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Chemical Transportation Risk and Safety

tschuetz
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In April 2024, Formosa Plastics Corp. USA was among 137 companies to receive the 2023 Pinnacle Award by the Union Pacific Railroad for "safe shipping of hazardous materials". The transport company honors cusotmers that "release prevention protocols, corrective action plans and have zero non-accident releases of regulated hazardous materials shipments". 

Meanwhile, journalists at the Intercept have followed how in the aftermath of the East Palestine train disaster, lobbyists have both weakened rail safety (Thakker 2023) and supported the buildout of toxic polyvinylchloride (PVC) production (Mitchell 2023, 2024). The latter includes Formosa Plastics planned expansions in Louisiana's St. James Parish.

TCEQ's 1-mile rule

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"The “1-mile rule”: Texas’ unwritten, arbitrary policy protects big polluters from citizen complaints. It’s not found anywhere in state law or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s rules, but for years the agency has denied citizens the ability to challenge air pollution permits because they live more than a mile away." (Baddour 2023)

Diane Wilson's writing

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Throughout her 30-year career, Diane Wilson has been a prolific author, having published several books (Wilson 2005; 2011) that have been highly regarded by scholars of feminist and environmental literature (Poe 2013; Thornber 2014; Aming-Hong 2022). Wilson's book, An Unreasonable Woman (2005), has been praised by Karen Thornber (2014), an ecocritical writer who has noted that the book highlights the "global consequences of local and national behaviors" and can "work to change consciousness in the absence of public policy" (Thornber 2014, 991). Moreover, literature scholar Heidi Amin-Hong (2022) has argued that Wilson's "documentary aesthetics" demonstrate how Formosa's pollution of Vietnamese waters is part of a longer history of pollution caused by militarized projects across transpacific geographies, ranging from Vietnam to Taiwan and Texas (Aming-Hong 2022, 1). According to Amin-Hong, Wilson's use of dialogue "decenters individual authority in favor of collective knowledge gathering and communal action" (Aming-Hong 2022, 6).

Air traffic. hazards (include lead)

Kim Fortun

Gardening labor is especially socially vulnerable

Kim Fortun

Pesticide hazards in gardening labor

Kim Fortun
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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. 

California Healthy Places Index

margauxf
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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.