Sociology

Environmental Justice For All

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Environmental Justice For All Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/01/2019 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

Teresa DeAnda near her home in Earlimart, Calif., where a pesticide drift incident sickened more than 250 people.

Low-income and minority families still bear the brunt of toxic pollutants. Jill Harrison wants to know why.

Teresa DeAnda had just gathered her family for dinner in the backyard of her modest home in California’s Central Valley when her eyes and throat began to burn.

At first, she joked that her homemade salsa must be too spicy.

Then things took a serious turn.

All across the dusty farm community of Earlimart, residents began to fall ill that warm evening in November 1999. Some vomited or felt short of breath. Many called 911.

“People were scared,” said ��񱦵� sociologist Jill Harrison. “No one knew what was happening.”

By the time Harrison interviewed DeAnda two years later as part of her doctoral research, the mystery had been solved: Earlimart residents, including DeAnda, had been exposed to a toxic fog of metam sodium, an agricultural pesticide that had drifted into town after application on a nearby field. Ever since, the working-class, largely Latino community had been afflicted by a wave of miscarriages, cancer diagnoses, asthma and birth defects.

While it’s impossible to say how much that night’s exposure contributed to these health outcomes, DeAnda herself ultimately died, at age 55, of liver cancer.

“That experience really changed me,” said Harrison, looking at a photo of herself and DeAnda. “It made me realize that, not withstanding all the accomplishments made in terms of wilderness protection and improving air and water quality, there are still massive pockets of extraordinary environmental harm persisting in the United States. And race and class play a huge part in that.”

Since then, Harrison has traveled the country interviewing regulators, environmental justice workers, activists and industry stakeholders, asking this: Why, as the broader environmental movement has flourished, do people of color and the poor still face disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards?

Some people point fingers at industry. Others blame anti-regulatory conservatives.

Through her research, Harrison — who studies the cultural roots of environmental inequality — has pulled the curtain back on an uncomfortable truth: Well-meaning progressives working to solve environmental problems sometimes overlook, even exacerbate, the unique challenges facing vulnerable communities.

“A lot of people are trying to do the right thing for the environment,” she said. “But sometimes doing the right thing for you doesn’t necessarily help those most affected by the problem.”

Warren County to Flint

In 1994, President Bill Clinton took an important step toward environmental justice by signing an executive order instructing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to implement policies to “achieve environmental protection for all communities.”

By then, people of color had been fighting for this for decades.

In an iconic 1982 battle, Warren County, N.C., residents lay down in front of a line of dump trucks delivering 60,000 tons of contaminated soil to the edge of a local neighborhood. Years earlier, truckers had been caught unlawfully disposing of oil laden with highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyl (PCBs), dumping it along the side of North Carolina highways. The state, with the EPA’s blessing, devised a plan to scrape it up and create a special landfill for it. Warren County residents saw it as no coincidence that their mostly black community, the poorest in the state, was selected for the site.

When the trucks arrived in September 1982, they met with hundreds of protesters. The delivery went ahead — but the protesters birthed a movement.

Jill Harrison

Yet, Harrison said, environmental racism persists.

In 2014, news broke that residents of Flint, Mich., — which is mostly black and largely poor — had lead-contaminated drinking water.

In 2016, protesters showed up in force in Western North Dakota to decry the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline, which Native Americans viewed as a threat to their ancient burial grounds and water supplies.

More recently, studies have shown that Hispanics experience double the exposure to industrial chemicals like chlorine than whites do, and Latino school children are twice as likely as whites to go to schools near heavy pesticide use.

In 2018, the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment published a study showing that poor people and people of color are exposed to as much as 1.5 times more airborne pollutants, often from factories, than their white counterparts.

“There has been a lot of attention paid to recycling and saving the redwoods,” Harrison said. “But the lived experiences of Indigenous people, people of color, and those who live in poverty have not been a focus of the broader environmental movement. I want to honor the good work that’s been done by the environmental movement while pointing out the gaps.”

