UPDATE: the developer of the proposed asphalt plant has abandoned its legal claims as of 6/10/24

North of Beech Street, in one of Manchester’s more affluent neighborhoods, a city pilot project took a two-lane, one-way street – a too-fast ‘neighborhood highway’ – down to one lane with a bike path. As a result, traffic slowed. Accidents decreased. The neighborhood is quieter. South of Beech Street, in the less-affluent neighborhood, no changes have been made to address the noisy, accident-prone neighborhood highway.

Now, residents are demanding better. The Manchester Community EJ Advisory Group is working to address the environmental challenges of the Queen City, and this place-based, community-led model is creating promising solutions. Across the state, Granite Staters are organizing in the pursuit of environmental justice and addressing the issue at monthly “Environmental Justice Roundtables.”

When Marina Vaz, Nashua-based Environmental Justice Community Advocate with the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) talks about “Environmental Justice” (EJ) she’s talking about the immediate impact of people’s surroundings on their life and health. She’s talking about access to green space, clean air and water, costs of energy and food and housing, and safer streets.

“Injustice determines everything,” adds Arnold Mikolo, Manchester EJ Community Advocate with CLF. Both Mikolo and Vaz point to certain neighborhoods bearing the burden of bad planning. These are neighborhoods devoid of trees, where concrete shimmers in the heat. It is houses painted with lead-based paint, and “neighborhood highways” where cars speed through residential areas. One of these neighborhoods is city-center Manchester, where rates of asthma, occurrence of lead paint, cost of housing, and poverty level all rank in the high-90th percentile of anywhere in the United States.

Mikolo and Vaz work with community members who are addressing EJ concerns in their communities, ensuring that residents have the resources to name challenges and identify solutions. In the summer of 2023, CLF, Granite State Organizing Project (GSOP) and Plan New Hampshire held community meetings to address the lack of safety for residents in this neighborhood. The report that came from those meetings calls for reducing two-lane streets to one-lane roadways, adding bike lanes, increasing accessibility to sidewalks, and planting trees to create shade and green spaces.

That community advocacy is helping grow an EJ movement in New Hampshire. This movement seeks to correct injustices caused by decades of poor city planning and redlining, injustices built on foundations of systemic racism.

Over in Nashua, community advocates are battling a proposed asphalt plant that would be located in a largely low-income, residential neighborhood. “An asphalt producing plant would spew dangerous chemicals through our downtown,” one resident said, “contaminating our homes, businesses, schools, and places of worship.” He adds: “They can’t take our air.”

Sarah Jane Knoy, Executive Director of the Granite State Organizing Project, said that even a state-of-the-art plant couldn’t reduce the impact of hundreds of trucks per day driving through a residential neighborhood. The increase in traffic, air pollution, and fallout from trucks, she said, would be catastrophic for the neighborhood.

The affected neighborhood also has a large population of immigrants, and language barriers can limit residents’ capacity to advocate for themselves. In areas where linguistic isolation is high, Mikolo notes, many residents don’t have the luxury of calling their elected officials and having their voices heard.

Residents of affected neighborhoods “need to have a full understanding of the process in their language of choice,” says Vaz. To that end, CLF and GSOP worked with the city to provide multi-language translation for the meetings where the asphalt plant was discussed. Now, the two organizations are working on a language access campaign to ensure that everyone has their voices heard in city meetings.

Advocates statewide stress the need for policies that ensure equitable health outcomes for everyone. Tom Irwin, a vice president at CLF, notes that an EJ law would help protect communities experiencing disproportionate environmental harm. Right now, he says, New Hampshire doesn’t have a law that requires the consideration of cumulative impacts – the recognition that any one source of pollution doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The work in Nashua is one example of how an EJ law would benefit residents. A cumulative impacts law, he explains, would mean that “when the developer of the asphalt plant seeks an air permit from state, the state takes into account not just the facility itself, but other sources of pollution like truck traffic, noise, heat, and chemical pollution.” But where the rubber meets the road – decisions by regulators whether to approve projects — the state, he says, currently has no authority to consider impacts holistically.

For now, it’s up to individuals and organizations to create change in New Hampshire. The monthly Environmental Justice Roundtables – organized by members of CLF, New England Grassroots Environment Fund, University of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and the Endowment for Health, among others – allow participants to learn from each other, share resources, and work collectively to build an environmental justice movement across the state. That includes rural and urban areas, from the seacoast to the Upper Valley to the mountains.

Irwin, Mikolo and Vaz are all inspired by how committed people are to the project of environmental justice, and how powerful community self-determination and public involvement can be. There are basic rights, said Vaz, that every person deserves. “Access to a healthy environment – access to green space, and to a good quality of life – those things shouldn't be barred from anyone.”