# data[].attributes.headline
ANCHOR TEXT - What is Environmental Racism

# data[].attributes.subject
ANCHOR TEXT - What is Environmental Racism

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is Environmental Racism, and How Can We Fight It?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Environmental racism often flies under the radar—with disastrous consequences. Here, experts explain what it is and how it affects our world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The environmental justice movement-championed primarily by Black people, Latines, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous People-was born of a statistical fact: Those who live, work, and play in America's most polluted environments are commonly people of color and those living in poverty. Because of environmental justice advocates, we now know this as environmental racism, and it's precisely what communities of color have been battling for decades.

What is environmental justice?

Environmental justice essentially means that everyone-regardless of race, color, national origin, or income-has the right to the same environmental protections and benefits, as well as meaningful involvement in the policies that shape their communities. But rarely has this been the reality for people of color and those with low incomes. That's because virtually all environmental injustice is shaped by the same patterns of racism and inequality that have existed in the United States since its founding and continue to influence every facet of our society, from education to housing to health care.

For example, to this day, majority-white and wealthy communities are where investments into infrastructure are more likely to be made, where environmental laws are more likely to be properly enforced, and where polluters are more likely to be held accountable or kept away entirely. By comparison, the most marginalized communities are routinely treated as the areas where highways can be built, waste can be stored, industrial warehouses and facilities can be concentrated, and where natural resources can be readily exploited or destroyed.

What's worse, the most affected communities often experience multiple environmental threats at once. A single resident may drink lead-contaminated tap water and go to school near a soot-producing, coal-fired power plant. When such threats compound, and are exacerbated by other social and economic vulnerabilities, residents face even higher health risks. This is why the environmental justice movement has long worked to change these unjust patterns.

How Warren County protests led to a national movement

The story of how the environmental justice movement became a national one can generally be traced back to Warren County, North Carolina. In the late 1970s, the state's government was deliberating where it could store 6,000 truckloads of soil laced with toxic PCBs. It decided on rural, poor, and overwhelmingly Black Warren County. That quickly became the focus of national attention.

Residents were furious that state officials had dismissed concerns over PCBs leaching into drinking water supplies. Many veterans of the Civil Rights Movement-often affiliated with Black churches-shared their sentiments and showed up. Among them were Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. and Reverend Joseph Lowery, then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Reverend Leon White of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The dump trucks still rolled into Warren County in mid-September 1982, headed for a newly constructed hazardous waste landfill in the small community of Afton. But the same frustrated residents and their allies stopped the trucks by lying down on roads leading into the landfill. Six weeks of marches and nonviolent street protests followed, and more than 500 were arrested-the first arrests in U.S. history over the siting of a landfill.

Other communities of color had organized to oppose environmental threats before Warren County. In the early 1960s, Latine farmworkers organized by Cesar Chavez fought for workplace rights. In 1967, Black students took to the streets of Houston to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that had claimed the lives of two children. In 1968, residents of West Harlem, in New York City, fought unsuccessfully against the siting of a sewage treatment plant in their community. But the Warren County protests and accompanying legal challenges are considered by many to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.

The people of Warren County ultimately lost the battle, and the toxic waste was deposited in that landfill. But their story-one of ordinary residents driven to protect their homes from a toxic assault-fired the imagination of many across the country who had lived through similar injustices. These events even inspired a new faction within the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, several early environmental justice leaders came out of it. They understood that the environment was another front in the struggle for justice, and they brought with them many of the same tactics-like marches, petitions, coalition building, community empowerment, litigation, and nonviolent direct action.

The mounting facts of environmental racism

In the wake of Afton, the newly energized environmental justice activists noticed a clear pattern. Corporations, regulatory agencies, and local planning and zoning boards consistently targeted low-income communities of color when siting polluting facilities like landfills, waste transfer stations, incinerators, garbage dumps, diesel bus and truck garages, auto body shops, smokestack industries, industrial hog and chicken processors, oil refineries, chemical manufacturers, and radioactive waste storage areas.

Activists also found some common factors among the most affected communities. For example, these communities typically had lower property values due to long histories of redlining. They often lacked connections to decision makers on zoning boards or city councils that could protect their interests. They usually couldn't afford to hire the technical and legal expertise necessary to fight a siting. And polluting companies intentionally withheld information from them about how the pollution could affect their health, something that was exacerbated in non-English-speaking communities.

