Over the last 10 years, the budget of Illinois’ Environmental Protection Agency has been so deliberately slashed by both political parties that the state has effectively announced to its citizens who hope to breathe clean air and drink clean water, “You’re on your own.”

The severe cuts mean the state is effectively out of the business of making polluters obey the law. Those few remaining staffers at our shriveled EPA can’t hope to even learn about violations, let alone punish them, because the agency has been stripped of the money and staff necessary to do inspections and enforcement. Consequently, as the Chicago Tribune has reported, Illinois ranks among the 10 most polluted states in the nation, and state residents face some of the nation’s highest risks for serious illnesses linked to industrial chemicals.

Though the state is a haven for environmental lawbreakers, precious few of them are ever referred to the Attorney General’s office for prosecution. That means our so-called “tough” anti-pollution laws scarcely matter — because nobody is enforcing them.

That the poor, and especially poor children, face the greatest risk from toxic exposure should surprise no one. They are routinely mistreated because they are so defenseless. They live in Chicago’s lead-infected Pilsen neighborhood, its manganese-contaminated Southeast Side, and in the shadows of rural hog and cattle farms, where our impotent EPA can’t prevent repeated manure spills into waterways.

This is what happens when a government abandons its people, and trusts the safety of its citizens to profit-driven industries who rely on the slowly creeping pace of toxin-based diseases like cancer to obscure their culpability.

The wickedness of this strategy is in the very DNA of Trump’s federal EPA, which is led by polluters who rig science to make chemicals believed to be very dangerous just three years ago seem far less so today. Also, in a devastating work of cynicism, Trump’s EPA shifts to state agencies the job of policing the air and water, but then strips away the federal funding states need to do that job, guaranteeing that it doesn’t get done at all.

At the state level, as environmental dangers have grown exponentially, Illinois has cut its EPA inspection and enforcement workforce by almost 50%, treating the budget once devoted to protecting citizens’ health like a piggy bank to be raided whenever a pork barrel project needs extra cash.

Though tempting, hopelessness is not the proper response to this. We first must recognize that government no longer has the money or will to protect us. So we must protect ourselves. How? By shaming and suing polluters until they clean up the environment, and by threatening legislators with forced retirement unless they stop serving their patron-polluters, and start working for citizens.

The shutdown of the Sterigenics plant in Willowbrook proves that this strategy works. When families there learned that the company had been spewing a human carcinogen into their backyards, they formed a citizen brigade that trained a white-hot spotlight on the company’s violations and the state EPA’s failings.

The organizing principle of the “Stop Sterigenics” movement was a relentless lack of faith in government as the people’s protector. By sheer force of will and energy, they forced the politicians who had previously been coddling Sterigenics to shut the plant down.

Illinois citizens, are you prepared to lead your own fight for your families’ right to a safe environment? Because there’s no longer a government agency willing or able to do it for you.