Environmental & Public Health

From the American Journal of Public Health: The Drinking Water Disparities Framework: On the Origins and Persistence of Inequities in Exposure Carolina L. Balazs, PhD, and Isha Ray, PhDAt the time of research, both authors were with Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley. Contributors

Kendra Klein has co-authored a report on redefining healthy food in the health care for Health Care Without Harm. Healthy food cannot be defined by nutritional quality alone. It is the end result of a food system that conserves and renews natural resources, advances social justice and animal welfare, builds community wealth, and fulfills the food and nutrition needs of all eaters now and into the future.

Why is Isella Ramirez’s environmental justice work so personal? She grew up in Commerce and, while she expresses her love for her community, she also knows first-hand what it is like living in a toxic environment. Situated in the midst of a major transportation hub, Isella, her 6-year old niece Citlalih, and neighbors are surrounded by the busy l-710 freeway that accommodates up to 260,000 cars and over 40,000 diesel trucks on a daily basis, rail yards, and blocks and blocks of industries reliant on the freeways and rail yards.

Evan Hansen of Downstream Strategies said the bills matches up to the way West Virginia’s Senate Bill 373 started the legislative process. That bill, which was signed into law earlier this week, changed, however, as it worked its way through both houses of the legislature. “The West Virginia bill is much more comprehensive,” he said Thursday. “They overlap in terms of having new regulations on aboveground storage tanks, but the West Virginia bill includes a lot more.”

Evan Hansen, an environmental consultant who has testified about the leak before the West Virginia legislature, has tracked the cumulative effect of that objective throughout the government. “In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”