Selected Publications
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My master’s dissertation from the University of Oxford, written in collaboration with Professor Jan Banfield.
Read the publication here.
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Read the full piece on Aspen Journalism’s website:
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Originally published for The Leaflet, a UC Berkeley environmental magazine.
Eighty percent of United States citizens dwell in cities. We celebrate, socialize, despair, earn, and learn in these grey grids, dotted with green if we are lucky. An average of ninety percent of our lives are spent indoors in our homes and offices. Escapes into forests, in a Kayak on a glassy lake or in skis down a powdered peak are largely available only for the wealthy. Save for farmers and the rural few, Americans learn of nature and urban life as a dichotomy to be traversed when money flows.
2020 is tense and brimming with disaster. Climate change invites a new season of ash filled air and torched ecosystems. The houseless struggle in increasingly frigid winters, while low income urban dwellers swelter in heightened heat. Rivers muck with algae blooming from dumped agrochemicals, coral bleach and aquifers taper away. Like the urban citizens we are, we search for answers in technology, the courts, government edifices and the free market, in carbon capture, senate bills, “green” investing, solar panels, and compostable plastics. Litigation and innovation are fundamental to saving our world. Yet, environment aiding litigation and innovation are driven forward by a love of the green world, a love hard to grasp in a heavily pixelated and paved life.
Not all of us have the privilege of depositing free time in national parks, which naturally cultivate a love for nature. Thankfully, this love can be instilled by ideas as well as practice, through listening to the languages of the people indigenous to the land our cities stand on.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi environmental biology professor, ecologist, and author, writes on how the English language objectifies nature and allows for exploitation and resultantly climate crisis. English is an object-based language; only thirty percent of words are verbs. Nature is full of objects: a tree, a bay, a mountain, all in relation to the human who narrates. In comparison, seventy percent of Potawatomi is verbs. Wiikwegamaa means to be a Bay, mskwa’a means to red; verbs exist for being a hill, being a Saturday, and being a long, sandy stretch of beach.
In the Dance of Person and Place, Thomas Norton-Smith writes that in Potawatomi, as well as many other Native American languages, nouns are distinguished as animate or inanimate. Animate nouns and verbs extend the notion of personhood to the natural world; any being that relates to and affects other beings, in the way a dance affects a human or the wind rustles through trees, is categorized as animate, if not a person. Shawnee adds an a onto the end of nouns to indicate animacy, such as kweena for woman, hanikwa for squirrel and sacouka for the mineral flint. The Greek letter Theta, pronounced as the “th” sound, followed by an a designates personhood to animate beings. Wiyeeqa is the word for a human person, while skoteeqa is a fire person and nepiiqa a water person.
Water, music, mountains and fire: all beings enmeshed in networks, subject to change, act, and affect. This understanding of the natural world instilled in Native American languages has the potential to cultivate a love and respect for nature in U.S citizens today, if it was taught in schools. For in conjunction with increasing city dwellers’ access to the outdoors, knowledge of indigenous language systems melts the walls between humans and our environment, instills the truth of our relational existence, and incites the love needed to pursue and prevent further extraction and plunder. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer writes, “If a maple is an it, we take up the chain saw. If the maple is a her, we think twice.”
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Originally published by The Leaflet, a UC Berkeley environmental magazine.
Amongst millennials, progressive, and new age circles, a new buzzword has rooted itself: toxins. The market has taken hold of toxin phobia and has flooded with enticing solutions: walk into a natural foods store and hundreds of food and body products will shout at you from the shelves, promising that a wheat grass shot, turmeric elixir, face peel and superfood smoothie will cleanse and purify your body. California city streets are crowded with hot yoga and exercise studios, spinning messages that a cycling class or heated stretch will eradicate your body of pernicious chemicals.
It is clear that eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly is fundamental to human health. Yet this mindset, which asserts that products, diets and classes will ensure a pure, healthy body, is false and dangerous. First off, the focus on consumption of expensive products and classes tacitly suggests that only those who can afford this lifestyle can obtain health and longevity. Secondly, this detox consumerism conceals structural solutions for the rising toxicity of our environments.
In reality, toxins, or chemical compounds that damage bodily systems when absorbed in low concentrations, are unavoidable even for the most fastidious vegan yogis. Over eighty thousand synthetic chemicals exist in the United States environment. Over four thousand synthetic chemicals are produced in or imported into the United States every year, each in a quantity of one million pounds or more. These chemicals are integrated into our clothes, furniture, vehicles, homes, foods, soils and streets. In sum, these compounds are everywhere, and we unknowingly absorb them through our lungs, mouths, and skin. A 2019 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that, due to constant exposure to chemical containing furniture, products, foods, and water, several hundred of these four thousand chemicals exist in the average American body at all times. And this study only tested for several hundred of the eighty thousand compounds that enter this country.
