TebbeM Desert StoryMaps Question 5.3
mtebbeDr. Cheney is attempting to answer the following question: What can we learn from the residents about their experience in living with asthma, and can this help us understand the disease?
Dr. Cheney is attempting to answer the following question: What can we learn from the residents about their experience in living with asthma, and can this help us understand the disease?
There are very few hospitals in the area around the Salton Sea--only two in Imperial County and three in the Coachella Valley.
The "Disparities in Environmental Exposures and Health Impacts" project has four goals:
New and Alamo Rivers - transboundary movement
Lee references work from two main sources: Jill Lindsey Harrison’s book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies, and Ana Baptista’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Just Policies? A Multiple Case Study of State Environmental Justice Policies.” Harrison describes how EJ managers and staff undermine environmental issues resisting EJ integration. She argues this resistance is based on: “environmental protection is colorblind, bettering the environment overall means that the environment is improved for everyone, EPA is a science agency while EJ deals with social issues, and other “standard narratives” rooted generally in American normative societal values or in long-held premises that have shaped the environmental protection field for decades” (Lee, 2021). Baptista’s concept suggest EJ practice’s inactivity contributes to procedural injustice while also highlighting the importance of structural justice when dealing with environmental injustice as it is deeply rooted in racial discrimination and the perpetuating of racism through the skewed relationship between governmental entities and black communities.
In addition to these references, Lee also highlights contributions from Rebert Bullard, who developed a public health model of prevention that focuses on community-outreach practices to address disproportionate impact. Ryan Holifield, who accentuated the difficulty for government agencies to define “disproportionate impacts” presenting another challenge in legally reinforcing the order. David Pellow, who highlighted the importance of critically looking at race and understanding how attributed meaning to concepts dealing with race change over time.
In order to advance these referenced works, Lee argues that the best way to integrate earlier findings is by building the capacity of the EJ practitioner “to deploy the core theories that guide EJ practice.” In this instance, the ability to define and contextualize the term “disproportionate impacts” is a crucial tool to ensure the Executive order becomes operational.
Lee’s main argument is that disproportionate impacts are intertwined with the distribution of environmental and social impacts. He highlights structural and procedural issues with environmental agencies and the EPA, along with other issues of data injustice, where agencies were sometimes characterized as “black boxes,” closed off from population scrutiny and from learning of the actual narratives in these communities.
“Not only are we now able to construct inarguable empirical statements that are commensurate with the deep historical and systemic drivers of environmental racism and injustice, but mainstream leaders and the general public are finally listening. Indeed, new tools for operationalizing the consideration of disproportionate impacts are emerging, not the least of which is New Jersey’s recent landmark EJ legislation (S.232/A.B.2212). Hence, we can now discuss what some building blocks of a second generation of EJ practice may look like.”
Lee uses CalEPA’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee definition and recognition of “cumulative effects,” or the public health effects of combined exposure of environmental pollutants and toxins with other stressors that impacts people of a lower socio-economic status in accordance with existing research. This led to the development of the CalEnviroScreen