Jane Bremmer
When Jane Bremmer and her partner Lee bought a weatherboard cottage in the
outer suburban area of Perth called Bellevue, they had plans to build a ceramics business from home. This was the ’90s, and the young couple were the proud owners of a backyard filled with fruit trees that seemed an idyllic play space for their four-month old son, and an outdoor shed that could serve as their ceramics workshop. However, their dream died the day Lee dug a hole in the backyard and suffered acid burns to his arms due to soil and water contamination from a nearby toxic waste dump.
“Unbeknownst to us, we had just bought a house next door to Western Australia’s worst
toxic site. An American waste oil company [Omex Petroleum] had been operating
across the road and had, for 50 years, been dumping their waste oil in a clayhole in the
ground. It had regularly caught fire, it regularly overflowed, the whole community had
been contaminated for years, but no one talked about it,” Jane said.
Becoming a voice for the voiceless
An environmental crusader since her university days who has campaigned for nuclear,
peace and disarmament, and for protecting forests and oceans before climate change
became a byword, Jane co-founded the Bellevue Action Group (BAG), together with her
partner and their neighbors following her firsthand experience of the impacts of toxic
waste dumping in her own backyard.
"I started to hear the stories about the women and the kids that were sick — the unexplained illnesses. So it was women talking to women"
The group had no problems with recruitment, particularly among mothers. “Most petrochemical-based pollution contains endocrine-disruptive chemicals, which is the type of pollution that impacts women and children disproportionately because of their physiology. Women and children are more likely to be exposed to contamination in their home and gardens. I started to hear the stories about the women and the kids that were sick — the unexplained illnesses. So it was women talking to women,” Jane said.
The BAG became a platform for sharing experiences — to validate the truth about the
situation and make it available for other people, particularly authorities, to hear and to
highlight the problems that needed to be addressed. It became a mouthpiece for the
residents who were unable to speak out.
“There are many reasons people don’t speak out in our community: for cultural,
religious, or social reasons including fear of retribution, [because of] their histories. We
understood that there were a lot of Polish immigrants that did not want to be identified,
but they still had relevant information to contribute and were entitled to environmental
justice. So that was a platform to help represent those communities,” Jane said.
The group effectively lobbied for the government to have the contaminated clayhole
capped, the toxic vapors extracted, the most affected residents relocated, and the
dumpsite remediated—but not without costs to themselves. Residents were subjected
to bullying and intimidation. They also suffered from ill health and personal financial loss.
They could not in good conscience offload their devalued property onto unsuspecting buyers. After seeking legal counsel that resulted in zero compensation, Jane and her
family abandoned their home rather than prolong their exposure to health hazards.
Forming an alliance for collective action
The BAG attracted the attention of communities in similar situations. Banding together, they formed the statewide Contaminated Sites Alliance (CSA), which dedicated itself to educating the broader community about the risks associated with contaminated sites. They pursued legal groundwork for transparency on the location and management of these sites and played a crucial role in the passage of the unprecedented Contaminated Sites Act, under which “known or suspected contaminated sites must be reported to the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DEWR), investigated and, if necessary, cleaned up (remediated).”
While BAG set the blueprint for environmental justice in Western Australia, it focused on one issue and one campaign. Similarly, CSA was limited to the issue of contaminated sites. Realizing the need for a concerted effort to tackle much larger issues, including the lack of regulation and laws to protect human health and the environment, a new and more coordinated organization was created: the Alliance for a Clean Environment (ACE). Incorporated in 1996, ACE became a new model for activism and organized Western Australia’s first conference on contamination laws and environmental justice.
Today, ACE follows the science, providing credible information to help other groups with
their campaigns, and legitimately and accurately representing some of the bigger issues
facing our shared life support systems: chemical pollution, waste, pesticides, and toxics.
To improve quality standards and industrial legislation, ACE endeavors to engage directly
with the government by participating in stakeholder roundtables and other platforms
allowing the legitimate representation of civil society.
