We Are All Impacted by Pollution
When I was a child, I would run through my yard in Pennsylvania on warm summer days. The smell of freshly cut grass from a neighbor’s lawn and the distant sounds of children playing filled the air. At the edge of our yard, my mother tended a small garden, ripe with fruits and vegetables. We’d pick strawberries in the mornings after she finished her yard work. Despite never helping with the weeding, I was always rewarded with freshly washed berries. I’d sit under the backyard tree, eating strawberries and gazing up at the sunlight flickering through the leaves.
If you were to look at my hometown on Google Earth today, you can still see the large black streaks that fill the land, which are remnants of historic coal mining in the area. The legacy of resource extraction impacts every generation of my family. As a child, I would play in coal waste outside of my grandmother’s backyard, searching for fossils in the slate just like my mother did in her youth. As I grew up, I came to understand that the reason my mother would always wash the strawberries before I ate them was because of the coal mining in the area and I understood for the first time that my family, my neighbors, and the environment were being polluted due to the historic and ongoing coal mining. My experiences growing up shaped my undergraduate studies, focusing on pollution and its intersection between human and environmental health. Now, as a doctoral student, I aim to continue this work in communities like mine, with the hopes of finding the answers to questions I had as a child and working to make the world a safer place.
In the center of Cottonwood, Arizona sits a large pile of copper slag, a waste byproduct of the copper smelting process. This slag is being crushed and repurposed into materials used for construction, road pavement, blast abrasives, and artificial turf. The process of repurposing slag in this community has raised concerns by the residents, including questions about whether residents are being exposed to unsafe levels of arsenic and heavy metals in the air they breathe and the soil they grow crops in. These concerns are especially pressing to the community since the slag sits adjacent to a Veterans of Foreign Wars outpost and the local children’s park.
To address these concerns, my project focuses on integrating Gardenroots, a community science program, into the Cottonwood community. Gardenroots – a University of Arizona initiative that has been established in other Arizona communities – aims to evaluate environmental quality and exposures near locations of current or historic resource extraction. Gardenroots uses participatory methods, meaning that community members are involved in most of the research process. The Cottonwood program hopes to inform potential environmental exposures to copper slag in dust, air and soil, which community members have identified as key areas of concern. Through this work, our team hopes to build capacity, provide prevention, intervention and mitigation strategies, and strengthen community trust in science.
In June 2025, our team held two training sessions for community members to learn how then can collect environmental samples from their homes. Two months later, we received soil and dust samples from various community members for analysis! As this work grows, I look forward to continuing to engage and learn alongside the community of Cottonwood, Arizona. If there is one thing that has been confirmed in my work thus far, it is that we are all lifetime learners, and everyone offers their own unique forms of knowledge. I am excited and honored to continue this journey I set out on as a child, one step at a time.