Activism as Academics

At her family’s dinner table growing up, Bhavna Shamasunder heard a lot about cancer. Her dad, an oncologist, treated patients across Southern California’s Antelope Valley and talked about his work at home. As a budding environmentalist, Shamasunder listened. “As I learned more about environmental exposures, he would tell me what he was seeing in his patients,” Shamasunder says.

What he saw was higher rates of breast cancer in some neighborhoods more than others or in workers in specific industries. Shamasunder wondered what caused these disparities, and as she learned more about environmental justice, she started to understand the compounding stress weighing on her family’s community.

“It’s very low income. People commute into Los Angeles for jobs. There’s a lot of pollution,” Shamasunder says. “The racial identity of these areas continues to be very complicated—there’s a lot of racial tension.”

The desire to quantify those factors to understand how they influence the health of a community led Shamasunder to a career focused on environmental justice. She’s now a leading expert on cumulative burden—the stacking of environmental risks—and an associate professor and department chair of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College.

Shamasunder’s research has covered a range of issues, from chemicals in consumer goods and beauty products to oil wells in residential areas. Her findings were cited in the LA County Board of Supervisors’ decision to restrict fossil fuel extraction in the region.

She credits her time in the College of Natural Resources as foundational for learning how to investigate the lived experience of impacted communities with scientifically tested data.

Shamasunder knew when it was time for her to pursue a doctorate. She had finished a master’s degree at Yale and was working for an environmental nonprofit, campaigning against a medical waste incinerator in Oakland.

While giving public comment on possible pollutants associated with the facility, she looked across the table and took note of the opposition. “They had someone with a PhD saying pollution wasn’t going to be a problem,” Shamasunder remembers.

She wanted her voice to be just as credible. Going back to school, she hoped, would give her the tools to evaluate and amplify the concerns of disadvantaged communities, like the people living near the incinerator.

Shamasunder chose UC Berkeley because she was inspired by the faculty, especially Dara O’Rourke in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), who was researching global governance and supply chains.

Her thesis was greatly influenced by her advisor, ESPM Professor Rachel Morello-Frosch, who introduced Shamasunder to biomonitoring, a tool that can analyze chemicals in people’s bodies. The two still check in regularly.

“Rachel is well known as being a tough-as-nails mentor, but also very gracious and generous with her time,” Shamasunder says. “She made me want to be that kind of a mentor.”

Shamasunder considered herself an activist before she got to UC Berkeley—an identity not always warmly welcomed in academia.  She says the College made space for her experience. Mentors encouraged her to investigate her interests scientifically and acknowledge her own biases.

“Berkeley is a good, rigorous place to think about your activism,” Shamasunder says. “You do have to work hard to maintain your public voice as one that comes through the data.”

Changing Public Policy on Pollution

Over the last decade, Shamasunder has studied the health impacts of oil drilling in Los Angeles. The county currently has over 200,000 active, idle, or abandoned oil wells, and community groups asked Shamasunder whether pollution from those wells could be causing health problems in their neighborhoods.

So, Shamasunder looked for the data. To her surprise, despite oil drilling going back over a hundred years in the city’s history, there were no health studies to start from. “Rachel always said, ‘when there’s no data, it just means there’s no data. It doesn’t mean there’s no problem,’” Shamasunder says.

In this case, there was a big problem. Most of those wells are within 500 meters of sensitive land uses like homes, schools, or parks, and pollutants from the wells were making it harder for people to breathe. By conducting a door-to-door health survey, Shamasunder found that residents living near oil wells in South Los Angeles had higher rates of physician-diagnosed asthma compared with the county population as a whole.

In a follow-up study, Shamasunder and University of Southern California Professor Jill Johnston measured the lung function of residents living near two drilling sites. They found the closer people lived to wells, the poorer their lung strength and capacity, even when adjusting for other risk factors like smoking, asthma, or proximity to freeways.

With data in hand, Shamasunder could confidently warn the Los Angeles community about the health risks associated with oil wells. That kind of outreach is an essential component of her research process. “We give public comment. We write letters that detail the science. We testify,” Shamasunder says. “A couple of really good studies in the hands of organized community actors are better than a lot of studies that sit on a shelf.”

Shamasunder’s research backed resident stories withdata, which led the LA County Board of Supervisors to ban the creation of new oil wells and phase out the ones currently operating over the next 20 years. These legislative efforts remain pending due to court challenges

“There’s still a long way to go,” Shamasunder says. “We celebrate recent wins and then continue our work to advance environmental justice.”