Posted: February 28, 2022
Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
Agencies responsible for contaminant monitoring privilege certain places, issues, and contaminants based on regulatory mandates, and often lack resources to sample for contaminants in soil, sediment, and water at the spatial or temporal resolution necessary to detect threats to human health. To protect themselves from contaminants, and to support political campaigns for contaminant cleanup, community organizations initiate monitoring campaigns to detect and track contaminants. The places they choose to sample are important because of cultural, subsistence, or recreational uses, however they often lack funding and technical expertise to detect metals and organic compounds found in current effluent and that persist from past dumping or releases. In this panel, we invite geographers, scientists, public health scholars, and others working with grassroots or Native collaborators to understand place-based specifics of contaminant monitoring, or to co-design and carry out community-led monitoring or cleanup campaigns. How do inequities in land use, land tenure, governance, and planning shape risk, and how are racialized and otherwise marginalized groups affected? How do community scientists highlight those inequities using monitoring data? What barriers hamper community scientists’ efforts to clean up contaminants and redress inequities? Who is included in government-led and community-led monitoring, respectively, and what groups are left out (e.g. unhoused people, people living in informal settlements, etc.) Contributions on science, policy, and politics of science are all welcome in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Contact: cleowe@uw.edu, guillermo.douglass-jaimes@pomona.edu
Keywords: health inequities, environmental justice, environmental governance
Published: 02/28/2022