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Children and families vulnerable to asthma

Cattle ranchers

CALTrans

Almond farmers

NOAA

EPA

SJV Air Pollution Control

Kern River Oil Field

Central California Asthma Collaborative

 Teve Brown of NOAA said the valley suffers from cows + cards. At Harris Ranch a large industrial cattle farm trucks drive 6,000miles/day for 60 loads of feed producing nitrogen oxides (NOx). NOx combines with the ammonia from cow manure and urine to from ammonium nitrate which accounts for more that 1/2 of the areas most polluted days of PM2.5.

In addition, Interstate is a major thorough bringing more traffic pollution and farming practices including nitrogen fertilizer contributes 1/3 of NOx in California air.  The SJV also holds 9000 oil wells and because all the light oil has been drilled, the current production is described as the "thickest, dirtiest petroleum" in the nation.

Intersecting factors: landscape (bowl shape of the Valley); economic (agriculture that contributes to PM2.5); transportation corridor that add more traffic pollution; and state-wide wildfires that bring more particulate pollution which is trapped; and political environment in which area elects representatives  (ex: Devin Nunes) who deny global warming and reject environmental protection.

Air pollution--the result of cows+cars--is the focus of this multimedia article. One in six children in the SJV suggest from asthma. It is estimated that air pollution costs SJV as much as $11 billion annually the result of emergency room visits, lost school days, and other public health impacts.

The setting for this article is the San Joaquin Valley which encompasses 2/3rds of the Central Valley CA. Because of it's fertle farmland, it supplies 1/4 of the food to "American plates."

In terms of setting, like other valley's in CA (ex: San Gabriel Valley) and the whole LA Basin, the SJV's bowl-like landscape (mountain ranges on 3-sides) results in temperature inversion that traps smo closer to the ground during Wintertime.

This book builds on environmental justice research and concepts. In a reflection over the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, Kim Fortun (2012) proposed the beginning of a “late industrialism” era where disasters would be normalized as a result of conflicting information from the media and “experts” making it impossible for individuals to make informed decisions on politics and to demand environmental regulation. Bullard and Wright (2009) and Pellow (2018) proposed ethnic minorities and groups from lower socio-economic status are disproportionately burdened by toxic pollution; polluted communities face an uphill environmental justice battle against powerful corporations and local politicians to prove this disproportional toxic exposure. Brown (1993) and Allen (2003) proposed “popular epidemiology,” where communities would upkeep with their own health research, as an important way to include the community in research that would benefit them; with the benefit of having multiple different perspectives addressing one issue. Citizen science, coined by Alan Irwin (1995) is a popular concept that enforces community-based participatory research. Pellow (2018) proposed “critical environmental justices,'' defining it in four pillars: (1) “intersectional forms of inequality and oppression,” (2) “the role of scale in the production and possible resolution of environmental injustices,” (3) “recognition that social inequalities are deeply embedded in state power,” (4) “indispensability, arguing that “excluded, marginalized, and othered populations, beings, and things ... must not be viewed as expendable but rather as indispensable to our collective futures'' (Pellow 2018, 26).

Thom and Mah (2022) build on the importance of community inclusion in research. Although there are scholars interested in coming up with solutions on social-environmental problems. The community rarely benefits from the results of that research because there’s a huge disconnect between academia and neighborhoods with limited resources. Often, individuals of lower socio-economic status are left uninformed and underrepresented, even in cases of research. This book uses case studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research to show different ways to understand environmental injustice, political strategies, and ways to expand citizen science engagement and environmental literacy around the world. 

Text focuses on questions about the production and spread of knowledge, and the role science plays in society. Thom and Mah introduce the term “post-truths” that is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Which factors into how the intersection of science, politics, and values around the world determine a population’s attitude towards environmental justice. They argue for the importance of “science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living in environmental risks and hazards” (Thom and Mah 2022). In doing so, they recognize data isn't sufficient to solve environmental injustice, especially since issues of environmental pollution are so deeply intertwined with structures that perpetuate social inequalities. Instead, they suggest an interdisciplinary approach that integrates “legacies of environmental justice movement, participatory citizen science,” and “experts” to come up with holistic questions on how to overcome environmental inequality and advance the environmental justice movement amid challenges on the salience of environmental expertise.