“The lived experiences of Indigenous people, people of color, and those who live in poverty have not been a focus of the broader environmental movement.”

Trouble at Home

Harrison grew up in a middle-class white family in Southern California in the 1980s. As an undergraduate in development studies at the University of California-Berkeley, she initially set her sights on addressing social inequalities in Central America. Then she heard about pesticide drift.

“My attention had been so focused on other countries that I hadn’t even considered the inequality and suffering going on in my own state,” she said.

During her first interviews with DeAnda, a non-confrontational mother-and-grandmother-turned-environmental activist, Harrison listened in disbelief about that day in 1999.

A nearby farm had used sprinklers to douse the ground with the legal but toxic fumigant, assuming it would soak in. But the day was warmer and windier than expected. A tainted fog began to lift and drift.

At least 250 residents fell ill. Dozens went to the hospital, racking up bills that would take years to pay.

Some, including children and elderly women, were rounded up by emergency responders, taken to a school playground, told to strip down to their undergarments and hosed down before TV cameras.

California fined the applicator $150,000. Metam sodium remains in use today.

“This never would have happened this way in Beverly Hills,” said Harrison.

Justice Redefined

While environmentalists concerned about pesticides often prioritize buying and eating organically grown food (which is grown without pesticides but involves only about 1% of farmland), this step alone has done little to help low-income agricultural communities like Earlimart avoid pesticide drift, Harrison’s research suggests.

She advocates for pesticide buffer zones around schools and neighborhoods, greater restrictions on which pesticides can be used and how, and providing farm neighbors with drift catchers, small devices for monitoring the air for pesticide residue.

“Jill seems to be the only person studying this at all. Period,” said Emily Marquez, a staff scientist with the Berkeley-based Pesticide Action Network, which works to counter pesticide drift. “These frontline communities already know they’re being poisoned, but the general public isn’t aware.”

As far as other pollutants go, Harrison believes that, first and foremost, existing regulations should be strengthened to reduce the amount of environmental hazards in use. Regulations could also be more evenly enforced, assuring that industries in underprivileged areas are monitored and penalized as severely as those in affluent communities. And new regulations could make it harder for new polluters to move into places already overburdened with them.

And, as Harrison discusses in her new book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies, the culture inside environmental regulatory agencies could be improved.

“Staff who have been tasked with trying to roll out environmental justice reforms face a lot of push-back from their own coworkers and, importantly, this pushback endures from one administration to the next,” said Harrison, who over the past eight years interviewed nearly 100 state and federal environmental regulatory agency employees.

Staff tasked with leading environmental justice reforms told her stories of eye-rolls and disinterest, and of complaints that considering environmental justice issues meant “just another box to check.”

“We need to reform regulatory practice so that reducing environmental inequalities is a top priority of government agencies,” Harrison said.

Government reform aside, she hopes her work will help people look beyond their own grocery cart or recycling bin, and reframe their notion of a “healthy environment.”

“Environmental justice requires fighting for things that might not benefit you directly,” she said, “and caring about people who live in places that might be very different from where you live.”

Photos @Getty Images/ Bettmann; @Getty Images/ Pacific Press (Flint); Tracy Perkins (top image)

Low-income and minority families still bear the brunt of toxic pollutants. Jill Harrison wants to know why.

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Lone Twin: A True Story of Loss and Found

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 17:23:34 +0000

Lone Twin: A True Story of Loss and Found Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/20/2019 - 11:23

by Laurel Richardson (PhDSoc'62)
(Brill/Sense, 140 pages; 2019)

