My Story | Mapping the Air They Breathe: Inside the Summer Academy Teaching Detroit Teens to Fight Pollution with Data

By Daja Elum | Atmospheric Science PhD Student

In Southwest Detroit and the neighboring communities of River Rouge and Ecorse, Michigan, environmental hazards are difficult to separate from everyday life. Oil refining, steel production, freight traffic, major highways, wastewater infrastructure, and other industrial sources sit alongside residential neighborhoods, schools, parks, and places where families have lived for generations. In the 48217 zip code region, a predominantly Black and Latine community long associated with some of Michigan's highest pollution burdens, residents have spent decades asking what they are breathing, what is being emitted around them, and how those exposures may affect their health.

This summer, a group of Detroit-area high school students spent a week learning how to investigate some of those same questions using the tools of environmental scientists, regulators, planners, and geospatial analysts.The Spatial Justice Summer Academy, created by Howard University atmospheric science PhD student Daja Elum through her nonprofit organization, The Earthly Advocate, introduced students to geographic information systems (GIS), environmental data, community air monitoring, remote sensing, and digital storytelling.

The idea behind the Academy was straightforward: instead of simply teaching students that environmental inequities exist, give them access to the tools used to investigate those inequities themselves. For Elum, the work is personal. As a Detroit native, she grew up surrounded by many of the same environmental and industrial landscapes that the students explored during the Academy. Her professional and academic work has since taken her into GIS, satellite remote sensing, atmospheric science, and environmental research, including doctoral research identifying monitoring gaps in greenhouse gas emissions and the community burdens they create. The Academy grew out of a desire to make those technical tools more accessible to young people who may otherwise encounter environmental science only through textbooks or news stories.

"When we talk about environmental issues in communities like Southwest Detroit, there is often a lot of information about what residents are exposed to, but less attention on whether they are given the tools to understand and analyze that information for themselves," Elum said. "I wanted students to see that GIS, environmental monitoring, and public data are not abstract tools. They can use them to investigate the places where they live."

Learning to See the Community Through Data
From July 6–10, 2026, the inaugural cohort learned the principles of air pollution, how to locate industrial facilities, examine publicly available environmental datasets, identify pollution sources, and map the relationship between environmental hazards and surrounding neighborhoods.
The Academy introduced students to GIS platforms and environmental databases while encouraging them to think critically about what spatial data does and does not show. Students explored questions such as: Where are industrial facilities located? What pollutants are being released? Which agencies regulate those facilities? What environmental information is available to the public? How close are homes and schools to major pollution sources? And how can maps help communicate those patterns?

The goal was not simply to teach students how to click through a mapping platform. Instead, students connected environmental datasets to the geography around them. That became especially tangible during a guided toxic pollution tour led by local environmental justice organizers, the Original United Citizens of Southwest Detroit. During the tour, students collected air quality samples with portable sensors and compared the physical environment around them with the data they had been learning to interpret in the classroom.
That connection between data and place is central to spatial justice. Environmental burdens are not distributed randomly. Geography can reveal how pollution sources, infrastructure, transportation systems, demographics, and historical development patterns overlap, and GIS lets students visualize and examine those relationships. For students, learning that process also meant learning that they can question, interpret, and communicate the environmental conditions around them.

From Data Consumers to Storytellers
By the end of the week, students began developing their own environmental investigations. Their final projects examined topics including industrial emissions and childhood asthma, toxic releases in their local neighborhood, wastewater infrastructure, and major industrial facilities affecting Detroit-area communities.
Using digital GIS and storytelling tools such as ESRI's StoryMaps, students combined maps, environmental information, research, images, and narrative into projects that explained the issues they selected. That pushed them beyond simply finding information: they had to decide what question to investigate, determine which datasets were relevant, interpret what they found, and explain why it mattered. That shift from consuming environmental information to producing an environmental analysis was one of the Academy's most important outcomes.

Student StoryMap Presentations

• Detroit's Largest Wastewater Treatment Plant: Local Impact
• EES Coke and Childhood Asthma
• Toxic Releases in Highland Park
• United States Steel

Why Access to Environmental Data Matters
Environmental information is increasingly available to the public. Federal and state agencies publish emissions inventories, air quality measurements, facility compliance records, satellite observations, toxic release data, demographic information, and other datasets online. But accessing that information meaningfully can still be difficult. Many environmental and GIS databases are technically complex and built for users who already understand the data's terminology and structure. Young people and community members may know the information exists but lack the training to locate, interpret, analyze, or map it in ways that connect to their own experiences.

The Earthly Advocate helps bridge that gap through environmental education, GIS, remote sensing, community-centered research, and advocacy. The curriculum also connects environmental data to the systems that govern it: students learn which agencies regulate facilities, how environmental standards are applied, where to find regulatory records, how public comment processes work, and how communities use evidence to participate in environmental decision-making. The aim is to help students understand pollution and equip them to act on it, bringing data and maps into the public processes where environmental decisions are actually made. Those same skills open doors to career pathways in environmental science, GIS, remote sensing, public health, and policy.

Get Involved
The Earthly Advocate is building the network that will carry its work into its next phase and is looking for two kinds of partners.
Volunteers. College students and emerging professionals interested in GIS, environmental research, data analysis, communications, education, youth mentorship, remote sensing, public health, or community engagement are encouraged to connect about volunteering, internships, and collaborative opportunities.
Program partners. Educators, schools, and community organizations interested in partnering on future Spatial Justice Academy programming are invited to reach out.

For more information or to get involved, contact info@earthlyadvocate.com | or fill out our Inquiry Form.