Citizen Pollution Monitors Face Industry Pushback, Legal Threats

Students from a local university sampling from Morris Creek near Charleston, West Virginia. Photo: James Holloway via Flickr Creative Commons (CC BY-NC 2.0).

TipSheet: Citizen Pollution Monitors Face Industry Pushback, Legal Threats

By Joseph A. Davis

If the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and states won’t do pollution monitoring, many of today’s citizens will. Polluters hate it when that happens.

To be sure, the EPA does sometimes do pollution monitoring — but not enough for air-breathers in many places to feel safe. That’s why citizen pollution monitoring became a thing some years back.

But there’s been pushback. Louisiana, for instance, the state with some of the most toxic and uncontrolled chemical air pollution in the United States, passed a law in 2024 — the Louisiana Community Air Monitoring Reliability Act — making citizen air pollution monitoring all but illegal.

Louisiana is, of course, home to “Cancer Alley,” a sprawl of petrochemical plants emitting toxic substances into the historically Black and not-wealthy communities just beyond their fencelines.

Elevated cancer rates in Louisiana communities are just one reason this matters. People actually die. Yet the Louisiana law makes most citizen monitoring data impossible to use in legal proceedings — and actually makes public disclosure of the data illegal in most cases.

So now, Louisiana community and green groups are suing the state for violating their free speech rights. Lawyers for the Environmental Integrity Project are representing them.

 

The backstory

Citizen monitoring has been going on for a long time, in many forms and in many places. One thing that has changed recently is that the EPA under Trump 2.0 has pretty much stopped most enforcement of environmental laws. That makes citizen action the last resort.

The movement is not just limited to toxic air. Nature Forward, a local naturalist club in the Washington, D.C., area, regularly holds outings where people put on waders, count mayflies and water beetles, and collect samples and measure pollution in area streams.

Doctors and Scientists Against Wood Smoke Pollution is another citizen science group, international in scope, that supports citizen monitoring aimed at this very particular air quality issue.

 

Pollution monitoring is

not just limited to citizens.

Journalists, too, do it.

 

And it’s not just limited to citizens. Journalists, too, do it. In fact, pollution monitoring is the kind of fact-checking that makes for compelling stories.

Technology is one of the monitoring bugaboos for both citizens and journalists. When the EPA and states measure pollution for possible prosecution, they typically use instruments of top scientific quality, properly calibrated.

But take heart: Affordable and portable pollution monitoring instruments are available on the open market. Cost depends partly on which pollutants they are designed to sense.

 

Story ideas

• Talk to local/regional environmental and citizen groups to find any citizen pollution monitoring activity in your area. Then visit those groups. Go with them on monitoring expeditions.
• Look in the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online, or ECHO database, to find recalcitrant polluters in your area of interest. What monitoring has the EPA used to ensure compliance?
• Is there an academic institution in your area that studies environmental pollution? Talk to professors and researchers about how they evaluate pollution.
• Talk to your city or county health department about what pollution impacts on people’s health they find. How do they know?
• Buy or borrow a pollution-monitoring instrument and walk or drive around your community to find hot spots.

 

Reporting resources

• EPA: The agency, at least theoretically, supports citizen monitoring, especially by supporting well-calibrated instruments. In past times, it even offered grants to citizen groups.
• Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences: This nonprofit membership group aims to boost expertise available to citizen monitors by networking them with a global array of experts.
• State air and water quality agencies: The attitudes of such agencies toward citizen monitoring vary a lot, depending on politics. Find your state agencies on this list.
• PurpleAir: This group makes and sells the sort of air monitoring instruments that are suitable and affordable for citizen air quality monitoring groups. They are networked with many government, academic and community groups interested in monitoring.

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 10, No. 43. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.