Buy the Book

On her death bed, Laurel Richardson’s sister whispers a deep family secret to her. Those whispered words send the famed sociologist and author on a personal exploration of a lifetime. Lone Twin: A True Story of Loss and Found is an extraordinary story of a search for identity, wholeness, and forgiveness. Grounded in the cultures of mid-Twentieth Century Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, Lone Twin weaves the personal with the social, cultural, and political. Richardson shares fascinating, resonant, and humorous stories about her relationships with a suicidal poet, a Swedish fencer, a budding scientist, a Puerto Rican family, a Mafia family, her Russian Jewish and Irish Catholic family, and her famous cousin, Laura Foreman. Her story is at once singular and plural. As Richardson shares her journey towards wholeness and forgiveness, readers are invited to consider their own journeys and ask: Is there something missing in my life? How do I justify my existence? Lone Twin is an exquisitely written book about identity, the search for people who understand us, and the ties that bind. This outstanding example of literary sociology can be used as supplemental reading in a range of courses in American studies, gender studies, social science, child development, and creative writing. It can be read entirely for pleasure and is a great choice for book clubs. An appendix offers discussion questions, projects, and creative writing exercises.

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The Gang Paradox: Inequalities and Miracles on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 20:50:56 +0000

The Gang Paradox: Inequalities and Miracles on the U.S.-Mexico Border Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/10/2018 - 14:50

By Robert J. Duran (PhDSoc’06)

(Columbia University Press, 320 pages; 2018)

Buy the Book

The areas along the U.S.-Mexico border are commonly portrayed as a hotspot for gang activity, drug trafficking, and violence. Yet when Robert J. Durán conducted almost a decade’s worth of ethnographic research in border towns between El Paso, Texas, and southern New Mexico—a region notorious for gang activity, according to federal officials—he found significantly less gang membership and activity than common fearmongering claims would have us believe. Instead, he witnessed how the gang label was used to criminalize youth of Mexican descent—to justify the overrepresentation of Latinos in the justice system, the implementation of punitive practices in the school system, and the request for additional resources by law enforcement.

In The Gang Paradox, Durán analyzes the impact of deportation, incarceration, and racialized perceptions of criminality on Latino families and youth along the border. He draws on ethnography, archival research, official data sources, and interviews with practitioners and community members to present a compelling portrait of Latino residents’ struggles amid deep structural disadvantages. Durán, himself a former gang member, offers keen insights into youth experience with schools, juvenile probation, and law enforcement. The Gang Paradox is a powerful community study that sheds new light on intertwined criminalization and racialization, with policy relevance toward issues of gangs, juvenile delinquency, and the lack of resources in border regions.

Robert J. Durán is associate professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Gang Life in Two Cities: An Insider’s Journey (Columbia, 2013).

Inequalities and Miracles on the U.S.-Mexico Border

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Inquiry: Lori Peek

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Dec 2017 21:00:00 +0000

Inquiry: Lori Peek Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/01/2017 - 14:00

Lauren Price

Natural Hazards

Lori Peek (PhDSoc’05), a ��񱦵� sociology professor, directs the university’s Natural Hazards Center.

Floods, hurricanes and wildfires: 2017 has been devastating in the U.S. Have you been unusually busy?

Yes. We have been compiling resources for community members, stakeholders and others to help educate and inform as these disasters are unfolding. We also run a quick-response grant program that helps deploy researchers into the field so they can gather data and launch longer-term studies. There have been a lot of inquiries from media outlets.

What sparked your interest in studying the sociology of hazards and disasters?

I arrived as a new graduate student at CU in 1999 and had the incredible fortune to be hired as the graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center. I fell in love with the possibility of taking social scientific knowledge and applying it for the betterment of humanity.

Have you ever directly experienced a natural disaster?

No, but when I was a child — I grew up in rural eastern Kansas — my grandparents’ house was hit by a tornado and their barn was destroyed and their house was badly damaged. Fortunately, they were fine. I still have such vivid memories of my three brothers and my parents and I going down into the cellar outside of our house when tornado warnings would be issued.

Your book with Alice Fothergill (PhDSoc’01), Children of Katrina, focuses on the long-term effects of Hurricane Katrina on children. What are they?

Something Katrina really taught us is that the most destructive and disruptive disasters can have truly life-altering consequences for children. When children experience life threat or multiple displacements, these sorts of things can disrupt education, peer networks and family networks and can have long-standing implications for their health, development and well-being.

