Kory Johnson was 9 when her 16-year-old sister died from heart problems caused by polluted well water her mother had drunk while pregnant. A lot of other young people were dying in their neighborhood. Kory went to meetings with her mother afterward, as the grieving families tried to figure out what had happened and why. Kory was sitting in the back in these meetings, just a kid doing her homework, but she was taking it all in.
She learned that this kind of thing happens in many low-income neighborhoods—they're prime locations for hazardous waste incinerators and dumps. She learned that the nitrate levels were high in the local wells, and that there were more cancer cases, and more heart problems in young people in her neighborhood than there were in the more affluent sections of their city, Phoenix, Arizona.
She also went to a bereavement support group for children who'd lost brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers. "We realized that we needed to turn our tragedies into something good, " Kory said, "that we always shouldn\'t come to our meetings and cry. And so, what I did is I organized a group called Children for a Safe Environment (CSE)."
Kory was warned by a teacher that because she was poor, and both a Latina and a Native American, she needed to count on scholarships to get into college; political activism would seriously damage her chances! Kory did not stand down. "Young people everywhere are entitled to environmental justice," she said, "no matter what their color or socioeconomic status."
Her group\'s first target was a hazardous waste dump planned by ENSCO, an international behemoth, in Mobile, a low-income suburb of Phoenix. ENSCO wanted to incinerate not only all of Arizona's hazardous waste in Mobile, but imported waste as well, just to make sure the enterprise was profitable. CSE teamed with Greenpeace Action and opposed the waste dump with everything from letters and children's art projects to protests and demonstrations. In the end, they prevailed. In 1991, as a result of the protests, the Arizona governor cancelled the plans for the hazardous waste incinerator.
That was the same year that young people in the tri-state area of Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania pooled their resources and bought Kory a plane ticket to meet with them and help them speak out against the Waste Technology Industries (WTI) nuclear waste plant planned in East Liverpool, Ohio. The WTI plant went in, but that didn't dampen Kory's spirit. She continued to travel around the U.S., speaking on behalf of young people whose communities were threatened by toxic wastes, some caused by industrial pollution and some by ill-advised disposal operations.
One of the most dramatic of Kory's campaigns was in 1996, when CSE again joined with Greenpeace and other environmental groups to protest the arrival in Mobile of 45 train cars full of dirt contaminated with DDT. The toxic load was coming from a California Superfund Site—one of the sites designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as a temporary spot to hold hazardous materials. In this case, cleaning up one location meant moving the poison to another—near Johnson's home. The protestors stopped the train at a railroad spur before it could dump the dirt.
And Kory Johnson did make it to college: Arizona State University. In an interview she gave in her freshman year, Johnson said, "I had to learn about politics at a very young age. I was 8 or 9 years old and wondering, why is our government so into money? Why aren't they protecting us? Why are we being paid off to just shut up and not say anything? Now I'm very happy I was raised that way. It makes me a better person today. I'm not afraid to stand up for what I believe in."
Update: In 2007, Kory Johnson's son, Jacob Crespo was named a Giraffe Hero at age 7.