Ishimure Michiko and Environmental Justice in Japan by Ho Tsz Ching On March 11 th , 2011, a tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, causing the deadliest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. The inquiries that followed stressed the unexpectedness of the situation – a perfect confluence of earthquake, tsunami, and reactor meltdown that no one could have prepared for. However true this may be from a nuclear engineering or contingency planning perspective; it is not true from the lens of environmental justice. From local issues like the location of the plant and its lax safety procedures, to policy issues like the Japanese government’s push for a peaceful nuclear future, these human failings caused the plant to be built where it was built and maintained how it was maintained. This video is not about Fukushima. It is about how these same human failings caused another environmental disaster in the past, and whether they will return to haunt Japan once more. ...

  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....