#environmental-justice

#environmental-justice

On May 16, 1998, the federal government used 600 pounds of explosives to destroy Marie Harrison's home, Geneva Towers, the largest residential implosion in California history. It was one of three detonations that rattled her community and inspired her life's work. The second came on June 18, 2008, when her activism helped light the fuse to implode San Francisco's old Pacific Gas & Electric Co. power smokestacks, long decried as an environmental and health hazard.

For nearly a century, miners used canaries, small yellow-greenish songbirds known for their high metabolisms and rapid breathing, to detect toxic gases in the mines. When a canary showed signs of distress, it gave miners enough time to evacuate before succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning. The songbirds were replaced by electronic gas detectors more than 40 years ago, but the saying "canary in a coal mine" is still a common metaphor for potential danger.

Now, the city's top staffer said Tagami's firm, Oakland Bulk and Oversized Terminal LLC, will be "treated like any other developer that comes into the city." "At this point, it's just another development project," City Administrator Jestin Johnson said in an interview. "The city has exercised all its legal options." The word "coal," he added, did not even come up during a recent meeting between the administrator and Tagami.

Christopher Swain's deep relationship with water began as a child. He recalls splashing around in the water, searching for the protruding edge of a pirate's gold chest along the shores of Massachusetts, and feeling an almost spiritual connection to the ocean. For Swain, the water has always been a place of belonging. His sunlit childhood memories of the ocean later shaped his life's mission to protect water and the natural world.

As the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Puerto Rican community-based organization, Yeampierre is reshaping what climate action looks like when it's rooted in community, culture, and collective care. UPROSE's mission is simple yet powerful: to build a just, sustainable future by equipping frontline communities to lead the solutions. From community-owned solar to climate education and youth leadership programs, the organization is proving that the most effective climate solutions are those designed by the people most affected.

It's not just the noise and the smell of the site that angers him. Soon, a pumping station will begin operation at the site, spewing wastewater from surrounding rich neighborhoods directly into Vila da Barca, from where it will then be pumped to Belem's first large-scale wastewater treatment facility. Wastewater from Vila da Barca, however, will continue to flow directly into the estuary.

Each sheet of paper, he told the commissioners, bore the name of a Wilmington resident killed by respiratory illness. Wedged between two of the country's busiest ports, the neighborhood is dotted with oil refineries, chemical plants, railyards and freeways. It's one of several portside communities known by some as a "diesel death zone," where residents are more likely to die from cancer than just about anywhere else in the L.A. Basin.

Earlier this year, my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and his eight colleagues, known collectively as the Ogoni Nine, were pardoned for a crime they never committed. After peacefully campaigning against environmental degradation of Ogoniland in Nigeria at the hands of the oil industry, they were imprisoned by the military dictatorship on false charges of treason and incitement to murder, following a trial condemned by the international community as a sham.

Schjetnan and GDU have designed some of the most significant parks in Mexico, including Chapultepec Forest and Park, the second-largest city park in Latin America, known colloquially as Mexico's "Central Park." With a focus on equitable access to nature, the application of environmental knowledge, and the potential of postindustrial sites, GDU's work has expanded the notion of what parks can do in Mexico.

William Bill Fobister remembers when things changed, seemingly overnight. The 79-year-old had grown up fishing across the sprawling English-Wabigoon River system. And the deep blue waters that lap the shores of his Ojibwe community - Asubpeeschoseewagong Netum Anishinabek, better known as Grassy Narrows - had fed his people since time immemorial. [My dad] was a commercial fisherman, and I helped him. That's how we survived, Bill recalls, sitting at a yellow picnic table in his backyard on a rainy August morning.

In particular, they seek "transition minerals," which are vital to the shift away from fossil fuels. These include lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel (often called critical minerals, essential for rechargeable batteries), as well as rare-earth minerals such as yttrium, scandium, and lanthanides (integral components of green infrastructure). Freedom from dirty energy, it would appear, requires doubling down on the decidedly nonrenewable practice of mineral extraction.

Violet Newborn had just moved into a new house, a rental on the edge of midtown and Frasier, when her son Logan's developmental milestones started "moving backwards." Logan was six months old and suddenly lethargic, always constipated, and refusing to eat or drink. He became joyless and fatigued. He'd sit silently at daycare, or hang his head when Newborn pushed him on the swings.

The president is absolutely right; and we've seen in the name of climate change, these left wing policies willing to cause extreme economic pain for people who can least afford it. We've seen in the name of climate justice, grants to $50 million to Climate Justice Alliance. They say that climate justice runs through a free Palestine. In the name of environmental justice, they will have tens of billions of dollars go to their well-connected left wing former Obama and Biden officials and Democratic donors,

As a framing term, just transition offers a critical awareness of the historical context of colonialism and extraction, as well as the baked-in systemic violence of our current systems and the necessary personal transformations required for tangible, meaningful change. Like any term, "just transition" is at risk of being co-opted or sanitized. There is also no consensus on what a just transition is.

When we apply that lens to the current proposals for casinos across New York City, one approach stands out above the others. Nearly every project would require demolishing existing buildings to construct new ones a process that generates enormous amounts of construction waste and debris while disrupting established ecosystems. In fact, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 90% of all construction debris is produced by the demolition of existing buildings.

Today, the Rio Blanco mining camp in south-central Ecuador lies in ruins. Shattered china litters the ground not far from a hollowed-out kitchen with no walls left standing. An abandoned mine tunnel as wide as a house stands on a hillside, overlooking the charred remains of a diesel station. In 2018, environmentalists hailed Rio Blanco's closure as a landmark win for conservation.

Air pollution from oil and gas activities is responsible for an estimated 91,000 deaths and over 10,000 preterm births in the US each year, according to a new study that examined the impacts of the industry through its lifecycle from extraction to refining to burning fuel in power plants. The study, published August 22 in the journal Science Advances, also attributes an estimated 216,000 annual incidences of US childhood asthma to air pollutants from fossil fuels, as well as over 1,600 lifetime cancers.