‘Environmental justice’ school’s students seek action on climate
Johnny Gallegos started to feel nauseated and sleepy — so much so that the 18-year-old couldn’t get off the bus.
He was on a “toxic tour,” an expedition led by a local advocacy group to some of the Houstonarea neighborhoods most affected by pollution from sources such as petrochemicals and metal recyclers. Something in the air was making him feel sick.
That made the Furr High School student feel something else: anger.
“Sometimes I feel like these (chemical) plants and the people who run these plants don’t care about what they are doing and they are just in it for the money,” said Gallegos, his eyes welling with tears. “And that angers me, but it also makes me really sad because these people” — the affected communities, he added — “their voices are not enough to change anything.”
Located on the city’s east side, the school was overhauled a decade ago to address high dropout rates. From the third floor, students can see the site of a oncemassive landfill. The nearby bayou is polluted, they say, and chemical plants lining the Hous
ton Ship Channel are only a few miles away.
It is also one of the few high schools in the country — if not the only one — where the curriculum revolves around the theme of environmental justice.
The focus on environmental issues at Furr comes as young people are becoming more vocal and active in calling for action on climate change. They sue the government, interrupt major sporting events and organize candidate forums. But they also grow gardens in food deserts, plant trees to mitigate flooding and monitor air quality to keep their communities informed.
This fall, Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teen who in 2018 started skipping school to strike outside of her country’s parliament, became a global icon after she sailed to New York to address the United Nations Climate Action Summit.
They say it’s personal for them. After all, they will be the ones to deal with the most dire consequences of climate change, especially if adults fail to act.
“This is the only Earth we have,” said Pearl Phan, 18, a senior at Pasadena Memorial High School. “Once it’s damaged, you can’t bring it back, so why not prevent it now — you know, make a difference now and not let it go?”
Furr’s transformation started three years ago, with a $10 million grant won through a national contest sponsored by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. The goal was to reinvent high school.
For Furr, that meant capitalizing on the school’s location, an area of Houston with serious environmental challenges. Students study traditional subjects such as math and English but also attend classes on wildlife, fisheries and ecology and agriculture.
On a recent morning, the agricultural class walked over to Herman Brown Park, where they maintain a garden full of fruit trees and a vegetable garden.
“Trees are the best solution to climate change,” David Salazar, an agriculture teacher specialist, told the students. “They help with erosion and flooding. Trees capture the carbon we are trying to sequester.” He then sent them out to pick clusters of bananas they would eventually take home, as they do with all the food they produce.
Most bananas are imported from Central America, Salazar said, which wastes energy. Those who pick them don’t get paid fairly either, he added.
Everything he teaches is solutionand action-oriented, he said.
The school is “about environmental justice,” said Steven Stapleton, the principal, “and about empowering our students to have agency and advocate for themselves and their community.”
That’s what Yulissa Cabrera, 18, aims to do.
Her media class spent more than two months preparing for a permit hearing for the Valero Houston Refinery, which is about 6 miles south of the school.
“Why can’t you treat our community the way you are treating the community in Los Angeles?” she asked company representatives, as audience members applauded.
Her knees were shaking and her palms sweating, but she felt she was not alone, she said, with a whole group behind her. So she continued to press officials.
“Some people saw it as us protesting,” she said later, “but it was really just us doing what we want to do when we grow up. This is just us raising awareness, being a voice, knowing what’s going on in our communities. We can’t just be oblivious to a black cloud that we see in the sky.”
In some ways, climate and the environment have become defining issues for many young people. While some conservative leaders question the science behind climate change, including how much humans are to blame, younger people increasingly see it as an urgent issue.
A clear majority of American teenagers, 86 percent, think human activity is changing the Earth’s climate, according to a recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official.
And it crosses party lines. According to the Pew Research Center, millennial Republicans are more likely than baby-boomer and older Republicans to say the Earth is warming due to human activity.
“You definitely see younger people becoming more active on this issue,” said Lia Millar, 22, a local organizer with 350.org, an international climate justice organization. She said access to information on social media and the internet has enabled people “to learn about the climate crisis in a way they weren’t able to before.”
They can also watch and draw inspiration from young leaders who use social media to create movements.
Locally, there are a handful of youth-led groups, Millar said, including Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future, Climate Strike US and 350.org — all of them relatively new here.
“People are realizing (that) maybe our representatives in federal office aren’t taking the climate movement seriously enough, and young people are willing to hold politicians accountable for their future,” she added.
Every social movement that has been successful in the U.S. has had “a strong youth and student component,” said Robert Bullard, an urban planning and environmental professor at Texas Southern University known as the “father of environmental justice.”
And this generation of young people is mobilizing across racial and class divides, with fewer wedge issues that keep them from working together, he said. Part of that is because they see it — and live it — in their own communities.
Houstonians are all too familiar with severe storms and hurricanes, which researchers have concluded are becoming more frequent and extreme due to climate change.
“ITC” has also become part of their vocabulary. Intercontinental Terminals Co.’s Deer Park chemical storage tank facility caught fire in March, sending a black plume of smoke across the sky that was visible for days.
Schools were placed on lockdown, baseball games were canceled and students weren’t allowed to go outside.
“I remember that day so clearly,” said Gallegos, the Furr High School student. “I walked outside, and I see this big cloud. I thought it was one giant rain cloud.”
When he got to school, everyone was talking about it.
The students organized a shelter-in-place workshop afterward to show residents what to do, including sealing their windows. Others organized informational forums.
“It was harder 10 years ago to draw attention to these kinds of issues because the discussions were more in the abstract and in the scientific,” said Jonathan Williamson, a political scientist from the University of Houston. “In recent years you’ve seen the negative consequences affecting, in a more obvious way, people and places across the globe.”
Phan and Kevin Juarez, 17, also a senior at Pasadena Memorial High School, say they can tell when the city of Pasadena is having a bad air-quality day.
“I can see it,” Phan said. “I look up at the sky and there are black fumes everywhere.”
There’s a reason why the community southeast of Houston is known by some as “Stinkadena,” Juarez said.
“Sometimes you come into the school and smell something and don’t know what it is,” he said, although he added that things have gotten better.
The two teens belong to the Environmental Youth Council, a new program by the Environmental Defense Fund deployed in three area schools: Pasadena Memorial and Galena Park high schools and the Raul Yzaguirre School for Success — all within a few miles of the ship channel.
“We are trying to prepare the next generation of environmental leaders,” said Shannon Thomas, who manages the program. “This is their planet.”
Phan and Juarez can now read and interpret data from two air monitors on the school’s rooftop. After school on a recent day, Juarez found the previous night’s readings upsetting.
“Did you see it was 147 last night?” Juarez asked Kathryn Williams, the AP environmental science teacher. “It was almost as high as the ITC fire.”
The air quality index reached 162 for particulate matter on March 24, seven days after the fire started, which means unhealthy.
“That’s the dangerous part of air pollution,” Juarez said. “You don’t know it unless you are on top of it.”
Both seniors are pushing for an idling policy at school to require students and parents to turn their engines off. They noticed that the air-quality index spiked in the mornings, before school started, and after dismissal. They said they had known it was an issue for a while, and they now have data to back it up.
There was a time when people in some countries in Asia didn’t have to wear a face mask, said Phan, whose parents are from Vietnam. “But now they do. (We) here in the U.S., we don’t have to wear a mask, but if we don’t make a difference, we are going to end up wearing a mask every time we walk outside a building, and that’s just a life no one wants to have.”