Robert D. Bullard and the Fight for Environmental Justice    by Giovanna Rudis   Imagine walking outside your home into a cloud of chemicals so thick, you can smell them in the air. Residents within the fifth district of Louisiana, otherwise known as Cancer Alley, are experiencing higher concentrations of pollution from waste plants than any other place in the U.S. Robert Taylor, a resident of a town called Reserve that lies within this district refers to it as the cancer capital of the world: “But we know people in this little town are suffering at a cancer rate that’s 700 to 800 times that of the nation.”  Environmental racism, in which pollution is targeted towards minority communities, has been confronted at the intersection of the environmental justice and civil rights movements. Before 1987, environmental racism was not a familiar term, and very little was publicly known about the oppressive living conditions in minority communities in the Southern U....

Fang Lizhi and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests by Ho Tsz Ching Who was the man the Chinese government blamed for inciting the June 4th protests? You may think he was a firebrand or a revolutionary, but he was actually an astrophysicist—and a mild-mannered one at that. So how did an astrophysicist get scapegoated for causing one of the world’s most famous protests, which led to one of the world’s most infamous massacres?  Fang Lizhi was born in Beijing on February 12, 1936, during a turbulent time in Chinese history. His childhood was framed by the Second Sino-Japanese War, his brother’s death, his own miraculous recovery from illness, and the rekindling of the Chinese Civil War. Yet he had as normal a childhood as one could manage to have – he tinkered with radios for fun, went to school, then Peking University, and eventually graduated with a degree in physics into a China that looked very different from the one he had been born into. This was now Mao‘s “New China“.  He wa...