights abuses. And when they called out DuPont and Comoros, the special rapporteur made a very interesting connection. He said that when we seek to decarbonize, we also need to make sure we detoxify. And I think that PFAS now intersect with climate change at this very important relevant level. Because what companies like Comoros have been saying for a couple of years now is they are essential to the clean energy transition. They're saying that you can't have clean energy without using PFAS.

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Christiana Figueres: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Can you say that one again?

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): These chemical companies like Comoros are claiming that, are claiming that you can't have a clean energy transition without including PFAS products. It's just they're saying it's not possible. The United Nations is saying at a global level, hey, nations, you absolutely need to hold your industries accountable. You need to make sure that if we're going to decarbonize, that we're not decarbonizing into something that is incredibly toxic and harming human life and the ecosystem. This is where we're at with PFAS. This is where PFAS now enters the fight with climate change, is let's make sure that all of these technologies that we're looking into, transitioning into, that we're safeguarding humanity in that process and making sure that workers are not being exposed, that communities are not becoming PFAS sacrifice zones, like mine became, like Maine has become, that we're holding ourselves accountable and our elected leaders accountable to make sure that the change that's needed to make these transitions, which are possible, can be done with green chemistry solutions and not just the next generation of toxic exposures that we'll be talking about in 20 years.

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah. Sarah? Yeah.

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Well, we're extremely concerned about what we're seeing at the EPA right now. At the end of the Biden administration, there was a draft risk assessment that came out actually looking specifically at on-farm contamination and did say there is a correlation between PFAS on farms and the impact on health of the farmers and the local community members. We were really happy to see that. It just verified exactly what we already knew and what we've seen directly here in Maine. And if anything, it was too conservative of an assessment because farmers who have PFAS contamination on their farm are the most impacted because they're likely experiencing that exposure pathway through multiple avenues. It's likely in their drinking water. It might be in the food that they're eating, if they're eating the food that they're producing. So we were really excited to see that action and that acknowledgement at the EPA, even though the PFAS action wasn't moving as fast as we would have liked it to have been moving, it at least was moving and there were water regulations, like Emily worked so hard to help support get those into place. And what we've seen over the last year in the Trump administration is shelving those things, rolling them back, ignoring them, just not doing anything. And on the pesticide side, we're seeing this rubber stamp approval of new PFAS pesticides. So it's just a continued just abdication of their responsibility to protect our environment from these chemicals that have known harm. And we see the impact that it has on the communities. And we know communities everywhere are impacted in some way, whether they're aware of it or not.

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Christiana Figueres: So some regulatory progress that we can celebrate and the threat of the rollbacks precisely on that regulatory progress that has been achieved by your efforts personally and so many others. Any thoughts about how do we hold the line? Any thoughts? I'm sure you've been thinking about how do we hold the line? How do we protect the ground that has been gained? What are your thoughts on that?

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): You know, I'm going to go back to and echo something that Sarah said earlier and it's that this truly is a bipartisan issue. When you finally educate yourself on forever chemicals and PFAS contamination and you really educate yourself on what's being done and what's not being done, we all tend to come to the same conclusions. So this is a unifying topic. I live in a very partisan state and we're severely gerrymandered. But this has been the one topic that creates unity amongst residents. Now, let me be very clear about that. It creates unity at the grassroots level, but it has not created unity at the state legislature. And again, that comes down to a dysfunction of our government and with gerrymandering. Now, we have outsized influence from the chemical industry, can control a select few legislatures that then control the whole system at the state level for all of us. At the federal level, though, where I see hope is I think if we continue leaning in to telling our stories and telling everybody what is happening with PFAS, you'll start to realize that nobody wants to have a baby born already contaminated with PFAS. Nobody wants to be drinking these synthetic man-made chemicals in their tap water on a regular basis. Nobody wants to eat food that is contaminated with this or find out that their farmland is now susceptible to contamination and increased exposure. No one wants to go swim in the ocean and be coated in a layer of PFAS while they do that. It is few and far between where I will find someone that agrees with the logic that it's okay to do all of that.

