There are over 300 PBS Member Stations across the country, with many telling incredible stories in their own backyard. 

American Experience's Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal tells the story of the remarkable women that rallied a community to fight for the health and safety of their families. In the late 1970s, residents of Love Canal, a working-class neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that their homes, schools, and playgrounds were built on top of a former chemical waste dump, which was now leaking toxic substances and wreaking havoc on their health.

Check out the trailer for Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal and stories from communities across the country that highlight the history of environmental injustice and the work being done to rectify it.

PBS SoCal

Watts Labor Community Action Committee president Tim Watkins explains that the ongoing environmental destruction of Watts is rooted in a history of racism and segregation going back over a century. He recounts what motivates him to open a community farm in the middle of Watts. To watch the full program check out the series, 10 Days in Watts, now streaming on pbs.org.

Reel South

As a centuries-old black community in Louisiana, contaminated and uprooted by petrochemical plants, comes to terms with the loss of its ancestral home, one man standing in the way of a plant’s expansion refuses to give up. Directed by Alexander Glustrom, this episode of Reel South premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival where it won The Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights.

New Mexico PBS

Correspondent Laura Paskus travels to Socorro and a Superfund cleanup site where a plume of toxic groundwater from an old battery plant is seeping underneath homes. The Eagle Picher site has been a federally designated cleanup project since 2007. Paskus asks state officials about the holdup on one of the state's 16 designated Superfund sites. Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future, New Mexico’s only broadcast series dedicated to covering environmental news, is streaming now on pbs.org.

Idaho Public Television

The richest silver producing region in the world is in Idaho and it closed in 1981. In 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency declared a 21 square mile area of the Silver Valley a Superfund site. The Silver Valley is starting to rebound. We explore the history of mining, heavy metal poisoning, superfund issues and other challenges and the opportunities facing Idaho's remarkable Silver Valley. Stream the full series, Scout-Places on pbs.org.

GBH

Courtesy of PBS Learning Media’s U.S. History Collection, learn about the beginning of the environmental justice movement in this video segment adapted from Earthkeeping: Toxic Racism. Meet various experts and leaders who describe the issues of environmental racism and justice, and learn about the watershed event—the controversy over the location of a toxic landfill in Warren County, North Carolina—that brought the issues to national attention in the early 1980s.