environmental justice
lborkowski | November 14, 2016by Jill Johnston, PhD
Steve and I were driving down a long stretch of two lane highway in eastern North Carolina. The six-hour round-trip journey happened frequently so Steve could visit residents most impacted by the industrial hog industry. Today, we were visiting a family concerned about their water quality and recent results they received from water testing – they had called Steve for interpretation. Then to a local church to hear from community leaders about the preparation of a Civil Rights lawsuit. Looking back, these thousands of miles I had the good fortune to spend on the road with…
lborkowski | July 25, 2016A few of the recent pieces I’ve liked:
Clint Smith at the New Yorker: Racism, Stress, and Black Death
Maryn McKenna at Germination: CDC Director: ‘This Is No Way to Fight an Epidemic’
Natasha Geiling at ThinkProgress: Cleveland Is Not The Place For Mocking Environmental Justice
Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu at STAT: Why don’t medical schools teach us to confront racism and police brutality?
Dan Diamond at POLITICO: Pulse Check: Why Obama's 'public option' may disappoint (the complete podcast is well worth a listen)
Anne Friedman at The Cut: Injured at Work? Your Gender Could Affect How Much You’…
kkrisberg | March 4, 2016During the years that community health researcher Jill Johnston lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas was experiencing an explosion of fracking. She and the community partners she worked with on environmental health issues had a strong hunch that most of the fracking wastewater wells were being located near communities of color. So, they decided to dig a little deeper and quantify the pattern.
The results of that effort were published this month in the American Journal of Public Health. It turns out that Johnston and her colleagues were right — the study found that fracking wastewater…
lborkowski | November 18, 2015A few of the recent pieces I've liked:
Laura Ungar in USA TODAY: Found too late: Cancer preys on rural Americans
Priya Batra on the Huffington Post blog: Confidentiality Is Key: To Reduce Teen Pregnancy, the U.S. Must Ban Parental Notification Laws for Contraception
Henry Wismayer at Vox: I got typhoid. Then dengue fever. Here’s what it taught me about my love of travel.
Heather Rogers at The Intercept: Erasing Mossville: How Pollution Killed a Louisiana Town
Jamie Smith Hopkins at the Center for Public Integrity: Unequal Risk: Disease victims often shut out of workers’ comp system
Amber…
egrossman | June 4, 2014Where you live may be hazardous to your health. This is the conclusion of several recent reports and studies, among them a supplement to the most recent examination of health disparities by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and an analysis by the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Reform of those who live in communities most vulnerable to hazardous chemical exposures. Together the two paint a disturbing picture of how the neighborhoods in which Americans live and work play a significant role in determining their residents' health. There should be no…
cmonforton | February 12, 2013It's one thing to say your agency is committed to environmental justice, but actions speak louder than words. That's why I'm eager to see how USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and his Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) respond to the environmental justice concerns raised about the agency's proposed regulation to "modernize the poultry slaughter inspection system" (77 Fed Reg 4408.)
A disproportionate share of workers employed in poultry slaughter and production are Latinos and women. Many earn poverty-level wages. Their work environment----which is already associated with adverse health…
lborkowski | June 25, 2012This month, Environmental Health News has been running a fantastic series of stories in a series entitled “Pollution, Poverty, People of Color.” The editors planned the publication around the 30th anniversary of protests in Warren County, North Carolina, which are widely credited with launching the environmental justice movement. In 1982, residents of Warren County -- a predominantly black, low-income area -- learned that the state was planning to build a hazardous-waste landfill there to hold thousands of cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil. Activists Deborah Ferruccio and Reverend Willie T…
lborkowski | January 16, 2012For Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Candace Rowell at Mind the Science Gap reminds us that environmental injustice is a pressing civil rights issue, writing, "minority groups in the United States bear an unequal distribution of environmental risks and outcomes." (Mind the Science Gap will feature posts from 10 University of Michigan MPH students over the next four months, as part of a course led by Andrew Maynard on communicating science -- I'm looking forward to checking it out over the several weeks.)
Underscoring the connection between environmental health and civil rights, US Attorney…
bcohen | August 26, 2009Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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Part 3 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: What place did science play in the EJ issues of the communities you've studied? We've talked about tensions between expertise, technical knowledge, and lived community experience in other conversations. It's a vast subject, in fact, and I shouldn't cast this question so tidily. But for Noxious New York, where did scientific practices fit?
JS: Science played a large part in the story I told in New York City, a story…
bcohen | August 25, 2009Part 1 | Pt. 2 (below) | Pt. 3
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Part 2 with Julie Sze, discussing her book Noxious New York, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Let's do this: I know we already brought up environmental justice before, but could you define it in your terms for the readers? In your use and experience, does it differ from environmental racism, does it differ from, say, an anti-toxics activism that some link to Love Canal and Lois Gibbs?
JS: That is a huge question in the book. I define environmental justice as the social movement that emerged in response…
bcohen | August 24, 2009Part 1 (below) | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3
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The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), with its author Julie Sze. Sze is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis, an environmental justice scholar, and the founding director of the Environmental Justice Project at the John Muir Institute for the Environment.
Noxious New York "analyzes the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City within the…
illconsidered | February 24, 2009Today's Dilbert suggests that today's generation may not escape the wrath of those coming next for the sorry mess we are leaving behind:
Well played indeed!