Change is happening on a different level. Changemakers need to adapt
And we're getting ready to join them.
Somewhere, right now, a regional air quality district is voting on whether to install air monitors near a neighborhood crossed by a highway. A local researcher pushed to investigate asthma rates there after gathering community testimony and data, and that’s why it’s on the agenda.
Somewhere, right now, a planning commission is deciding whether to approve a new AI data center, after residents and a local scientist raised concerns about how much of the community’s drinking water it would use to keep its servers cool.
Somewhere, right now, a state agency is deciding whether to ban organophosphate pesticides, as they’ve met several times with researchers from a local university and farmworkers who have informed they’re linked to reduced IQ, changes to brain morphology and cerebral palsy.
None of these are dramatic scenes. There’s no testifying before Congress, no press conference with cameras flashing and questions coming from every direction. It’s probably a Tuesday night. There are maybe a dozen people in each room, and most of them have sat through this same kind of meeting before, on some other routine agenda item, at some other ordinary hour.
But this is what translating research to action actually looks like. Sitting through town halls just to be a familiar face, grabbing a coffee with a staffer who didn’t have to say yes. Perhaps showing up to a grassroots organization’s event months before they even know who’s going to speak at a hearing.
We think those rooms are where the future of environmental health is being written. And we don’t think enough researchers are in them.
Over the past year, a lot of the decision-making that used to happen in Washington has moved closer to home. Change is happening on a different level now. So changemakers need to change too.
The room has moved
The federal government’s pullback from public health is hard to overstate.
The EPA’s office in charge of researching how chemicals and pollution affect human health once had more than 1,500 employees. It’s down to about 140.
Budgets to enforce the nation’s environmental laws could be slashed in half.
Environmental justice programs at the EPA have been eliminated outright.
The federal standard meant to keep PFAS out of drinking water was rolled back, a change researchers estimate could contribute to nearly 10,000 preventable deaths a year.
States haven’t waited for permission to respond. At least 22 have introduced their own PFAS bills this year. Places like Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and California are leaning on their own authority to protect public health as the federal government walks away from things like the endangerment finding, the legal basis it has long used to regulate climate pollution.
Governors and city councils are becoming the last line of defense for the air people breathe and the water they drink. We want to find the researchers who are already working alongside them, or who are ready to start.
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Something is shifting
For seven years, Agents of Change has trained early-career environmental health researchers to do something academia rarely teaches well: communicate their science to people who aren’t scientists.
But knowing how to talk about your research and knowing how to move it into the rooms where decisions get made are two different skills. One gets you cited. The other gets PFAS out of the water. Last May, we gathered in California to come up with a plan that will help our next cohort of fellows move toward the latter.
Not doing science on the sidelines
Cohort 7 will still offer what fellows have come to expect from us: mentorship, community and a platform for stories too often left untold. But this cohort is about taking the next step, from communicating research to translating it into something a city council, a state legislature, or a local health department can actually use.
We’re looking for people who are tired of sitting on the sidelines. Someone who is passionate about connecting their science to environmental and climate action and policy. People who have been doing this work despite set ups and losses and want a community of peers and mentors to help them develop a strategic plan that maps out exactly how to achieve their long-term policy goals.
We’re not going to pretend this is easy. Local health departments and agencies are even further stretched thin, and in desperate need of researchers who show up prepared, not just with data, but with the case for why it matters. We want to help our fellows be that researcher.
Anyone who’s sat through a city council meeting or worked with a community partner knows this kind of policy work is slow. It’s tedious. Sometimes it’s just plain boring. But that’s also how change actually happens. Not in one dramatic moment, but in the pile-up of small, ordinary ones.
We think there are researchers out there ready to create this kind of scalable, tangible change. We’re building Cohort 7 to help them do it.