Environmental & Public Health

In April of 2019, a team of scientific researchers and documentarians arrived at Mount Everest’s southern basecamp in Nepal to measure the impacts of climate change and human activity on the world’s tallest mountain. The pollution team, led by University of Maine Assistant Professor Kimberley Miner, lugged heavy scientific equipment up the most popular ascent route. At each stop, Miner's team took samples of snow, the same snow climbers were boiling and drinking, the same snow that melted each summer and provided water for people living in the valleys below.

Thawing permafrost is releasing microorganisms, with consequences that are still largely unknown, writes Kimberley Miner in the November issues of Scientific American.

Candice Youngblood has received a $20,000 grant from Aerie to develop Youth on Root, a state-wide youth leadership program focusing on environmental health disparities. Youth on Root seeks to be a healing space and educational resource for high schoolers in low-income communities. The initiative was featured on Forbes magazine's website:

Lauren Richter, Alissa Cordner & Phil Brown, Sociological Perspectives Producing Ignorance Through Regulatory Structure: The Case of Per-and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Abstract:

... As Americans cast their ballots in next Tuesday’s election, voters have a choice: continued deregulation that could lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions, worsening symptoms of climate change and mass species die-offs or a reversal of those policies and slate of new governmental restrictions.

It is abundantly clear that climate change is not a future event; it is happening now, and it affects our lives, and our health. In a new report from The Yale Center on Climate Change and Health, Fellow Laura Bozzi and Robert Dubrow tracked 19 indicators on climate change and health in Connecticut across four broad categories — temperature, extreme events, infectious diseases, and air quality — and found disturbing trends in each.

For decades, families across a swath of southeast Los Angeles County have lived in an environmental disaster zone, their kids playing in yards polluted with brain-damaging lead while they wait on a state agency to remove contaminated soil from thousands of homes. Now, the cleanup faces even greater uncertainty. A bankruptcy plan by Exide Technologies, which operated the now-closed lead-acid battery smelter in Vernon that is blamed for the pollution, would allow the site to be abandoned with the remediation unfinished.

Editor's note: The following piece authored by Anna Robuck was first published on The Hill's website.

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