Several studies in the late 1980s and early '90s gave these accounts of environmental racism new credibility. Walter Fauntroy, the District of Columbia's congressional delegate and then chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, took part in the Warren County protests. When he returned to Washington, he tasked Congress's General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office or GAO) with determining whether communities of color suffered disproportionate negative impacts from the siting and construction of hazardous waste landfills within them. That GAO study was published in 1983 and revealed that three-quarters of the hazardous waste landfill sites in eight southeastern states were located in primarily low-income, Black, and Latine communities.

More evidence of widespread environmental racism soon followed. In 1987, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ), under the leadership of executive director Chavis, who had been at Afton, published the landmark Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States report. Researched by Charles Lee, CRJ's director of the Special Project on Toxic Injustice, the report showed that race was the single-most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States. It also found that the placement of these facilities was the intentional result of local, state, and federal land use policies. And in 1990, sociologist Dr. Robert Bullard published what is considered to be the first overarching book on environmental injustice, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, which underscored the importance of race as a factor in the siting of unwanted facilities that produce toxic chemicals.

The push to advance the environmental justice agenda nationally

By 1990, leaders of the growing environmental justice movement, who had chiefly relied on coalition building and community empowerment, began to look for allies among the traditional, primarily white-and more well-resourced-environmental organizations. These were groups that had long fought to protect the wilderness, endangered species, clean air, and clean water. But they had had little or no involvement in the environmental struggles of people of color. That year, several environmental justice leaders cosigned a widely publicized letter to the "Big 10" environmental groups, including NRDC, accusing them of racial bias in policy development, hiring, and the makeup of their boards, and challenging them to address toxic contamination in the communities and workplaces of people of color and the poor. As a result, some mainstream environmental organizations developed their first environmental justice initiatives, added people of color to their staff, and resolved to take environmental justice into account when making policy decisions. All of this remains a serious work in progress.

Environmental justice leaders also pushed their agenda within the government. In 1990, a meeting between a group of prominent academics and advocates within the movement and a top official in the first Bush administration led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Equity Workgroup . The following year, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit brought together hundreds of environmental justice leaders from around the world to Washington, D.C., to network and strategize for the first time. The list of attendees-which included Reverend Jesse Jackson, Dolores Huerta, Cherokee Principal Chief Wilma Mankiller, and the heads of NRDC and the Sierra Club-demonstrated that environmental justice was beginning to be taken up by many in the American mainstream. What's more, the summit produced the " Principles of Environmental Justice " and the "Call to Action," two foundational documents of the environmental justice movement.

By 1992, when Bill Clinton became president, it was clear that environmental justice was becoming important to leaders of a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Clinton appointed two leaders, Chavis and Bullard, to his natural resources transition team, where they helped make environmental justice an important part of the president's stated environmental policy. And then, on February 11, 1994, Clinton signed Executive Order 12898-a groundbreaking order directing federal agencies to identify and address the disproportionately high adverse health or environmental effects of their policies or programs on low-income people and people of color. It also directed federal agencies to look for ways to prevent discrimination by race, color, or national origin in any federally funded programs dealing with health or the environment. What began in the streets of Warren County had made it to the White House.

The legacy and future of environmental justice

In the roughly 40 years since the dump trucks first rolled into Afton, hundreds of environmental justice grassroots groups-like WE Act for Environmental Justice , the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Poverty , Asian Pacific Environmental Network , and the Southeast Environmental Task Force -have formed. They represent strong and enduring forces for environmental protection and social change in their communities. Their work has also continued to ensure that environmental justice is a central issue within environmentalism and progressive politics.

Now, environmental justice leaders who once influenced policy as outsiders are more likely to have seats at decision-making tables. Take LaTricea Adams , who founded Black Millennials for Flint and also sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC). Plus, environmental justice has become more embedded across federal policy. The Justice40 Initiative , which directs 40 percent of federal investments in climate and clean energy toward disadvantaged communities, is a prime example. And mainstream environmental groups have also learned from and increasingly worked alongside environmental justice organizations. For example, NRDC often provides technical advice and resources, supplies expert testimony at hearings, and joins in litigation.

Of course, there is plenty of work that remains. Wide-ranging research continues to show the ubiquitousness of environmental injustice in everything from drinking water violations to the impacts of climate change, like extreme heat vulnerability . Even in the face of those continued challenges, what remains clear is this: The work of the environmental justice movement has already reshaped how so many experience the environment; it has saved lives; and it represents the power of sustained collective action.

