Category: ALABAMA_CN ClimateJustice_CN Executive_Landing_CN

The Biden administration’s choice of Lowndes as the site of its first big environmental justice inquiry was based on the magnitude of the county’s problems. But it also sent a message. The county was a voting rights battleground and a focal point of Martin Luther King Jr.’s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, making it a logical choice to open a new front on civil rights.

On its website, Marathon Petroleum Corp. touts a commitment to the environment that transcends run-of-the-mill regulatory compliance.

During heavy storms, water overflows the dirt drainage ditch fronting his yard and the bayou at the end of his block — flooding the street, creeping up his front steps, pooling beneath the house, and trapping his family inside.

In reporting two recent stories about abandoned uranium mines north of Church Rock, N.M., I heard residents say several times that they want federal officials to take action, not just more talk about cleaning up radioactive waste left practically in their backyards for 40 or more years.

Indigenous leaders have called on Citigroup to stop financing oil and gas projects in the Amazon, saying the bank’s activities contradict its climate pledges by putting the threatened ecosystem at greater risk.

In the U.S., April commemorates Fair Housing Month, the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the now-global Earth Day. This year, those events find a fitting relationship in a sobering new study published in the journal Nature that identifies a strong correlation between structural racism and the siting of active and inactive oil and gas wells. The raw numbers on redlined neighborhoods date back nearly a century, but the human, societal and financial costs continue to this day.

Both joy and frustration are in the air in New Orleans at the HBCU Climate Change Conference this week as environmental and climate advocates and researchers from around the United States press for urgent climate action and pollution cleanup in poor communities and communities of color.

The Environmental Justice for All Act (EJ for All Act) is an essential federal legislative effort to begin remedying the long history of environmental racism and injustice in the United States, including the cumulative and disproportionate pollution burdens threatening communities of color, low-income communities, and Native/Indigenous nations and communities across the country.

Overshadowed though it is by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released on February 28th, still made news – and not just for its updated, and grimmer, forecast regarding Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.

The Ash Center Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) Project and the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development (HPAIED) held a JFK Jr. Forum on April 4, 2022 about how racial and climate justice intersect. Hear from Karen Diver MPA ‘03, senior advisor to the President on Native American affairs at the University of Minnesota, former special assistant on American Indian affairs during the Obama Administration, former Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa chairwoman; Shamar Bibbins, senior program officer, environment, Kresge Foundation; and Governor Stephen Roe Lewis MPA '06, Gila River Indian Community. Megan Hill, director of the Honoring Nations program at Harvard and the program director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, moderated.