Category Archives: Justice (EJ)

Urban noise pollution is worst in poor and minority neighborhoods and segregated cities

Neighborhoods with median annual incomes below US$25,000 were nearly 2 decibels louder than neighborhoods with incomes above $100,000 per year. And nationwide, communities with 75 percent black residents had median nighttime noise levels of 46.3 decibels – 4 decibels louder than communities with no black residents. A 10-decibel increase represents a doubling in loudness of a sound, so these are big differences.

Review of Richard S. Newman’s “Love Canal: A Toxic History from Colonial Times to the Present”

Newman’s activists press for environmental change imbedded with critiques of capitalism and industrialization, racial injustice, and its global implications. This view distorts the complexity of historical events within the environmental movement.

Pollution is Colonialism

Colonialism in Canada is an ongoing structure whereby settler society and government assert sovereignty over lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples.

The forgotten story of how a toxic spill and a book launched Britain’s environmental movement

When in 1963 some farm animals in the parish of Smarden in Kent became sick and died, suspicions fell on a nearby pesticide factory run by a division of Rentokil Laboratories. The events that followed amounted to one of the first environmental scandals in contemporary British history – one that would galvanise the environmental movement.

Your city could be exporting deadly air pollution – here’s why

Goods and services produced in one region for use by another region are responsible for 22% (762,400) of air pollution-related deaths worldwide.

Cleaning up toxic sites shouldn’t clear out the neighbors

Notions of “sustainability” and “urban greening” ought to include values of justice and equity. Otherwise, important projects like the Blue Greenway will build sustainable waterfronts for the urban elite, rather than spreading the environmental benefits of toxic cleanup to the many.

Community Responses to Toxic Hazards: A Reading List

A reading list of the David and Goliath story of communities versus industries, governments, and polluting infrastructures.

Call for participation: Enacting Environmental Data Justice

Held on Tuesday, August 29, this event will explore possibilities for data justice through a framework of environmental justice.

We need to think about redefining citizenship in the Anthropocene

The concept of citizenship originally described inhabitants of (probably walled) towns. Some insistence on specificity of place certainly remains, although the concept today generally refers to nations rather than cities. But what are concerned citizens to do in the face of problems such as climate change, which cannot easily be contained by walls or borders, and to which we all contribute?

Difference in the Anthropocene: Indigenous Environmentalism in the Face of Settler Colonialism

Both Todd and Whyte argue that achieving climate justice for and by Indigenous people requires addressing the ways in which global environmental change is intimately connected with— and in fact is predicated upon— practices of settler colonialism.