A Bucket of Air Helps a Nonprofit Leader Battle Polluters

I grew up in Lafayette, La., which is a town where much of the community has prospered from the oil industry, so I was exposed to a lot of wealth growing up. My father was a pediatrician, and my mother was a teacher. However, my mother taught in a special-ed school, so I was also exposed to a community that had not benefited from the oil industry.

After getting a degree in political science from the University of Colorado in 1990, I joined the Peace Corps

ANNE ROLFES Age: 40 First professional job: Peace Corps forester, Togo Current job: Founding director, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, New Orleans

and worked as a forester in Togo, which is in West Africa. I worked with small tree nurseries on erosion-control projects. This was daunting work, and while I had a boss, he was two days away, and there really wasn’t anyone to help me.

It was only the people in the village who appreciated what I was doing. These people were similar to the people I work with now through my environmental group, Louisiana Bucket Brigade — neither have any special financial or political power.

After the Peace Corps I supervised volunteers for the San Francisco Food Bank. At the time, California required that everyone who was receiving public assistance do 14 hours of volunteer work every week at nonprofit organizations. I really enjoyed the people I worked with, and I loved the job, but I always felt that I was putting a Band-Aid on a problem, not getting to the root of it.

About 1996 I began learning about Nigeria and its problems with Shell Oil, which was leaving its industrial waste on people’s farmland. When I saw pictures of villagers, they reminded me of the family I lived with in Togo.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a wealth of nonprofits, and I found one — Project Underground — that was working on the issue of oil production and oil destruction in West Africa. It had a program that focused on Nigeria, and in 1998 Project Underground sent me to West Africa to write a report on the people who had been made refugees by Shell.

Part of my report made its way to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and I later found out that the report had caused quite a stir in Nigeria because it shed light on the approximately 2,000 refugees who had been violently driven out of their country into refugee camps in Benin.

I returned to Berkeley, Calif., and after a short while I decided to move back to Louisiana to work on the same issues of oil pollution in my own state that I had first seen in Nigeria. In the United States the communities near these petrochemical plants are seeing higher rates of cancer and respiratory illnesses. The issues in Africa and this country are the same — ordinary people are being hurt by the irresponsible behavior of big, powerful companies.

I had learned about “the bucket,” which is a low-tech air-sampling device that makes it possible for the people who live near oil refineries and chemical plants to gather information about what is going on in their environment. The bucket sucks air into a bag that is then sent to a lab. When the results come back, community leaders know if air-quality standards are being violated. Consequently, the community then has the information it needs to decide what it wants to do.

At the time, a California group, Communities for a Better Environment, was working to get these buckets distributed throughout the United States, and it had established a very small presence in Louisiana.

In 2000 I applied for funding and received $50,000 from the Beldon Fund — which no longer exists — to formally establish the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

Today I have a staff of four and an annual budget of $375,000. Our funders include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Norman Foundation, Catholic Campaign for Human Development, and others.

My staff and I now work with various community groups. If there are problems, we help educate the community as to how to put the pressure on the Environmental Protection Agency or the state Department of Environmental Quality to clean things up, although even when we have the documentation, the agencies and the oil companies will still try to blow us off. However, that is when things get fun — especially when we get the media involved.

For way too long, people here have lived with pollution and are used to it. Pollution is viewed as business as usual.

For example, people in Garyville, La., live near a refinery, and when they wake up they find black soot and white film all over their property. They wonder, “If this is what is on our property, what is in our lungs?” I help these people to stop complaining to each other and to get to the root cause of the problem. And I help them take their case to the media and the regulators.

I’ve seen people who took air samples and got back a report that uses intimidating works like “benzene” and “hydrogen sulfide.” Suddenly these men and women become invested in understanding what these words mean and the effect these chemicals have on their health. Now, because they took their own samples, they are no longer intimidated by these words, and these citizens finally have the data to back up their observations.

We got Louisiana to put in air monitors near refineries, and pressured refineries to purchase contaminated properties where people were actually living, thus making it possible for these residents to be able to afford to move to safe properties.

A lot of my job is shaking things up and getting people — on both sides — to see that environmental violations are no longer acceptable, and that business as usual no longer works.