EiJ Concept: Equity
A critical exploration of the concept of equity.
A critical exploration of the concept of equity.
Environmental injustice involves cumulative and compounding, unevenly distributed vulnerabilities, hazards, and exposures – produced locally, regionally, nationally and transnationally – with open-
Enviornmental injustice researcher's program pages.
Digital collection of resources for understanding and using critical concepts to characterize and respond to environmental injustice.
Collections of readings that examine and conceptualize environmental injustice.
My interests center around soil--its preservation, regeneration, and remediation. Living farther up North on the Mississippi in Saint Louis has changed my thinking around the relationships between soil, water, and contamination. Saint Louis and New Orleans are linked not just through their shared river and its attendant water management issues, but through patterns of extraction and contamination. New Orleans may also provide some clues (and potential solutions) to my community's changing relationship with water as we confront climate change. My work as an artist explores our relationship with landscape through tours of contaminated sites and remediative interventions in the landscape, so I approach New Orleans with questions about contaminated environments and water management through landscape design, gardening, and education.
Most of the citizen-produced data is discounted by officials. There is little authorized data, though data has been collected and can be found with some effort. Dissemination of information is on a grassroots level. PRPs have been engaged in misinformation campaigns as well, creating organizations with misleading names who advertise on the radio and distribute flyers.
Monitoring. Decisions from the EPA about 'safe' levels of radiation exposure.
Cancer cluster. Not racialized in this particular area so much as class-based. Bridgeton is a working-class, mostly white suburb. The neighborhood closest to the landfill is a mobile home park.
Dualistic attitude of humanity as separate from nature led us to believe that we can dump nuclear waste in a floodplain and it will not affect us. Refusal to trust in ecological processes, hubris of engineering, and faith that we are not subject to natural laws because we are above nature led us to use the land in this way. Ecosystems compromised are innumberable because of the nature of the site--its proximity to water and the porous nature of the karst beneath it. This is still not recognized as a fundamental issue as evidenced by the fact that our solutions to these problems are always based on engineering, attempting to outsmart geography, geology, and physics...never a long-term solution or re-thinking land use practices.