As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the globe, public health data continues to show that the virus’s worst effects are felt by communities already weighed down by the burden of multiple social and environmental stressors. As of May 3, in CPR’s home city of Washington, DC, African Americans account for 79 percent of coronavirus deaths, despite making up only 45 percent of the city’s population and 47 percent of diagnosed cases. This inequitable trend appears to be playing out across the country.
Widely cited research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has also connected long-term air pollution exposure and coronavirus mortality, prompting researchers to explore this link in their own communities. Using Harvard’s data, Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic mapped particulate matter emissions against parish-level health and COVID-19 data in Louisiana. Their findings confirmed the suspicions of local environmental justice advocates: Most of the parishes with the highest per capita death rates are in Louisiana’s industrial corridor, often referred to as “Cancer Alley.” Long before the pandemic, grassroots organizations like Concerned Citizens of St. John have demanded better accountability for chemical polluters clustered in the region. The pandemic has only reinforced their position, as the parish has one of the highest death rates in a state that has the fifth highest COVID-19 death rate in the nation.
How do these social and environmental stressors interact to increase community vulnerability to COVID-19? How can we build resilience in the face of a pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis? These questions and more were addressed last week in CPR’s fourth installment of our climate justice webinar series, titled, “Vulnerability and Resilience to COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis.” The featured speakers were Dan Farber, Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, and Dr. Aaron Bernstein.
Farber, a CPR Member Scholar and UC-Berkeley law professor, discussed federal powers that may aid in the United States' response to the coronavirus. One example is the Stafford Act, which President Trump used to declare a national emergency, enabling the government to distribute supplies and emergency assistance. Farber also commented on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent actions to weaken enforcement and power plant mercury and air toxic standards (MATS), how these decisions are unjustified, and how they only serve to endanger communities already located near hazardous facilities.
Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, discussed strategies for building community resilience to disasters, pointing attendees to the COPEWELL Self-Assessment Toolkit, a rubric she developed with other researchers at Johns Hopkins University. Schoch-Spana also described disaster planning measures that states should pursue during the pandemic, such as identifying additional evacuation sites to ensure families can maintain social distancing.
Bernstein, a pediatrician and Director of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard University (C-CHANGE), discussed the connections between climate change and health and how environmental degradation through deforestation, for example, can increase the risk of future infectious disease outbreaks by increasing human and animal contact. Bernstein also described the parallels between COVID-19 and the climate crisis – one a rapid, visible disaster and the other slow-moving, yet both bearing fatal and far-reaching consequences. He urged public health and policy practitioners to continue connecting the dots between climate change and health, saying, “We can learn from the COVID experience that when health is on the table, when it’s made personal, people are willing to do extraordinary things.”
To conclude the discussion, the speakers shared what they think should be the key investment to protect vulnerable communities and build resilience, whether in response to COVID-19 or the climate crisis. Among their responses: “Invest in participatory planning so that vulnerable populations have an active voice in making decisions about strengthening resilience in their community” and “campaign finance reform.”
To hear the full discussion, you can watch the webinar recording on YouTube or right here in this post.
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Darya Minovi | May 5, 2020
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across the globe, public health data continues to show that the virus’s worst effects are felt by communities already weighed down by the burden of multiple social and environmental stressors. As of May 3, in CPR’s home city of Washington, DC, African Americans account for 79 percent of coronavirus deaths, despite making up only 45 percent of the city’s population and 47 percent of diagnosed cases. This inequitable trend appears to be playing out across the country. These issues and more were addressed last week in CPR’s fourth installment of our climate justice webinar series, titled, “Vulnerability and Resilience to COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis.” The featured speakers were Dan Farber, Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, and Dr. Aaron Bernstein.
Michael C. Duff | May 5, 2020
As Senate Republicans and corporations continue to lobby for the broadest possible "liability shields" in connection with the Great Reopening, a novel lawsuit framed in terms of public nuisance theory is being litigated in a Missouri federal court.
