Communities hope new panel will help shed light on historical environmental racism

Vanessa Hartley is an eighth-generation Black Loyalist descendant from Shelburne who lives in Halifax. 

In 2019, she got involved with a non-profit organization to address social and health effects of a landfill in Shelburne.

The dump has been located in the south end of Shelburne, N.S., an African Nova Scotian community, since the 1940s.

"Growing up in the south end," she said, "I didn't really recognize what environmental racism looked like."

Filled with industrial, medical and other types of waste from the municipality and individual households, the dump was regularly set on fire to incinerate piles of junk throughout the years it operated.

The community is known for its high cancer rates. 

In 2016, the landfill closed as a result of the community's efforts.

Hartley is the project manager for a new panel in Nova Scotia looking into historical environmental racism in the province.

Agassou (Augy) Jones, the chair of Nova Scotia's Environmental Racism Panel, calls the Shelburne dump, or Morvan Road landfill, a "stark example of environmental racism."

He was appointed as the first member and chair of Nova Scotia's Environmental Racism Panel in December. 

The goal of the panel, Jones said, is to empower people in communities like Shelburne "to speak for themselves and tell the story of environmental racism, and make it stop."

The panel, appointed by the provincial government, has seven new members with expertise in Mi'kmaw and African Nova Scotian history, law, health, environment and policy. 

They are Angie Gillis, Desiree Jones-Matthias, Gaynor Watson-Creed, Karen Hudson, Lisa Young, Mike Davis and Thomas Johnson.

Jones said the panel is "one piece to a huge puzzle," because environmental racism is just one example of how marginalized communities have been underserved for centuries. 

The panel will collect information from advisers and community members. By December 2023, it will submit its recommendations to the provincial government.

"It's a higher level of systemizing something that's been a conversation for a long time," Jones said.

He hopes to see changes made for Indigenous and African Nova Scotian communities that have experienced environmental racism so they can "be first on the list for the positivity of climate change initiatives."

'Move in the right direction'

The newly appointed panel coincides with a study that is investigating the Shelburne dump. 

A team of medical researchers will be taking blood samples from residents to study potential links between the contaminated site and the cancer rates in the community. 

Dalhousie University and McMaster University are conducting the research.

Paola Marignani, a biochemistry and molecular biology scientist and professor at Dalhousie University, said she hopes the outcome of the research will support the panel's work and help guide their recommendations. 

Her role with the research is to analyze samples for changes to residents' DNA that may be due to toxins in the environment. 

She said the panel is a "move in the right direction" because it "signals that the government of Nova Scotia is listening to the people of south Shelburne."

In August, Marignani and another researcher, Juliet Daniel, will be in Shelburne to begin the sample collection process and conduct community engagement.

"This has been a long time coming, the pandemic slowed us down," she said. 

Hartley said the research is generally being well received within the community and she hopes it will answer some long-awaited questions.

"It will allow for a deeper conversation and exploration within the academia world of environmental justice and really starting to understand what that legacy looks like here in Nova Scotia and in Canada," Hartley said.