Four years ago, when Destiny Watford was a high school senior, she learned that the nation’s largest trash incinerator was going to be built less than a mile from her school and the house where she lived with her family. The facility, to be erected on a 90-acre tract in her Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay, had the enthusiastic support of state and local political leaders, who touted it as a job-creating, green-power initiative. Watford, a shy, hard-working student, hadn’t thought much about environmentalism. But a facility that would burn gargantuan piles of garbage so close to her community, even if the politicians promised it would have sophisticated air filters, didn’t seem like a cause for celebration. So she teamed up with a half dozen fellow students at Benjamin Franklin High School to learn as much as possible about the project. “We were confused,” she recalls. “We asked ourselves, ‘What aren’t they telling us?’”