The 2020 New Orleans Nurdle Spill – Tracking the Path of Hundreds of Millions of Plastic Pellets.
In August 2020 a container ship called the MV Bianca was moored in New Orleans. During a storm, it lost four shipping containers. One of those containers was filled with polyethylene resin pellets called nurdles. An estimated 750 million pellets entered the river. Dr. Mark Benfield of LSU’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences discusses the events around the spill, the fate of the nurdles, and the questions that this event raised regarding how we deal with plastic spills.
Rachel L. B. Stevens, assistant professor at Environmental Justice Clinic at Vermont Law School, will share some of her case work with environmental justice communities who fight “greenwashing,” where companies support false environmental solutions like waste incineration, factory farm gas, and sewage sludge processing to present an environmentally friendly image. These greenwashing tactics allow companies to take advantage of clean energy programs and subsidies while harming communities. Ms. Stevens will discuss clean energy programs, how to avoid greenwashing, and how the “Just Transition” framework shifts economic and political power from an extractive economy to a regenerative one.
Items mentioned in the discussion:
Sacrifice Zones by
The stories of residents of low-income communities across the country who took action when pollution from heavy industry contaminated their towns. Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say "Enough is enough." After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action--organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods "sacrifice zones." And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fenceline with heavy industry.
The Color of Law by
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation--that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation--the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments--that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post-World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. "The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book" (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein's invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
During the summer of 2020, people around the US were looking for a safe way to get away and enjoy some sort of vacation during the time of COVID-19. National Parks, always a major attraction, were a major destination. However, our national parks are always crowded during the summer and social distancing can be difficult at major attraction sites and places like visitor centers in the parks. Also, while the "gateway" towns to the parks rely on tourism for their economic viability, a flood of tourists would also put them at risk for outbreaks of the COVID-19 virus. Find out how the National Park Service handled visitors in our national parks this past summer and how that might change management of these parks in the future as well how these changes affect education, like Dr. David Burley's Study Away Programs, in our parks.
“Climate Action: Getting from 2020 to 2030” -- a discussion with Dr. Liz Davey, Director of the Office of Sustainability at Tulane University, on the implications of 2020 for climate change, and how we can achieve the levels of greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed by 2030. The talk will use examples from Tulane’s sustainability programs and include discussion of green jobs.
“From housing ‘justice’ to environmental injustice: Gordon Plaza and the Agriculture Street Superfund Site.” Dr. Christopher Oliver of Tulane University will talk about the on-going efforts by residents living in the Gordon Plaza housing development in the Desire area of New Orleans, LA to achieve a fully funded relocation after more than forty years of living on toxic landfill (and a US EPA former Superfund Site).
