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

An Epigenetic Pilot Study Investigating Biomarkers in Maternal-Infant Pairs

Rationale: Particulate matter (PM) is a measurable component of air pollution that has been associated with adverse cardiovascular and respiratory outcomes. Research indicates environmental factors such as air pollution are involved in changes through epigenetic mechanisms during development that may persist into adulthood and even span multiple generations of inheritance. Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes of gene expression that do not alter the actual DNA sequence. One epigenetic mechanism is DNA methylation. Long Interspersed Nuclear Element (LINE-1) is a DNA repetitive element that can be used as a proxy measurement of DNA global methylation. The purpose of this pilot study was to compare epigenetic biomarkers across different sample matrices (i.e. blood and buccal) and across related subjects (i.e. maternal and infant). Methods: Informed consent was provided by pregnant women (n=23) who were recruited through Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), hospital birthing classes, or flyers in obstetrician’s offices. Demographic and medical data was collected from hospital records for both mothers and newborns after birth. Follow-up health surveys were administered by telephone that were designed to collect indicators of pre-asthmatic respiratory symptoms or conditions. Biological samples were collected before or shortly after time of birth at Community Medical Center of Missoula, MT. The samples collected were maternal blood (n=15), umbilical cord blood (n=15), and maternal (n=23) and newborn (n=23) buccal (cheek) cells. Buccal cells were collected and processed according to the Gentra Puregene Kit (Qiagen, Germantown, MD). These biologically accessible tissues serve as surrogates to study gene methylation associated with respiratory health. Samples were stored at -80°C until DNA extraction and subsequent bisulfite treatment. The samples were amplified in duplicates with polymerase chain reaction (PCR). LINE-1 methylation was analyzed with pyrosequencing on a Pyromark Q96 MD (Qiagen, Germantown, MD). All statistical analysis was performed in Statistical Analysis Software (SAS, version 9.3). Results: The mean (standard deviation (sd)) of LINE-1 methylation percentage for mother and infant buccal cell derived DNA were 58.75 (3.89) and 57.16 (2.54), respectively. Percent methylation maximum for mother and infant buccal samples were 70.22 and 64.25, respectively, and minimum were 54.86 and 52.94, respectively. Paired t-test indicated that LINE-1 methylation percentages in maternal buccal samples were higher than methylation percentages in the paired infant samples (mean difference (95%CL) = 4.4 (2.3, 6.6)). The mean (sd) of LINE-1 methylation percentage for mother and infant/cord blood derived DNA were 75.19 (3.17) and 75.86 (3.05), respectively. Percent methylation maximum for mother and infant blood samples were 79.42 and 79.50, respectively, and minimum were 70.39 and 69.31, respectively. Paired t-test indicated that LINE-1 methylation percentages in maternal blood samples were similar to methylation percentages in infant blood samples (mean difference (95% CL) = 0.66 (-2.0,3.3)). Conclusions: LINE-1 methylation percentages between sample matrices (i.e. blood and buccal) and subjects (i.e. maternal and infant) were not correlated. The percent methylation of LINE-1 in DNA from blood was consistently greater than for DNA from buccal tissue for both mother and newborn samples. It was expected that LINE-1 measurements for blood DNA would differ from buccal DNA because circulating blood represents a more diverse cell population. Gene-specific methylation of the promoter region for interferon-γ, a cytokine associated with asthma, will be studied with the remaining samples of bisulfite-treated DNA from this study. Epigenetic changes may serve as useful biomarkers for predicting asthma risk in children exposed to biomass smoke. These methods can be applied to future studies to investigate the epigenetic relationship of prenatal asthma risk and PM wood smoke exposure