*Reposted from the NC Health News website
By Will Atwater
Larry Baldwin stood before a crowd of about 60 people gathered in Northampton County for the screening of The Smell of Money, a documentary that follows rural North Carolinians standing up to the industrial hog industry, and he posed a question.
“This is a beautiful room,” he said, “but there is one thing missing. Anybody know what it is?” He paused, waiting for an answer.
“It’s our youth,” he said.
Baldwin, an activist who works for the international clean water advocacy group NC Waterkeeper Alliance, co-hosted the screening with local resident and community activist Belinda Joyner.
Baldwin’s question carried a sense of urgency, given that some of the people featured in the documentary are no longer living — including Rick Dove, a longtime environmental advocate who died in August. For years, Dove worked closely with Baldwin to educate the public about environmental harms — particularly the effects of factory farms housing thousands of swine and poultry — on land and human health. His death underscored a larger reality: As veteran activists leave the stage, fewer young people are stepping in to continue the work.
The absence of young environmental activists — especially in rural areas like Northampton County, where the air quality is affected by air pollution from nearby highways and a wood pellet factory, among other things — is striking at community gatherings like the one Joyner organized. At 72, she refers to herself as “a voice for my people.” That voice, like those of many colleagues who have fought for decades to improve air and water quality in low-wealth rural communities across the state, is getting older.
‘Where are the young people?’
While longtime community leaders like Joyner continue to speak out, many rural areas are aging as younger residents flee in search of better opportunities. In 2023, 21 percent of the U.S. nonmetro population was 65 and older, compared with 17 percent in metro areas, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. With fewer working-age residents, rural communities have a smaller pool of young people to assume leadership roles. This threatens the future of grassroots activism in areas with a high level of environmental threats.
This demographic shift is unfolding against a backdrop of environmental insults that weigh on rural North Carolinians — especially those living in the eastern part of the state. There, massive hog farms dominate the landscape in places like Duplin County, where it’s said that hogs outnumber people.
North Carolina-generated research has also linked air pollutants from poultry farms — ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and fine particulates — to asthma, eye irritation and higher rates of heart disease and stroke. Managing the thousands of gallons of hog urine and feces generated daily has led to groundwater contaminated with nitrates and pathogens, which raises risks of gastrointestinal illness. Persistent odors, noise and truck traffic add stress and reduce quality of life. Giant poultry-growing operations pose similar risks, as piles of chicken feces release ammonia and generate dust that worsen asthma and may strain cardiovascular health. Overall, research suggests that people living near factory farms experience poorer health outcomes than those who don’t.
Activists point to several reasons it’s difficult to keep young people in their communities after high school.
“As [young people] graduate from school and leave to go off to college, they don’t come back, given the conditions they grew up under,” said Naeema Muhammad, 74. Muhammad began advocacy work as a teenager and spent 21 years as a community organizer for the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, a community advocacy organization. She is now a senior adviser for the group.
She believes parents can help address the issue by exposing their children to community work early on.
“I always thought part of the problem was that when the adults came to meetings, they left their children at home,” she said. “I’d [ask] them, ‘Where are the young people, and why didn’t you bring your children or grandchildren with you to the meeting?’”
Getting children involved early and giving them responsibilities during community meetings, Muhammad said, would make them more likely to stay engaged in advocacy as they grow older.
That idea resonates with UNC Chapel Hill senior Mary Jane Watkins, 21, who said she began her activist journey at 19 after learning more about the alleged environmental harms to her hometown of West Badin by the Alcoa Aluminum Co., which operated a smelting plant there for a century before closing in 2007.
“This environmental justice issue, being so close to home and my family, motivated me to stand up and fight for the cleanup of Badin and other rural towns like my own,” Watkins said in an email to NC Health News.
She agreed that the best way to engage the younger generation in environmental and social justice issues is to reach them early.
“The biggest barrier that prevents young Black people from environmentally impacted communities from becoming advocates is the lack of education,” Watkins said. “Despite prior advocacy efforts that had been taking place for decades before I was informed, I did not learn about the damage Alcoa had caused in my town at school or from community members during my upbringing.”
“Beyond this, a lack of access to higher education due to economic and social barriers — especially in rural communities — prevents young people of color from gaining the knowledge and networks that might mobilize them against environmental racism.”
