Healthy Food, Healthy Communities

An often-ignored contributor to poor health is lack of access to good quality, affordable healthy food. Residents in low-income communities have limited options for healthy eating and often resort to buying unhealthy foods at corner stores or fast food outlets. Certainly, people choose what they eat but their choices are based on availability. Across the nation, communities are addressing this issue, often by partnering food retailers with residents and policymakers. The PolicyLink report, Healthy Food, Healthy Communities: Improving Access and Opportunities through Food Retailing, examines how low-income communities are accessing healthy, affordable, good quality food - right in their neighborhoods. The report illustrates how policymakers, business leaders, community organizations, and foundations have joined together to identify ways to create innovative community-driven solutions to the food access problem across the country. The report shows how vacant land, abandoned properties, and existing smaller sites are being adapted for grocery store developments in poor communities and spurring economic development; small stores are stocking healthier options, promoting local small business development, and even turning "problem" locations into community assets; farmers' markets are sustaining small farms while providing fresh, local food, opportunities for small business development, as well as a social space. It also shows how community organizations are partnering in-sometimes even owning and operating-grocery store development, which helps build the community's economic capital and creates a more cohesive community environment. Healthy Food, Healthy Communities describes examples of successful programs in Baltimore, Boston, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Newark, New York City, Providence, St. Louis, Washington, DC, and throughout California and Pennsylvania, and showcases the important role of state and local governments in increasing access to healthy food in low-income communities. Healthy Food, Healthy Communities: Improving Access and Opportunities through Food Retailing was funded by a grant from The California Endowment (TCE). This report builds on earlier work about the effects of community factors on health that was developed by PolicyLink in partnership with TCE, Reducing Health Disparities Through a Focus on Communities. Rebecca Flournoy and Sarah Treuhaft, who authored Healthy Food, Healthy Communities: Improving Access and Opportunities Through Food Retailing, are program associates at PolicyLink. Flournoy leads a project designed to improve access to grocery stores and other healthy food retail options in underserved communities, and advises coalitions on advocacy strategy for policies that will improve community conditions and residents' health. Treuhaft researches and writes on a variety of equitable development topics including the use of information technology tools for community building, regional equity strategies, economic development, and healthy neighborhood environments. She also provides data and mapping analysis for PolicyLink projects

Designed for Disease: The Link Between Local Food Environments and Obesity and Diabetes

Examines the link between a community's retail food environment -- the ratio of fast-food outlets and convenience stores to grocery stores and produce vendors, with income level as a factor -- and the prevalence of adult obesity and diabetes

From Ship to Shore: Reforming the National Contingency Plan to Improve Protections for Oil Spill Cleanup Workers

