EHN Originals

PITTSBURGH—Many Pennsylvania school districts have detected lead and other contaminants in their drinking water and documented problems with mold and radon in school buildings—but not all of them removed the hazards, according to a new report. The report, published this month by the Pittsburgh-based health advocacy nonprofit Women for a Healthy Environment, looked at testing…

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Natural. Holistic. Eco-friendly. What do these terms mean when it comes to landscaping and lawn care? Those looking to reduce their use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers are facing an increase in greenwashing. In 2012, Scott Miracle-Gro paid criminal fines and civil penalties for pesticide law violations, including affixing misleading labels to pesticides. In 2020,…

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Deniss Martinez joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss the importance of incorporating Indigenous knowledge into wildfire management. Martinez, a PhD candidate at UC Davis in the Graduate Group in Ecology and an alum of the Agents of Change program, talks about working with the Karuk Tribe, learning about the value…

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This is an excerpt from the new book Silent Winter: Our Chemical World and Chronic Illness. Chemistry is essential to all life on Earth. Indeed, it is a combination of radiation and chemistry that caused life to form on this planet. The chemical environment found within each of our bodies is a complex orchestra that…

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Despite a revived national focus on environmental injustice, one group remains largely ignored: disabled people, who make up more than 25% of the U.S population. Even the definition of environmental justice provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doesn’t currently include disability. Yet, a recent study suggests that disability status—especially in combination with race,…

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Environmental science, and its evil twin, environmental journalism, have been around long enough to have histories. Here are some (mostly) unsung pioneers. Rachel Carson  Spanning the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh are three taxicab-yellow suspension bridges. They were built in the 1920’s and named in honor of three distinguished Pittsburghers: Baseball hero Roberto Clemente; the…

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PITTSBURGH—Residents in two Pittsburgh suburbs are demanding public hearings on a proposal to drill two new fracking wells within a mile of an elementary school. The wells, proposed by Apex Energy, would be within one mile of Level Green Elementary School and within two miles of 12,733 residents in Penn Township and Trafford Borough (about…

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Plastic pollution: we all know it’s a problem. In 2015, we produced almost 450 million tons of plastic, with that number expected to double by 2050. Think that it’s all managed? Think again: less than 10% is recycled. And every year more than 8 million tons make their way into our oceans. Plastic pollution in…

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A specific component of air particle pollution found in some common household products could be responsible for up to 900,000 premature deaths every year—10 times greater than previous estimates, according to new research published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. While the majority of these components, referred to as anthropogenic secondary organic aerosols (ASOAs), are produced…

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The 2021 report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) went well beyond the relatively sedate tones of its prior assessments. Impacts of climate change are already here, and some are “irreversible” for centuries, or even millennia, to come. The IPCC counsels that strong actions – i.e., the kind we seem unwilling to…

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