What is Environmental Justice?

Environmental Justice as defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says "Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."

Environmental Justice can apply to many different environmental issues ranging from deforestation, air pollution, global warming, water pollution, Natural resource depletion and many more ranging issues. Some issues can be more prevalent more specific to the state like California who's issues range from drought, wildfires, bad air pollution, coastal dangers, and other such environmental issues. Below is a deep dive into some of the pressing issues that California, more specifically Central California, have been fighting.

Pesticides in Farming

Pesticides while in farming has larger side effects on the farm workers who work closely with this chemicals who are exposed to large quantities at a time.
Pesticides were created for good things such as to kill bugs in agriculture and keep crops safe from diseases like malaria and typhus
Pesticides also help increase the amount of food grown and many farmer even organic use them
Pesticides are broad category in that the kill or control pests ranging from animals, plants, to bacteria and fungi
Specific pesticides for specific problems within agriculture
DDT was one of the first pesticides to be notices as being a harsher chemical pesticide after world war 2 and was noted for causing bugs to spasm & twitch to the point it paralyzed and killed them
DDT eliminated a lot of spreadable diseases so much so it got a Nobel Prize in medicine in 1948 but it had some consequences as well
DDT built up in many ecosystem from the going up the food webs that it caused massive loss in bird of prey and highly toxic to fish as well
DDT has been banned now but DDT allow the start of the modern environmental movement since it made people question the use of chemicals in growing food
While pesticides have been far more careful in developing and using pesticides it still isn’t perfect
Pesticides can still be very much harmful to humans especially went affecting the water system
While the government tries to monitor the amount of pesticides in foods but it doesn’t monitor all foods fairly like organic even though organic produce has pesticides as well.

Information gathered from: How Safe Are Pesticides, Really? and Do we really need pesticides? - Fernan Pérez-Gálvez

Josefina Miranda shows her daughter how she protects herself when she works in the fields. When Miranda was four months pregnant with an earlier child, she and her co-workers were put to work in a field still wet with pesticides. By the time they left, her clothes were so soaked that she could wring the pesticides out of them. Photo and description provided by: http://www.voicesfromthevalley.org/photos/#7

Biodiversity loss and Habitat loss

Biggest threats to biodiversity come from climate change and ecosystem=tem loss and transformation which is heavily influenced by human population growth
Been causing damages to biodiversity from the very beginning even when we were hunter and gathers
With Habitat loss causes more animals to fight for territories which causes loss of species with time
Human growth has increase the rate of deforestation which causes habitat loss for animals
Even in protected area of natural spaces are at risk for change since it’s isolated from other similar areas
It’s not just climate change alone but disease and invasive species, pollution, ocean acidification and Isolated protected areas
Threats to biodiversity even in protected areas come from Disease-parasitism, non-natives, climate-related, threats to populations and human encroachment
Three types of habitat loss: Destruction, fragmentation and degradation
Efforts are being made to help fragmentation by using wildlife/land bridges so as to help animals pass safety away from humans and less chance of animals being hurt

Information gathered from: Humans, Biodiversity, and Habitat Loss — HHMI BioInteractive Video and Why is biodiversity so important? - Kim Preshoff

What is Environmental Justice?

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