Last week, we focused on “Homo Toxicus” -- what humans have become as toxic chemicals from industrial sources have become part of our lives and built into many systems we depend on – our agricultural and food system, for example.  We also explored many reasons it is difficult to deal with toxic chemicals – because they are often slow to show effects, because of the economic and political power of the corporations that manufacture them, because of inadequate government regulations, and because of  “greenwashing” that confuses people’s perceptions, for example. You also read a short editorial that highlighted how minority and poor communities in the United States are especially impacted – resulting in many cases of environmental injustice.

 Last week, I asked you to pay special attention to  this question: Why is it so far hard to reduce environmental health threats?  Continue to take notes on this. I want you to recognize many reasons toxic chemicals and environmental injustice are difficult to deal with, requiring very inventive approaches in science, engineering, government and community organizing. 

 This week, we’ll also pay more attention to the other questions that we’ll return to throughout the course: What produces environmental health threats? How can social science research help us understand environmental health threats and injustice?   

 In the second part of the week, you’ll work in your groups on case studies, addressing a set of social science questions that can be asked in diverse settings to draw out how environmental injustice plays out. You’ll produce case studies this week, and again in weeks 3 and 4.  By the end of the course, you should be familiar enough with social science case study analysis to know when and how it can be useful to you in your later work.

 Click through here  to review the ten questions in the case study analytic framework that we will use.  Scroll down to see pointers on how to answer each question.

 In case study analysis, it is especially important to recognize who all the players are and what stakes they have.   In environmental politics, these players are often referred to as “stakeholders.” Stakeholders are individuals, groups or organizations that have an influence on or are impacted by a problem or project.  When dealing with pollution cases, for example, polluting companies are stakeholders, as are residents living near pollution sources, labor unions, hospitals, schools, businesses, and local, state and federal government agencies. In all course material and case studies, try to identity different stakeholders.  This is a very useful type of analysis in many different settings. (When my students return to visit me after graduating and working for a few years, they often tell me how often they do a quick stakeholder analysis – when working on projects, within the companies they work for, in the communities they live in, and so on).  

 Our topical focus this week – in case studies and in course material for Fast Disasters --  will be on “worst case scenarios” and what I think of as “fast disasters” – and how they produce environmental injustice.  In environmental policy, a “worse case scenario” refers to the potential for catastrophic, fast, often explosive disaster at industrial facilities that handle more than a certain (“threshold”) amount of extremely hazardous substances.  Provisions of the US Clean Air Act require companies to submit worst case scenarios for their facilities to the EPA. The information provided isn’t fully online because of concerns that it could be useful to terrorists. This makes it harder – but not impossible – for people to access and work with the information.  Citizens, activists and researchers can access the information in other ways (in designated reading rooms, for example). The reports you are assigned this week shows you this kind of research.

 I think of “worse case scenarios” as “fast disasters” to contrast them with the “slow disaster” of everyday pollution.  I also, however, want to emphasize that even though fast disasters erupt in a dramatic way – often with an explosion or gas cloud that requires emergency response -- this doesn’t mean that fast disasters occur suddenly.  All fast disasters that I have studied have a deep backstory: they were years in the making.  By studying these back stories, we can identity where things went wrong and where changes in the way things are done could prevent future disaster.  The film recommended (but not required) for this week – The Spill  (Links to an external site.)(about the 2019 Deepwater Horizon Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico) – does a particularly good job drawing out the backstory: showing a long history of negligence and poor safety culture in British Petroleum.