Community Power Helped Win This Clean Water Victory: A Conversation with Bayou City Waterkeeper

Environmental justice has never been just about the environment. It’s about who has power, who gets protected, and which communities are disregarded. Along the Houston Ship Channel — one of the most industrialized waterways in the country — predominantly Black and Latine neighborhoods have borne the burden of pollution from oil refineries, plastics manufacturers, and chemical plants for generations. Some of the toxins discharged into their waterways, including dioxins and 1,4-dioxane — both linked to cancer — aren’t even regulated under current EPA standards. That’s not a gap in the system. That’s the system working exactly as it was designed.

Last year, community power shifted that equation. Bayou City Waterkeeper — as part of a coalition of 13 water and environmental justice organizations represented by the Environmental Integrity Project — secured a landmark legal victory. A federal appeals court ruled that the EPA broke the law by letting polluters off the hook — allowing oil refineries, plastics plants, and chemical manufacturers to dump waste into public waterways using pollution controls that haven’t been updated since the Reagan era. Eighty percent of the EPA’s water pollution standards are more than 30 years out of date. The court said: enough. The EPA must now modernize these rules — because grassroots organizers and frontline communities demanded it.

We recently sat down with Kristen Schlemmer, Co-Executive Director of Bayou City Waterkeeper, to learn more about what this victory means for the communities along the Ship Channel — and what it took to get here. 

KIMBERLY: What inspired you to focus on clean water and environmental justice along the Houston Ship Channel?

KRISTEN: At Bayou City Waterkeeper, we’re on a mission to further justice, health, and safety for the waters and people of the greater Houston region through bold legal action, community science, and creative, grassroots policy. This region is large, with 7 million people spread across 10 counties and 4,000 square miles, and it is also rich in water, with dozens of bayous, creeks, rivers, bays, and countless wetlands. To keep our work focused, strategic, and rooted in our organization’s values of justice and equity, we concentrate our work in what we call “water justice zones,” which represent areas where cumulative environmental burdens intersect with historical disinvestment, leaving residents vulnerable to compounding issues of chronic localized flooding, aging infrastructure, and impaired water quality. By naming the neighborhoods clustered around the highly industrialized Houston Ship Channel as a water justice zone, we are signaling that this is where we will devote time and resources, and that wins here will be harder fought but have bigger impacts, including ripple effects for all of us living in this region.

We participated in the nationwide lawsuit challenging the US EPA’s out-of-date regulation of the petrochemical, plastics, and fertilizer industries because of how it could address water quality and human exposure to toxic pollutants within the Houston Ship Channel zone. Beyond the lawsuit, we are actively tracking sources of industrial and sewage pollution in this zone for potential legal action, collaborating with local governments and financial partners to invest in green infrastructure, and as members of the local Houston Port Communities Coalition, fighting for relocation of dredging disposal sites. This was a legal victory, but it was won by both the grassroots organizers and legal teams working together.

KIMBERLY: Why is community organizing so essential to winning a case like this?

KRISTEN: Our work is special because it is place-based and seeks to advance solutions that reflect community priorities. Community organizing helps us understand what those priorities are as an organization and shape our work around them, and also connect our work to a broader strategy that goes beyond water and the legal system. We entered this lawsuit because we saw it as an opportunity to advance what we were hearing from community members on the ground: The industries that are operating on the edge of neighborhoods and bayous are not following the rules that are meant to keep people safe and water clean. This legal win helps get us closer to true accountability and improving health and safety for both people and water.

KIMBERLY: You took on this fight as part of a 13-organization coalition. What did Bayou City Waterkeeper bring to that effort that no one else could?

KRISTEN: Our work is local in its focus and requires us to leverage opportunities at the local, regional, state, and federal level. Collaboration is essential to this work.

Locally, we have focused on addressing the largest sources of water pollution, ranging from sewage from the city of Houston’s massive sanitary sewer system to toxic pollution from major industrial facilities. Before entering this lawsuit, aided by the analysis of public data by Environmental Integrity Project, we learned that many of the worst industrial polluters are in our own backyard. Seven of the 10 worst polluters for total dissolved solids dumped into waterways in 2021 were in Texas, and the worst across the nation was the ExxonMobil Baytown Refinery, located within our region, in the Houston Ship Channel water justice zone. ExxonMobil had released almost 127 million pounds of harmful chlorides, sulfates, and other dissolved solids into local waters. This is just one of many harmful examples in our region that came out of this analysis.

