Ben Duncan joins me to give a history of air pollution and diesel mitigation work in North Portland, where diesel emissions are particularly high and impact communities of color disproportionately. He is the Chief Diversity and Equity Officer for Multnomah County. He has been with the county since 2004 when he began his career in Environmental Health as a community health worker. He has since worked as a health educator, policy analyst and manager of the Health Equity Initiative. He is also a founding board member of OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, an organization that organizes low income and people of color to build power for environmental justice and civil rights in the community. He serves as Chair of the Oregon Governor’s Environmental Justice Taskforce, and recently became Chair of Oregon Public Health Institute’s Board. He recounts over 20 years of work on projects related to clean air and diesel reduction, and those years correspond to Ashia’s entire lifespan living with and suffering from asthma.

Diesel exhaust contains a variety of chemicals that can make people sick. For example, black carbon is a component of a particularly deadly form of particulate matter called PM 2.5, often forming its backbone, carrying deadly combustion particles deep into the lung, where they cross into the bloodstream and circulate throughout the body causing disease in nearly every organ and from womb to tomb. Pregnant women exposed to it have premature deliveries and give birth to children who are smaller for age. Multiple studies have shown that exposure to black carbon stunts the growth of a child’s lungs and increases the risk of that kid developing asthma. One study looked at healthy children from non-smoking homes and measured the black carbon in the cells they coughed up, and found that as the black carbon in their lungs increased, their lung function decreased. The black carbon in their lungs was directly related to the air pollution where they lived.  The damage does not stop in childhood, because we are all vulnerable to the air we breathe. This tiny particulate matter can circulate all around the body and it causes damage everywhere in the body- including heart attacks, strokes, and lung disease, as well as decreased brain function, including studies showing MRI changes in children’s brains, worsened vocabulary and cognitive performance, as well as associations with dementia in the elderly. Previously on this site and podcast, we have talked about the case of Tubman elementary school, also in Albina and located by a freeway with black carbon levels far in excess of the ambient benchmark.