Rural communities are essential to food production in the United States. Despite this, they rarely receive the benefits of this food commensurate with their investments in this system. Elders in rural communities are incredibly overlooked in food access interventions and consistently benefit the least from the food they help grow. This oversight makes rural elders particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. The current food system disconnects elders from the food grown in their communities and, therefore, must be transformed to prioritize care for these vulnerable populations.
Pollution from coal-fired power plants harms human health. Low-income neighborhoods are often the most exposed to coal impacts. New research highlights closing power plants can improve children’s health and performance in school.
While many toys still offer benefits after normal wear and tear, 80 percent end up in landfills. Often controversial for the direct risks posed to humans, toys also pose a risk to the environment in their design, production, and life cycle.
A cultural shift away from animal consumption has been met with a counter-cultural glorification of meat. These two societal trends reflect a redrawing of moral boundaries – the linespeople draw to assert moral status. An interdisciplinary approach threading philosophical, psychological, and sociological perspectives offers unique insight to understand the formation and evolution of moral boundaries in meat consumption.
Achieving more equitable and sustainable food systems is not just realized by larger systems transformation. Women practice everyday provisioning activities that empower communities and free them from dependencies on market economies.
When discussing climate change, media and news outlets often focus on its negative impacts and the threats it poses. Current research reveals that this approach not only fails to promote more pro-environmental behavior, but it may also heighten racist attitudes. These findings highlight the importance of discussing global warming in a way that does not solely focus on its negative consequences, but also provides actionable suggestions on how to tackle climate change.
U.S. territories face many environmental challenges, but research on environmental injustice often neglects these locations.A new study shows that the burdens of environmental crimesinequitably fall on these islands and the vulnerable people that live there.
The socio-cultural harm of manmade environmental disasters on Native American communities is difficult to quantify. However, recent Native-led research demonstrates that quantifying this harm is crucial.
Solar geoengineering– a technology that reflects incoming sunlight back into space –has gainedattention as a potentialsolution for preventingglobal temperature rise and reducingthe risk of the worst global warming impacts. Recent research shows thatsolar geoengineering has the capacity to immediately cool the atmosphere, but also calls attention to the fact that it can beextremely controversial and excessively risky.