Engaging the next generation
“We haven’t done a good job of getting young folks to understand how important this work is,” said Sherri White-Williamson, executive director of Environmental Justice Community Action Network, based in Sampson County. She noted that environmental justice requires many disciplines — from attorneys who shape policy to riverkeepers who protect waterways — because the work touches every part of the environment.
White-Williamson also highlighted another challenge rural communities face in keeping and recruiting young people.
“It’s hard to get young people because they want to be where things are sexy and fun and close to recreation and entertainment — and there’s just not that [here],” she said. “It’s going to take a different mindset, but it’s also going to take us, who are older and have been in this business, to figure out ways to get younger people engaged.”
Building career pathways is another hurdle.
“We have a lot of internships, but we don’t have a lot of positions that open up,” said Emily Sutton, executive director of the Haw River Assembly, a Chatham County-based advocacy group, where she also serves as the Haw Riverkeeper. “We try to provide stipends and paid internships when we can and when we have funding for the projects that the interns are working on.”
Despite those hurdles, efforts are underway across the state to introduce young people — from grade school to college — to environmental justice work and potential career paths.
Bridging the gap
For more than three decades, the Haw River Assembly has run The Learning Celebration, a three-week program that introduces fourth graders to the river and its surrounding ecosystem, Sutton said.
Students spend a half day at the river, rotating through stations on stormwater pollution, aquatic insects as indicators of water quality, local history and art using native clay, and watershed animals. About 100 students participate each day, and the visit concludes with a puppet show and concert, Sutton said.
“There are kids that have grown up [coming here]. Their parents brought them along with them when they were infants to volunteer, and now they’re grown and [some] are environmental scientists,” she said. “I’ve been at meetings [where] people are like, ‘Oh, you work for Haw River Assembly? I remember going there on a field trip when I was in fourth grade.’ I don’t think it’s an exaggeration or hyperbole to say that [the experience] really changes people’s lives.”
Sutton estimated that more than 40,000 kids have participated in the program in the past 35 years.
While the Haw River Assembly introduces elementary school students to environmental stewardship, other programs in North Carolina aim to engage older students and prepare them to become environmental activists and find professional work in the field.
Planting seeds
For the past three years, Catawba College, a small liberal arts institution in Salisbury, has offered students seven to 10 days of hands-on environmental and environmental justice education through the Clean Water Advocacy Boot Camp, a partnership with the Waterkeeper Alliance.
The boot camp was the brainchild of Larry Baldwin and Rick Dove, the late former riverkeeper and senior adviser to Waterkeeper Alliance. Their goal was to expose students to a wide range of environmental issues and introduce them to leaders in the field, such as Joyner who has spoken to boot camp attendees about environmental issues in her Northampton County community.
Sarah Jackson, assistant professor of communication studies and digital media, has co-taught the semester-long course that precedes the boot camp. During the semester, students interact with guest lecturers, writers and policymakers such as Corban Addison, author of Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial (2022). The book recounts the hog nuisance lawsuits against Murphy-Brown/Smithfield Foods, which were tried in federal court in North Carolina between 2012 and 2019.
Another guest was documentary filmmaker Jamie Berger, producer of The Smell of Money, which also covers the hog nuisance trials from the plaintiffs’ perspective.
“They’re covering the same events but coming at them through two different media,” Jackson said. “The students get to hear both of their perspectives — how they worked on location and how they approached the subjects differently. It was cool for the students to see those two artifacts, the book and the documentary, and how they were both made.”
Third-year Catawba student Jenna Coleman, who is studying environmental studies and sustainability, said she would definitely recommend the boot camp course to other students.
“It is so intensely hands-on. You really get to experience what is going on [in the environment] — you’re in the water, scooping [samples] into the little vial, rowing your boat … you’re doing it all.”
Last summer’s boot camp participants spent time with Sound Rivers Neuse Riverkeeper Samantha Krop, who took them on a canoe outing on the Neuse River. Recently, Krop reflected on her career path.
Krop said that she worried about climate change and land loss when she was a teenage volunteer, and she later discovered she could build a career in environmental advocacy. Her path was different from colleagues in science, law or agriculture, but she stressed that there are many ways into the work.
“I always tell students that whether you’re interested in education, advocacy, law or science — you can come at this work from [any] angle.”