Understanding the local stakes, we decided to engage in this national fight. When Houston shows up in national news, it is often because of disasters like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. Our lawsuit allowed us to powerfully call attention to the fact that many people in the Houston region are being forced to live with another kind of disaster that is invisible to us every day. Moving forward, we will be able to build on this victory by continuing to address this other kind of disaster through the combination of legal tactics, policy advocacy, community organizing, and cultural strategies that our organization is known for.

KIMBERLY: Now that the court has ruled, what do you expect to change for communities along the Ship Channel?

KRISTEN: Implementation of a court ruling like this takes time, and we’ll be focused on making sure the EPA follows through on its commitments. In terms of what we see for communities in our region, including along the Houston Ship Channel, this sends a clear message that community members and local advocates will not sit idly by while our neighborhoods and waters are polluted. This work has exposed which local facilities are benefitting from regulatory lapses in oversight and not complying with existing law. This informs future advocacy and where our local coalitions can move next to make meaningful change for the health of our people and our waters.

KIMBERLY: What advice would you give to other community organizers who want to take on environmental fights in their own neighborhoods?

KRISTEN: Be clear on your values. At Bayou City Waterkeeper, our values serve as a compass that guides decision-making. This means we are not afraid to disrupt systems that have not worked, create new frameworks, bring together unconventional allies, and transform data and research into action. We recognize and call out inequities in our watershed arising from historic injustice.

Be clear on how the law can advance change. In 2025, we launched our first policy agenda, which articulates our vision for our region and the strategies and actions needed to get there. BCWK sees policy change as an important part of the solution that can simultaneously drive and be responsive to community organizing, data science, narrative change, and cultural strategies. In our policy agenda, we named that our work would “reduce industrial risks by closing regulatory gaps and exclusions from environmental review.” This helped us clearly understand what this lawsuit would advance and how — and informed our analysis of whether legal action was the right approach.

Understand the limits of the law. A legal win is not enough on its own. Legal wins often spur government action, which requires significant follow-through to hold elected officials and agency heads accountable, and are most effective when they are part of a broader strategy bringing together community organizing, communications, media engagement, and government relations. At BCWK, our approach recognizes this, with lawyers, policy wonks, community organizers, scientists, communicators, and artists working side by side to advance change together.

KIMBERLY: If someone reading this wanted to support the kind of work you do, what would you want them to know about your outlook for the future and what’s next for Bayou City Waterkeeper?

KRISTEN: This year marks our 25th anniversary as an organization. Since Hurricane Harvey, we’ve grown up and grown in size, transforming from a volunteer-led to a staff-led organization. While our region’s capacity to address environmental challenges expanded greatly following Hurricane Harvey, we remain the only non-profit in Houston, a city covered with water and wetlands, that has lawyers on staff exclusively dedicated to using the law to protect our water. We see this as a great gift and responsibility.

In this milestone year, we’re more deeply rooting ourselves in our organizational values of bold action, recognizing that our efforts must disrupt systems that have not worked, create new frameworks, and bring together unconventional allies, and regeneration, in which we build the world that we want through our everyday actions, create new visions, and transition our world into the one we want, which embraces water as a site for healing, joy, celebration, reflection, and growth. We invite you to learn more about our work here.

Bayou City Waterkeeper’s victory is what becomes possible when power and resources shift to the people already doing the work. But victories like this don’t happen without sustained investment in the communities waging these fights — often at great personal risk and financial cost.

Tides’ Frontline Justice Fund was created to resource exactly this kind of leadership. Launched in 2022, FJF supports frontline community groups fighting for environmental and climate justice through legal and regulatory advocacy. Governed by an Independent Advisory Committee of environmental justice leaders and grounded in participatory grantmaking, FJF puts decision-making power in the hands of the communities doing the work. It provides flexible, unrestricted funding — including rapid-response grants for urgent legal battles and multiyear support to help organizations thrive beyond the courtroom — because the people closest to the harm have always been closest to the solutions.

Shift Power to the Frontlines This Earth Day

This Earth Day, the most powerful thing you can do for environmental justice is invest in the communities already leading it. When you support the Frontline Justice Fund, you’re resourcing the legal battles, the water monitors, the organizers — the people who show up every day for their neighbors and refuse to let polluters write the rules.

Contact us to learn more about Frontline Justice Fund.