Suchergebnisse

The year 2003 marks the twenty fifth anniversary of the Love Canal crisis, when more than 900 working-class families were relocated away from a leaking toxic waste dump & the nation awoke to the hazards of toxic chemicals in our environment. This grassroots effort demonstrated how ordinary citizens obtained power through community organizing & succeeded against great odds. The events at Love Canal sparked a new social justice movement. While traditional environmentalism has focused on protecting the natural environment using legislative & regulatory strategies, the grassroots leadership of this new movement focuses on protecting public health through building power at the local & state levels to influence federal policies. Many members of this movement believe their neighborhoods were deliberately targeted because of their economic & political weakness. As a result, this is a movement that is as much about justice & human rights as it is about public health & the environment. 1 Table, 4 References. [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications, Inc.]

In an interview conducted by the Multinational Monitor, the author discusses her reasons for forming the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW). Gibbs envisioned the CCHW as a kind of environmental justice center in which vulnerable populations -- eg, low-income people, people of color, & blue-collar workers -- could resist the dangerous environmental activities of corporations. Environmental justice is distinguished from environmentalism by its focus on people & communities. Initially, this focus led to a not-in-my-backyard attitude. However, in recent years, the CCHW has worked to solve environmental dilemmas, rather than push them onto other neighborhoods. CCHW's role in combating the use of dioxin is briefly described. It is insisted throughout that only very local, grassroots campaigns can achieve environmental justice, because only local education & activist efforts can effectively resist the dumping of toxins in their communities. D. Ryfe

The increase in environmentally induced diseases and the loosening of regulation and safety measures have inspired a massive challenge to established ways of looking at health and the environment. Communities with disease clusters, women facing a growing breast cancer incidence rate, and people of color concerned about the asthma epidemic have become critical of biomedical models that emphasize the role of genetic makeup and individual lifestyle practices. Likewise, scientists have lost patience with their colleagues' and government's failure to adequately address environmental health issues and to safeguard research from corporate manipulation. Focusing specifically on breast cancer, asthma, and Gulf War-related health conditions-"contested illnesses" that have generated intense debate in the medical and political communities-Phil Brown shows how these concerns have launched an environmental health movement that has revolutionized scientific thinking and policy. Before the last three decades of widespread activism regarding toxic exposures, people had little opportunity to get information. Few sympathetic professionals were available, the scientific knowledge base was weak, government agencies were largely unprepared, laypeople were not considered bearers of useful knowledge, and ordinary people lacked their own resources for discovery and action. Brown argues that organized social movements are crucial in recognizing and acting to combat environmental diseases. His book draws on environmental and medical sociology, environmental justice, environmental health science, and social movement studies to show how citizen-science alliances have fought to overturn dominant epidemiological paradigms. His probing look at the ways scientific findings are made available to the public and the changing nature of policy offers a new perspective on health and