Social Justice and Environmental Justice Is an Easy Blend For Us: You Can't Have One Without the Other-An Interview With CEEJ

Reverend James Black and his daughter, Joi Black-Tate, are key members of the Center for Environmental and Economic Justice team that served as a community hub for risk dissemination and clinical cohort management during the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health risks related to the Macondo Spill effort to characterize risk from the Deepwater Horizon well explosion and crude oil spill. In this interview, Reverend James Black and Ms. Black-Tate discuss how their community in Biloxi, Mississippi, was impacted by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and connect this catastrophe to their previous experiences with collaborative Environmental Protection Agency projects measuring dioxin in "Back Bay Biloxi" and toxic chemical seepage from the Keesler Air Force Base. They elaborate on why they view their organization's commitment to environmental justice as a natural outgrowth of the struggle for African-American civil rights and social justice in Mississippi and share reflections on the spiritual core of their relationship to community, social change, health, and the natural world.

Studying the Human Health and Ecological Impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Disaster (Part 2): Introduction to This Special Issue of New Solutions

This introduction to the special issue continues an examination of the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks Related to the Macondo Spill (GC-HARMS) project that began in New Solutions 28:3. GC-HARMS was part of a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences-funded Gulf-wide consortium that created regional community-university research partnerships addressing health impacts from the oil spill exposures. Findings from this program enhanced regional preparedness and reinforced existing disaster-response networks. This special issue of New Solutions includes an article exploring the outcomes and implications of using a community-based participatory research-citizen science approach in implementing the project's exposure assessment/population health study and another article that describes analytic processes used to characterize toxicity of petrogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons which provided data used to develop the project's risk message. Finally, this issue includes three Movement Voices interviews from individuals and nonprofits that served as GC-HARMS community hubs during the project.

Three More Voices Papers for This Special Issue of New Solutions-Environmental Justice in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region

The U.S. states along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico have often been described as America's Energy Colony. This region is festooned with polluting industries, storage and waste disposal sites for toxic products, and a history of generally lax approaches to environmental public health and enforcement of regulations. This issue of New Solutions includes three interviews of groups and individuals who work for Environmental Justice in the Gulf Coast region. The interviewees provide key insights into the diverse cultural texture and social fabric of the Gulf. Their range of gulf locales and population groups embody different styles of engagement and different relationships to organizing, disseminating health and environmental risk information, and advocating for social and environmental justice. Similarities among their communities in terms of health and economic disparities, climate risks, and vulnerabilities lend credence to the idea of the Gulf as a regional Environmental Justice community.

Implications of the GC-HARMS Fishermen's Citizen Science Network: Issues Raised, Lessons Learned, and Next Steps for the Network and Citizen Science

This paper is intended to complement our extended documentation and analysis of the activities of the Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks related to the Macondo Spill project Community Outreach and Dissemination Core entitled, "Building and maintaining a citizen science network with fishermen and fishing communities after the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster using a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach." We discuss nuances of CBPR practice, including trust-building, clarification of stakeholder expectations, balancing timelines and agendas, cultural fluency, and the importance of regional history-political-economic context, regulatory practices, and cultural life-ways-in creating social dynamics that overarch and underpin the entire process. We examine the unique role of knowledge-making hybrid structures like the project's Fishermen's citizen science network and compare/contrast this structure with other models of participatory science or deliberation. Finally, we reiterate the importance of environmental health literacy efforts, summarize project outcomes, and offer thoughts on the future roles of collaborative efforts among communities and institutional science in environmental public health.

Studying the Human Health and Ecological Impacts of the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Disaster: Introduction to This Special Issue of New Solutions

Gulf Coast Health Alliance: Health Risks Related to the Macondo Spill (GC-HARMS) began in 2011 as a component project of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' (NIEHS) Deep Water Horizon (DWH) Research Consortia program. This Gulf-wide consortium created regional community-university research partnerships focused on addressing health impacts resulting from oil spill exposures. Findings from this trans-National Institutes of Health program have helped enhance and refine community disaster preparedness and reinforced local-regional disaster response networks. Focal points of individual projects included the following: effects of multiple stressors on individuals and vulnerable populations, exposure to contaminants associated with crude oil, and mental health impacts. This introduction to New Solutions Special Issue on the GC-HARMS response to the DWH disaster presents an overview of the project's internal structure and relationship to the comprehensive NIEHS consortia response and lists articles and interviews featured currently with brief mention of additional articles slated for the next issue.

Three Voices Papers for This Special Issue of New Solutions-Environmental Justice in the U.S. Gulf Coast Region

The U.S. states along the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico have often been described as America's Energy Colony. This region is festooned with polluting industries, storage and waste disposal sites for toxic products, and a history of generally lax approaches to environmental public health and enforcement of regulations. This issue of New Solutions includes three interviews of groups and individuals who work for environmental justice in the Gulf Coast region. The interviewees provide key insights into the diverse cultural texture and social fabric of the Gulf. Their range of gulf locales and population groups embody different styles of engagement and different relationships to organizing, disseminating health and environmental risk information, and advocating for social and environmental justice. Three additional interviews will appear in the next issue of New Solutions.