Has the U.S. made progress since Katrina on hurricane recovery?

While we have improved in terms of our emergency response, we have continued to build and develop in areas that are subject to natural hazards. If we don’t mitigate risk, we’re going to continue to see these bigger disasters. We must keep our eye on the prize and work on reducing the risks we face, which means building smarter, more sustainably and with a climate-resilient framework so we don’t see more mega-catastrophes.

Has there been an increase in natural disasters, or are more people just living in vulnerable areas?

The number of reported natural disasters in the U.S. has tripled over the last 20 years. Some of the explanations for the increase are related to climatic changes, population growth and unsustainable development in hazardous areas. There is no one simple answer for why we are seeing bigger disasters, but we must understand these complex causes if we ever hope to reduce them.

Are there positives that have come out of increased media coverage?

What I’ve found most positive and heartening is that there has been a lot more evidence-informed reporting, really drawing on the expert knowledge that is out there. In addition, leaders have come on TV and been doing something that we recommend, which is to provide actionable information. It is not effective to just say: ‘A hurricane is coming, get out of the way.’ It is important to offer concrete steps people can take in light of their social context.

Are there certain regions in the U.S. that are more vulnerable to disasters?

There is no place that doesn’t have some hazards risk. However, some places have much higher exposure, and some hazards are much more frequent and severe. New Orleans, Miami, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston are what we call disaster hotspots, because they have large concentrations of people and infrastructure in highly hazard prone regions.

What is the most important thing people around the country need to learn from our recent natural disasters?

Disasters of this magnitude are not inevitable. There is a possibility to reduce the risk we are all facing, but that is going to take time, resources, sound science, leadership, focused attention and collective action.

Condensed and edited.

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

Lori Peek, a ��񱦵� sociology professor, directs the university’s Natural Hazards Center.

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Behind the Bars

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 08:30:01 +0000

Behind the Bars Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 02:30

Lisa Marshall

A CU professor goes inside America's prisons to study gang life.

Seated inside a windowless, soundproof room at the county jail in Fresno, Calif., David Pyrooz was getting nervous.

Across from him sat a gang member awaiting trial for murder, his slick-bald head tattooed with a devil’s horn above each temple. His eyes were darting, a sign that — as Pyrooz’s professors had warned — the interviewee might be growing impatient.

Pyrooz, then a 22-year-old criminology student, glanced at the button on the wall he’d been instructed to press in case of trouble.

The inmate spoke: “You know, you have to hold that button for two seconds before someone will come.”

David Pyrooz, assistant professor of sociology

“I remember thinking ‘A lot can happen in two seconds,’” Pyrooz said. He paused, reestablished eye contact and asked the next question.

Fast forward 12 years and Pyrooz, an assistant professor of sociology at ��񱦵�, has interviewed hundreds of gang members in correctional facilities and on the streets, searching for insight into how some people manage to avoid or escape what he calls “the snare” of gang life, while others succumb to it and suffer lifelong consequences.

His research comes at a time when 33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the United States and gang violence — though down from its 1990s peak — still plagues cities like Denver and Chicago, where 50 percent of homicides are gang-related. The Trump administration has named one gang, MS-13, “one of the gravest threats to American public safety.”

Pyrooz, with several high-profile papers newly published and the largest-ever study of imprisoned gang members in the works, hopes his research can prevent youth from joining gangs and help veteran members escape. His colleagues say the work could also shed light on the power of groupthink and its hold over all of us.

“I have always been fascinated by social groups whose collective power is greater than the sum of their individual parts,” said Pyrooz, a married father of two young children. “We all like to think our accomplishments come from individual merit, but so much of our success is driven by the people in our environment. If it weren’t for the gang, things might have turned out differently for a lot of these guys.”

Dodging the Snare

Pyrooz grew up in California in the 1990s, splitting his time between his dad’s house in the Bay Area, where the Norteno gang ruled, and his mom’s house in the Central Valley, Sureno turf.