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Environmental justice is an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment, especially for communities of color who have been forced to live, work, and play closest to sources of pollution.

# data[].attributes.headline
Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution

# data[].attributes.subject
Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When asked directly whether environmental racism was at play in Flint's water crisis, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder replied last month, "Absolutely not." But the city's money-saving shortcuts have now poisoned, with their own tap water, up to 8,000 children as well as many other residents, most of them black.

"Environmental racism" describes the fact that people of color and low-income people are most likely to be situated near sources of contamination and away from clean water, air, and soil. A city like Flint, where more than half of the population is black in a state that's nearly 80 percent white, and where the poverty rate is above 40 percent, is a textbook case, whatever Governor Snyder says.

Across the country, African Americans are more than twice as likely as whites to live in a home with substandard plumbing. More than 1 percent of black people live in houses without potable water and modern sanitation, compared to less than 0.5 percent of whites. They are also, understandably, twice as likely as white people to mistrust the water that flows from their taps and to say that more regulation is needed.

It's not just water: A 1987 report found that race was the most significant predictor of a person living near hazardous waste. Communities that were located near multiple commercial hazardous-waste facilities or a landfill had three times the amount of minority residents as communities that were far away from such dump sites. The Government Accountability Office found in 1983 that black people made up the majority of communities near landfills. Decades later, a 2007 report found that things were actually worse: Communities near commercial hazardous-waste facilities consisted mainly of people of color. Finally, people of color are exposed to a level of nitrogen dioxide-which emanates from cars and industrial sources and can cause respiratory problems-at an average rate 38 percent higher than white people.

The location of black and brown communities near sources of pollution springs from racist government policy that can be traced back to the early part of the century. In the 1930s, federal housing agencies redlined black neighborhoods, locking black people into crowded city centers, while helping white people flee to the more pleasant suburbs. In Flint, for example, maps from the time show these neighborhoods literally colored in red. Redlining exacerbated poverty in the black community as black people were shut out of the wealth accumulation accessed by whites through cheap home loans. By the mid-1960s, Flint was 94 percent segregated.

As the authors of A Twenty-First Century U.S. Water Policy write, "Whereas many of the water-related impacts of urbanization are related to local planning and permitting decisions, it is also local-level planning that has influenced the concentration of low-income communities and communities of color into marginal urban geographies."

Visit Cuba with The Nation!

Once they were trapped in the inner city, these communities were routinely selected as dumping grounds for urban sources of pollution and contamination. With few resources and little political clout, poor black communities were ill-equipped to resist their new role. The facilities that are the most noxious polluters are disproportionately located near communities of color.

Flint residents have grappled with environmental racism long before the latest crisis. In the 1990s, residents fought against an air permit for a steel "mini-mill," which would operate within the city limits and spew 100 tons of lead and other pollutants into the air each year, adding to the existing air pollution generated by the Genesee Power Station. Residents charged that the quantity of pollution would violate their civil rights.

But the complaints of black and poor communities usually go ignored. The Environmental Protection Agency ruled against Flint residents in the steel-mill case. It has also denied 95 percent of the civil-rights claims brought by communities of color against polluters, and it has never once made a formal finding of a civil-rights violation. When sour-smelling, discolored water came out of Flint residents' pipes in the spring of 2014, their complaints went ignored for nearly two years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When asked directly whether environmental racism was at play in Flint's water crisis, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder replied last month, "Absolutely not." But the city's money-saving shortcuts have now poisoned, with their own tap water, up to 8,000 children as well as many other residents, most of them black.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Justice for our planet and justice for all people are two profound conversations that are happening simultaneously, but often in different rooms. The interconnectedness of daily human life and the state of the Earth often goes unexamined, but at this point in human history we cannot afford to separate these conversations.

The assumptions that many people carry, that the Earth is separate from us and thus exploitable, are paralleled by assumptions that some people are different and inherently disposable-and this is the crux of the issue.

Issues that impact the environment have impacts on the people who live there as well. And when some people have access to resources that help them relieve those impacts while others don't, that becomes a social justice issue.

From a community scale to a global scale there is an intense connection between people and the Earth, and harm to one cannot be escaped by the other.

The Effects of Climate Change on Marginalized Populations

Our decisions as a species have led to intense changes in how the planet is functioning. These changes in climate aren't arbitrary; they are having tangible effects across the globe. But the capacity for all populations to mitigate these changes isn't universal. In many places climate change has had a hand in threatening human rights.