Jane’s work led to her participation in the community engagement forum of the federal
government’s industrial chemical regulatory committee—the erstwhile Australian National
Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS), now the Australian
Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS)—for 10 years. “Women like me, sitting
on these committees, made sure that the existing chemicals review program included
all of the things that would affect women and children… Standard risk assessment, let’s
not forget, is based on a 70-kilogram healthy male. Now that’s not representative of our
society,” she said.
Besides being co-founder of ACE, Jane is currently the Zero Waste and Anti-incineration
campaign coordinator for Australia’s National Toxics Network, working collaboratively
with GAIA and the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN). Cumulatively, these
networks represent more than a thousand non-government organizations working for the
public interest and a Zero Waste, incinerator-free, and toxics-free future.
Working towards systemic change
Jane believes that caring for the environment means taking an active role in sustaining it.
She credits other internationally recognized environmental justice experts like Dr. Mariann
Lloyd-Smith of the Australian National Toxics Network and Lois Marie Gibbs from the U.S.-based The Center for Health, Environment and Justice, whose journey mirrors her own
and provided the powerful female role models and mentoring she was long seeking. It was
at a Greenpeace OZ Toxics conference in 1997 that Jane met Dr. Lloyd-Smith and
Ms. Gibbs, who both taught her that using independent scientific evidence, as well
as legal and political methods, was key in successful environmental justice campaigns, a
methodology that stands strong today.
In her years of campaigning, Jane has learned numerous lessons and basic principles that
even frontline communities in the midst of a traumatic experience may follow. She shares
that it is important to not let feeling overwhelmed paralyze you—break the challenge down
to manageable issues that are actionable; and find your friends, your allies, particularly in
grassroots groups free from corporate influence, and partner with the people whom you can trust and will support you. Finally, she underscores the importance of elevating your
voice. “Develop good relationships with the media, and be brave and speak out,” she said.
"...it’s just not enough to put a woman in a position of power, it has to be a woman who can articulate the rights of women and children at the forefront."
The changes in the environmental movements landscape and its influence in Australia
make it both an exciting, but also an uncertain time. The political power shifting to
Australia’s Labour party and the election of the female “Teal independents” or minor party
candidates on a platform focused on climate change action and political accountability
is a welcome change for Jane, but she remains cautious as the job’s not yet done. “The
next test is how honest and committed they’ll be to the grassroots and real change. That’s
where people like me and my sisters in the environmental justice movement will be ready
and waiting because it’s just not enough to put a woman in a position of power, it has to be
a woman who can articulate the rights of women and children at the forefront,” she said.
For Jane, there is no more room for compromise and no time to skirt the big issues. “I know what it means to live in fear of toxic contamination, to have your health harmed by toxic contamination, and to feel the betrayal of those institutions that should be defending you, turn their back on you. So I’m not interested in working on soft issues like
lifestyle choices, I want systemic change because we’re running out of time.
Too many people are being harmed. We’re destroying our children’s futures… Legislative change drives behavioral change rather than the other way around. That’s why I positioned myself in driving systemic legislative change because I know that changes behaviors faster than asking individuals to do that themselves,” she added.
Jane, together with her colleagues at the National Toxics Network illustrate the
effectiveness of women-centered, environmental justice approaches to addressing many
of the biggest environmental challenges our world is currently facing. “Fossil fuel and
petrochemical pollution, whether it’s plastics, pesticides, toxic and hazardous industrial
chemicals, or waste incineration, all threaten women and children disproportionately,
globally and inter-generationally,” she said.
“It is by holding corporations and governments to account in the very places that laws
and standards are set — from the highest international bodies and most importantly,
where the impacts are felt most, which is in our local communities — that citizens and
communities are empowered to defend their health and environment. The effectiveness
of this approach can be seen in our campaign wins to resist waste incineration threats,
ban toxic and hazardous chemicals and pesticides, and place Zero Waste and circular
economy policy firmly at the center of our current Australian government policy and
legislative reforms,” she added.
Originally published in January 2023 in VISION & GRIT: Exceptional Zero Waste Women in the Asia Pacific Region, by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA).
Download the book and read more stories of women who are leading the fight to save our environment.