Investigators Give a Voice to an Underrepresented Community
By Benjamin Sipes
“They call it a ‘cesspool,’” recalls Dr. Kent Pinkerton, a professor of pulmonary pathology at the University of California, Davis, “it really is a sad story.” The “cesspool” is the Salton Sea in Imperial Valley, California and the “sad story” comes from the communities living around the lake as conditions become increasingly worse.
The Salton Sea is the largest lake in California, and it is heavily polluted. Pesticide runoff is just one of the contaminants streaming into the lake. The runoff, in turn, causes algal blooms that absorb all of the lake's oxygen and kill the fish population living within it. A US Geological Survey report in 2000 described the lake as having a “noxious odor of decay” coming from the dead fish that line the shore.
Life for communities in the Imperial Valley revolves around agriculture and requires the Salton Sea as a source for their irrigation. Not only does a drying lake present problems for the future of agriculture in the area, but communities surrounding the lake are noticing a high prevalence of asthma among their children. The cause, they believe, is the dust from the drying up lake.
People around the Salton Sea, however, do not have the political power to influence water allocation policy in California. These communities are vastly dominated by people of color and nearly half of them are limited English speakers. This language barrier significantly impairs their agency in political action. And it if that was not enough, about 65% of the population lives below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level.
While communities surrounding the Salton Sea experience direct impacts of the drying lake, they do not have the evidence or the political voice to express their challenges.The asthma affecting their children could be dust, but it could be due to another cause. Dr. Pinkerton, in partnership with Comité Civico del Valle (CCV) and the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW) are starting a project to investigate the cause of children’s asthma. Using this research, they hope to give people of the Imperial Valley the evidence and voice to enact change.
Like many areas of Southern California, Imperial Valley is naturally a desert. As California’s population grew, the people of Imperial Valley pressured the California Development Company to give them access to water for agriculture. In 1905, the Colorado River was breached, causing huge amounts of water to run down the Alamo Canal and create the Salton Sea. The circumstances of that breach remain controversial to this day. Some believe it was merely an accident; others claim it to be a criminal act by the California Development Company. Regardless, climate change is now causing the Salton Sea to dry up, and water is not being allocated to replenish it.
Organizations concerned with environmental health are now becoming involved with water and health issues around the Salton Sea. Dr. Pinkerton, associate director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center (EHSC) at UC Davis, recently started a project to research the community’s concerns with asthma. The EHSC is an organization that focuses on multidisciplinary academic involvement in community-driven research to solve problems related to environmental disease and public health.
“There is a pilot study program that allows you to apply research that is environmentally centered but also reaches out to the community,” says Dr. Pinkerton. Research has shown that, when it comes to health, community engaged research can be very empowering and valuable to communities. “One of the things that I wanted to make sure of is that the community had something to get them involved.”
Their idea is simple: they will visit two communities in the Imperial Valley, Brawley and Calipatria, and give a presentation proposing a community directed research project. These two communities were chosen for their distances respective to the Salton Sea Lake. After they complete the study, the team will return to explain the results and ask the community what they can do next.
The pilot study “is to help them understand whether the air quality in the Imperial Valley was the reason for the increase of asthma in the children down there,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “Basically, they feel as though they have poor representation in [state] Congress and that they are being overlooked.”
This project enables Dr. Pinkerton to conduct research with the potential to validate the concerns of people in the Imperial Valley, a small labor based community not unlike the one where he spent his childhood.
He grew up in American Fork, Utah, a town primarily sustained by the steel plant. His father was initially a steelworker at the plant, but he eventually left to start a business. “There are five of us in the family,” explains Dr. Pinkerton. “We grew up all helping as a family in Pinkerton Meat Market.”
Dr. Pinkerton currently studies respiratory science, but his favorite subject in school was history. Back then, his life aspirations were to be either a lawyer, work in the forest service, or be a school teacher. “Never in my life did I think I would be a university professor.”
Despite his varied interests in grade school, at Brigham Young University in Utah he found an interest in microbiology. After finishing his degree, he moved to Southern California to work at a hospital affiliated with USC as a pulmonary function technician. There his interest in the respiratory system was born.
Dr. Pinkerton enjoyed working with patients with illnesses of the respiratory system inciting his decision to go to graduate school for pulmonary pathology. “I checked around the country and applied to eight or ten graduate programs hoping that USC would take me,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “What was funny was USC was the first school to reject me.” When the choice came between Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and Duke University in North Carolina, “the weather in North Carolina was better.”