Certain chemicals are more ubiquitous than others. Bisphenol A is one of the four thousand chemicals released into the United States in an excess of one million pounds per year. It is responsible for making plastics and resins hard, and is added to receipts, toilet paper, wine bottles, water bottles, and countless plastic products. Due to its omnipresence, BPA is in the majority of Americans: 93 percent of us, according to a 2005 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately, this chemical is a potent toxin: many animal studies have shown that it acts on estrogen receptors and disrupts the normal functioning of the reproductive system. For this reason, scientists posit that our constant exposure to BPA could be partially responsible for the decreasing fertility trends, lowering sperm counts, and earlier onset of puberty and menarche occurring in the United States.
It is clear that yoga, veganism, and phthalate free shampoo will not save anyone from exposure to the thousands of chemicals present in our environment. In order to truly salvage the health of present day and future Americans, we must advocate for policy change in U.S industrial chemical regulation. This means amending the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. Currently under the act, chemicals are presumed safe unless there is substantive data proving a threat to human health. This rule places the burden of proof onto consumers and communities to expose the noxious qualities of chemicals and leads to a dearth of data on the effect of these chemicals on human health. Out of the three thousand chemicals produced in annual quantities of one million pounds or greater, information on potential toxicity for humans is available for less than a third of the chemicals. In contrast to present day legislation, industries should be held responsible for proving to the public that their chemicals and products are safe. This is already the standard in EU countries.
In addition to new policy, citizens must vote into office politicians that expand the EPA’s budget so that industry can be further monitored on the types of chemicals it released into the US environment. Currently, the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention does not have the funds or staff to regulate the thousands of new chemicals produced annually by industry. With this advocacy, in a hopeful future Americans can put on a lotion without worrying if it contains endocrine disruptors, and blindly select a toothpaste from drugstore shelves and be assured it does not contain pesticides. Stockpiling kombucha won’t materialize this future, but effective policy just might.
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Originally published for The Leaflet, a UC Berkeley environmental magazine.
Post-meal, piece of plastic in your hand, you hover over the blue bin engraved with that little directional triangle. Then, maybe closing your eyes, you drop the item in the recycling, hoping for the best. This mode of “wish-cycling” is the dominant strategy of most Americans; twenty-five percent of what we throw into the bins cannot be recycled. In addition, only two of the seven types of plastic consumers purchase are turned into new materials: plastics #1, what disposable water bottles are made of, and #2, a thick, durable plastic made into items such as chairs, milk jugs, and crates. Butter tubs, yogurt containers, and clamshell packaging, while sporting the recycling symbol, are destined for incineration.
Despite movements across the United States to improve our plastic sorting and disposing, the vast majority of plastics end up in the landfill. In 2017, the year with the most recent EPA data on recycling, eight percent of plastics consumed in the U.S were recycled. Twenty-seven million tons were buried. And no, the liberal, eco-conscious East Bay is not doing better. Although many people shop second hand, bike, and religiously ponder their ecological footprint, only fifty percent of the city’s recycling is processed into new materials. The remainder is dumped into a domestic landfill in Southern California.
Crucially, the disposal of waste in this country does not equally affect us all. Landfills and other hazardous waste facilities nationwide are disproportionately located in black and brown neighborhoods. The 2007 study Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty found that beyond income, education, and other socioeconomic indicators, race is the most significant factor that determines where a hazardous waste facility is located. Communities where multiple hazardous facilities are located have even higher percentages of people of color.
And what about the eight percent of plastics which, in 2017, were recycled? These were sent to China, in a national approach to wish-cycling. In the southern, seaside Yunnan province, low wage workers in sixty thousand recycling plants would wash and melt the plastic. Yet, this mass enterprise lead to wide scale water, air, and soil pollution with dire health consequences for workers involved. A study from the Guangdong Institute of Eco-environmental and Soil Sciences found that plastic breakdown releases volatile organic compounds, which are directly inhaled by plant workers and known to cause cancer and damage the organs and central nervous system. In addition, plastic burning, a frequent informal method of plastic disposal, releases dioxin into the air, known to cause cancer, birth defects, and Parkinson’s disease.
Weary of importing the trash of high income countries at the cost of ecosystems and public health, the Chinese government passed the National Sword Policy in 2018, limiting the flow of plastics into its borders. Losing China as our trash outlet, U.S cities scramble to send off or stow away waste. Some cities send plastic to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia, where it is often burned or swept to sea. Other cities are stuffing their landfills, storing it in warehouses, or burning it themselves. National Sword policy or not, it is clear that the U.S recycling system has never been sustainable, and impacts low income people of color, nationally and globally, the most.
Let’s move beyond wish-cycling and advocate for state bans on single use plastics. We must petition senators to pass bills such as California’s proposed Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Bill, which would require companies to reduce their reliance on plastic packaging and invest in domestic recycling plants. Let’s listen to leaders of environmental justice movements and hold cities accountable for processing their own waste. For the sake of public, health, land, and oceanic systems, we must move beyond the blue bins to reach a greener future.