Eleven workers died on April 20, 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform exploded beneath them. Since then, tens of thousands of workers have toiled under difficult conditions to stop the leak and clean up the mess. For these workers, the spill is more than an environmental and economic disaster; it poses straightforward and serious risks to their health and safety. Oil is toxic, as are the dispersants used liberally by BP to contain it. BP’s foul up is not the first significant oil spill in the nation’s history, nor even the first in the Gulf. The oil companies and government agencies with a stake in guarding against and cleaning up the spills that inevitably accompany oil drilling have had ample opportunity and motivation to devise and hone plans for protecting workers. And yet, thousands of cleanup workers began their work in the Gulf without the training and guidance necessary to ensure their safety in the face of hazardous conditions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) eventually settled on policies for training workers and requiring appropriate safety gear. Their response undoubtedly helped limit the risks the workers faced. But the time it took to settle these policies put into sharp focus a significant problem in our nation’s emergency response policies: OSHA and NIOSH had only limited roles in the planning process and in the development of implementing regulations, a failing that badly slowed the government’s response on the worker-safety front. From this “original sin” flowed a number of negative consequences, some of which compromised the health and safety of cleanup workers. • Too many workers in the Gulf were given inadequate training on the use of personal protective equipment. Employers and individual workers were thus left to determine on their own how to resolve the difficult question of what level of PPE was appropriate for their particular work environments. The most difficult issue was respirator use. A properly worn and properly functioning respirator puts additional stresses on the cardiovascular system, creating acute hazards that might be more dangerous than the long-term hazards of exposure to the air contaminants the respirator is designed to filter, particularly in the heat and humidity of the Gulf coast summer. • Contractor and individual worker decisions about safety gear were complicated by an insufficient understanding of the chemical exposures faced by workers engaged in various tasks. No one knew the precise contents of the oil dispersants applied by BP because they were protected for several months as confidential business information under EPA’s liberal trade secrets policies. Moreover, toxicity testing required by the Oil Pollution Act only assessed ecological toxicity, not toxicity to human health. • Air quality monitoring designed to characterize worker exposures was inconsistently summarized and published by BP and OSHA. • BP’s medical recordkeeping following the explosion of Deepwater Horizon appeared to under report workers’ injuries and illnesses, in part because OSHA’s regulatory definitions enabled employers to avoid reporting certain health effects. Significantly, OSHA and NIOSH also did a number of things well. • OSHA quickly moved additional personnel to the region, thus enabling frequent site visits to address worker safety and health hazards. • OSHA overcame an early and significant jurisdictional problem, extending through a Memorandum of Understanding with the federal on-scene coordinator the reach of its worker safety authority beyond the three nautical mile limit from the shoreline. • OSHA and NIOSH developed a “matrix” of various tasks in which cleanup workers were engaged, a model that could be used to improve planning for future oil spills. • NIOSH attempted to compile a roster of all workers involved in the cleanup so that it could more readily track health effects. • NIOSH began a Health Hazard Evaluation and published interim reports of its work. This report offers six specific recommendations: • EPA and the Coast Guard should require Regional Response Teams and the oil industry to develop a matrix of likely or foreseeable cleanup tasks for each level of spill, from routine to worst case scenario, in consultation with NIOSH and OSHA. The cleanup task matrix should be the basis for planning task-specific levels of training, air quality monitoring and sampling protocols, and personal protection equipment (PPE) choices. • EPA and the Coast Guard should include OSHA in the chain of command that approves Regional Contingency Plans and site-specific contingency plans in order to ensure that cleanup workers’ health and safety are properly addressed. • EPA and the Coast Guard should require a NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluation for any spill that demands a significant number of cleanup workers or long-term cleanup efforts, paid by the company responsible for the oil spill. • As they revise the National Contingency Plan, EPA and the Coast Guard should consult with volunteers, employees of oil spill response organizations, and occupational health specialists who have been involved in major disasters including the Valdez, Prestige, and Horizon spills. • To ensure that adequate training and worker protection are provided, regulators should permanently adopt the provisions of the June 10 Memorandum of Understanding between OSHA and the federal on-scene coordinator that guarantee OSHA’s leadership is included in all consultations about the implementation of cleanup under the national and regional contingency plans. • The White House should seek an emergency, supplemental appropriation for OSHA to support the substantial extra resources required to participate in this unprecedented response. Already operating on a shoestring budget, the failure to grant substantial additional resources to the agency will only endanger other workers for the sake of workers in the Gulf

Loss of deep roots limits biogenic agents of soil development that are only partially restored by decades of forest regeneration