A U.N. report on climate change stated that it is the poor who will suffer the most as the effects of climate change continue.

"People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change," it said.

The Human Impact Report published in 2009 said that 300,000 people a year are already dying from the effects of climate change and another four billion are vulnerable to negative side effects such as:

Drought and water shortages

Floods and other extreme weather

Crop failures and food insecurity

Reduced agricultural productivity

Loss of low-lying lands and islands

Desertification

Loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services

Spread of diseases, such as malaria

Although these effects are not exclusive to the poor, they have limited ability to deal and cope with them.

For example, because of desertification, water shortages and crop failures, crop yields will continue to drop, and while this will eventually affect rich nations, it will first and foremost affect the countries and the people who aren't able to afford higher-priced crops.

The poor are also hit hardest in weather-related disasters, such as heat waves or storm surges. And the number of natural disasters between 2000 and 2009 was around three times higher than in the 1980s-almost entirely because of climate related events. And as they find themselves subject to these adversities it makes it even more difficult to fight poverty.

Industry, Human Welfare and the Environment

Even in more industrialized nations, social justice and environmental justice are undeniably linked.
For example, industrial crop and livestock production damages the environment, threatens human health, degrades rural communities, harms workers, and compromises animal welfare.
Common practice in industrial agriculture includes continually using the land, not rotating crop sufficiently, and over application of chemical fertilizers.

In addition to degrading the land, workers in industrial farms and animal agriculture are subject to non-livable wages, hazardous working conditions and unfair labor management. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agriculture ranks among the most hazardous industries. Farmers are at high risk for fatal and nonfatal injuries, work-related lung diseases, noise induced hearing loss, skin diseases, and certain cancers associated with chemical use and sun exposure.

Outside of farming, this correlation is seen in communities near oil refineries, power plants, or other toxic waste facilities. Research shows that hazardous waste facilities are disproportionately located in poor, minority neighborhoods.

Residents living near these types of facilities are subject to both short-term and long-term illness. Symptoms such as uncontrollable vomiting and burning rashes have been linked to overexposure of emissions from drilling near residences and still very little has been done on a governmental level.

Effects on Our Indigenous Neighbors

Our indigenous partners in the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest also embody the mutual inclusivity of social and environmental justice. As industries like oil continue to expand indigenous communities are needing to work harder and harder to protect the land that has been theirs for centuries.

In instances like the Chevron oil spill in Ecuador, Texaco (who is now Chevron) defiled Ecuador's northern Amazon rainforest by contaminating its soil, rivers and groundwater because of neglectful practices.

In consequence, indigenous communities suffer from epidemics of cancer, birth defects, miscarriages, and have threatened the indigenous livelihood.

And the dismantlement of any indigenous cultures can ultimately lead to a loss of deep wisdom and understanding that they hold about this planet.
Photo by: Flickr user Asian Development Bank.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Social Justice and Environmental Justice Are Intrinsically Interconnected

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Justice for our planet and justice for all people are two profound conversations that are happening simultaneously, but often in different rooms. The interconnectedness of daily human life and the state of the Earth often goes unexamined, but at this point in human history we cannot afford to separate these conversations.

# data[].attributes.body
Greta Thunberg's full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WATCH: Greta Thunberg's full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This site uses cookies to deliver website functionality and analytics. If you would like to know more about the types of cookies we serve and how to change your cookie settings, please read our Cookie Notice. By clicking the "I accept" button, you consent to the use of these cookies.

Image: Reuters/Damir Sagolj

Image: Elizabethwarren.com

Lead astray & environmental racism

Environmental racism is a planet-wide problem

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is Environmental Racism And How Can We Fight It?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Read on to know what is environmental racism and how can we fight it. From toxic tap water to oil pipelines on native land to waste dumps in the global south, here's how structural disadvantages play out in the environment.

