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Afterglow: Envisioning a Radically Different Climate Future

Overview The stories we tell about the future have the power to shape the world we eventually create. From creative scientific solutions to climate change, to an economy built on ecological restoration, to the pursuit of right relationships in social systems and inclusive design, imagination has the power to shift what we see as possible. Inspired by cutting-edge literary movements, such as Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunk, Afterglow imagines intersectional worlds in which no…

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The Lingering Shadow of Redlining: Fossil Fuel Power Plants and Air Pollution

Historically redlined communities in the U.S. today have lower home values, poorer health, and greater exposure to environmental hazards. Our research found that between 2000 and 2019, fossil fuel power plants were 31% more likely to be built near and upwind of neighborhoods that were redlined in the 1930s. Why are some communities more burdened by air pollution than others? People of color including Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are…

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A City Lost a Crown Jewel, and the Black Community Suffered

Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., kinesiology Associate Professor Jennifer Roberts heard stories about a magical place called Humboldt Parkway, a two-mile, tree-lined boulevard in one of the city’s predominantly Black neighborhoods. Roberts’ mom, uncle, aunt and grandparents spent years walking, biking and playing in the 200-foot-wide swath of green space, part of a system of parks and parkways designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and they often used the parkway…

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WATER SHARING AS DISASTER RESPONSE: COPING WITH WATER INSECURITY AFTER HURRICANE MARÍA

In 2017, Hurricane María left more than a third of Puerto Rican households without water services. Cascading failures—including the simultaneous collapse of water, electricity, and transportation sectors—presented serious challenges to the timely restoration of governmental services. In response, families across Puerto Rico adopted self-organized coping strategies to obtain the basic resources they needed, including safe and sufficient water. Drawing on the fast-growing literature on household water sharing, we examine how…

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New NIH-funded project brings public health faculty and community leaders together to seek climate justice

Record-breaking heat and drought. Thick blankets of wildfire smoke. Walls of wind-driven flames. Pelting hail. Swath-cutting tornadoes. The summer of 2023 has been a constant reminder of the powerful effects of climate change. But the trying season is only one dramatic recent reminder of the changes and the toll they have taken on neighborhoods, communities, and economies in the form of air quality, water resources, food production and other factors…

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Toward Language Justice in Environmental Health Sciences in the United States: A Case for Spanish as a Language of Science

Increasingly, marginalized communities are disproportionately facing the worsening effects of environmental hazards, including air pollution, water pollution, and climate change. Language isolation and accessibility has been understudied as a determinant of health. Spanish, despite being the second-most common language in the United States with some 41.8 million speakers, has been neglected among environmental health scientists. Building capacity in high-quality Spanish-language science communication, both for scientific and nonscientific audiences, can yield…

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New Article: Scaffolding civic infrastructures: Examining the role of civic technoscience in public engagements with oil and gas pipelines

Oil and gas pipelines bring attention to the importance of public participation in the management of large-scale infrastructure projects. Participation transforms how communities understand benefits and risks, and can result in safer and more resilient projects. However, participation can be hindered by procedural injustices in planning processes and lack of industry transparency. Based on a survey of 103 civil society groups conducted in 2021, this paper investigates how groups mobilize…

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Student Spotlight: Katherine (Rin) Ball

A Brilliant Journey Unfolds Meet the brilliant Katherine (Rin) Ball, a doctoral student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University. With an unwavering passion for understanding how the U.S. federal government implements environmental policies and engages with local communities. As an ORISE Science Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy, Rin’s journey has been nothing short of inspiring, filled with exceptional dedication…

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Inhaling smoke from wildfires in Canada was on the level of indoor second-hand smoke

As of Monday morning, nearly five thousand wildfires have burned 30.4 million acres in Canada since the beginning of 2023. Smoke from those wildfires has drifted to the eastern United States, including here in Central Pennsylvania and resulted in poor and unhealthy air quality days in June and July. In fact, researchers at Rutgers University found the smoke was at levels not seen since smoking was banned indoors 15 years…

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JPB Fellows Workshop at IAPHS!

Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS) Conference. When & where: Baltimore, Maryland Monday, October 2, 2023, at 8:30 AM – 12:30 PM EDT Fellows Katie Dickerson, Hector Olvera, and Allison Appleton, who are founding members of SERG (Socio-Environmental Research Group), will lead the workshop titled “Strengthening Research for Action at the Intersection of Environmental & Social Determinants of Health” during the IAPHS Conference. This capacity-building workshop aims to provide social…

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