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Environmental Injustice Concepts

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Digital collection of resources for understanding and using critical concepts to characterize and respond to environmental injustice. 

The Safe Side of the Fence

World War II's Manhattan Project required the refinement of massive amounts of uranium, and St. Louis-based Mallinckrodt Chemical Works took on the job.

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Andreas_Rebmann

According to the Center, due to a compelx system of policies and practices an epidemic of incarceration has occured that has impacted a large population of the United States, particulary those who struggled with addiction, substance abuse, or mental illness. The public health system, especially in relation to prison, has failed to address these issues properly over the past decades. Due to these systemic issues and their symptoms growing in impact and importance, the Center was created. (They didn't go into specific events or even specific issues, general policy and health problems.)

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Andreas_Rebmann

"Soviet scientists, too, were unprepared, but they did not admit their ignorance. In an August 1986 meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), they presented a crude analysis of the distribution of radiation in the Zone of Exclusion and in the Soviet Union: "assessments were made of the actual and future radiation doses received by the populations of towns, villages, and other inhabited places. As a result of these and other measures, it proved possible to keep exposures within the estab- lished limits."

"In this daily bureaucratic instantiation of Chernobyl, tensions among zone workers, resettled individuals and families, scientists, physicians, legislators, and civil servants intensified. Together, these groups became invested in a new social and moral contract between state and civil society, a contract guaranteeing them the right to know their levels of risk and to use legal means to obtain medical care and monitoring. The suf- ferers and their administrators were also supported by the nonsuffering citizens, who paid a 12 percent tax on their salaries to support compensations. The hybrid quality of this postsocialist state and social contract comes into view."

"He told me, how- ever, that "when a crying mother comes to my laboratory and asks me, Professor Lavrov, 'tell me what's wrong with my child?' I assign her a dose and say nothing more. I double it, as much as I can." The offer of a higher dose increased the likeli- hood that the mother would be able to secure social protection on account of her potentially sick child."

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Andreas_Rebmann

Good begins with explaining his own experiences working with patients suffering from epilepsy in Turkey, and his struggle to better understand the history of their illness

He then proceeds to give an in-detail explanation of one such patient, going into the specifics of the lack of clarity, and explaining the cultural connotation of different aspects of the patient-provided story, explaining why they might be muddled or less than accurate.

Next he looks at the work of others in the field, trying to get a better way of assessing the experiences of others and understanding their narrative without knowing everything they know.