Thom and Mah use four case studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research to show the importance of including citizens in scientific research. Citizen science refers to public engagement with science, from data sensing and crowdsourcing to design, collection, analysis of research. Although citizen science is not the only answer - with Catree (2016) pointing out that citizen-led processes have become a “lucrative business,” which creates a conflict of interest - this book redefines the meaning of “justice” within the environmental justice movement and explores “role and interpretation of citizenship within citizen science research (Thom and Mah 2022). They recognize there’s tension in balancing a community’s subjective experience and contextual knowledge with rigorous, scientifically appropriate research. 

To tackle environmental injustice in a post-truth era, Thom and Mah (2022) argue there needs to be political change. An interdisciplinary approach is used to study local and global environmental justice challenges with a range of “qualitative and quantitative social science methods, including community-based participatory research (CBPR), epidemiology, ethnography, visual methods, and other innovative methods of participatory environmental justice and citizen science research” (Thom and Mah 2022). 

This article was published in 2022 in England. This is amid the coronavirus pandemic and after the populist influence of Trump’s fake news politics around the world. With populist leaders propagating their own version of post-truths in India, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil. These leaders have incited a new wave of climate change deniers while political conflicts and environmental vulnerabilities worsen worldwide. 

At the time of the article, Trump had defunded environmental protection and pulled the USA from the Paris agreement - although, since then, Biden has proposed other plans on environmental justice, and the US has rejoined the Paris agreement -, Brexit had threatened to derail  environmental regulation - still remains an issue -, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro had opened vast tracts of Amozonian forest for permanent exploitation - still remains an issue. 

“Not only is the history of environmental justice temporally deep, it is also geographically diverse and still expanding. Any account of environmental jus- tice will therefore remain incomplete, not least because it is still being written. Right now, across the world, thousands of communities are embroiled in the midst of ongoing toxic struggles. Environmental justice also belies its seemingly American past, and today it is increasingly clear that “the concept has travelled to different places” (Holifield et al. 2018, 2). Despite scholarly work on envi- ronmental justice remaining skewed toward American case studies (Reed and George 2011), many scholars have demonstrated how issues of environmental justice are truly global in nature (Walker 2009a; Armiero and Sedrez 2014; Guha 2014; Pellow 2018).” (6)

“A further body of environmental justice research places justice as a procedural concern. This form of environmental justice was born out of participatory democracy, and places the focus of justice squarely on access to decision making and accurate information upon which to base decisions (Yenneti and Day 2015). … This move from a distributional to a procedural logic of justice, which involves public hearings and access to reliable information, is predicated on the redistribution of power relations (Pellow 2018).” (8)

“Within the radical science movement tradition, citizen science emerged out of calls for the democratization of science and expertise to include perspectives from wider publics (Irwin 1995). For decades, scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have argued that scientific expertise is highly political and embed- ded in power relations (Irwin 1995; Epstein 1996; Fischer 2000; Frickel et al. 2010).” (11)

This text (the introduction to the book Toxic Truths) summarizes the content of the full book while providing context for it through framing the environmental justice movement through the lens of the “post-truth” rhetoric that has been common for the last several years. The introduction argues for critical thought as a crucial antidote to “post-truth politics”, especially in the name of making sure that environmental justice momentum is not forgotten by the short public attention span during the chaotic and complex times we live in. The authors cite the examples of (i) environmental protection defunding under former American president Trump, (ii) the threat to environmental regulation of Brexit, and (iii) exploitation of the Amazon rainforest under Brazilian president Bolsonaro to highlight the recent politics that have muddied the waters of environmental justice and protection. The authors then expand their focus outward to include the interconnected roles of science, politics, and community values in the global fight for environmental justice.

Through this guide, Raphael makes a case for ES within EJ research. Particularly, Raphael articulates the value ES in: 1) building scholarly relevance and promoting restorative justice, 2) improving methodological designs in communication research, 3) reaching a wider pool of audiences in ways that are translatable to the public sphere, and 4) prompting greater reflexivity and collaborations by scholars across disciplines. Evidence is cited from a particular case study wherein a collaboration across academic institutions, independent research institutes, and a statewide advocacy organization led to improvements across the four aforementioned spheres for the research project itself. For example, by co-designing materials to increase the visibility and transparency of specialized research on pollution emissions, this collaboration succeeded in relating knowledge around pollution risks and lent strength to a wider organizing campaign to reduce emissions from the Chevron Oil Refinery in Richmond.