Growing up on Chicago’s South Side, an urban landscape of metal and concrete, Miguel Mendez had limited access to open spaces, and always dreamed of traveling. Yet there in the city, he got his first introduction to environmentalism.
“In some of the places I lived in Chicago, environmental activists are fighting air pollution and the limitation on parks,” Mendez says. Many of those groups have been there for years, and as he grew up, Mendez internalized the importance of preserving and advocating for a safe environment for all communities.
When he was about to enter ninth grade, Mendez applied for a scholarship to an environmentally focused high school. So instead of walking into a classroom his freshman year, he found himself trekking into the Sylvania Wilderness, an expanse of pristine, protected lands within the Ottawa National Forest on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Everything about wilderness school was different from the urban life he had left in Chicago, from where he slept—Mendez spent one night in an igloo on a frozen lake—to the community that surrounded him. “The only other people of color that I knew were the students who were also part of my scholarship program,” Mendez says.
Still, he welcomed the opportunity to immerse himself in nature. “I think of that time at boarding school as where I got my spark for the environment,” Mendez says.
That spark caught fire as Mendez went on to study chemistry at Williams College, focusing much of his academic coursework and senior thesis on environmental justice. His chemistry thesis examined paper-based sensors for mercury and arsenic designed to be low-cost and user-friendly. Mendez explored the applications of these sensors with the hope that they could serve as a tool for communities to easily assess their own water quality and advocate for change.
Mendez went on to earn his master’s degree in environmental engineering at Stanford before beginning working at the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) in 2020. At the SFEI, Mendez focuses primarily on PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, synthetic “forever” chemicals that do not break down easily in the environment. PFAS occur in many consumer products, including cosmetics, clothing and cookware. Mendez is currently analyzing the levels of PFAS in wastewater treatment facilities in the Bay Area.
Mendez and his fellow researchers found relatively low amounts of PFAS in municipal wastewater and biosolids, byproducts of the wastewater treatment process. However, “one of the key problems with PFAS is that even though we may be seeing them at low levels, they’re extremely persistent” and pose a health risk to humans, potentially causing damage to the liver and immune system, he explains.
Mendez’s corgi, Coco, often accompanies him to the beach. Photo: Areli Valencia
Mendez is currently attempting to identify potential sources of PFAS in Bay Area wastewater treatment facilities by zooming in on specific wastewater discharges. Laundromats, food waste industries, and semi-conductor manufacturing could be contributing to elevated PFAS levels, Mendez explains. He is also beginning to analyze PFAS concentrations in wastewater flows in residential areas. “That will give us an indication of how much of this might be coming directly from our faucets.”
Recently, as part of a larger report produced by the SFEI, Mendez helped develop conceptual models that illustrate how plastic moves through the environment. “The pandemic increased our dependence on single-use plastics,” Mendez says, in turn increasing plastic waste. In one of the models Mendez and his team developed, single-use plastic foodware ends up on land as litter, where rainfall or runoff then carries the plastic and other pollutants into the stormwater system. In most cases, stormwater is not treated before being discharged into urban waterways or directly to the ocean. Through this pathway, plastic may be degraded, forming smaller plastics pieces including microplastics. The report Mendez and his colleagues produced helped inform California’s strategy for addressing microplastics, a two-pronged approach that includes immediate solutions to manage plastic waste and a longer-term research agenda.
Though Mendez focuses on particles and chemicals smaller than the naked eye can perceive, he never loses sight of the larger context. Witnessing how environmental hazards like PFAS, microplastics, and other contaminants disproportionately affect certain communities, Mendez makes a concerted effort to reach and educate these audiences.
As California launched its microplastics plan, Mendez partnered with the Spanish-language network Telemundo to provide Spanish language interviews and share the science across language barriers. “As a person of color in the environmental field, it’s really important to highlight these types of studies…to a wider audience,” Mendez says.
Mendez knows firsthand that communities of color are often exposed to environmental dangers that are under-researched and unaddressed by government and policy organizations. Reflecting on his childhood in Chicago, Mendez describes a massive smokestack he walked by every day. “Now I look retrospectively and can see the different environmental hazards [around me] when I was young.”
From a young age, Miguel Mendez learned about the value of the natural world from environmental activists in his own community, and he continues to push that work forward today. “I ask the science to speak for itself,” he says. “Through science we can find avenues to make an impact.”
Top image: Miguel Mendez speaking to a reporter on Spanish language network Telemundo. Photo: Telemundo
Kate Raphael is a freelance writer in Berkeley, California and a current student at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. She writes about how climate change affects health, ecosystems, and policy. You can find her running trails in the Berkeley Hills or on Twitter @KateRaphael_
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Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.