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April 2003 | Volume 1, Number 7
Promoting
the Environmental Justice
& Health Union mission, Catalyst identifies training,
research, policies, events, and funding opportunities that
foster partnerships to eliminate environmental disease in
poor minority communities within the United States. To do
that, Catalyst depends on information submitted by an advisory
board of environmental health professionals and environmental
justice activists as well as our readers.
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TOOLBOX
Training for community environmental health assessment
The National Association of City and County Health Officials
has developed a protocol for assessing community excellence
in environmental health (PACE-EH).
The final PACE-EH training
will be conducted in Chicago on May 15 - 16.
Reducing health disparities through a focus on communities
PolicyLink has examined the issue of health
disparities and communities and identified new strategies, approaches, and policies
that may be required. These new approaches are drawn from extensive
review of the literature, as well as from interviews with
researchers and practitioners working on reducing health disparities
in communities across the country.
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ADVISORY
BOARD
Lynn Battle
Executive Director, Citizen's
Lead Education & Poisoning Prevention (Birmingham, AL)
Michael
Green
Executive Director, Center
for Environmental Health (Oakland, CA)
Swati
Prakash
Environmental Health Director, West
Harlem Environmental Action (New York, NY)
Alejandra
Tres
Executive Director, Association
of Environmental Health Academic Programs (Portland,
OR)
The Environmental Justice and Health Union is an independent
project of the Center for
Environmental Health
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The
Next Step...
The struggle to decrease the threat from pesticides continues.
The 1996 Food Quality Protection Act represented a significant
shift in pesticide regulation by requiring EPA to eventually
define the risks posed by specific pesticides to children
and consumers rather than simply evaluating whether pesticides
were effective killing pests. However, the risks to the
people most exposed to pesticides - farmworkers - remain
poorly understood. Instead, EPA created general worker
protection standards that provide farmworkers with minimal
data about risks posed by pesticides they handle.
Recently, groups supporting farmworkers have challenged
the weak training, content, and enforcement of the worker protection standards. Groups
like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee continue to march
in protest (as they will on April
13!) of unsafe working conditions. And the battle to
ensure adequate
representation by health professionals at EPA pesticide
conferences is on-going. State pesticide programs, such
as California,
are considering how to strengthen such protections through
environmental justice policies. Lawsuits
filed against EPA have fostered the development of more
farmworker risk data.
Detailed
pesticide information is available. Each state has pesticide
contacts. Pesticide-free
crops are grown nationwide. However, pesticides remain
a prime target for the Precautionary
Principle. Pesticides should not be used until they
are shown to be safe. That day has not yet arrived, but
it is coming.
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PARTNERSHIPS
Rural Coalition
The Rural
Coalition Community Responsive Partnerships for Environmental
Justice is a NIEHS-funded collaboration between rural environmental
justice groups, local health agencies, and Rutgers University.
The goal is to increase the number of communities performing
environmental justice research, improve relationships between
academic, health, and environmental justice groups, and
improve the quality of community-based research design.
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ENVIRONMENTAL
HEALTH
Daily asthma risk
Air Now is an on-line
system that provides daily air quality data for more than
165 cities. The data can help those with asthma and other
respiratory ailments identify periods of high risk.
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ENVIRONMENTAL
JUSTICE
 Negotiation
EPA is funding efforts to research the advantages
of collaboration and negotiation (in contrast to litigation)
to resolve environmental justice conflicts through training
and dispute resolution for standard setting and local decision-making.
The final
product will be a series of workshops and reports about
how to structure effective collaborations.
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SUBSCRIBE and PROVIDE
The
Catalyst
is an online newsletter sent monthly to Environmental
Justice & Health Union members.
Groups with annual budgets of less than $200,000 receive
free EJHU membership. The EJHU website (www.ejhu.org) includes
information for activists and professionals about training, research, and policies, EJHU membership, and past
issues of Catalyst. If you want to provide information to be considered for inclusion in Catalyst, include a contact name, website, and e-mail address. Please forward the information to ejhu@ejhu.org
or the following address:
Max Weintraub - Director
Environmental Justice and Health Union
528 61st Street, Suite
A
Oakland, CA 94609
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CLOSING DATES
April 18
Local
leadership council for community environmental health resource
center
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 25
Wilburforce Foundation
(Western US)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
May 1
Community Technology
Foundation (California)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
May 9
Pathways
to collaboration
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
May 29
Impact Fund
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May 30
Disparities
in healthcare
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90 days before activity
Technical
assistance and capacity building
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EVENTS CALENDAR
April 1-3, Reston VA
Natural science
and public health: Prescription for a better environment
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April 4, Memphis TN
Environmental
racism lecture by Robert Bullard
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 9, Berea OH
Environmental
justice
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 9 - 10, Washington DC
Environmental human
health research
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April 10
Environmental
justice and public relations
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
April 11, Cambridge MA
Symposium
on racial/ethnic health disparities research
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April 17, Seattle WA
Community
based participatory research
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April 19, Seattle WA
Community
based solutions for environmental health and justice
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April 24 - 26, Washington DC
Conflict
resolution and urban environmental policy
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April 25 - 27, Austin TX
Toxics
in the age of globalization
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May 1 - 3, Phoenix AZ
National
farmworker health conference
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May 13 - 15, Atlanta GA
Public
health information network stakeholders conference
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
May 23 - 27, Washington DC
Health
and the Environment
Return to EJHU or Catalyst
homepage
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