By 6th grade, he was noticing groups hanging out by their cars, rap music booming, gang signs flashing. Roadside buildings were emblazoned with graffiti.

By high school, some of his friends were in gangs.

33,000 violent gangs with 1.4 million members are active in the U.S.

Instead, he made salutatorian and landed a scholarship to California State University, where he volunteered to help a criminology professor with research at the local jail. Those first interviews fed his curiosity about what makes “us” and “them” so different — or whether we really are.

“I was struck by how, in many ways, these guys behind bars were not much different than me or my friends,” Pyrooz said. “They just got caught doing something, and once they got into that web that is the criminal justice system, they had a hard time getting out.”

Later, during doctoral studies at Arizona State University, Pyrooz explored a question few others had: How does joining a gang as a teen — as 8 percent of U.S. adolescents do — impact life later on for the gang member?

He found sobering answers: Joiners were 30 percent less likely to earn a high school diploma, 60 percent less likely to earn a college degree, more likely to be unemployed as an adult and lose tens of thousands of dollars in potential earnings — and 100 times more likely to die by homicide.

One subsequent study, subsidized by the Google Ideas think tank, explored how gangs use the Internet. (To brag about their exploits and keep tabs on other members, but generally not for recruitment, it found.) Another looked at similarities between gang members and domestic terrorists (not many, he found).

The closest of the seven prisons near David Pyrooz's old office was a 10-minute walk. He would often watch the newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do.

“What David has done that few others have is place gang membership in the context of what came before it and after it,” said Scott Decker, foundation professor of criminology at ASU. “That kind of understanding is critical when it comes to thinking about how to address this problem.”

The Art of the Interview

Before arriving at CU in 2015, Pyrooz taught at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, a.k.a. “Prison City U.S.A.,” because of its seven correctional facilities.

The closest was a 10-minute walk from his office. He’d often watch newly released inmates file out, ready to start a new life, and wonder how they would do.

There, he and Decker embarked on a monumental project. They began interviewing 800 inmates, half gang members, half not, 48 hours before they were released, then followed up with them 30 days and nine months later.

The project, still going, has been both gratifying and emotionally taxing, Pyrooz said.

He begins each interview by shaking the inmate’s hand, a gesture that — for someone who has not experienced human touch for months — can go a long way toward establishing trust and rapport. He breaks the ice with a friendly question: What are you most looking forward to eating when you get out?

“The number one thing I want to do is treat them as another human being, not a prisoner,” he said.

Then the stories pour out: A six-figure-salary businessman who landed in prison for a white-collar crime and joined the Mexican mafia for protection. A member of a motorcycle gang who got in trouble for fighting, landed in jail and took up with the Aryan Brotherhood. A young man who, at 18, fell in love with a 16-year-old girl. When the relationship went sour, her mom called the police. He was charged with statutory rape, went to prison, joined a gang, and never left.

Especially hard to hear are the stories of fathers who missed their children’s lives and of inmates in solitary confinement, whom Pyrooz talks with through a mesh wall.

“You just see a lot of lost potential,” he said. “You go home at night wondering what these guys might have been doing if they weren’t behind those bars. You also wonder: Are they really ready to get out?”

The Takeaways

His research has already produced some key conclusions.

First, it’s important to keep kids out of gangs, as 90 percent of juvenile crimes are committed in groups, and membership’s long-term consequences are grave.

Second, the way kids spend their time, and with whom, matters.

“Working to keep kids busy and monitor their activities, particularly the friends with whom they hang out, along with instilling in children good moral values and coping skills, are the ways in which we can keep youth out of gangs,” said Pyrooz, with a nod to his own attentive parents.

You see a lot of lost potential.

Many inmates he’s interviewed ultimately left their gangs, pulled away by the attractions of other groups comprised of wives or girlfriends, children and grandchildren, employers and friends.

