Environmental Health

Environmental health covers the exposures that no individual can opt out of. You can choose what you eat; you cannot choose the air on your block, the lead in your building's pipes, the heat in an apartment without cooling, or what the plant upstream discharges. Those exposures are decided collectively, through permits, zoning, budgets, and enforcement, which makes them a policy subject as much as a scientific one.

The exposures are unevenly distributed, and not by accident. Industrial facilities, highways, waste sites, and rail yards were sited where land was cheap and political resistance was weakest, which in practice meant low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Decades later the asthma rates, the cancer clusters, and the emergency department visits during heat waves follow the same map. This is the ground the environmental justice movement was built on.

Several of these exposures are moving in the wrong direction. Extreme heat is now a leading weather-related cause of death, and its burden falls on outdoor workers, older adults, and neighborhoods with less tree canopy and more asphalt. Wildfire smoke has made air quality a health issue thousands of miles from any fire. Flooding drives mold, displacement, and contamination. Agricultural runoff and nitrates affect drinking water in farm states, including for private wells that no public system tests.

The interventions are mostly infrastructural and boring in the best way: replacing service lines, remediating lead paint, planting shade, filtering air in schools, cooling centers with transportation to them, monitoring that is dense enough to see a neighborhood rather than a county, and enforcement that has consequences. Community-collected data has repeatedly been the thing that forced a regulator to look.

These conversations bring in environmental health researchers, regulators, organizers, and residents who noticed something in their own neighborhood and went looking for the cause.