The dirty-energy economy has brought pollution and poverty to too many. But a clean-energy economy can bring opportunity, health, and wealth to struggling communities. Clean-energy jobs such as weatherizing homes, installing solar panels, and manufacturing wind turbines will put people to work in their own communities.
A new green economy will provide opportunity to people who have been left out of the old economy. That is the promise of Green For All.
Watch the video. Take Action. Share A New Sound with your friends and family.
A new green economy will provide opportunity to people who have been left out of the old economy. That is the promise of Green For All.
Watch the video. Take Action. Share A New Sound with your friends and family.
The sound and images of the young girl in the video gasping for air, coughing and using her aspirator made me think of how many kids, and adults I know with asthma. I don't know any families in the city who are asthma free.
Lisa Jackson wrote this opinion piece recently on The Griot
Environmental threats contaminate our health and prosperity
Until about a year ago, Jyra Hill never had a green thought in her life. Hill, who turned 17 recently, admits she regularly threw trash out the car window. Heart disease, cancer and respiratory illness are three of the top four deadliest health threats in America. They account for more than half of the deaths in the nation and all three have an overwhelming impact on black communities. Blacks visit the emergency room for asthma at three and a half times the average rate that whites do, and die from it twice as often. Mortality rates for cancer are higher for us than for any other group and heart disease is the most fatal illness in the black community. Many of us have friends or family members battling these diseases, and far too many of us know loved ones who have lost those battles.
There is another common trend here: all of these illnesses have been linked to environmental causes. Pollution in our air, land, and water are connected to our greatest health challenges. African Americans - who are almost twice as likely as other Americans to live in cities - breathe in more air pollution related to asthma and heart disease. High-traffic urban areas are blanketed by smog, doubling the risk of premature birth and raising the threat of developmental disabilities in children. Poor and minority communities often live in the shadow of polluters and face exposure to disease causing chemicals in their land and water. These health threats don't travel alone. Building schools in polluted areas means our kids fall behind by missing days of class with asthma or other problems. The poor who get sick because of toxins in their neighborhoods are the same people who typically seek treatment in emergency rooms. That drives up health care costs for everyone and hurts the entire economy.
And environmental challenges hold back economic growth. At a recent meeting of national black business leaders, I heard understandable concerns about the costs of environmental regulations. But what about the costs in lost productivity from employees calling in sick, or staying home with a sick child? What about the costs for small businesses that pay higher health insurance premiums because their workers are at greater risk of chronic diseases? When environmental degradation keeps businesses from investing, economic possibilities are limited. As a result, crime and violence are higher, often drug use is rampant, and the vicious cycle continues. What have we taught our young people to value, aspire to, or take pride in when they see that their communities are unclean, unhealthy and unsafe - and that the people around them seem unconcerned?
Jackson raises important questions here.
Let's examine some of the research on asthma. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Asthma Initiative has these data. They have been focused on reduction of asthma in specific neighborhoods.
Asthma is a common disease among New York City's children and adults. People with asthma have chronic lung inflammation and episodes of airway tightening that cause symptoms such as wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath. Asthma is a leading cause of missed school among children and is the most common cause of hospitalization for children 14 years and younger. Among adults, asthma causes missed work, emergency department visits, and limitation of activity. In the past two decades, the number of people with asthma has increased, although some improvements, such as fewer hospitalizations, have occurred in recent years. Although we do not yet know how to prevent asthma, we do know that asthma can be controlled both by avoiding exposure to triggers and by taking anti-inflammatory medicines. With good control, almost all people with asthma can lead normal, active lives.
Targeted efforts by city agencies involved with the initiative are bringing some of the rates down slightly, but the number of hospitalizations are still above the national average
As in prior years, children have the highest asthma hospitalization rates. The rate among those 0-14 years of age declined by an estimated 17% in 2005, to 5.4 per 1000 population (Table 1 ). The hospitalization rate among children is 43% lower than in 1997, when nearly 15,000 children 0-14 were hospitalized for asthma compared with fewer than 9000 in 2005. Despite the decline, this rate is higher than the national rate (3.1 in 2004 ). Hospitalization rates continue to vary widely across neighborhoods; with the highest rates occurring in the United Hospital Fund (UHF) neighborhoods of East Harlem (11.9), Central Harlem (11.2), Highbridge-Morrisania (11.0), Williamsburg-Bushwick (10.5), Crotona-Tremont (10.3), and Hunts Point-Mott Haven (9.5). As a group, low-income neighborhoods like these have had the highest asthma hospitalization rates over time but have also experienced the greatest decline in rates since 1997 (45%) compared with those living in the wealthiest neighborhoods (37%) (Figure 1). Given the large number of neighborhoods being tracked, year to year changes in hospitalization rate in individual neighborhoods should be interpreted cautiously as they may be due to chance. Among boroughs, the Bronx had the highest rate in 2005 (8.9) and Staten Island (2.5) the lowest.