# data[].attributes.headline
Environmental Racism Is the New Jim Crow

# data[].attributes.subject
Environmental Racism Is the New Jim Crow

# data[].attributes.body
This short video draws comparisons between the current disparities in climate change impact and the Jim Crow South.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Environmental Racism Is the New Jim Crow

# data[].attributes.headline
Bill Nye Explains Racism as Anti-Scientific

# data[].attributes.subject
Bill Nye Explains Racism as Anti-Scientific

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bill Nye Uses Science to Explain Why Racism Doesn’t Make Sense | NowThis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How environmental justice work takes a toll on people of color

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
​From discrimination and a lack of staff diversity to witnessing communities like yours harmed, environmental justice work is an emotional and physical struggle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New Rule: Climate Shame | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

# data[].attributes.body
An amazing emotional and poignant piece.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Marriage marriage is like you say everything everything in stereo stereo fall fall on the bed bed at dawn dawn because you work work all night. Night is an apartment. Meant to be marriage. Marriage is an apartment & meant people people come in in because when when you marry marry chances are there will be edibles edibles to eat at tables tables in the house. House will be the apartment which is night night. There there will be a bed bed & an extra bed bed a clean sheet sheet sheet or two two for guests guests one extra towel. Extra towel. How will you be welcomed? There will be drinks drinks galore galore brought by armies of guests guests casks casks of liquors liquors & brandies brandies elixirs sweet & bitter bitter bottle of Merlot Merlot Bustelo coffee. Will you have some when I offer. When you are married married there will be handsome gifts for the kitchen kitchen sometimes two of every thing. Everything is brand brand new new. Espresso coffee cups, a Finnish plate, a clock, a doormat, pieces of Art. And books of astonishing Medical Science with pictures. Even richer lexicons. When you are married married there will be more sheets sheets & towels towels arriving arriving & often often a pet pet or two two. You definitely need a telephone & a cellphone when you are married married. Two two two two lines lines lines lines. You need need separate separate electronic mail electronic mail accounts accounts. When you are married married you will have sets sets of things things, of more sheets & towels matching, you will have duplicates of things, you will have just one tablecloth. When you are married married you will be responsible when neighbors neighbors greet you. You will smile smile in unison unison or you might say he is fine, she is fine, o she is just down with a cold, o he is consoling a weary traveler just now, arrived from across the Plains. She my husband is due home soon, he my wife is busy at the moment, my husband he is very very busy busy at the moment moment this very moment. Meant good-bye, good-bye. When you are married married sex sex will happen happen without delay delay. You will have a mailbox mailbox & a doorbell doorbell. Bell bell ring ring it rings rings again a double time. You do not have to answer. That's sure for when you are married people people understand understand you do not not have to answer answer a doorbell doorbell because sex sex may happen happen without delay delay. You will hear everything twice, through your ears & the ears of the other. Her or him as a case case may be be. He & he & she & she as a case case may be may be. When you are married married you can play play with names names & rename yourself if you like. You can add a name, have a double name with a hyphen if you like. You can open joint accounts when you are married. Marriage is no guarantee against depression. A shun is no guarantee against anything. Marriage is no guarantee against resolution. Revolution is a tricky word word. Here, you hear here? Marriage is sweeter sweeter than you think. Think.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Marriage marriage is like you say everything everything in stereo stereo fall fall on the bed bed at dawn dawn because you work work all night. Night is an apartment. Meant to be marriage. Marriage is an apartment & meant people people come in in because when when you marry marry chances are there will be edibles edibles to eat at tables tables in the house.

# data[].attributes.headline
I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth

# data[].attributes.subject
I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth

# data[].attributes.body
A poem of reflection about the state of Earth, Politics, and Race

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Here's your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaar
kameez, made small by this land of american men.

Everyday she prays. Rolls attah & pounds the keema
at night watches the bodies of these glistening men.

Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.
Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men.

She smiles as guilty as a bride without blood, her love
of this new country, cold snow & naked american men.

" Stop living in a soap opera" yells her husband, fresh
from work, demanding his dinner: american. Men

take & take & yet you idolize them still, watch
your auntie as she builds her silent altar to them-

her knees fold on the rundown mattress, a prayer to WWE
Her tasbeeh & TV: the only things she puts before her husband.

She covers bruises & never lets us eat leftovers: a good wife.
It's something in their nature: what america does to men.

They can't touch anyone without teeth & spit
unless one strips the other of their human skin.

Even now, you don't get it. But whenever it's on you watch
them snarl like mad dogs in a cage-these american men.

Now that you're older your auntie calls to say he hit
her again, that this didn't happen before he became american.