It was not long before Dr. Pinkerton became an associate professor at Duke. Soon afterward, he transferred to the University of California, Davis. “This was supposed to be a stepping stone,” he describes, “I was only supposed to be here for two or three years, and now it has been 30. I haven’t regretted it at all.”
The project in the Salton Sea is also not Dr. Pinkerton’s first experience with community-based research. In addition to being the associate director of the EHSC, he is the assistant director of the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, one of the first two agricultural health safety centers in the country. He describes the transition from basic science to something “a bit more about community involvement” as challenging but rewarding.
With community involvement comes community outreach, and both were new skills to him. However, he has continued to dedicate time to community outreach and representation of air quality issues.
The air quality in the Salton Sea is Dr. Pinkerton’s next big project. He knows that addressing the community’s concerns not only involves conducting community directed research but also working with those communities to develop a solution.
This project is a completely different dynamic compared to the current state of those communities. The people living around the Salton Sea currently believe Sacramento is ignoring them. A 14 million dollar grant was just given to look at bird migratory patterns in the Salton Sea area, which is frustrating to the people in Imperial Valley who feel the health problems affecting their children should take priority.
Dr. Pinkerton wants to use his research to give Imperial Valley citizens evidence to influence the politics surrounding the lake. “The people we talked to in Sacramento just want to have some scientific data that they can use to argue their point.”
But Dr. Pinkerton, the EJCW, and the CCV may face the challenge of giving results the community does not expect. “We can make no guarantees that we can show that the dust or air quality is producing an asthmatic like environment. We work with mice; mice are not children,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “What we can provide is biological plausibility and a voice for them in Sacramento.”
Even if they do provide that biological plausibility, the pith of this issue begins to raise other questions. For example, should water continually be reallocated to keep the Salton Sea artificially alive? Or conversely, what should be done if we accept the fact that Imperial Valley is destined to return to its natural desert?
Many stakeholders are divided on this issue. People like Colin Bailey with the EJCW believe that proper water allocation is imperative to save the Salton Sea and improve the health of people who live there. Scientists who study the area, on the other hand, believe the writing is on the wall for the lake. “It is inevitable,” says a climatologist working with Dr. Pinkerton. “The Salton Sea is going to dry up. Imperial Valley has always been a desert.”
The issues facing the Salton Sea are already nuanced, and the project has just begun. The research which may decide the fate of Salton Sea will happen, but unlike other research ventures, Dr. Pinkerton and his collaborators are determined for the community to be involved both in discovering the truth and having a voice for its consequences.
The Salton Sea is the largest lake in California, and it is heavily polluted. Pesticide runoff is just one of the contaminants streaming into the lake. The runoff, in turn, causes algal blooms that absorb all of the lake's oxygen and kill the fish population living within it. A US Geological Survey report in 2000 described the lake as having a “noxious odor of decay” coming from the dead fish that line the shore.
Life for communities in the Imperial Valley revolves around agriculture and requires the Salton Sea as a source for their irrigation. Not only does a drying lake present problems for the future of agriculture in the area, but communities surrounding the lake are noticing a high prevalence of asthma among their children. The cause, they believe, is the dust from the drying up lake.
People around the Salton Sea, however, do not have the political power to influence water allocation policy in California. These communities are vastly dominated by people of color and nearly half of them are limited English speakers. This language barrier significantly impairs their agency in political action. And it if that was not enough, about 65% of the population lives below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level.
While communities surrounding the Salton Sea experience direct impacts of the drying lake, they do not have the evidence or the political voice to express their challenges.The asthma affecting their children could be dust, but it could be due to another cause. Dr. Pinkerton, in partnership with Comité Civico del Valle (CCV) and the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW) are starting a project to investigate the cause of children’s asthma. Using this research, they hope to give people of the Imperial Valley the evidence and voice to enact change.
Like many areas of Southern California, Imperial Valley is naturally a desert. As California’s population grew, the people of Imperial Valley pressured the California Development Company to give them access to water for agriculture. In 1905, the Colorado River was breached, causing huge amounts of water to run down the Alamo Canal and create the Salton Sea. The circumstances of that breach remain controversial to this day. Some believe it was merely an accident; others claim it to be a criminal act by the California Development Company. Regardless, climate change is now causing the Salton Sea to dry up, and water is not being allocated to replenish it.
Organizations concerned with environmental health are now becoming involved with water and health issues around the Salton Sea. Dr. Pinkerton, associate director of the Environmental Health Sciences Center (EHSC) at UC Davis, recently started a project to research the community’s concerns with asthma. The EHSC is an organization that focuses on multidisciplinary academic involvement in community-driven research to solve problems related to environmental disease and public health.
