Environmental Science homework for the week of August 22nd-August 26th

In Environmental Science class this week we will be discussing the environmental justice movement. Please read the history of the environmental justice movement essay, and think about how this movement is connected with the civil rights movement which gained force in the 1950s and ´60s. The environmental justice movement was advocated predominantly by African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. The environmental justice movement speaks to the statistical fact that people who live, work and play in America's most polluted environments are generally people of color and the poor. These neighborhoods are also Environmental justice advocates have shown that this is no accident. Without equal representation, legislatively and economically, these communities are targeted for the creating of L.U.L.U.s (locally unwanted land uses) such as a landfill, dirty industrial plant or bus station. The statistics provide clear evidence of what the movement rightly calls "environmental racism." We will examine an Al Jazeera report, Faces of China: Heavy Me about the computer recycling industry in China. This is an example of toxic colonialism, a type of exploitation in which some companies in the United States and in other developed nations around the world contribute to the injustice by shipping the toxic waste and byproducts of factories that are not disposed of in the host country and ship it to less developed countries to be disposed of. This act increases the amount of waste in the third world countries, most which do not have proper sanitation for their own waste much less the waste of another country. Many times the people of the less developed countries are exposed to more toxins from this waste and do not even realize what kind of waste they are encountering or the health problems that could come with it.

On Thursday and Friday we will begin to look at some of the basic chemistry and biology involved in environmental systems. Please read chapter 3: Matter, Energy, and Life. We will be discussing pages 54-59 for Thursday and 60-62 for Friday.