Articles by Kate Sheppard

Tour calls attention to low-income communities of color facing environmental challenges

This week, environmental justice activists are travelling the country with the Environmental Justice For All Tour to call national attention to sites of ecological and public-health concern in the nation's poorest communities.

Stops include both major metropolitan and rural areas, most of which are communities of color and low-income communities disproportionately affected by toxic contamination in their air, water, and soil.

In San Jose, Calif., employees toil in carcinogen-laden factories. In Dickson, Tenn., waste from a nearby landfill seeps into a community's wells. And in Syracuse, N.Y., a woman stands up to a city government that would evict her in order build a sewage treatment facility.

The tour allows these folks to tell their stories, many of which are absent from the conversation of the mainstream environmental movement.

The tour is the result of the efforts of more than 70 environmental-justice groups around the nation. It includes three tour groups -- in the northeast, south, and west -- and is intended to provide social and political forums for citizens to tell their stories. Monday, Oct. 2, is meant to be a lobbying day in Washington, D.C., where the participants speak to representatives about what they have witnessed on the tour.

The Times a bit too flowery on China’s growing rose industry

China is positioning itself to take the lead in world rose production. Government leaders hope investing in the flower industry will bring capital and jobs to southwestern China, and florists in the U.S. see it as an opportunity to obtain cheaper products, thereby increasing profits.

Workers in the burgeoning rose industry are mostly young women, earning an average of $25 per month, which the NYT article at least points out. Missing from the piece, though, is any thought to the health, labor, and environmental effects of the flower industry, or to how China's flower project could engage with fairer standards.

Lousiana spends half a mil beautifying private golf course

According to a report in today's Times-Picayune, the state of Louisiana has pledged half a million dollars to replace trees on a private golf course damaged by Hurricane Katrina last year.

The expenditure was buried in the budget state legislators passed last spring, and is listed as a "forestry program for the planting of trees and other native plants." This comes after the state spent $13 million to subsidize the construction of the Tournament Players Club in the first place.

Scientists unearth 3.3-million-year-old toddler

Meant to get this one up yesterday but failed. Anyhoo, scientists are hailing the recent unearthing of a fossilized human-like child in Ethiopia.

The child, estimated to have been about three years old at the time of her death about 3.3 million years ago, is from the Australopithecus afarensis species. This important human ancestor is the same species as "Lucy," the adult skeleton found in the same region in 1974.