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Christiana Figueres: No matter what side of the isle they sit on.

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): Right. No matter what side of the isle. And so what it boils down to is quite honestly, who has the power and who has the money. This becomes then an issue of equity. Because when everybody learns about PFAS, people immediately want to protect themselves. And those who have the privilege of the financial fortunes can protect themselves moderately, but they can't protect themselves fully because we all access the river, we all access the ocean and we all go out to dinner and we don't know if we're eating contaminated food where we go to eat. So there's not that much control that you can have and it really does equalize socioeconomic differences. However, one thing that I want to make incredibly clear is that people throughout history have always had the final say and the most power. And we just have to keep reminding ourselves that, that we have to not get distracted, to not lose focus, and to understand and believe that we can achieve hard things. I have seen it played out. I am doing this now. This is our ninth year and we're a volunteer organization. We didn't wake up in 2017 and go, I can't wait to become activist Barbie. I can't wait to do all of this work on my free time of holding other people accountable to do their jobs correctly. That is not something that we dreamed about doing. We was born into necessity that we had to do it. That is where we hold the line as reminding everybody that it is your right to a free and clean environment. It is your right. That is your freedom to be able to access an ocean that doesn't have contamination. It is your freedom to take sips of water, to make sure that when you're nursing your infant, that you're not already contaminating them with more PFAS, that your farmers who are already struggling or not struggling further with contamination and medical debt. Because we don't have the power to hold a couple of polluters accountable, I know we have that power. And I just know as long as we get this message out here and we do it in a passionate and honest way, we will have the last say. The people always do.

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Christiana Figueres: Wow. Great. Thank you so much. So well put, Emily. Sarah, do you agree with that? It's people power that continues to make the difference?

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Absolutely. Absolutely. I agree with everything Emily said. And yes, that is what makes the difference. That's what made the difference here. I think we can continue to make a tremendous amount of change at the local level, at the state level, and keep pushing at the federal level. We do know that this is a bipartisan issue. We have just introduced at the federal level something called the Relief for Farmers Hit with PFAS Act. It's a federal safety net that's modeled off of the safety net that we put in place here in Maine that would support farmers and has bipartisan support. Even if the administration and the agency isn't actively moving forward on these things, in the span of time in history, three years is a pretty short time. We're going to keep at it and keep making that change and working towards this long-term solution.

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Christiana Figueres: Ladies, thank you. Thank you so much for that forward thinking. And your communities, your states are incredibly blessed that they have you and that you continue to fight the good fight. What about other communities, other states that don't have these amazing heroines working for them, but that have understood and have been made aware of the fact that they're facing similar challenges? What would be your suggestion for those cases?

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): First, just that there's good news, that you're not alone, that there is a network of grassroots PFAS-contaminated community groups all over the country that have mobilized. And we formed a national coalition called the National PFAS-Contamination Coalition. So I want to just stress that this is not something that I've done alone, that there's been a tremendous amount of support and allies and coalition building that we've done along the way. We had Erin Brockovich come to our area, we had Mark Ruffalo come to our area. So we've had big microphones come. And the one thing that they consistently said over and over again is that it really is going to take the community coming together to fight for itself. We can have all the resources, but we need to have community first. And so start talking to your neighbors, start talking to your friends, make this a conversation in the grocery store line and the car line, wherever you're hanging out on your Sunday afternoons, and make sure that you're educating and talking and organizing and then reaching out to the support networks that have already existed to help you mobilize yourselves and become more engaged on this topic.

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Absolutely. Starting at the community level is extremely important in the first step. And I would also just say on the farmer side, we have a national coalition as well, the National Coalition for Sludge-Free Land, and farmer support resources for how we've helped our farmers navigate. Those are available on our website. And also the Safer States Coalition. So looking at states across the country that are taking up action and legislation on PFAS all across the board. So that can be a great place just to see, is there any legislation already being considered in your state and who's working to support that and how can you get involved?

