LA Weekly

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The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report today that reminded me of the one that came out a few months ago about how homeless children don't do as well in school as sheltered counterparts. The study is valuable, and it helps to have the cold, hard statistics, but I can't say I'm shocked.

The report, "Hidden Danger: Environmental Health Threats in the Latino Community," shows that exposure to chemical and biological contaminants in the air and water disproportionately affects Latinos, many of whom live in "fenceline" or border communities near industrial sources of pollution. One and a half million Latinos live on the U.S.-Mexican border with faulty sewage systems and insufficient access to drinkable water; 88 percent of the nation's farmworkers are Latino, work without proper safety equipment and endure repeated exposures to carcinogenic pesticides; and the majority of Latinos live in cities with poor air quality. In San Diego's Barrio Logan, 28 percent of the population suffers from asthma -- four times the national average. Here in Los Angeles County, "60 percent of the people living within a half mile of the top 100 emitters of toxic pollutants are Latino, even though Latinos make up only 44 percent of the county’s population." The report cites the Bandini community in Commerce, which abuts a container train yard and the 710 freeway, for its diesel-smoked air.

Plus, warning signs about health risks tend to be in English.

"Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people," writes Wendell Berry in an essay up on Grist today:

If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.

I'm hearing this more and more from conservationists and ecologists. At Bioneers, Michael Lerner (not the rabbi) referred to poverty and income disparity as the greatest threat to our ecological health. And yesterday I talked to Laurie Kaufman at TreePeople, who told me that increasingly she frames the work she does as public health, because the concept of environmentalism is too abstract for some people. And because, well, public health is what it is.

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