You know its true & try to help, but what can you do?
You, little Fatimah, who still worships him?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
i don't know what will kill us first: the race war or what we've done to the earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here's your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaarkameez, made small by this land of american men. Everyday she prays. Rolls attah & pounds the keemaat night watches the bodies of these glistening men. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen.Her eyes kajaled & wide, glued to sweaty american men.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Environmental justice (video) | Khan Academy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Visit us (http://www.khanacademy.org/science/healthcare-and-medicine) for health and medicine content or (http://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat) for MCAT related content. These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

# data[].attributes.headline
How Communities Of Color Are Hurt Most By Climate Change

# data[].attributes.subject
How Communities Of Color Are Hurt Most By Climate Change

# data[].attributes.body
Climate change disproportionately affects communities of color due to systemic factors that make them more vulnerable to its impacts, such as pre-existing health conditions, poor living conditions, and lack of access to resources.

# data[].attributes.headline
Rise: a poetry expedition to Greenland’s melting glaciers

# data[].attributes.subject
Rise: a poetry expedition to Greenland’s melting glaciers

# data[].attributes.body
Beautiful reading by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner & Aka Niviana of their co-authored Poem 'Rise'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rise: a poetry expedition to Greenland’s melting glaciers

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
From the creators of 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama'

# data[].attributes.body
Former vice president Al Gore shares his concerns on the pressing issue of global warming in his documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' in this satirical cartoon excerpt.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Inconvenient Truth (2/10) Movie CLIP - None Like it Hot (2006) HD

# data[].attributes.headline
Environmental Racism Is Real, According to Trump's EPA

# data[].attributes.subject
Environmental Racism Is Real, According to Trump's EPA

# data[].attributes.body
The politics around the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have been politically fraught since its inception by the Nixon administration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east." Marvin Gaye wasn't an environmental scientist, but his 1971 single "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" provides a stark and useful environmental analysis, complete with warnings of overcrowding and climate change. The song doesn't explicitly mention race, but its place in Gaye's What's Going On album portrays a black Vietnam veteran, coming back to his segregated community and envisioning the hell that people endure.

Gaye's prophecies relied on the qualitative data of storytelling-of long-circulated anecdotes and warnings within black communities of bad air and water, poison, and cancer. But those warnings have been buttressed by study after study indicating that people of color face disproportionate risks from pollution, and that polluting industries are often located in the middle of their communities.

Late last week, even as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Trump administration continued a plan to dismantle many of the institutions built to address those disproportionate risks, researchers embedded in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Assessment released a study indicating that people of color are much more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air. Specifically, the study finds that people in poverty are exposed to more fine particulate matter than people living above poverty. According to the study's authors, "results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites."

The study focuses on particulate matter, a group of both natural and man-made microscopic suspensions of solids and liquids in the air that serve as air pollutants. Anthropogenic particulates include automobile fumes, smog, soot, oil smoke, ash, and construction dust, all of which have been linked to serious health problems. Particulate matter was named a known definite carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and it's been named by the EPA as a contributor to several lung conditions, heart attacks, and possible premature deaths. The pollutant has been implicated in both asthma prevalence and severity, low birth weights, and high blood pressure.

As the study details, previous works have also linked disproportionate exposure to particulate matter and America's racial geography. A 2016 study in Environment International found that long-term exposure to the pollutant is associated with racial segregation, with more highly segregated areas suffering higher levels of exposure. A 2012 article in Environmental Health Perspectives found that overall levels of particulate matter exposure for people of color were higher than those for white people. That article also provided a breakdown of just what kinds of particulate matter counts in the exposures. It found that while differences in overall particulate matter by race were significant, differences for some key particles were immense. For example, Hispanic people faced rates of chlorine exposure that are more than double those of white people. Chronic chlorine inhalation is known for degrading cardiac function.

The conclusions from scientists at the National Center for Environmental Assessment not only confirm that body of research but advance it in a top-rate public-health journal. They find that black people are exposed to about 1.5 times more particulate matter than white people, and that Hispanic people had about 1.2 times the exposure of non-Hispanic white people. The study found that those in poverty had about 1.3 times more exposure than people above poverty. Interestingly, it also finds that for black people, the proportion of exposure is only partly explained by the disproportionate geographic burden of polluting facilities, meaning the magnitude of emissions from individual factories appears to be higher in minority neighborhoods.

These findings join an ever-growing body of literature that has found that both polluters and pollution are often disproportionately located in communities of color. In some places, hydraulic-fracturing oil wells are more likely to be sited in those neighborhoods. Researchers have found the presence of benzene and other dangerous aromatic chemicals to be linked to race. Strong racial disparities are suspected in the prevalence of lead poisoning.

