Protesting coal dust and half-burned medical waste, South Baltimore residents lead the way on environmental health research.

Vilma Gutierrez is a shy, quiet girl. When she speaks, others find themselves moving toward her, tilting their heads to catch the 17-year-old’s gentle words.

But in June, she finds herself clutching a microphone in front of a crowd outside the Curtis Bay recreation center in South Baltimore, asking the international corporation CSX to stop polluting the area’s marginalized and overburdened communities.  

Nearby, children clamber onto a circus-colored playground glinting in the sun. A few hundred feet away, trains clank across a dozen crisscrossing tracks, looping around their nucleus: a series of four-story-high heaps of coal. The mountains of Appalachia gutted and reconstituted in South Baltimore.  

When the wind lifts the dust in eddying clouds, it looks like ocean waves rolling across the sky, one resident says. Read more at Public Health magazine.