The Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

1
The Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Dr. Bailus Walker, Jr.
• Professor of Environmental and Occupational
  Medicine
• Howard University College of Medicine
• APHA Session 3100
• November 8, 2004
• Washington, DC

2
Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Definition and scope of environment
• Environment-- An elastic term
• Media (air, water, soil ,food)
• Economic sector (transport, land use, energy
  generation)
• Physical scale (local, regional global)
• Setting (household, workplace, urban environment)
• Socio-cultural environment (community stress)

3
Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Environmental Exposure As A Cause of Disease
• Increasingly contentious
• Knowledge about disease etiology is incomplete
  (role of gene-environment)
• Bidirectional relationship between environmental
  conditions, socioeconomic circumstance
  demographic change

4
Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Demographic Transition
• Increase trade and travel, population
  movement, and a shared food supply
• People are more mobile
• 70,000 foreigners enter US every day
• 57 million American traveled abroad (2001)

5
Changing Landscape of Environmental Justice

• Demographic Transition
• Mass relocation of rural populations
• Growth of Hispanic and Asian populations
• 4.3 million people listed themselves as
  being of more than one race

6
Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Economic transition
• Factory Jobs are vanishing
• Fewer routine jobs Internet has taken over
• More jobs in analytic work
• Analyzing, manipulating and communicating through
  numbers, shapes, words
• Personal-service work, growing, (medical,
  technicians)

7
Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

• Globalization
• Globalization of disease
• One nations environmental health concern is the
  concern of all nation
• Environmental hazards have significant cross
  border effects
• Every infectious disease is 36-hour plane
  journey away
• Financial crisis can spread rapidly

8
Changing Landscape for Environmental justice

• Conclusion
• Environmental justice issue must be viewed
  through a prism different from that of the 1987,
  when the issue was elevated on the domestic agenda