Matt Shudtz, Rachel Micah-Jones | May 4, 2020
President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to order meat and poultry plants to continue operating despite COVID-19 outbreaks, exposing Maryland's poultry workers to enormous risks. Poultry processors haven't demonstrated they're able to keep workers safe and healthy, but they know that many of these low-wage workers will be forced to return. To top it all off, one of the president's goals with this order was to provide legal immunity to companies, so that they can't be sued by employees who are infected as a result of unsafe working conditions.
Sean B. Hecht | May 4, 2020
For decades, "states' rights" has been a rallying cry of the right wing. Most Americans are familiar with the dynamics that required the federalization of civil rights law, both in the 1860s and again in the 1960s, the protection of much of our nation's federal lands, and the national crises that necessitated the federal government to enact national minimum standards to protect public health and the environment. Many of us are also familiar with the right-wing backlash to these movements—indeed, the devolving of baseline environmental standards and public land management to the state and local level has been a keystone of the political right since at least Ronald Reagan's presidency. But federalism—the division of authority between state and local governments, on one hand, and the federal government on the other—doesn't have to tilt in one (rightward) political direction.
Karrigan Bork, Steph Tai, Thomas Harter | May 1, 2020
Last week, the Supreme Court decided a case involving discharge from a wastewater reclamation facility owned and operated by the County of Maui, which discharged 3 to 5 million gallons of treated wastewater per day into four injection wells about half a mile from the ocean. Recent research showed that much of the injected waste eventually discharges to the ocean. Environmental groups sued the county for not obtaining a Clean Water Act permit, arguing that point source discharge of pollutants that eventually reach surface water is governed under the Act. Justice Breyer, writing for the Court majority, wrote "we do not see how Congress could have intended to create such a large and obvious loop hole in one of the key regulatory innovations of the Clean Water Act." On the "fairly traceable" approach, the opinion stated that such interpretation "would require a permit in surprising, even bizarre circumstances".
Robert Verchick | April 30, 2020
No one really expected FEMA’s leadership of the coronavirus response to be inspiring or even, to put it bluntly, moderately competent. Still, I’ve been puzzled by several reports from state leaders and others that federal authorities have been confiscating purchased medical supplies without explanation or, at least in one case, compensation. I don’t mean situations where a federal agency outbids someone or orders a vendor to sell to the federal government instead. That happens, too, and the practice is controversial. I’m talking about instances in which federal officials show up unannounced at a warehouse or a port and physically seize crates of medical gear that had been on their way to some needy hospital or test center that had paid or agreed to pay for them. The agent flashes a badge, the goods are trucked out, and no one knows where they go.
Michael C. Duff | April 30, 2020
The president's invocation of the Defense Production Act to order meat producers back to work apparently comes with broad liability immunity for producers compelled to comply with its terms. Michael Duff writes, "So 'anti-liability' is apparently coming by executive order and by Mitch McConnell edict. I think it remains to be seen how far into state law the immunization will purport to intrude. But if this goes much further the constitutional dimensions of tort law may be tested a lot more starkly than in prior periods of 'tort reform.'"
Katie Tracy | April 27, 2020
Tomorrow, April 28, is Workers' Memorial Day, a day the labor movement established to mourn workers killed on the job and to renew the fight for the living. This year, as the coronavirus pandemic grinds on, taking its toll on workers and their families, we’re reminded more than ever of how critical it is to guarantee all workers the right to a safe and healthy workplace. Even before COVID-19, a typical day in the United States saw 14 workers killed on the job – hardworking people who set out for work, never to return home. In 2018, 5,250 workers – one worker every 100 minutes – died on the job. Black and Latinx workers were hit hardest in 2018, with a 16 percent increase from 2017 in black worker deaths and a 6 percent increase in Latinx worker deaths.
Lisa Heinzerling | April 24, 2020
On April 23, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the Clean Water Act requires a permit when a point source of pollution adds pollutants to navigable waters through groundwater, if this addition of pollutants is "the functional equivalent of a direct discharge" from the source into navigable waters. Perhaps the most striking feature of Justice Stephen Breyer's opinion for the majority is its interpretive method. The opinion reads like something from a long-ago period of statutory interpretation, before statutory decisions regularly made the central meaning of complex laws turn on a single word or two and banished legislative purpose to the interpretive fringes.