Covid-19 and Relating News

This quarter, students in ENVS 467: Power, Privilege, and the Environment are meeting weekly in discussion pods as a way to build connections while physically distancing. This week, the pods talked about news articles related to environmental justice.  

 

News Roundup: Covid-19 

Article: My Mother is Getting Busy Ready to Die by LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant

In the midst of a global pandemic, healthcare and insurance is on most people’s minds. The article My Mother is Getting Busy Ready to Die, a black woman is denied from medicaid and is going to die from liver disease and kidney failure.  She, “is the body of all the black people at the bottom of the pandemic. No insurance though not for lack of trying” says LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant. She represents the idea of intersectionality and will die due to the racist ideologies this country practices, “this has nothing to do with Covid-19” (Manigault-Bryant, 2020). 

 

Article: COVID-19 Pandemic Opens Possibilities for Positive Change: Turning Pain into Progress by Emma Lockridge

“Our health, lives, wealth and comfort are sacrificed so that our society can function in what was once described as normal.”

A poignant personal account of the impacts of Covid-19 in African American communities in Detroit. The author’s community of majority African Americans is located near 29 facilities which pump all sorts of toxic chemicals into the air. This has made them especially vulnerable to Covid-19, a pattern which has been repeated across the country, leading to a disproportionate number of deaths in majority African American communities. The author acknowledges in these troubling times that although pollution is decreasing in many areas, creating as little sparks of hope, we cannot go back to the way we were living previously. We need to learn to create a new normal in the hopes that something like this will never happen again, and disproportionately affect struggling minorities.

 

Article: ‘Extinct’ Toad Rediscovery Offers Hope Amid Amphibian Apocalypse by Jason Bittle

As our climate is under continual change, the survival of threatened species looks bleak. Could there be hope found in these dark times? One small frog has reappeared after its assumed extinction for 30 years.  Like the Corona virus, much testing needs to be done to confirm a victory, but life for this small frog looks like it is far from over.

 

Article: The Dangerous Morality Behind the “Open It Up” Movement by Daniel Burke

As lock-downs affect a rising share of the global and US population, people are divided by decision-making about re-opening the economy and the states. Many of utilitarian thoughts are provoking some groups of people this time – whether ‘letting a minority suffer to save the majority’ is a moral decision. Lives are important, but livelihoods are also critical, and some people are worrying if the curing pandemic may get worse than the disease. Italy has made a decision, allowing ventilators to people under 60 as they are facing resource scarcity. People, seeing a big problem with utilitarianism, criticize, saying that re-opening the economy means that we are putting the vulnerable, like front-line workers, children, and minorities, in a harder position and almost letting them sacrifice for the majority.

 

Article: As Coronavirus Deepens Inequality, Inequality Worsens Its Spread by Patrick Sharkey

When people who are already struggling are faced with a natural disaster like a pandemic, and when there is no equitable healthcare system to support them, it creates a positive feedback loop. Expensive access to health care increases poverty which leads to greater risk of being affected by COVID. Healthcare should be for everyone, not just for those who can afford it. 

“The disease has demolished spatial barricades and party lines; it may force us to come together.”-Patrick Sharkey 

People have been sliding into the DM’s of the government during COVID-19, but minoritized people have been left on read. This article sheds light on the history of segregation in America in order to solve disaster. The irony of COVID-19 is the only way to solve the disaster of Covid-19 is to separate. What we are seeing right now is, once this separation no longer serves the elitist interest, they start protesting. Will we, the American people, reply to those we have left on read by taking advantage of this strange time to come together by staying apart?

 

Article: Reopening California by Jill Cowan

This article outlines California’s plans to reopen the state in 4 stages. When businesses and schools do begin to reopen, many modifications must be made. “If our behavior radically changes, we risk the framework we’re advancing,” says Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

A new nationwide study done by researchers at Harvard University found a clear link between long-term air pollution exposure and death rates of Covid-19 cases. This means that people that experience long term exposure to polluted air are at a higher risk of dying of Covid-19, and that someone who has lived in a polluted area for more than a decade is 15% more likely to die from the illness. Disproportionate exposure to pollutants is already an environmental injustice, but this injustice is intensified by the disproportionate death rates due to pollution exposure. While the New York Times article that reported on the study doesn’t explicitly link these findings to environmental justice, we can assume that some communities are impacted more than others by this newfound risk factor.