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Jackie Echols didn’t need another crisis to add to her dossier. As president of the South River Watershed Alliance (SRWA), she was already working hard to clean up a river — almost forgotten by locals — that flows through Fulton, DeKalb, Rockdale and Henry counties in Georgia. South River traverses a mostly low-income African American community and has long been polluted by sewage spills and hemmed in by landfills, truck yards and industrial sites.

Jacqueline “Jackie” Jones wasn’t looking for a second career when the Tennessee native settled in tiny Reidsville, Georgia, after retiring from crunching numbers for the IRS.

But she quickly found herself thrust into the position of environmental activist when the role practically washed up on her doorstep – or rather, up to her windowsills – with flooding that inundated her property.

Activists from A2 member organizations recently gathered with other environmental advocates in Washington, D.C., to “talk dirty” about pollution and viable solutions in the American South.

We’re thrilled to wrap up 2023 with news that 29 members of Anthropocene Alliance were successful in individual and group applications for funding from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation! Some of the grants were relatively small ($20,000) and some big ($700,000).

The White House hosted its first-ever Summit on Building Climate Resilient Communities, and Anthropocene Alliance was there!
Ali Zaidi, Assistant to the President and National Climate Advisor opened the event noting the diverse group representing 25 different states, territories and tribal nations gathered for an event he said was conceived over the summer as President Biden was flying to California to talk about climate impacts out west.

Global warming continues to accelerate, just as climate scientists predicted it would. During the two weeks following July 4th, the entire planet was hotter than it’s been in about 125,000 years. As I write, Phoenix is suffering its worst heat wave ever, with 23 days in a row of temperatures at or above 110 degrees F.

We caught up with Justin on May 24 to talk about his work in Tennessee and the struggle for environmental justice across the country and the world. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

The New York Times recently published a major story titled: “Living and Breathing on the Front Line of a Toxic Chemical Zone”. It addressed corporate profiteering by the petrochemical industry while communities near their plants suffered diminished health, including cancer and premature death. The Biden EPA is proposing stronger protections in such border areas, which many have called “sacrifice zones.”