CC cuts student research program that helped drive federal legislation

When Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced a bill this past week that would extend compensation benefits for people exposed to radiation from uranium mining, it ignited an immediate reaction in the West as some celebrated the move and others questioned its necessity. It is a little-known fact that CC students have had a prominent role in influencing this federal legislation through a summer research program collecting data on the health problems of former uranium miners and millers. However, the Southwest Studies department has discontinued the program in an effort to reallocate its resources to other areas.

Uranium, a necessary nuclear material for both weapons and power plants, was long mined in the United States without public awareness of the health consequences associated with direct contact with the radioactive substance. Workers in western New Mexico describe working in the mines in a time when they would sit on piles of ore during break times and eat lunch, their food sprinkled with yellow dust.

In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to acknowledge the dangers of radiation and offer help to those harmed by it. The RECA law, however, does not extend benefits to anyone who worked after 1971, when the federal government stopped buying uranium and increased safety standards began to be imposed.

In January 2007, former uranium workers in the town of Grants, New Mexico met to discuss uranium radiation in Cibola County. The region had noticed health problems in former miners and their families, even in those who worked only after 1971. At that meeting, residents organized to form the Post ’71 Uranium Exposure Committee to represent mill workers, miners and transporters.

However, the group lacked the education and experience to analyze the data from surveys they created. That year the group met Maria Varela, a visiting professor at CC who had a background in environmental justice activism. With the help of the Southwest Studies department, Varela organized a summer student research program to assist in the effort. Over the course of two summers, six CC students entered data from handwritten notes on thousands of surveys, assessed medical conditions and researched relevant legislation.

“Post ’71 is a great story. Navajo grandmothers, wives of miners, et cetera knew they were getting sick and the [Center for Disease Control] said, ‘You’re too small of a population; We don’t care,’ so they created their own survey,” said history professor Anne Hyde, who served as director of Southwest Studies at the time. “[As a CC project] that just kind of fell out of the sky. It was data no one else would touch.”

Junior Kelsey Speaks served as one of the three research fellows in Grants last summer after learning of the program through Varela’s Environmental Justice class. Speaks took particular interest in the issue because her grandfather, a former uranium ore hauler in Arizona, had long suffered from radiation-related health problems and died from renal failure and silica disease in his lungs.

“It was personal to me,” she said.

Speaks and other fellows Joey Glick and Sarah Rice spent June through August living in Grants where they continued the work of the previous summer, analyzing data from the surveys and looking for more specific health information from reconducted surveys. The students used a CDC data program to analyze results of the surveys, which Speaks described as challenging because many members of the community had a difficult time identifying their specific conditions.

The Post ’71 survey received 1,302 responses from uranium workers who mined only after 1971. According to the data collected, half of the former workers reported having heart problems and 68 percent reported respiratory problems. One-quarter had chronic skin blisters. In all, 72 percent of respondents reported at least one medical condition consistent with uranium exposure as recognized by the federal government. Of the workers who had died for any reason since they worked, one-third died from cancer of some kind. Forty percent of women married to the miners had had at least one miscarriage, stillbirth or deformed child. CC students worked to collect this data, which was distributed to politicians and others nationwide.

“We were with people who worked after 1971 and had some strange diseases for people of that age group,” Speaks said. “No one would listen to them and no one would believe that what they were suffering was the result of uranium exposure.”

The efforts of the Post ’71 committee to link such health problems to uranium have had some successes. The nearby Laguna reservation, home to the once-largest open-pit uranium mine in the world, passed a resolution in December 2009 indicating that the tribe fully supported the work of Post ’71 and called for the tribal council to do everything in its power to support amending RECA.

Most notably, on April 19 Senator Udall introduced the bill that, among other things, would broaden RECA to include people who worked in uranium mines and mills between 1971 and 1990.

However, despite this victory for the program, the CC summer research program examining uranium data will not be continued this coming year.

“The program itself is awesome, but it’s very expensive,” said Sally Meyer, chemistry professor and current director of Southwest Studies. “It doesn’t serve enough students, in my opinion.”