Roots and associated microbes generate acid-forming CO2 and organic acids and accelerate mineral weathering deep within Earth’s critical zone (CZ). At the Calhoun CZ Observatory in the USA’s Southern Piedmont, we tested the hypothesis that deforestation-induced deep root losses reduce root- and microbially-mediated weathering agents well below maximum root density (to 5 m), and impart land-use legacies even after ~70 y of forest regeneration. In forested plots, root density declined with depth to 200 cm; in cultivated plots, roots approached zero at depths >70 cm. Below 70 cm, root densities in old-growth forests averaged 2.1 times those in regenerating forests. Modeled root distributions suggest declines in density with depth were steepest in agricultural plots, and least severe in old-growth forests. Root densities influenced biogeochemical environments in multiple ways. Microbial community composition varied with land use from surface horizons to 500 cm; relative abundance of root-associated bacteria was greater in old-growth soils than in regenerating forests, particularly at 100–150 cm. At 500 cm in old-growth forests, salt-extractable organic C (EOC), an organic acid proxy, was 8.8 and 12.5 times that in regenerating forest and agricultural soils, respectively. The proportion of soil organic carbon comprised of EOC was greater in old-growth forests (20.0 ± 2.6%) compared to regenerating forests (2.1 ± 1.1) and agricultural soils (1.9 ± 0.9%). Between 20 and 500 cm, [EOC] increased more with root density in old-growth relative to regenerating forests. At 300 cm, 'in situ' growing season [CO2] was significantly greater in old-growth forests relative to regenerating forests and cultivated plots; at 300 and 500 cm, cultivated soil [CO2] was significantly lower than in forests. Microbially-respired d13C-CO2 suggests that microbes may rely partially on crop residue even after ~70 y of forest regeneration. We assert that forest conversion to frequently disturbed ecosystems limits deep roots and reduces biotic generation of downward-propagating weathering agents

Regulatory Blowout: How Regulatory Failures Made the BP Disaster Possible, and How the System Can Be Fixed to Avoid a Recurrence

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is destined to take its place as one of the greatest environmental disasters in the history of the United States, or for that matter, of the entire planet. Like so many other disasters on that list, it was entirely preventable. BP must shoulder its share of the blame, of course. Similarly, the Minerals Management Service (MMS) – since reorganized and rebranded – has come under much deserved criticism for its failure to rein in BP’s avaricious approach to drilling even where it was unable to respond to a worst-case scenario in a responsible and timely fashion. But the problems run much deeper than a single risk-taking company and a single dysfunctional regulatory agency. This report sketches out widespread regulatory failure, touching several agencies of the federal government and affecting several critical environmental statutes. Prepared by Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), it has two goals: (1) to identify how and why the regulatory system failed to protect the public and environment and prevent the BP disaster, and (2) to recommend the priority reforms that are essential to correct these regulatory deficiencies. The report begins by laying out the shortcomings in the primary statute under which deepwater oil drilling is regulated – the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) – and outlines key reforms needed to provide the authority necessary to protect the public interest. It then turns to systemic problems within the agency charged with regulation of deepwater oil drilling under the OCSLA – the Mineral Management Service (MMS), renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) in the wake of the disaster. These include problems of agency capture and inadequate funding. The third topic addressed in the report is the role of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – how and why this landmark statute was disabled from performing its critical role in the case of the BP well, and what regulatory changes can ensure that it functions effectively in the future. The report next details the problems that surrounded the implementation and enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as it applied to oil drilling and recommends several key reforms. The report then discusses a systemic problem that is a theme in each prior section and that specific statutory reforms cannot fully remedy: obstacles to making sound regulatory decisions in the face of uncertain, low probability risks of potentially catastrophic or irreversible harm. This section highlights a common sense solution: adoption of a precautionary stance. A precautionary approach would replace the current widely-adopted presumption that regulation must await a high – and often unattainable – degree of certainty, even when the potential costs are irreversible or catastrophic. In the last sections of the report, we step back to look at the regulatory system from a broader perspective. We consider first how the regulatory system and its failures in this case were caused in part by the absence of coherent policies on energy and climate change. Our current policy provides vast incentives for risky oil and gas development like deepwater drilling and few for low-carbon alternative energy sources. In the wake of yet another painful lesson on the cost of our current incoherent approach, it is time to focus political attention on the difficult but necessary task of debating and adopting a coherent and sound energy policy. In the final section, we step back geographically to suggest why another lesson of this disaster is that the United States should undertake to learn more from the experience abroad, offering the example of the North Sea. Had we been paying closer attention, the investigations and reforms in the wake of the infamous Piper Alpha spill or the Bravo platform blowout might have offered insights to help us avoid this disaster