- So we're going to add 10 drops to our 10 milliliters, right?

- What happens if she does 11?

- I mean, it probably wouldn't be the biggest deal, but- - Oh, okay.

(upbeat music) Climate change is not a future problem.

It's here now.

And as global temperatures rise, the glaciers are melting and the sea level is rising too.

You can see the effects all over South Carolina, right now.

Coastal cities like Charleston have seen the sea level rise about half an inch per year since 2010.

And heavier rain has led to flooding all across South Carolina.

- I was born and raised in Columbia, and I lived in the lower Richland community.

So now I'm a graduate student at USC trying to address environmental justice issues in my community.

Since 2015 when we were hit with the 1000-year flood, my community was impacted drastically.

Mold, property damage, road closures, and even now we have more recurring rain events and flooding, as you can see along the Congaree.

We don't have all the answers and we know that the flood's gonna keep on happening, it's just figuring out the best way to mitigate and respond.

- And those flood waters bring with them even more problems, from property damage to pollution, because many of the same fossil fuel facilities that are responsible for warming our climate are also polluting our environment.

Climate change and environmental destruction are part of our present, but just how much they affect our future is still in our power because the answers of what you could do about it could be closer than you think.

I'm KJ Kearney, and this is "Citizen Better."

(upbeat music) South Carolina is home to 28 of the country's 1,300+ Superfund sites, land contaminated with toxic waste that can infiltrate our water systems, especially during floods, and sometimes waste gets dumped directly into the rivers.

As recently as 2010, South Carolina's DHEC determined that a former manufactured gas plant had been discharging coal waste, which was found in the Congaree River sediment.

The $20 million cleanup efforts were only completed in 2023.

In the meantime, everywhere the Congaree flood waters went, coal tar pollution followed it.

So I'm out here in Congaree National Park with Beata Dewitt.

She's close to the problem and she's close to the solution because she's teaching the next generation of lower Richland residents how to monitor the quality of their water.

So how do you find these groups of people that you're leading?

And do other states have similar programs?

- So we started with the high school students.

And so these students are in a biology course, environmental health course.

So they kind of already have the passion or the awareness of our ecosystem.

And so we hope that not only just engaging with them, but also showing them like, you can do this in your own backyard.

That will spark people to want to come out and do more and probably tell their friends that, "Hey, this is something interesting, but we're also doing something impactful for our environment."

- Things like rising sea levels and temperatures, heavy rains, toxic waste sites, and pollution in river ways may seem like separate issues from environmental degradation, but they're deeply intertwined.

And like many other civic issues we face, they impact vulnerable populations first.

- I work a lot in the energy space, and one thing that we found is that when it comes to energy and when it's where they place these fossil fuel facilities and coal plants and gas plants, it's almost exclusively in communities of color, so black and brown communities.

And we found that these communities suffer the brunt of whatever's being done, and we call 'em often frontline communities, fence line communities, but they are suffering unequally the burden of energy generation everywhere throughout the US.

- In 1982, environmental advocates discovered a disturbing pattern, when a toxic waste dump was slated for placement in a black neighborhood in Warren County, North Carolina.

The Warren County project was just one instance of a nationwide trend of placing waste sites, power plants and other pollution generators and non-white, low-income neighborhoods, leaving communities of color to bear the health consequences.

Residents in Warren County marched and protested the dump for over six weeks, concerned that it would leach toxic chemicals into their drinking water.

The dump was still built, but they brought national attention to the issue of environmental justice.

Congress requested a report on the locations of toxic waste sites in the US, which was released the following year.

The US Government Accountability Office found that most of the population living close to surveyed hazardous landfill sites were black.

Other organizations, including the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, launched their own investigations.

The group found that communities next to at least one hazardous site were on average, 24% people of color, where communities without a waste site, were only 12% non-White.

Dr. Benjamin Chavis Jr, who worked on this report, coined the term "environmental racism" to describe this concerning pattern that environmental justice advocates like Beata and Paul are still trying to unravel today.

- One of the real world consequences of the climate change is local flooding.

And here in the Midlands, it's been a little bit insane.

We can have flood events in Five Points area if it rains more than an inch at any given time.

And not only does it have an impact, like with a car that might be floating, it also impacts communities down river as well.

So the Lower Richland community is right beside Congaree National Park.

They have every form of pollution you can think of down there.

In the outskirts of the community, there is even a nuclear fuel fabrication facility that has been known to leak contamination out into the community.

- To address environmental racism and climate injustice, people need to be able to access information about what's happening in their community, whether that's at the side of a river or behind a keyboard.

You'd be surprised what's happening in your neck of the woods, what's happened in your backyard.

If you were to go onto the EPA or their state equivalents websites and look for Superfund sites or Brownfields, you'd find they're all around you.

So by looking up and trying to find what's going on around you, you can know a little bit more about the risks that are at play and hopefully take action to stop them.

But then importantly, environmental justice advocates share that information with the people around them so they can work together towards a solution.

Climate change is an all-hands on deck issue that starts with observing the world around us and speaking up when we notice that something isn't right.

Black and brown communities are often most affected by these changes, but that also means environmental justice communities can be on the front lines of making change.

As Paul Black says, the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.

So what solutions will you create in your community?

Happy Earth Month, everybody.

All this month, PBS is dropping new episodes, celebrating our amazing planet, like the new video from Sovereign Innovations, all about the history of the buffalo and indigenous foods.

Links to that video and the full Earth Month playlist are in the description.

I'm KJ Kearney and thanks for watching "Citizen Better."

(upbeat music)