Maria and Michael Payan Use Scientific Evidence to Fight for Communities

Michael Payan’s parents wanted him to grow up in rural America, so in 1999, they moved the family from Baltimore City to York County, Pennsylvania, next to a family farm. For a while, life seemed idyllic, and Michael remembers feeding carrots to horses as a young child. Then the farm was sold and converted to industrial scale poultry houses and a cattle feed lot. Michael grew accustomed to the scent of rotting chickens and manure by the ton near his home. 

“I remember getting off the school bus and racing to the doorstep, trying to make it indoors before I threw up,” he says.

Sometimes his friends were not able to come to his house because the smell was so nauseating, and at other times there were hundreds of flies in his house. He remembers playing outside and being called by his parents to come inside because the air was too noxious. Because of various respiratory issues, he was tested for cancer at age 14. Thankfully, those tests were negative.

Michael and his mother, Maria Payan, sometimes get their point across by telling the story of a mass die-off of 20,000 chickens at the farm next door. Following that event, Michael took a bath and came out of the tub with his body covered in blisters. A dead chicken from the facility ended up on their lawn, and Maria put it in a plastic bag and stored it in her freezer, hoping she could get someone from a state agency to come out, test the chicken, and look for links between the die-off and the blisters. But the agencies they contacted told them the blisters were from the limestone, and although they visited the site, they would not take a water sample when Maria requested it. 

Because of how unpleasant their home had become, the Payans—Michael and his parents—moved to Sussex County, Delaware, but they found themselves facing the same problems with neighboring livestock operations: Different state, same issues. 

In Delaware, in 2018, Maria and Michael founded the Sussex Health and Environmental Network. Maria is the executive director, and Michael is the director of operations. The organization, known as SHEN, aims to serve as a collective voice that can bring attention to environmental justice issues and work with various stakeholders toward solutions.  (Mr. Payan, who was also involved in SHEN, passed away last year.)

“A lot of people live with belief that their government is looking out for them,” says Michael. “We started out with a lot of faith in our government, but then we found out that it was community members who needed to do the job of their state agencies.”

“The agencies are not doing their jobs,” says Maria. “They’re not capturing the reality of what’s going on here.”

While journalists have been documenting the realities on the Eastern Shore for quite some time (see articles on nitrates in the water, air pollution, a class action settlement against a large poultry facility), convincing state agencies such as the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) to investigate is challenging.

Maria feels that loyalty is at the heart of the matter. “There’s a small community of people who’ve lived here forever, and they don’t want to talk against the state,” she says. “They work for the state or their kids work for the state, and they don’t want to speak against their neighbor.”

“The industries are taking advantage of the fact that people don’t want to speak against their neighbors,” says Michael. 

But when people do decide to complain, their path tends to be most effective when they bypass state agencies and become plaintiffs in court.

Mohammad Akhter, former president of the American Public Health Association, has worked closely with SHEN and spoken out in many gatherings to advocate for more funding for agencies and more testing of water. At a forum in Georgetown, Delaware, in 2020, he said that “When citizens have a problem, they need to run it up a certain chain of command… First, call public officials. If there is no response, contact the news media, then the federal government, then nonprofit organizations, and finally, the courts.”  

One example of how citizens take the poultry industry to court—and win—is the historic groundwater contamination case against Mountaire in Millsboro, Delaware. The case resolved at $205 million in 2021, and of that $205 million, $65 million was awarded to more than 800 plaintiffs as compensation for polluted groundwater and air. That court case took three years and required dozens of experts testifying against Mountaire, including a hydrogeologist, wastewater management expert, economist, and environmental engineer.

But what can communities do when there is no class action suit afoot, and no political will to test or monitor the air and groundwater? The Payans believe that community science, or citizen science, projects, such as those they are designing with Chris Heaney, who leads the Community Science and Innovation for Environmental Justice (CSI-EJ) Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, move SHEN closer to a favorable outcome. As a core community partner, the Payans are helping to design research that responds to the public health and environmental justice concerns and questions at the fenceline of industrial food animal production facilities (IFAP). Science can help fill in the gaps, says Maria. 

Michael believes that with data and scientific evidence, they can catch the ears of legislators, push back on industry’s narratives, and validate community members’ concerns. 

“You feel like you’re crazy after a while,” he says. “But to see it on paper, to look at these levels [of contaminants in the air], this is not what it looks like at the beach [15 miles from Millsboro]…. The community has questions they want answered, and the community wants to know what’s at their doorstep.” 

​​​The Inflation Reduction Act, known as the IRA, passed by the Biden Administration in 2022, provides funding to invest in frontline projects involving environmental justice, climate justice, tree-planting, solar energy, and more. And while the Payans applaud this kind of spending, they also would like to see more investment in unincorporated rural communities for basics, such as wells and clean water.  

“In my groups, I got people with lesions, their kidneys are dying, and they need clean water,” says Maria. “We need to spend less money on economic development, and more of that money to get data, solutions, replace the wells, and the most important thing is clean water to drink.”

“This is the first time we’ve seen money in community hands to do fenceline work,” says Michael, referring to work that has an interest in the well-being of people and communities living near large livestock operations. “But if the work is not linked with the community, you end up with charging stations.”

The community has questions that they want answered, say Michael and Maria, and another bright spot in addition to the CSI EJ Initiative is a research center funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. It’s called CHARMED, which is the acronym for Community Health: Addressing Regional Maryland Environmental Determinants of Disease. Its mission is to build capacity in community-engaged research so that we can better understand the links between environmental exposures and adverse health outcomes—and use these findings to improve health. Chris Heaney co-leads CHARMED Center’s Community Engagement Core and is leveraging its scientific and technical capacity along with the CSI EJ Initiative to help answer community-identified questions such as the ones the Payans are struggling to answer about disproportionate and adverse impacts of IFAP. 

If they had a magic wand? Maria says we need to end “pollution without representation.” Michael says we need to bring clean industries into communities, not just redistribute the dirty industries. 

Michael: “Stop raising more animals than your land can handle. When you do that, then you have to think up ways to get rid of the waste, like biogas [methane digesters], which is pure greenwashing.” Maria says, “Get rid of cap and trade, most ridiculous thing anyone ever came up with. It all exists on paper.” 

“Rebuild the system, regenerate the system, rebuild the soil,” says Maria. 

For more insights and opinions, check out CLF Perspectives on Food Animal Production.