This story was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of The 19th, and republished through Rewire News Group‘s partnership with the 19th News Network.

Rhonda Anderson has spent nearly three decades fighting for clean air and water in Detroit. As an environmental justice organizer with the Sierra Club, she led campaigns to raise awareness about lead poisoning of babies and children in the vicinity of steel mills and is part of a Clean Air Act lawsuit against the EES Coke Battery, a local industrial facility.

So watching the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) taking one step after another to weaken air pollution regulations over the last year has felt “really, pretty much devastating,” she said.

“Just looking at my little world, we’ve worked so hard to get a lot of these things recognized,” Anderson said. Most of her work has been in southwest Detroit, which has over 150 industrial facilities and some of the worst air quality in Michigan. Just a year ago, “we had a fifth grader who passed from an asthma attack,” she said.

In addition to overturning dozens of regulations aimed at reducing air pollution to save lives, the EPA has also exempted over 100 industrial facilities, including the Coke Battery plant Anderson has been fighting, from more rigorous rules to reduce pollution, created under the Biden administration.

Experts say all these moves combined favor industry while sacrificing public health—and it is Black women like Anderson, as well as their families, who stand to be harmed the most.

Black women already have the highest death rates due to asthma, a condition caused and exacerbated by air pollution. They are four times as likely to die of an........

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