EHN Originals

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?” asked Tupac Shakur. I did—it’s the story of Black survival in spite of living in undesirable environmental conditions. Living conditions must be improved to ensure Black futures. As a Black woman passionate about environmental justice, this is the charge that guides…

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This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Solyndra scandal. What was already a failure of a government-backed solar panel firm became a story about cronyism in the Obama White House in late May 2011. On Sept. 4, 2009, the Obama Administration announced a $535 million loan guarantee to the up-and-coming photovoltaic maker Solyndra. Who…

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Climate change is projected to drive down seasonal extremes, which would decrease soil microbe productivity, impact plant and forest growth, and reduce carbon emissions from soil, according to a new study published in Global Change Biology. The study is the first to look at the relationship between soil microbiomes around the world and the global…

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Dr. Jamaji Nwanaji-Enwerem joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss his wide-ranging training in environmental research, medicine, and public policy, and how he plans to use all of it to make people and communities healthier. Enwerem, postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and a final-year MD/MPP candidate at…

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Over the last 25 years, the toxicity of 381 pesticides in the U.S. more than doubled for pollinators and aquatic invertebrates such as crustaceans, mayflies, and dragonflies, according to a new study. For vertebrate groups like birds, fish, and mammals, toxicity dropped. But as pesticides harmful to vertebrates were phased out, this made way for…

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As North Carolina heads into another hurricane season, some residents and organizations fear the stormy season will again flood communities with hog waste. The state’s hog waste management works by funneling feces, urine, and blood from hog farms into massive open waste lagoons, which let off foul odors and methane gas. When the lagoons become…

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Agents of Change founder and director Dr. Ami Zota sat down with Dr. Shanna Swan and Annie Hoang to discuss fertility, environmental chemicals, and reproductive justice. Swan, a professor of environmental medicine and public health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, recently published Count Down: How Our Modern…

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When climatologists started standardizing global weather data about 100 years ago, they didn’t know that heat-trapping greenhouse gases were already pushing the planet’s climate inexorably in one direction, off the charts of human experience.  But people like to measure things in understandable segments, so, based on the data it had at the time, the World…

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Americans have learned a lot about the concept of denial in recent years. COVID-19 denial, where the horrible facts of a global body count of three million, including an American COVID death toll that’s nearly twice the U. S. combat toll from World War II. That fact hasn’t impressed some who think the pandemic is…

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Reflecting on her childhood, Tucson, Ariz., Mayor Regina Romero points to her father as the figure who lit an environmentalist fire within her. Any chance he’d get, Romero’s father would take his wife and six kids to an 800-acre ranch in the Sierra Madre mountain range of Sonora, where they learned how to ride horses,…

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