A paradigmatic case of the “sacrifice zone,” West Port Arthur and similar neighborhoods in Beaumont also epitomize the cumulative impacts faced by America’s most environmentally burdened communities.
Is it as safe to drink tap water in Paterson as it is in more affluent, whiter communities nearby, such as Wayne? EDGI’s new tool, available at sdwa-eew.streamlit.app, is designed for college students to answer questions such as this and explore the intersection of drinking water safety with social justice in New Jersey.
Webmaps that are meant to evaluate and “screen” neighborhoods for environmental injustices have seen a lot of interest in both the United States and Canada lately. From informing where to distribute climate funding in the US as “Justice 40” to Canada’s Bill C-226, the pursuit of environmental equity has led to a strongly felt need for data and mapping tools that overlay environmental health with racial and income disparities.
Defining healthcare as a responsibility of good government could transform our ability to expect better environmental governance.Though corporations are technically subject to environmental laws, as EDGI has thoroughly documented, these laws are largely unenforced, not effective as deterrents when enforced, and largely reliant on accurate self-reporting of any misdeeds.
Tuesday July 19, 2022, after recently announcing the planned sunsetting of portions of its online archive, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated their Web Archive website with an announcement that the archive in its entirety will remain online until at least July 2023. The EPA stated that they extended the timeline “to assess the use of archive content and to continue to analyze, inventory, and transition key content to our main website.” This comes after EDGI and other environmental groups sent an open letter to the agency, urging them to keep this critical public resource online.
Seventy-six congressional report cards released by Environmental Data & Governance Initiative’s Environmental Enforcement Watch on October 22, 2020, show a decline in compliance and enforcement for key U.S. environmental laws under the Trump administration. The report cards are summarized in the new report, Democratizing Data: Environmental Enforcement Watch’s Report Cards for Congressional Oversight of the EPA, which provides for the first time an analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data on compliance and enforcement in the districts and states of the representatives and senators serving on the two congressional committees tasked with overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.
By Kelsey Breseman, EDGI As of December 2019, ToxMap and ToxNet are being retired from the National Library of Medicines website maintained by the National Institute of Health. EDGI has written previously about the impact of this removal of access in our post “Goodbye to ToxMap–and our Environmental Right-to-Know”. In advance of the removal of … Read more