Environmental & Social Justice

Editor's note: The following opinion piece by Fellow Ayana Johnson first appeared on The Hill's website.

The goals of the project between Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) and Switzer Fellow Dr.

Fellow Martha Matsuoka co-authored the chapter "Working Together to Clean Up Freight Transportation" in the new report from the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, Strategies for Health Justice: Lessons from the Field.

Infinite Earth Radio, a weekly podcast featuring thought leaders and change agents who are building smarter more sustainable and more equitable communities and businesses, interviewed Fellow Mike Antos on the intersection of homelessness and water management. Listen to episode 106 (part 1) Listen to episode 107 (part 2)

Lauren Richter has published an article in Social Studies of Science, "Non-stick science: Sixty years of research and (in)action on fluorinated compounds" about how the risks of PFASs have been both structurally hidden and unexamined by existing regulatory and industry practice. Abstract

Recent scholarship on urban agriculture (UA)—the production of food in cities—argues that UA can both undergird and resist capitalist accumulation, albeit often at different spatio‐temporal scales. Scholarship that explicitly examines how UA, capitalist development, and racial difference work through one another, however, is less extensive. In this review, Fellow Nathan McClintock proposes that the lens of racial capitalism can elucidate UA's contradictory motivations and outcomes.

A few days after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, a single mother of two escaped the disaster that left Puerto Rico in chaos and without electricity. Through her informal social networks, and with only a three-hour notice, she and her family boarded a humanitarian plane with a western physician and patients from the local hospital.

Over the past decade, more researchers have focused on the correlation between segregation and broad pollution exposure. Residents of a city like Memphis, they have found, are exposed to more pollution than those living in a city like Tampa, Fla., which is less racially divided.

Mohawk midwife Katsi Cook lives in Akwesasne, an indigenous community in upstate New York that is downwind and downstream from three Superfund sites. For years she witnessed elevated rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer in her town, ultimately drawing connections between environmental contamination and these maladies. When she brought her findings to environmental health researchers, Cook sparked the United States’ first large-scale community-based participatory research project.