Analyze

“Under a 1986 federal law titled the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), hospitals are required to treat people who come to the ED presenting with an emergency medical condition, defined as a condition that, without treatment, will likely lead to serious impairment or death. … EMTALA is one of the largest federal mandates to provide services to have gone unfunded (Friedman 2011); costs instead fall on states and local health care systems.” 481

“In bringing ethnographic attention to hot spotting as a technique of governance, we find that it provides lifesaving humanitarian interventions while operating within the racialized structures of violence that produce continual life crises. The institutional rationality of hotspotting and the encounters of care that it produces illustrate the often-contradictory role of medicine in the lives of poor people: both caring and coercive, it intertwines care and violence.” 475; “we conclude by suggesting that economic investment and return are becoming a reigning logic in the governance of poverty, generating hot spots as sites of interest for both policing and health care and decentering normative assessments of deviance, illness, and social problems” 476; “Neoliberal social assistance, as it is practiced in the health care safety net, is conceptualized as an “investment “in the population, as a strategic and targeted deployment of basic resources, one that promises to generate a return on investment for the state or health system in the form of cost savings.“ 485

 The authors examine the practice of “hot spotting,” a form of surveillance and intervention through which health care systems in the US intensively direct health and social services towards high-cost patients.  Health care hot spotting is seen as a way to improve population health while also reducing financial expenditures on healthcare for impoverished people. The authors argue that argue that ultimately hot spotting targets zones of racialized urban poverty—the same neighborhoods and individuals that have long been targeted by the police. These practices produce “a convergence of caring and punitive strategies of governance” (474). The boundaries between the spaces of healthcare and policing have shifted as a “financialized logic of governance has come to dominate both health and criminal justice” (474).

"'Environmental Justice and Cumulative Impacts' is intended to create stronger environmental and land use policy tools at the local level to prevent and mitigate additional pollution associated with a variety of development and redevelopment projects. It also addresses environmental justice by helping to prevent Newark, which has a disproportionate number of low-income and residents of color, from having a disproportionate number of polluting projects placed within its borders" (Hislip par. 1).

"showed a graph developed by environmental justice community organizers, which detailed the differences between communities that experience pollution versus the predominant race of those communities, which showed that as the number of people of color or the level of poverty in a neighborhood increased, so too did the cumulative impacts. In New Jersey, the amount of pollution you experience is directly correlated to your income and skin color" (Hislip par. 5).

"She explained that zoning laws in Newark are slowly changing, including rezoning and getting rid of outdated rules that were grandfathered in. But the impacts from the pollutants that were allowed to run rampant are very evident. Before Newark’s zoning laws were updated in 2012, the last time they had been updated was in 1954 and therefore had little regard for quality-of-life issues. The Ironbound district later became a hotbed for environmental justice movements due to its adjacency to industrial areas. Many heavy pollutants that were planned for this area saw heavy protest from EJ activists, like automobile shredding plants and chicken crematoriums" (Hislip par.8).

"The ordinance itself requires individuals applying for commercial or industrial developments within Newark to take the following steps:

1. Reference the city’s ERI and prepare a checklist of pollutants
2. Submit checklist and development application to the city
3. Checklist goes to the Environmental Commission
4. Checklist goes to the Planning or Zoning Board (where appropriate)" (Hislip par. 9)

The main sources of resilience are: discussing the list of pollutants that are spread across through a demographic structure, how pollutants affect and become more apparent to different race and economic levels; the information about possible new pollutants that could appear due to the addition of new companies; and the reconstruction on the zoning laws in Newark. Additionally, there are numerous environmentalists of all types behind this new addition to the zoning and land use regulations. 

The first point that peaked my interest is when Dr. Nicky Sheats brought up the real world example of a powerplant that was placed in the Ironbound District. It's an example of how government standards don't reflect or align with individual standards. I thought this was interesting to see how the people didn't have their due justice in deciding to have a polluting plant in their neighborhood. The other fact that caught my eye is that Newark zoning laws, previous to being updated in 2012, had been grandfathered in since 1954. This goes to show the complete lack of awareness for public health that has resided in New Jersey's History. The last point that truly shaped this article is how steps were being taken to prevent environmental justice issues. Commercial and Industrial developers have to go through the following process when proposing for a building: "

1. Reference the city’s ERI and prepare a checklist of pollutants
2. Submit checklist and development application to the city
3. Checklist goes to the Environmental Commission
4. Checklist goes to the Planning or Zoning Board (where appropriate)

The public has full access to this checklist to weigh in on it and make their voices heard." 

The policy is to have stronger land use and environmental rules on a local level. It aims to mitigate use of pollutants, and give careful attention to low-income, minority citizens as to not pollute their communities.

A process is placed that allows for social justice to take place in the development phase. 

"Commercial and Industrial developers have to go through the following process when proposing for a building: 

1. Reference the city’s ERI and prepare a checklist of pollutants
2. Submit checklist and development application to the city
3. Checklist goes to the Environmental Commission
4. Checklist goes to the Planning or Zoning Board (where appropriate)

The public has full access to this checklist to weigh in on it and make their voices heard." 

One process to consider is that alot of Newark Environmental and Public Health laws had not been changed since the 1950's, so that allowed for continuing of neglegence over the course of history in terms of environmental justice. Other social processes that might have played a part is race and class. Low-rise and dense housing for low-income and minority civilians have become major victims of careless industrialization.

This article did not talk about how much newark is polluted, in comparison to social implications. Granted this article was about a passed government action, there was information I probably wasn't shown that was taken into consideration.