Homes in Washington, DC's Brookland neighborhood were condemned to clear room for a highway in the 1960s. The community fought back. Brig Cabe / DC Public Library
By Teju Adisa-Farrar & Raul Garcia
In the summer of 1969 a banner hung over a set of condemned homes in what was then the predominantly black and brown Brookland neighborhood in Washington, DC. It read, "White man's roads through black men's homes."
Earlier in the year, the District attempted to condemn the houses to make space for a proposed freeway. The plans proposed a 10-lane freeway, a behemoth of a project that would divide the nation's capital end-to-end and sever iconic Black neighborhoods like Shaw and the U Street Corridor from the rest of the city.
Demonstrators outside a Republican presidential debate in Detroit in 2016. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Michigan prosecutors dropped all criminal charges against government officials involved in the Flint water crisis Thursday, citing concerns about the investigation they had inherited from the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) appointed by former Attorney General Bill Schuette, CNN reported.
Activist Merci Ferrer stands and looks at the mountain of trash at a dumpsite in Dumaguete City, Philippines. Greenpeace
By Kaitlin Grable
Turtles, seabirds, seals, and whales are well-documented victims of plastic pollution — but when was the last time you saw a video of a person suffering in the grips of the global plastics crisis?
Cyclone Idai hit the Mozambican coast earlier this month, devastating the port city of Beira and killing at least 700 people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. GUILLEM SARTORIO / AFP / Getty Images
By Michael Novick
Environmental catastrophes in southern Africa and in the U.S. Midwest underscore the fact that life-threatening damage from capitalist-induced climate change is happening already.
It's a frigid December morning when I meet Chairman Joseph Holley at the Te-Moak tribal headquarters in Elko, Nevada, seven hours north of Las Vegas. Holley, tall and round-faced, offers me a cup of coffee. He has the burly build of a man who worked 37 years in the area's gold mines, drilling aboveground and digging below the surface.
"Given the right circumstances of inclusion and support, people can't resist expressing their love and concern for this greatest of all relatives, our Earth." YES! Illustration / Fran Murphy
By Mary Annette Pember
Resistance to the North Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock brought greater media and public attention to Native peoples and our struggles with environmental injustice. It also provided a means for the public to express fears over the environmental threats posed to the Earth by unchecked corporate and governmental exploitation of fossil fuels.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where six racist messages have been found on a shared whiteboard since August. krblokhin / Getty Images
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s chief of staff assured employees on Monday that the agency would investigate after a series of racist messages were written on a whiteboard in EPA headquarters, ABC News reported.
"EPA has no tolerance for racism and will investigate and hold the individuals who are spreading these messages responsible. Concerning the most recent instance, EPA is taking every measure to both find who did this and protect our employees," chief of staff Ryan Jackson said in the email.
The fact that nature and nation share a common root—the Latin verb nasci, "to be born"—might rate as trivia to most people. But in the context of early American art, at least, the connection has profound cultural meaning. Paintings of natural vistas, from New York's Hudson Valley to the purple mountains and red deserts of the West, became early symbols of a young nation and its so-called manifest destiny. In the minds of many early Americans and pioneers, the land was out there for "us" (as in, men of European decent) to celebrate—but also to conquer. The very idea of American civilization meant destroying some of those beautiful, natural vistas to build the cities, farms, and factories of the future.
A first-of-its-kind study published Monday shows that tax havens don't just shelter the wealth of celebrities and large corporations—they also obscure the financial transactions behind environmental destruction.
Declaring that climate change is "an issue of survival" that must be confronted with urgency, young activists across the globe on Saturday kicked off three days of marches and demonstrations to pressure elected officials to "reject the corrupting monetary influence of fossil fuel executives," ban all new dirty energy developments, and safeguard the planet for both its current inhabitants and future generations.
Without a touch of irony, the EPA celebrated Black History Month by publishing a report that finds black communities face dangerously high levels of pollution. African-Americans are more likely to live near landfills and industrial plants that pollute water and air and erode quality of life. Because of this, more than half of the 9 million people living near hazardous waste sites are people of color, and black Americans are three times more likely to die from exposure to air pollutants than their white counterparts.
