Environmental & Social Justice

One clear lesson in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is that extreme weather in the age of climate change and global warming knows no class, race and privilege boundaries. Many, many communities in the New York metropolitan area need help, but as David Rohde wrote this week in The Atlantic, "Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city." Read more

On September 30, 2012, California Governor Brown signed the “Climate and Community Revitalization” bills – AB 1532 and SB535. The first of these sets up a process to allocate revenues from auctioning allowances (that is, emissions permits) under the new market-based system that is part of the implementation of the Golden State’s 2006 landmark legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).

The Los Angeles Times also ran an excellent story on this subject: "An exquisite Mexico beach, cursed by plastic" (January 27. 2012)

Chris fondly remembers chopping wood and picking slugs off the lettuce in his family’s organic garden. He believes practicing his parents’ alternative lifestyle based initially on choice and then on necessity gave him a basic understanding of how to live sustainably, but he didn’t actually hear the term sustainability until he went to college at UC Santa Barbara to study Economics and Environmental Studies. Read the full story

Tales of environmental injustices around the country provide strong evidence that chemical-by-chemical and facility-by-facility regulation is inadequate to protect public health.

While shrubs may shield bad behavior, mature, well-tended trees do just the opposite, said J. Morgan Grove, a social ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and one of the study's three authors. That could be important for a city like Baltimore, where trees cover just 27 percent of its landscape and some neighborhoods are practically barren. Read the full story

“We were in Seville last week doing survey work and heard about people getting boil notices when there’s bacteria,” said Balazs, who joined the Community Water Center as a staff scientist after completing her Ph.D at UC Berkeley. “But one of the worst things you can do is boil water when there are nitrates. It just concentrates them.” Read the full story