Community interviews have found that many household have members that are gardeners. Research has shown that garndening labor is especially socially vulnerable and hard to protect through organizing. See: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M5_McMmsbcb_s2Qn17XtnFQ3HBeC2hcfYSBYrqmDB-0/edit?usp=sharing . Also see Sal Zarate's work: https://www.zotero.org/groups/130725/disastersts/collections/ICRQQ8PM
MPNA-GREEN's Community Research Board is conducting community interviews and learned that there are professional gardeners in many households, which likely comes with significant exposre to pesticides, likely brining them home to their families. See, for example, this recent study: https://www.ehn.org/glyphosate-childrens-health-2659484037.html, and there is always worries about endocrine disrupting chemicals in ag work.
This image hides many things, including:
1. the slow but steady dispossession of smallholder (often African-American) farms that have been overtaken/bought out by Smithfield Foods to enlarge the industrial footprint of CAFOs;
2. the hogs themselves, whose hooves never touch the ground as they stand on "hog slats" inside the hangers as they move through the Fordist stages of transformation from individual animals into packaged pork;
3. the human operators, themselves, who are rarely wealthy, and are contracted for decades (or life) to purchase all "inputs" (feed, semen, etc) from Smithfield; in 2010, I took my EJ class from UNC-Chapel Hill to visit one of these operators at his CAFO, outside Raleigh, NC, and he was battling Smithfield and Duke Energy to be allowed to erect and operate a small-scale, experimental wind turbine that ran on methane captured from his pigs; years later, individual efforts at small-scale biogas would be overtaken by entities like Align LNG which now, in Sampson County, proposes the "Grady Road Project" to scale-up factory-farmed methane gas capture from much larger operations;
4. the legacy of resistance to this form of agricultural production, led by community-based intellectuals like Gary Grant, who as early as the 1980s was speaking out, traveling to state and federal lawmakers, publishing, and organizing against the growing harms of CAFOs in his home territory of Halifax County, NC. [See the suggested readings by Gary Grant and Steve Wing, Naeema Muhammed and others, that tracks this organized resistance and the formation of several community-based EJ groups in response].
This photo essay offers a visual example of maps that can be created using the California Healthy Places Index. It specifically focus on various health-related indicators in Santa Ana, California.
On Wednesday Oct 5th 2022, CUAL (Communidad Unida Aire Limpio) hosted an air monitoring day. Santa Ana residents were asked to volunteer and donate their time. There was three shifts available (Morning 7am-10am, Noon 12pm-3pm, Evening 4pm-7pm). A volunteer will use the app Atmotube and pair their phone up with an air monitor. There are driving routes and walking routes. A person will need to stay at each stop of the route for 7 mins. After the route is done, the volunteer will go back and return the monitor and will then send their data to mpnacorg@gmail.com
This video is a Tik Tok I made about my experience with volunteering for CUAL.
https://www.tiktok.com/@josephvkast/video/7151573175829318958?is_copy_u…