Analyze

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.

The Pollution Reporter app allows users to: (1) make a pollution report of something they see or sense, (2) search different polluters in Chemical Valley and access data on their emissions, (3) look up health symptoms and see what chemical pollutants might be linked to these symptoms, and (4) learn about specific chemical pollutants.

The workflows are meant to provide impacted individuals access to important information that can help them link health harms to specific polluters and chemicals from the nearby Chemical Valley. The reporting workflow also allows individuals to create reports, and thus their own data, on things they see or sense that might not be captured by industry monitoring systems. In this way, workflows both streamline access to important and relevant information while also enabling the capturing of experiential data.

The Pollution Reporter app includes data on: (1) polluters in Chemical Valley and a list of its chemical emissions, (2) health symptoms and the chemicals that are associated with that symptom, and (3) chemical pollutants that are emitted in Chemical Valley and the associated health impacts and polluters. Users are encouraged to search within these three categories and see the interconnectedness between polluters, chemical pollutants, and health symptoms. This helps users attach responsibility for health harms to chemicals and the corporations that make them. Users are also encouraged to submit their own data through a pollution report of something they see or sense. 

The Pollution Reporter App translates and connects government, industry-reported, and peer reviewed sources of data into accessible information about the known health effects of pollutants. The creators of the app recognized the limitations to government data in that it is (1) created by Industry, (2) disconnected from the health harms that pollution causes, (3) hard to get, (4) inaccurate, tending to underreport harms, (5) out-dated, (6) and usually organized one chemical at a time, not accounting for cumulative exposure of multiple chemicals. 

The key participation that the Pollution Reporter app supports is the ability for a user to report a pollution event, spill, or leak to the Ontario Ministry of Environment, making it easier for community members to report problems to the Spill Action Centre. The app assists in making the report, which is then sent through the users own email, and allows users to share on social media or keep a record of their reports.

This  reporting workflow is one of the main features of the app (one of four) and is located in the bottom navigation bar as the report icon (next to the polluters, chemicals, and health symptoms icons). 

"So far, however, the idea of setting up a trust fund to allow the Haitian government to eradicate cholera by providing clean water and sanitation has been a deal-killer among international donors."

"'If we do get a final order that the UN's immunity doesn't apply, we would expect the UN to put in clean water and sanitation and compensate the victims,' Concannon says [....] That's the optimistic view."

"That kind of political morass is one big reason - though by no means the only one - why the billions in relief and recovery aid haven't been enough to rescue Haiti from the disasters that fate kept flinging its way."

""USAID has spent about $1.5 billion since the earthquake,' Johnston told Goats & Soda. 'Less than a penny of every dollar goes directly to a Haitian organization.'"

This quote shows the extreme difference in total money donated compared to the money that is being used to help Haiti directly. I was mentioned that their government is hard to trust, so outside companies tend to hold the money, but that means that they can decide how they want to spend it.

"The U.N. and its agents are "absolutely immune from suit in this Court," Oetken ruled."

This quote shows the irony of the situation, by using the word "immune" it brings light to the fact that the UN's actions had major impacts on Haiti, from with the people of Haiti are very much not "immune", as cholera affects so much of the population.