On Dec. 5, 1982, about a month after residents learned of dangerous dioxin levels in Times Beach, the town along the Meramec River was ravaged by a record-breaking flood. The flood damaged or destroyed most homes in the town. Read more... Photo credit: St Louis Post-Dispatch Staff photographer
President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will pay more attention than the Trump administration to the concerns of people with higher-than-average chemical exposures as it decides whether those chemicals should be regulated, attorneys said. In last month’s final presidential debate, Biden described the health fears faced by “frontline” communities—generally those in poor areas with a predominantly minority [...]
Joe Biden, like many other families of service members diagnosed with illnesses from overseas deployments, suspects toxic exposure may have been behind his son Beau’s brain cancer. Beau Biden boarded a military aircraft for Iraq on Nov. 19, 2008, just days after his father became vice president-elect. He deployed with the Delaware Army National Guard [...]
Our colleague and friend Lou Zeller at the Blue Ridge Environmental League (BREDL) shared an article he wrote a few years back about the great pioneer Rachel Carson who wrote in her epic 1962 classic Silent Spring that “If the Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons [...]
Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face. The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is [...]
The Center for American Progress, or CAP, a progressive think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., released the report, “Building a Just Climate Future for North Carolina,” Wednesday. It also looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has “highlighted the interconnection between systemic racism and injustice and environmental, public health, and economic disparities.” Read More Story by Jennifer Allen [...]
“People are realizing that there is intentional siting of these massive industrial edifices in communities that are predominantly Black and brown and an intentional disregard for community needs wrapped up in the tax exemptions.” Read more. Photo: Brian W. Fraser for The Intercept
Current legislation in Louisiana makes it a felony to trespass on the lands of oil and gas facilities, which are considered “critical infrastructure”. Louisiana is currently working to expand these laws to make these trespassing charges include those of flood control infrastructure and to stiffen the penalties of jail time from 3 to 15 years [...]
A handful of environmental groups have filed lawsuits against the Trump administration's finalization of a new rule that will weaken waterway protections set in place under the Obama Clean Water rule. Groups including the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and ShoreRivers filed lawsuits in Baltimore on April 27 and the Southern Environmental Law Group, representing numerous other environmental organizations, [...]
This blog was recently published by Hesperian Health Guides. Coronavirus is all over the news and people are looking for how-to, actionable information on surviving the pandemic. But limiting advice and actions to improving individual or community hygiene is only washing our hands of the problem. To successfully defeat the looming epidemic, we have to change [...]
