"Championed primarily by African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders and Native Americans, the environmental justice movement addresses a statistical fact: people who live, work and play in America's most polluted environments are commonly people of color and the poor. Environmental justice advocates have shown that this is no accident.
"Communities of color, which are often poor, are routinely targeted to host facilities that have negative environmental impacts -- say, a landfill, dirty industrial plant or truck depot. The statistics provide clear evidence of what the movement rightly calls "environmental racism." Communities of color have been battling this injustice for decades. "
- the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Read more of this essay on environmental justice.
Bronx River Alliance is a local non-profit group whose mission is "to serve as a coordinated voice for the river and work in harmonious partnership to protect, improve and restore the Bronx River corridor and greenway so that they can be healthy ecological, recreational, educational and economic resources for the communities through which the river flows."
Sustainable South Bronx is a local non-profit organization. They explain what they do :""to address economic and environmental issues in the South Bronx--and throughout New York City--through a combination of green job training, community greening programs, and social enterprise."
Find out more about how you can get involved at their website.
A sample of the kinds of reports you can find on environmental issues in the South Bronx:
This article was written by a professor at Lehman College (CUNY), and was part of a special issue on environmental justice, population health, critical theory, and GIS, by the journal Health & Place, vol. 13, issue 1, March 2007. Pages 32-56
This document is from the NYC Dept. of Health.
This article is from the journal Population and Environment.
This article is from the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which is published by the National Institutes of Health.
For more research reports, you can go to the Hostos library website and:
* search databases like Academic Search Complete, Google Scholar, CINAHL (for health issues)
* or use the library's website to search all of our books, ebooks, and articles across multiple databases with OneSearch
* if you know the name of a specific journal, you can see whether we subscribe to it and look up its back issues by using our e-journal finder.
Outside of the library, some other sources of information about environmental justice:
The New York City Environmental Justice Alliance unites activist groups from throughout the city. Learn more about their campaigns.
Read about the campaign concerning the Sheridan Expressway in Hunts Point.
Watch the short film by Streetfilms "Building Greenways and Community in the Bronx":