“To the advocates: keep us honest and hold our feet to the fire,” said Lisa F. Garcia, the U.S. Environmental Protections Agency’s senior advisor to the administrator for environmental justice, told a crowd of activists and academics in Ann Arbor Friday. The occasion of her keynote address was a conference to celebrate the life work of Bunyan Bryant, the co-founder of the Environmental Justice program at the School of Natural Resources and Environment and a beloved mentor to many alumni. Rather than a traditional retirement party, Bryant wanted to end his career with a conference that also would chart the future of the movement and serve academics and activists alike.
The legacy and future of the field of environmental justice is the focus of a conference organized by the University of Michigan Oct. 4-6 at the Ann Arbor Sheraton Hotel. The event also celebrates the contributions to that field by Bunyan Bryant, who is retiring after a 40-year career as an activist, researcher and mentor at the School of Natural Resources and Environment.
At its meeting this month in Honduras, the Council of Ministers of the Central American Commission for Environment and Development (CCAD) named SNRE Professor Ivette Perfecto as a founding member of its new biodiversity science council. The Scientific Council on Biodiversity for the Central American Integration System will ensure the technical quality of work plans of the Regional Institute of Biodiversity, the technical body of the CCAD.
SNRE Professor Dorceta Taylor has received the HR Johnson Diversity Service Award. Taylor is a professor in the Environmental Justice field of study at SNRE and director of the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, a research and outreach center she founded and which is housed within the school. In 1992, she received a Rockefeller-Ford post-doctoral fellowship at Michigan's Poverty and the Underclass program. She joined SNRE in 1993 and is dually appointed with the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. In 2010, she was honored with the Outstanding Publication Award for Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change by the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
The research tool of spatial-data analysis is key to discovering and addressing environmental risks to children's health, Marie Lynn Miranda said Monday in giving the 11th Annual Wege Lecture on Sustainability.Miranda, the new dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, said such tools give both scientists and policy makers the ability to see obscure but possibly meaningful connections between a child's environment and his or her health. (VIEW VIDEO). The lecture drew on Miranda's more than 20 years of research on the topic, and specifically her published work about lead contamination among children.
Minority professionals have historically been underrepresented in major environmental organizations. A long-term study by SNRE Environmental Justice Professor Dorceta Taylor, published this winter in Environmental Practice, parses apart the stereotype that the field has been slow to diversify because minorities are generally disinterested in environmental careers.
Out of 10 Michigan Society Postdoctoral Fellows selected university wide this year, two—Kimberley Kinder and Elizabeth Pringle—are affiliated with the School of Natural Resources and Environment. Each is finishing their first of three years as an assistant professor and using funding from the Fellows program to pursue research projects.
The 112th Congress matches the 111th as including the largest number of Hispanic representatives in U.S. history with 31 members: two in the Senate and 29 in the House. According to recent research published by SNRE doctoral student Kerry Ard and Professor Paul Mohai, this diversification may bode very well for pro-environmental policy-making.
In the spring of 2011, Paul Mohai, SNRE professor, and Byoung-Suk Kweon, U-M research investigator, completed an extensive study that found that Michigan schools located in areas with the highest industrial air pollution levels had the lowest attendance rates—an indicator of poor health—as well as the highest proportions of students who failed to meet state educational testing standards even after controlling for factors such as school demographics, expenditures and location.That study, funded by the Kresge Foundation, was published in the journal Health Affairs and received wide media attention.
SNRE Professor Dorceta Taylor has been named chair-elect of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. The Section on Environment and Technology provides a home for about 460 sociologists interested in a range of environmental issues. Section members recently voted on new officers. Next year, Professor Taylor will become chair of the Section.