The program cost between $45,000 and $50,000 per year. The majority of those funds were personnel expenses, including average costs of $26,250 for a program coordinator, $2,750 for a data analyst specialist and $10,500 for student stipends. Each student received $3,500 for ten weeks of work. In addition, the program had average costs of $3,900 for travel expenses and $3,975 for logistics including meals, rent of office space and work supplies.

Varela emphasized the impact of the work that the program had been doing. She said the program was financially efficient and cited a Southwest Research and Information Center program which budgeted $5 million to do a similar survey of uranium exposure effects on 1,200 people.

“We provided this same service to the region at roughly $90,000 over two years,” Varela said. “Anyone who says you can do it for cheaper is someone who has no long-term experience working in low-income communities to empower them.”

Varela said that in her view, a liberal arts education must include the opportunity to take real action on real issues, and that for such efforts to be legitimate and worthwhile, they have to include the guidance of consultants and coordinators with strong experience in the area.

When word reached Grants, New Mexico that the CC program would likely be discontinued, Elizabeth Lucero and Linda Evers from the Post ’71 committee sent a letter to the school administration urging them to continue it. Evers and Luchero said starting Post ’71 was like opening a 55-gallon drum of worms, and that without Varela and her students they would not have been able to compile and evaluate what information they had. They said such analysis was crucial in other nearby communities as well.

“In 1979, there were an estimated 21,000 plus workers in the Grants mineral belt alone,” the letter reads in part. “Please, we’re really asking, on bended knee, allow the program to continue.”

A response letter from Susan Ashley, Dean of the College, in January 2010 agreed that the program was “exactly the type of experience we hope to provide our students through initiatives such as the Southwest Studies summer research fellowship program” and discussed the college’s commitment to community-based research.

However, Southwest Studies, which gets funding from endowments separate from the school’s overall budget, determined that the program was too expensive for the number of students involved. Meyer described it as her major goal to increase the number of students able to participate in summer research programs and said that while influencing federal legislation and people’s lives is a wonderful outcome, it cannot be the main objective for the college.

“Our primary focus has to be on educating students,” Meyer said.

For this reason, Southwest Studies has chosen to redirect the money from Varela’s research program to the programs of other professors. This year, sociology professor and Dean of Summer Programs Eric Popkin will be taking a group of four students to document abuse of immigrants coming across the Mexican border and anthropology professor Sarah Hautzinger will run a program in Colorado Springs focusing on military issues.

Southwest Studies has also been redirecting money to other new expenditures. The department now assumes two-thirds of the cost of the CC GIS lab, according to Meyer, which she considers crucial to the campus. As well, small amounts of money are being dedicated to retrofitting the Southwest Studies Hulbert Center building to make it more environmentally sustainable. Hulbert Center is currently the least energy efficient building per square foot of any small CC house.

“It’s my goal as director to make this the first carbon-neutral building on campus,” Meyer said. “My goal as a scientist is to cut the need for resources. You can prove all you want about the effects of uranium mining on health, but if we need energy and start building nuclear plants we’re going to mine uranium.”

Meyer also noted that payoffs from endowments are significantly down in this economy, which affects the amount of money the school can spend on bringing in visiting professors, both to conduct summer research programs and to teach classes. In addition to not funding her summer program, the school was also not able to hire back Varela, who typically teaches three blocks per year of interdisciplinary courses.

“We’ve had a lot of pressure to have fewer visitors on campus, which is tough for ID programs,” Hyde said. “It’s high on my list to figure out a way to get Maria back here in a way that makes sense for her.”

As far as the Post ’71 research, part of the decision to cut funding from the program was based on Southwest Studies being unsure of where the research would go next after the Grants region survey had been completed.

“According to what Maria had told me, the project was done,” Meyer said.

However, Varela said that she had indicated to the department the need to expand the research to other communities. Three other communities along the Grants mineral belt had asked for help with data collection, one of them on tribal land.

“The program was beginning to get a reputation in New Mexico,” Varela said. “We had plenty of places to go.”

One of the critiques of Udall’s bill is that it relies on limited data.

Varela rejected the view that summer research programs should be focused on involving higher numbers of students. She said that involved students bring their experiences back to the campus, and that she considers summer research an opportunity to have an impact on people outside the college.

“We use the southwest as a commodity to practice research on, rather than working together with communities,” Varela said. “This [program] is in the spirit of the Southwest Studies endowments – to serve the region.”