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Anonymous (not verified)
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Lee argues that EJ practice has long stagnated over an inability to properly define the concept of disproportionate (environmental and public health) impacts, but that national conversations on system racism and the development of EJ mapping tools have improved his outlook on the potential for better application of the concept of disproportionate impact. Lee identifies mapping tools (e.g. CalEnviroScreen) as a pathway for empirically based and analytically rigorous articulation and analysis of disproportionate impacts that are linked to systemic racism. In describing the scope and nature of application of mapping tools, Baker highlights the concept of cumulative impacts (the concentration of multiple environmental, public health, and social stressors), the importance of public participation (e.g. Hoffman’s community science model), the role of redlining in creating disproportionate vulnerabilities, and the importance of integrating research into decision making processes. Baker ultimately argues that mapping tools offer a promising opportunity for integrating research into policy decision making as part of a second generation of EJ practice. Key areas that Lee identifies as important to the continued development of more effective EJ practice include: identifying good models for quantitative studies and analysis, assembling a spectrum of different integrative approaches (to fit different contexts), connecting EJ research to policy implications, and being attentive to historical contexts and processes that produce/reproduce structural inequities.

Ronny Zegarra: Urban reforestation for climate change - side effects

RonnyZP
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I am an environmental engineer with a profound interest on providing urban sustainability through the use of biotechnology. I currently research about air pollution in public health and its environmental factors related. My interest is focused on how to adopt greenery as air pollution mitigation strategy in developing cities of south America.
While making this briefly research about NOLA, I observed how air pollution has been historically related to a environmental injustice issue. An example of this is a 1960s study documenting asthma incidence among black communities due its near location to dumps, where subterranean burning happened commonly. This depicts the “southern pattern” in New Orleans, where African American were forced to reside in undesired areas subjected to frequent flooding, unhealthy air and noise levels, as well as unsanitary water and sewerage conditions. Morse (2008) describes Katrina as a turn point, where America’s attention on the enduring legacy of racial segregation and poverty were refocused. Local government remarked the necessity of green restoration in flooding areas, where most of segregated population lived in. Communities and foundations are also working together to sustain the urban landscape mainly for flood control. Therefore, I got interest on know how urban reforestation in NOLA was adopted as a tool for climate change adaptation but also in knowing how it acts as a pathway to reach environmental justice.

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Jacob Nelson
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1: Crowding is shown to be common in displaced populations, and local overpopulation/crowding often facillitates the transmittion of disease

2: Natural disasters that do not cause a displacement of a population are rarely associated with disease outbreaks

3: There is little or no evidence that dead bodies, as some believe, pose a epidemic risk for a population of survivors after a disaster has struck

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Jacob Nelson
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"The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires communities located within 10 miles of nuclear power plants to develop emergency plans. In New York, the four counties within 10 miles of Indian Point—Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Orange—have taken such measures. But the Disaster Accountability Project, a nonprofit organization that monitors disaster response programs and the author of the report, cited the commission’s response to the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, in which it recommended that U.S. citizens within 50 miles evacuate."

"NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the Fukushima site isn’t comparable to any in the U.S. 'Quite frankly, we don’t have any nuclear plant complexes where you have so many reactors packed so closely together.'"

"Those communities are exempt from the NRC’s emergency planning zones, so most haven’t developed such plans or conducted studies. According to several of them, they couldn’t without help from the federal government."

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Anonymous (not verified)
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" Then, after the scale of the disaster had sunk in and victims began to realize they were barred by the local and federal authorities from returning home, another kind of trauma set in. Families had to find a place to live, a way to replace lost income, a place for their children to go to school, a way to obtain their prescription medications and telephones, a way to pay mounting unpaid bills for homes they no longer inhabited. Without their personal documents, they had to try to track insurance policies, if they had them, bank accounts, and health records, to begin the slow process of accessing government or insurance funds to help pay for their displacement and their hoped-for recovery. The reality of how much had been destroyed, not just in personal physical property but in whole communities, whole ways of life, had just begun to be felt" "The ongoing conditions of displacement have prompted some to report that, despite the length of time since the actual disaster, New Orleans is still in a state of “responding” rather than “recovery.”4 This ongoing predicament is key to understanding that what we are calling “chronic disaster syndrome” is different from posttraumatic stress disorder, in which traumatic events are isolated in time and symptoms are related to events in the past. In the case of Katrina displacement, conditions that are traumatic continue; they are ongoing. " " “Cleaning up the mess” in this case included a deliberate effort to get rid of the poorest sectors of the population, who were seen as a drain on public resources— those who lived in public housing. The notion that subverting support for public-sector recovery and using disaster to enrich private contractors by evicting and “erasing” the poor were part of a deliberate plan was affirmed for residents when they heard one of their state lawmakers say, in regard to the loss of public housing from the storms and flooding, that “God did what we could not do.""

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Jacob Nelson
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In response to

I did further research into what the Disaster Accountability Project is and what they are trying to accomplish. I also looked into the NRC and how they are focused on safety of nuclear power in the US, and what some of their differences are with the DAP. Finally, I looked up the Indian Point Energy Center, in order to find out the size and scope of the plant and some of the concerns people have about nuclear power in their area

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Jacob Nelson
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The main findings of the article are that the relationship between natural disasters and communicable diseases is not as much due to dead bodies or high trauma as it is to population displacement and a lack of preparredness of the local governing body for the disaster and the crowding of survivors that follows a disaster as this

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Jacob Nelson
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This article has been referenced in a wide variety of emergency medicine journal articles, ranging from flood protocols, use of cell phones in disaster enviroments, earthquakes and medical complications, to the costs of disaster consequences. Many of the articles referencing this paper appear to go into greater depth for some of the epidemics and diseases that were touched on in the research article. These include hepatitis E, Leptospirosis, cholera, and tetanus.

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Jacob Nelson
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This article shows how some communities that, in the opinion of the Disaster Accountability Project organization, are within an effective radius of a nuclear incident at Indian Point and have little or no emergency plan for this kind of event. This is primarily due to these communities not having the knowledge that they could be effected by an event of this nature if they are over 10 miles away from the plant. Also, many of the communities that said they had not undergone any studies in relation to the plant's effects on their own community or developed any emergency plans because they cannot without federal aid. These counties and towns are not well-enough informed and are lacking the funding from the government in order to provide for their own safety if a nuclear accident were to occur