Download The Changing Landscape for Environmental Justice

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
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)
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
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)
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
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)
Changing Landscape for
Environmental Justice
Globalization
Globalization of disease
One nation’s 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
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