It seems that almost anywhere researchers look, there is more evidence of deep racial disparities in exposure to environmental hazards. In fact, the idea of environmental justice-or the degree to which people are treated equally and meaningfully involved in the creation of the human environment-was crystallized in the 1980s with the aid of a landmark study illustrating wide disparities in the siting of facilities for the disposal of hazardous waste. Leaders in the environmental-justice movement have posited-in places as prestigious and rigorous as United Nations publications and numerous peer-reviewed journals-that environmental racism exists as the inverse of environmental justice, when environmental risks are allocated disproportionately along the lines of race, often without the input of the affected communities of color.

The idea of environmental racism is, like all mentions of racism in America, controversial. Even in the age of climate change, many people still view the environment mostly as a set of forces of nature, one that cannot favor or disfavor one group or another. And even those who recognize that the human sphere of influence shapes almost every molecule of the places in which humans live, from the climate to the weather to the air they breathe, are loath to concede that racism is a factor. To many people, racism often connotes purposeful decisions by a master hand, and many see existing segregation as a self-sorting or poverty problem. Couldn't the presence of landfills and factories in disproportionately black neighborhoods have more to do with the fact that black people tend to be disproportionately poor and thus live in less desirable neighborhoods?

But last week's study throws more water on that increasingly tenuous line of thinking. While it lacks the kind of complex multivariate design that can really disentangle the exact effects of poverty and race, the finding that race has a stronger effect on exposure to pollutants than poverty indicates that something beyond just the concentration of poverty among black people and Latinos is at play. As the study's authors write: "A focus on poverty to the exclusion of race may be insufficient to meet the needs of all burdened populations." Their finding that the magnitude of pollution seems to be higher in communities of color than the number of polluters suggests indicates that regulations and business decisions are strongly dependent on whether people of color are around. In other words, they might be discriminatory.

This is a remarkable finding, and not only because it could provide one more policy linkage to any number of health disparities, from heart disease to asthma rates in black children that are double those of white children. But the study also stands as an implicit rebuke to the very administration that allowed its release.

Under the guidance of President Donald Trump and Administrator Scott Pruitt, the EPA has begun to walk back already anemic federal environmental-justice work, putting a stop to some civil-rights investigations and replacing or firing many of the scientists with deep technical knowledge of the subject. Last year, facing cuts to the environmental-justice program that seem likely to continue, former assistant associate administrator Mustafa Santiago Ali resigned. Further changes to move the offices of environmental justice into a policy office staffed by Pruitt hires promise to further reduce the autonomy of lifelong environmental-justice staffers and reduce the effectiveness of their work.

More broadly, with a defiant stance against climate and environmental science, Trump and Pruitt have begun a rollback of environmental protections. Pruitt appears to be dismantling Clean Air Act provisions at every turn, and while Trump's promises to save the coal industry have produced no real policy in his first year, there are still opportunities in 2018 and beyond. And while all these actions in the aggregate will likely increase the amount of particulate matter in the air for everyone, the White House's own research shows what Marvin Gaye saw 47 years ago: The burden will be increased most on people of color.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Environmental Racism Is Real, According to Trump's EPA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east." Marvin Gaye wasn't an environmental scientist, but his 1971 single "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" provides a stark and useful environmental analysis, complete with warnings of overcrowding and climate change.

# data[].attributes.headline
High ice and hard truth: the poets taking on climate change

# data[].attributes.subject
High ice and hard truth: the poets taking on climate change

# data[].attributes.body
One poet watches her heritage turn to water; the other watches that same water sweep up the beaches of her country and into the houses of her friends. The destruction of one’s homeland is the inevitable destruction of the other’s.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
High up on a melting Greenland glacier, at the end of this summer from climate hell, two young women shout a poem above the roar of the wind. Aka Niviana, grew up on the northern coast of Greenland; as its ice inexorably thaws, her traditional way of life disappears. And the water that melts off that ice sheet is drowning the home of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and everyone else in her home nation, the Marshall Islands of the Pacific. One poet watches her heritage turn to water; the other watches that same water sweep up the beaches of her country and into the houses of her friends. The destruction of one's homeland is the inevitable destruction of the other's.

I've spent 30 years thinking about climate change - talking with scientists, economists and politicians about emission rates and carbon taxes and treaties. But the hardest idea to get across is also the simplest: we live on a planet, and that planet is breaking. Poets, it turns out, can deliver that message.