For those of you not familiar with the the distribution of people by race/ethnicity in NY - the area with the lowest rate, Staten Island, is predominantly "white".
The Philadelphia Tribune had this article recently, Cockroaches, asthma and children of color
Asthma is a growing concern in this country, particularly in inner-city African-American and Latino populations.Inner city children have the highest prevalence and the highest mortality rates for asthma in the United States.
Children exposed to high levels of air pollution during their first year of life run a greater risk of developing asthma, pollen allergies and impaired respiratory function.
When most people think of allergy "triggers," they often focus on plant pollens, dust, animals and stinging insects. In fact, cockroaches also can trigger allergies and asthma. In the 1970s, studies made it clear that patients with cockroach allergies develop acute asthma attacks. The attacks occur after inhaling cockroach allergens and last for hours. Asthma has steadily increased over the past 30 years. It is the most common chronic disease of childhood. Now we know that the frequent hospital admissions of inner-city children with asthma often is directly related to their contact with cockroach allergens — the substances that cause allergies. From 23 percent to 60 percent of urban residents with asthma are sensitive to the cockroach allergen.
To the surprise of many, as far back as 1997, a large study supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) concluded that the combination of cockroach allergy and exposure to the insects is an important cause of asthma-related illness and hospitalizations among children in U.S. inner-city areas.
Now who can say they knew about this?
Cockroaches are part of the day-to-day lives of the inner city poor. I remember the first thing that hit me when I moved to the country, to the farm. Yup, I had insects, but nary a cockroach. I have to stay on guard however when friends come to visit from the city who may inadvertently bring those critters with them, in suitcases or supermarket bags.
When I was younger, one of the most powerful poems I ever heard performed was by Pedro Pietri, recently deceased Nuyorican (Puerto Rican) Poet Laureate. It was entitled "Suicide Note From a Cockroach in a Low Income Housing Project" which can be heard at this link to his "Loose Joints" album. Literary scholars often reference his poem.
Ostensibly this poem is a suicide note from an irate cockroach protesting the "genocide" of his "people," brought about by the accessibility of pesticides among "the minority groups" in low-income housing projects. This reactionary cockroach longs for the days before DDT was affordable (now "DEATH IS JUST A SPRAY AWAY" and credit cards, TVs, radios, and other electric appliances were easily available to ghetto residents. His political slogan is "END THE WAR ON POVERTY NOW / before our race is erased from the face / of every place" (25). But under the guise of this reactionary and absurd (and hilarious) anticonsumerism, Pietri recounts the integration of the ghetto into the new consumer society of late capitalism - the process that underlies, as the cockroach perceptively asserts, the liberal social policies of the Johnson era and of his much-vaunted Great Society's "war on poverty." Through the imaginative discourse of a suicidal cockroach in a low-income housing project, we are allowed to perceive this process of integration into consumerism that, according to Fredric Jameson, characterizes late capitalism in general and the 1960s in particular.
I grew up loving Archy and Mehitabel, the carton characters created by Don Marquis.
Archy (whose name was always written in lower case in the book titles, but was upper case when Marquis would write about him in narrative form) was a cockroach who had been a free-verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy's best friend was an alley cat named "Mehitabel," and the two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.
The cockroach is the butt of inner city jokes, and food for comedic material from a host of urban black and latino comedians.
But the epidemic of asthma is no joking matter. Nor is the infestation of inner city homes and workplaces.
If our children miss school constantly, they aren't learning. If our hospital emergency rooms, already overstressed are flooded with visits from under-insured or un-insured minority families attempting to cope with frequent asthma attacks we have a major health issue.
To address these issues that are crippling and killing so many let us begin to build stronger coalitions between health care advocates, green environmental groups and communities of color. Support grass root groups involved in these efforts. I applaud the recent initiatives supported by the White House like Green The Block
Green For All and the Hip Hop Caucus have joined together to launch a new campaign, Green The Block, to educate and mobilize communities of color to ensure a voice and stake in the clean-energy economy. This past Tuesday, August 4th, we announced the first major initiative of the campaign at a Press Conference at the White House with key Obama Administration Officials. Green the Block will kick off Green the Block Service Events on National Service Day, Sept. 11, 2009. Read More about Green the Block...
California has CalAsthma.org.
Fight Asthma Milwaukee Allies
is another local effort.
Please share any links you have to local green efforts involved in minority community health and environmental efforts.
How many folks do you know with asthma? Please join in the efforts to fight it.
I'd like to add a special note of thanks to Senator Edward Kennedy, whose battle for health care for the poor, for children and underserved communities should be the guiding light for us all.
RIP Teddy.
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