Technical Air Quality Fellow

by stevie | October 19, 2021 18:17

October 19, 2021 18:17 | Tags: air-quality , monitoring , jobs , pm , fellows , technical , fellowship , particulate-matter , purpleair , purple-air , fellowship-team , st-james , fellowship-teams , with:travislondon , formosaplastics

Opening November, ASAP

Commitment Period: roughly 6-8hr/week November - June

Fellowship Stipend: $6,600

USD in total over the commitment period.

Where: This fellowship is open to anyone and is remote; phone in team meetings will be held in CT and be grounded in community efforts in Louisiana.
Candidates who are within driving distance of St. James Parish, Louisiana strongly encouraged to apply.

Requirements for the position: This fellowship will require remote work abilities, comfortable working across diverse stakeholder groups, and strong communication skills (verbal/written).

Join our newest fellowship team to bring about a healthier and more equitable world through community science, open technology, and the advancement of environmental justice. Public Lab supports, develops, and applies open-source tools to further environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible do-it-yourself techniques, Public Lab creates a collaborative network of knowledge bearers and practitioners who actively reimagine the human relationship with the environment.

For years, the St. James Parish community in Louisiana, already struggling with extreme pollution, has been fighting to keep out new industry. The historically black, and now elder, community hosts no less than 11 industrial facilities spanning their mere 258 square miles These include refineries, a fertilizer plant, a steel company, an asphalt company, and several chemical companies. Formosa Plastics, is slated to be a new 2,500 acre project just one mile from an elementary school ( Center for Biological Diversity ).

As a company, Formosa has been a historic bad actor. In its other facilities around the world, it has been the cause for the largest private citizen lawsuit under the US federal clean air and water laws, caused many community threatening and deadly explosions, been the source for major chemical releases, and created at least one major superfund site.

On August 18, 2021 the US Army Corps of Engineers announced it would “require a full “environmental impact statement” (EIS) for the massive petrochemical complex Formosa Plastics proposes to build in St. James. The decision is a major victory for opponents of the plant, who sued to block the project in January 2020, and convinced the Army Corps to suspend its permit” in fall of 2019 ( Center for Biological Diversity ).

For this EIS, the company will be required to “provide a baseline for understanding the current environmental situation” and should also include air, water, historical and economic impacts of the project ( American Bar.org ).

The aim for this project is to regularly collect particulate matter and other air quality monitoring data to grow the body of evidence on the existing levels of pollution to show the pollution burden already borne by the St. James Parish community. We aim for this information to be used in the open comment period of the EIS with the Army Corps of Engineers, to educate and bring others into this work, and provide scientific evidence for why further pollution sources such as the Formosa Plastics, should not be developed in this community.

For more about this issue read the Project Scope here and the post on Formosa around the world here .

The major components of this fellowship are to:

• Support the fellowship team to develop a particulate matter air monitoring program for…