“The stereotype is that these guys are violent predators with zero empathy for other people,” Pyrooz said. “Some of that is true, they have done some very bad stuff. But they still love their kids and want to see their families be successful. If you look at them at one point in time, they may look like the worst person out there, but even that person can change.”

Photos by Getty Images/Jan Sochor/CON

A CU professor goes inside America's prisons to study gang life.

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A Yogi in the Classroom

Anonymous — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 17:28:00 +0000

A Yogi in the Classroom Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/01/2016 - 11:28

Christie Sounart

Inquiry: Lori Hunter

In spring 2016 ��񱦵� sociologist Lori Hunter introduced a course on the sociology of yoga. Here she discusses the commercialization of yoga in the U.S., its cultural impact and mastering the art of mindfulness.

What motivated you to create a class on yoga and society?

I’ve long been a committed yoga practitioner and, about two years ago, became certified to be a yoga teacher. It was during this training that I began thinking about a sociology course on yoga as practiced in our modern culture. As a sociologist, I always look at the world around us with a critical lens and I’d thought about the obvious increase in the commercialization of yoga in our culture — with the proliferation of chain studios, increasingly high-priced yoga ‘gear’ and more athletic companies getting into the yoga game. During teacher training I realized my teaching expertise isn’t actually in the yoga classroom, it’s in the sociology classroom. I’ve been teaching sociology for more than 20 years.

Much of your class focused on how yoga has manifested in the West. What should we know about yoga in the U.S. today?

There is so much about yoga in the U.S. today that is fascinating! For example, it’s widely practiced, female-dominated, privileged and crosses age boundaries. Yoga is now over a $10 billion industry. All of these facts raise questions related to its appeal — Why so popular? Is it a respite from our busy lives? — its gendered nature — Do modern male gender roles make yoga less appealing for men? — and its privilege — In what ways is this privilege perpetuated by commercialization? One discussion point we visited a lot in class relates to authenticity. Since yoga in modern Western culture emerged primarily as a physical fitness pursuit, is this version of yoga ‘authentic’? Does it matter? It’s also interesting to me that the physical practice is what comes to mind when people hear/use the word ‘yoga’ — although yoga actually encompasses much more.

Your students kept a yoga journal throughout the course. What sort of things did they start to notice in their yoga practices?

All of the students kept journals, although they didn’t necessarily engage in a physical practice like we think of as ‘yoga.’ Yoga is historically an ‘eight-limbed’ practice which includes ‘asana’ — the physical practice our culture mostly considers ‘yoga’— but yoga is broader and includes compassion, truthfulness, contentment — in general, mindfulness. I asked students to spend at least five minutes daily, six days a week, engaged in a mindfulness activity. For many students, this simply meant taking off their headphones while walking to class to be more attentive to their surroundings. For some students who practice yoga in studios, they took notice of the demographics of their fellow students, what they were wearing, and they began reflecting on the privilege associated with studio practice — for instance, the price of memberships. All of these insights reflect students’ use of critical thinking skills to reflect on the world around them. To be honest, the students were the most engaged of any class I’ve taught during my time at ��񱦵�!

Will you teach the course again?

Possibly in spring 2017.

How often do you practice yoga?

My practice has been up and down over the past decade due to personal circumstances — but at the most, I practiced five days a week, although I’ve also had months where I’ve not practiced at all. Typically, I try to practice two to three times weekly in a studio and at least another day at home.

What role does yoga play in your personal life?

I’m fortunate to travel a lot for work, as my research on climate change, migration and natural resource-based livelihoods is of interest and importance to a variety of organizations across the globe. During my travels, I often try to practice yoga at local studios to get a flavor for local culture and differences (and similarities) in yoga practices across contexts.

What other things are you interested in?

I’m also a gardener, and I find tremendous joy in crafting lovely combinations of colors and textures in my flower beds, and growing yummy produce in my fruit and vegetable beds. I have a great raspberry patch!

Condensed and edited by Christie Sounart (Jour’12).

Photo by Glenn Asakawa

A CU scholar talks about the sociology of yoga.

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