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Christiana Figueres: Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much to both of you ladies. Thank you for your work and thank you for taking the time off of your crazy work schedule to share here on Outrage and Optimism and educate us about a topic that otherwise would not have come across our radar screens at all. So thank you so much to both of you.

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Sarah Alexander (guest, Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association): Thank you for having us.

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Emily Donovan (guest, co-founder of Clean Cape Fear): It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: What a great and alarming conversation that really reveals to us something that we've normalized to such a degree that we don't even really think about it. It's interesting that water and food are really the vectors and entry points into this conversation. We so often talk about the air with pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but water and food are different entry points that may be cut at people in a different way. What were your reflections either on that point or from the conversation, Christiana?

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Christiana Figueres: Well, I agree with that, Tom, and also it made me realize that we climate nerdies think about climate as being global pollution, and we tend to dismiss or put in a second level of importance things that are of local pollution. Here, what we're understanding, what these two brilliant women have explained, is that while the contamination occurs locally in very specific points, either the water or the land and food, it's not contained within strict boundaries. It actually permeates very, very large areas, both the water and the food. So interestingly, Tom, I sort of began to think, is there a blurring here between global and local pollution? Because maybe we shouldn't differentiate as clearly as we tend to do or we tended to do. Maybe local pollution isn't so localized. Maybe it does spill into much, much larger regions and especially here with PFAS, as we have discussed, it's not just in the United States or in Europe, it's practically in every country. And these countries, this, the United States and in Europe, of course, are the countries that are farther ahead. Sadly speaking, most other countries are not even paying any attention to it. So is there really a big difference between, in terms of impact on human health, is there that much of a difference between local pollution and global pollution, in terms of impact on human health?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's such a great point. And I think building on that, one other thing I was thinking as we go through this episode is that local pollution is often the window into global issues. To ask somebody to care about a global issue, by definition, it's abstract. It seems far away.

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Christiana Figueres: And too far away, yeah.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Too far away. And the connection between your own actions and the overall issue, you feel kind of powerless, you feel impotent, you don't feel like you couldn't have any impact. But when it's local, it can really get significant engagement and personal participation, because you see the impact on your life. I was always very impressed by something I learned many years ago, which is that the groups that became the governments of the old Soviet states when the Soviet Union collapsed, all of those groups started as local pollution activist groups. They built momentum in their local area, and then they ended up turning into broader issues and becoming governance mechanisms. I think it's just one interesting example of how, when you actually go at this from a local perspective, I think it's something on climate, we've never really worked out how to talk about what the local impacts are, because of the diffuse and global nature of it, although of course it does have local impacts.

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Christiana Figueres: So as we heard last week, as we had level rise.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, I do think that these ways in our ways to get not just like a slightly soft. Yes, I think it's broadly interesting, but this is really important and I will I will take action and I will show leadership to make a difference.

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Christiana Figueres: Yeah, both of them are such good examples of mobilization of people, real people getting really mobilized around a real issue. And somehow that proximity to the issue is one that we're slightly missing on climate.

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, yeah. So that's a broader question for how we address that. And I think we need to think about it. Because as I say, this is the moment we need to really identify how we find our way into it and human impacts at the local level. And of course there are many.

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Christiana Figueres: The other thing to note about this, Tom, is that climate has become so polarized and polarizing that the two sides of the aisle don't even talk to each other about this. And this PFAS challenge is a very interesting example exactly of the opposite. Because everyone is concerned about their direct health, the health of their children. That is not a political issue. It's not about which side of the aisle you sit on. It's not about ideology. It's about something very real, which is the health that we can aspire to. So it is an interesting insight into that could be another way that we begin to hone in on climate so that we're able to depoliticize it because it is affecting every single citizen. And can we then take it out of the political dilemma that it is in and make it much more of a human shared issue?

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Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah, that's a great point. So thank you, Christiana, for this week and last week. Amazing episodes and we'll see if we find Paul by next week. Thanks everyone for listening. Bye bye. Bye.