harlotte cherry lives with her husband and two children in the waterfront community of El Jardin, in a modest wood-frame house just a few blocks from Galveston Bay. The setting sounds idyllic, but in fact an industrial complex of more than fifty plants looms half a mile from her neighborhood. At night, Cherry says, "there's an orange glow over the trees to always remind us that they're there." Sometimes, when huge machines at the plants go into operation, the reminders are more intrusive: "You can't sleep because something turns on in the middle of the night that rattles your house," she says. She keeps tissue paper wedged under the pictures hanging on her walls, so that the frames don't bang too much when the house starts shaking.

Cherry still has a copy of a flyer that found its way into her daughter's book bag in grade school several years ago. Titled "The Bright Star of Texas," the flyer (credited in part to Texas A&M University) touts the benefits of chemical plants and refineries and warns against the hazards of overzealous regulation: "Texas needs public policies that...balance the cost of regulations against health, safety, and environmental benefits."

The message infuriates her. After watching many of her relatives succumb to cancer and leukemia over the years -- including her brother-in-law, who died of an unidentified carcinoma at age forty -- Cherry became a pollution activist. For the past five years, she has been organizing opposition to petrochemical expansion in her neighborhood. Her work with various community organizations has put her in contact with sick people throughout the region, and her job as an administrator in a Texas Medical Center genetics lab keeps medical issues constantly before her. "Everywhere I look," she says, "cancer."

There's some circumstantial evidence to support Cherry's conviction that pollution is contributing to long-term illness in the area. A 1991 Houston Chronicle investigation showed that lung cancer mortality along the Gulf Coast petrochemical belt ranged from 4.5 percent above the state average for Hispanic men to 23.8 percent above average for white women. Texas Health Department cancer registry data indicate higher-than-expected incidences of several cancers in some Harris County zip codes. Harris County ranks at or near the top in industrial emissions of specific chemicals that are known or suspected to be carcinogens as well as to adversely affect the immune and respiratory systems, brain, liver, skin, and kidneys.

But without specific health-effects studies from the academic sector, residents are helpless to effect change. "Right now you don't have the evidence," says Angelina Esparza, program director for community relations at the Center for Research on Minority Health, based at M.D. Anderson. "You can postulate all you want, but until you have evidence, you're impotent. And that's where we are."

ast October, Blackburn addressed a town meeting at the Baylor College of Medicine, one of a series around the country called by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to hear community concerns. The previous speakers had been polite. Blackburn wasn't. Citing statistics on toxic emissions, ozone levels, and other air and water quality problems, he named the petrochemical industry as the prime culprit and charged that Houston's politicians were reluctant to take on the powerful business community. "Our leaders are more concerned with appearances," he said, "than understanding the health effects of air pollution on our citizens."

Then, in an unheard-of breach of etiquette in a city that counts the Texas Medical Center among its sacred cows, Blackburn went on to finger the center itself as a co-conspirator. "Houston has a world-class medical center," he said. "Yet our community has no significant or ongoing health studies." He also accused the medical center administrators who belong to the Greater Houston Partnership of a conflict of interest. It was, as far as those interviewed for this article can recall, the first time the center has been publicly charged with complicity in Houston's pollution problem.

Blackburn's accusation was one of a number of recent signs that change may be coming. Some citizens are so desperate that they have formed their own "bucket brigades" to collect air samples for testing. Though funding is scarce, the preliminary results show that some plants may be putting out toxic emissions that exceed state and federal permit levels. And environmentalists are starting to marshal their legal forces. Two local groups have joined with NRDC, the Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense in legal action to hold EPA to its duty to make sure ozone in the region is reduced. Blackburn and Charlotte Cherry are also involved in a lawsuit to stop plans for a massive new port facility on the Houston Ship Channel.

Some activists are trying to fund their own studies. Jane Owen, whose grandfather was one of the original principals in the company that later became ExxonMobil, is independently bankrolling pilot studies of air quality next to several of the area's worst polluters -- including ExxonMobil's aging Baytown refinery. There's also the Workplace Toxics Foundation -- a small granting agency run by a former plant worker and union official who has survived both lung and bladder cancer. The foundation paid for a pilot study in Marvin Legator's butadiene work. After that project showed results, Legator was able to get funding on a larger scale, and the studies eventually helped lead to much stronger federal rules on butadiene in the workplace.

Change may even be coming to the Texas Medical Center itself. Some researchers, including Tom Stock and Maria Morandi of the UT School of Public Health and Winnie Hamilton at Baylor, are looking for community-based research opportunities. An EPA-sponsored air quality study that included some medical center involvement is yielding a wealth of data -- some of it showing pollution levels at certain plants much higher than their self-reported data suggest. And the environmental sciences faculty of the UT School of Public Health is examining its research agenda with an eye toward being more community-responsive. "I think we are moving more in that direction all the time, though very slowly," says Carson.

But Lovell Jones, for one, is skeptical. "The leadership talks a very good game," he says. "The problem is the lack of will." Ultimately, community toxics issues will never be a high priority, he charges, "because they're going to impact [the center's] ability to get donors."

In the meantime, the residents of Harris County continue to bear the brunt. The week before last Thanksgiving, a foul odor assaulted the neighborhoods around the Bayport chemical complex on the Houston Ship Channel. The smell lingered for three days. One of many residents who complained to local officials was Karen Laake, who had sheltered an elderly neighbor panicked by the fumes. For Laake, it was one of several last straws. "I don't know how anyone can say where our health problems come from if they can't even trace the odors," Laake says. "I'm out of here. I'm out of Harris County. I'm gone."