But they don't watch impassively. Both are climate activists, and both have raised their voices in service of their homelands. Jetnil-Kijiner, 30, has been at it for years - she's performed her work before the United Nations General Assembly and the Vatican. Niviana is newer to activism - just 23, she recited a poem at a recent Copenhagen climate protest, where she met a well-known glaciologist, Jason Box, and he, in turn, organised the complicated logistics of this glacier expedition.

We've come with a video crew to the remote fjords of southern Greenland. After two days travelling by boat, we've unloaded our gear on the rocks at the foot of the rapidly dwindling glacier, and hauled it up to a base camp nestled on red granite bedrock next to a cascade fed by thundering meltwater. Now, in a cold wind next to a gaping crevasse, the two women are performing the words they've spent weeks writing.

Jason Box says there's no doubt they're both correct: all told, Greenland has enough water frozen on its rocky mantle to raise the sea by seven metres. After 25 years of field work on the great ice sheet, he understands its significance like few others: right now, there's no place on earth contributing more to the rise of the oceans. Eventually the even-vaster Antarctic will produce more water, but for now the Arctic is melting much faster (while we were camped on the glacier news reports said that sea ice north of the island - "the oldest, solidest ice in the Arctic" - had melted in this year's freakish heat).

The strange science of melting ice sheets: three things you didn't know

"We called this 'Eagle Glacier' because of its shape when we first came here five years ago," Box said, "but now the head and the wings of the bird have melted away. I don't know what we should call it now, but the eagle is dead."

It's not, of course, as if global warming is some mysterious, uncontrollable force: it comes from a particular way of life, a way of life which has left some people rich and an increasing number in desperate straits. These poets can't avoid the politics: their stanzas indict the civilisations which - long before we worried about climate change - blew up Bikini Atoll in the Marshalls and polluted Greenland's ice sheet with nuclear waste.

Hearing the roll call of giant cities in the poem seems odd at first, on this remote glacier thousands of miles from the nearest traffic jam. But that's the point. There is no distance any more: the isolation that once protected places like Greenland or Micronesia no longer offers any buffer. The carbon that the rich pour into the air traps heat in the atmosphere we all share. That heat comes north and south, where it melts the world's great storehouses of ice; in turn the oceans that lap at every continent rise. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner literally stands with two feet planted on the ice that will submerge her country.

This science is uncontroversial. But science alone can't make change, because it appeals only to the hemisphere of the brain that values logic and reason. We're also creatures of emotion, intuition, spark - which is perhaps why we should mount more poetry expeditions, put more musicians on dying reefs, make sure that novelists can feel the licking heat of wildfire.

interactive

Alun Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist who was carrying huge loads of supplies up the glacier to build base camp, remembered his first visits to thawing Greenland. "It's just gobsmacking looking at the trauma of the landscape. I just couldn't register the scale of how the icesheet had changed in my head." But artists can register those thoughts, and turn them into images that potentially unite us.

And that unity is precisely what's required, because otherwise inertia - and the political power of the fossil fuel companies - seems destined to slow our transition to renewable energy. Slow it enough that the ancient ways of life that gave rise to these young women will warp and then disappear. Slow it enough that everyone everywhere will feel the pain their communities are already feeling. These poets are up on the ice hoping that they can somehow rouse more of the world to action.

Excerpt from Rise by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana

The very same beasts

That now decide

Who should live

And who should die ...

We demand that the world see beyond

SUVs, ACs, their pre-package convenience

Their oil-slicked dreams, beyond the belief

That tomorrow will never happen

And yet there's a generosity to their witness - a recognition that whoever started the trouble, we're now in it together.

Let me bring my home to yours

Let's watch as Miami, New York,

Shanghai, Amsterdam, London

Rio de Janeiro and Osaka

Try to breathe underwater ...

None of us is immune.

Life in all forms demands

The same respect we all give to money ...

So each and every one of us

Has to decide

If we

Will

Rise

* Bill McKibben wrote the first book about climate change, The End of Nature, in 1989, and co-founded 350.org, which has become the planet's largest grassroots climate campaign. His forthcoming book is Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
High ice and hard truth: the poets taking on climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greenland poet Aka Niviana's way of life is disappearing as her country thaws, while the subsequent meltwater threatens Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and her fellow Marshall Islanders thousands of miles away. Their joint trip to the melting glaciers inspired a climate call to arms