This map is a fascinating and important image as it does NOT show the many sites of (ongoing) nuclear radiation contamination in communities impacted by uranium extraction and processing. For example, the Navajo Nation has around 270 unreclaimed open pit tailings piles. This is not official "waste" but is quotidian waste that creates longstanding environmental harm.
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].
The Sampson County landfill can be smelled before seen. This olfactory indicator points toward the sensory scale of these pungent emissions but also toward the geographic scope: this landfill receives waste from as far away as Orange County (the state's most expensive property/tax base), among dozens of other distant counties, making this "hazardous site" a lesson in realizing impact beyond the immediate locale. So when we answer the question, "What is this hazard?" we must think not only about the landfill as a thing in itself but as a set of economic and political relations of capital and the transit of other peoples' trash, into this lower-income, rural, predominantly African-American neighborhood. In this way, 'thinking with a landfill' (like this one in Sampson County) enables us to analyze wider sets of relationships, NIMBY-ist policymaking, consumerism, waste management, and the racialized spatial politics that enable Sampson County to be the recipient of trash from all over the state. At the same time we think spatially and in transit, we can think historically to (a) inquire about the DEQ policies that enable this kind of waste management system; and (b) the emergent "solutions" in the green energy sector that propose to capture the landfill's methane in order to render the stench productive for the future -- that is, to enable more consumption, by turning garbage into gas. As such, the idea of "hazard" can expand beyond the site itself - impactful and affective as that site might be - to examine the uneven relations of exchange and capitalist-driven values of productivity that further entrench infrastructures such as these. [This offers a conceptual corrollary to thinking, as well, about the entrenchment of CAFOs for "green" biogas development, as we address elsewhere in the platform].
To control this is to create more job oppurtunities for black and low-income families.
Hurricane Sandy impacted the community by distroying homes and landscapes. The Red Cross's decision to give out $310M as a recovery of the Hurricane is such a great way to step on solving such a vulnerabilitial hazard. Hurricane Sandy impacted buildings and lives, including children who lost their homes. Having a fund for the recovery of such an event is a great way to help people who lost their homes or beloved ones. Government started to help the hurricane victims right after the Hurricane by providing them homes or food. However, I believe that having a fund for recovery will be more flixable to help the hurrican victims. Lots of families lost family members in the hurrican. The Red Cross is helping with money, which cannot bring lives back. However, I believe that I is relieving to just think about those victims and consider them in the plan as well. There also lots of organizations were helping with the recovery form Hurricane Sandy by providing volunteers to build up houses and volunteers to make children recover from the event by providing performing arts. $310M fund will help those organizations do their job of building houses and bring kids' spirits back.
The author of the article read over the New Jersey's Drinking Water Watch database and read a letter that was sent by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to the Newark Water Department.
The author used the census to gather the information needed to back up his argument on why it is important.
The author used the census to accurately make the statistics needed to back up the main argument.
You can't really control the poverty line because there will always people who fall under the majority income. If everyone had the same amount of money, no one is really rich or poor. If everyone was given a million dollars, the poverty standard would increase along with it. Therefore, coming to a solution towards this problem isn't a one way fix. It is very complicated and has multiple different perspectives that go about it.
To control this is to create more job oppurtunities for black and low-income families.