“There is a pilot study program that allows you to apply research that is environmentally centered but also reaches out to the community,” says Dr. Pinkerton. Research has shown that, when it comes to health, community engaged research can be very empowering and valuable to communities. “One of the things that I wanted to make sure of is that the community had something to get them involved.”
Their idea is simple: they will visit two communities in the Imperial Valley, Brawley and Calipatria, and give a presentation proposing a community directed research project. These two communities were chosen for their distances respective to the Salton Sea Lake. After they complete the study, the team will return to explain the results and ask the community what they can do next.
The pilot study “is to help them understand whether the air quality in the Imperial Valley was the reason for the increase of asthma in the children down there,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “Basically, they feel as though they have poor representation in [state] Congress and that they are being overlooked.”
This project enables Dr. Pinkerton to conduct research with the potential to validate the concerns of people in the Imperial Valley, a small labor based community not unlike the one where he spent his childhood.
He grew up in American Fork, Utah, a town primarily sustained by the steel plant. His father was initially a steelworker at the plant, but he eventually left to start a business. “There are five of us in the family,” explains Dr. Pinkerton. “We grew up all helping as a family in Pinkerton Meat Market.”
Dr. Pinkerton currently studies respiratory science, but his favorite subject in school was history. Back then, his life aspirations were to be either a lawyer, work in the forest service, or be a school teacher. “Never in my life did I think I would be a university professor.”
Despite his varied interests in grade school, at Brigham Young University in Utah he found an interest in microbiology. After finishing his degree, he moved to Southern California to work at a hospital affiliated with USC as a pulmonary function technician. There his interest in the respiratory system was born.
Dr. Pinkerton enjoyed working with patients with illnesses of the respiratory system inciting his decision to go to graduate school for pulmonary pathology. “I checked around the country and applied to eight or ten graduate programs hoping that USC would take me,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “What was funny was USC was the first school to reject me.” When the choice came between Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and Duke University in North Carolina, “the weather in North Carolina was better.”
It was not long before Dr. Pinkerton became an associate professor at Duke. Soon afterward, he transferred to the University of California, Davis. “This was supposed to be a stepping stone,” he describes, “I was only supposed to be here for two or three years, and now it has been 30. I haven’t regretted it at all.”
The project in the Salton Sea is also not Dr. Pinkerton’s first experience with community-based research. In addition to being the associate director of the EHSC, he is the assistant director of the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, one of the first two agricultural health safety centers in the country. He describes the transition from basic science to something “a bit more about community involvement” as challenging but rewarding.
With community involvement comes community outreach, and both were new skills to him. However, he has continued to dedicate time to community outreach and representation of air quality issues.
The air quality in the Salton Sea is Dr. Pinkerton’s next big project. He knows that addressing the community’s concerns not only involves conducting community directed research but also working with those communities to develop a solution.
This project is a completely different dynamic compared to the current state of those communities. The people living around the Salton Sea currently believe Sacramento is ignoring them. A 14 million dollar grant was just given to look at bird migratory patterns in the Salton Sea area, which is frustrating to the people in Imperial Valley who feel the health problems affecting their children should take priority.
Dr. Pinkerton wants to use his research to give Imperial Valley citizens evidence to influence the politics surrounding the lake. “The people we talked to in Sacramento just want to have some scientific data that they can use to argue their point.”
But Dr. Pinkerton, the EJCW, and the CCV may face the challenge of giving results the community does not expect. “We can make no guarantees that we can show that the dust or air quality is producing an asthmatic like environment. We work with mice; mice are not children,” says Dr. Pinkerton. “What we can provide is biological plausibility and a voice for them in Sacramento.”
Even if they do provide that biological plausibility, the pith of this issue begins to raise other questions. For example, should water continually be reallocated to keep the Salton Sea artificially alive? Or conversely, what should be done if we accept the fact that Imperial Valley is destined to return to its natural desert?
Many stakeholders are divided on this issue. People like Colin Bailey with the EJCW believe that proper water allocation is imperative to save the Salton Sea and improve the health of people who live there. Scientists who study the area, on the other hand, believe the writing is on the wall for the lake. “It is inevitable,” says a climatologist working with Dr. Pinkerton. “The Salton Sea is going to dry up. Imperial Valley has always been a desert.”
The issues facing the Salton Sea are already nuanced, and the project has just begun. The research which may decide the fate of Salton Sea will happen, but unlike other research ventures, Dr. Pinkerton and his collaborators are determined for the community to be involved both in discovering the truth and having a voice for its consequences.