Remedies for Environmental Racism: A View from the Field

The Michigan Law Review\u27s recent Note, Remedying Environmental Racism, is an important and timely analysis of a civil rights law-based approach to environmental justice work - one of the first to emerge from legal academia. It correctly points out the high hurdles that toxic racism\u27s victims must overcome to successfully pursue such a strategy. Godsil\u27s piece will hopefully spur more academic and on-the-ground work in this nascent legal field, which I call environmental poverty law - that is, representing low-income communities (often, in this field, communities of color) facing environmental hazards. As a practitioner of environmental poverty law who has used civil rights law to fight a toxic waste incinerator, I want to offer a view from outside the academy on several of Godsil\u27s points

Environmental Justice Comes Full Circle: Warren County Before and After

This article/remembrance chronicles the Warren County struggle. It begins before the protests that thrust it into the national spotlight, examining the factors that led to the struggle in the first place. It touches on the protests themselves, and then recounts part of the Warren County story that is not well known: the ultimate detoxification of the polychlorinated biphenyls (“PCBs”) site. Finally, it examines the legacy of the Warren County struggle, both nationally and locally in the county itself. In places, it self-consciously departs from the third person to describe in first person narrative (presented in the italicized portions of the article) the actual events of Warren County as remembered by one of its central participants, Dollie Burwell

Structural Racism, Structural Pollution and the Need for a New Paradigm

Any serious attempt to address the issues of poverty, wealth and the working poor would do well to learn from the Environmental Justice movement, a broad-based national social movement that has emerged from the ground up over the past twenty years. The movement operates at the intersection of race, poverty and the environment, and offers hope in an otherwise bleak landscape of environmental and social justice advocacy. The movement offers a new paradigm for community leadership and control. This Essay explores the need for that new paradigm, using one community’s struggle against toxic intrusion to illustrate the failure of the traditional paradigms of environmental and civil rights law. The experiences of residents of the Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden, New Jersey, demonstrate the need to address the structural nature of both pollution and racism, and we offer an environmental justice approach as a start

Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education (I.-C.E.E.)

This is the critical design review for the Telepresence/Telerobotic Technology for Children with Disabilities Project by team I.- C.E.E. (Innovative Connectivity Ensuring Education). This report details our telepresence system design for our client (Nathan Stilts) including design choices/justification, testing verification and procedures, and chosen components for implementation. There are seven chapters in total starting with introductory/background information followed by hardware and software design, verification, and testing and concludes with the current status of the project and what future work may need to be included