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Building Bold Solutions Volume 27 (6), July/August 2022 Table of Contents 1. Editor’s Note 2. Anchors in Action: Building a Future Towards the Food System We Envision 3. Towards a Rapid Shift to Healt
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Volume 27 (6), July/August 2022
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Editor’s Note:
Coalitions are Building Bold Solutions for this Moment
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Listening in on a recent webinar hosted by the Progressive Caucus Action Fund (PCAF), “Progressive Playbook: Messages to Build Power,” I heard strategists, researchers, and organizers respond to the potentially paralyzing fatigue and frustration that untold numbers are feeling amid what seems to many of us like constant policy setbacks. The goal was to help participants create effective messaging for their respective constituents but judging from the comments in the “chat” and my own response, it helped reinvigorate us, too. Presenters shared conclusions based on what resonated with groups they studied, such as:
+ We have strong footing for pushing what we believe in.
+ People want to hear the bold solutions for seemingly insurmountable problems.
+ They liked to hear that there is still so much we can do, with and for each other.
+ We cannot stop proposing and advocating for where progressives want society to go. And powerfully, + No one gets to sit this one out because if we do, there is a wave of injustice on our backs. Presenters shared focus group data from PCAF and HIT Strategies (“the leading millennial and minority-owned public opinion research firm in Washington, DC”) that indicated “bold, progressive argument beats the moderate argument every time in test messages of where we are and where we need to go.” They said that we should not mistake despair for apathy, that people do care deeply about finding solutions for societal problems. They need to know, however, that they are being heard, that there are places for them to experience solidarity and a shared sense of hope, and that there are still policy avenues for making people’s lives better. In this edition of the Networker, a double July-August issue, we present two powerful initiatives worth learning about, taking heart in, and lending your support to, that stand to make people’s lives better in countless ways. They both model the type of coalition-building for systems change in which SEHN immerses itself. They both have the potential to fast-track health, justice, environment, and climate progress. They offer bold solutions for complex problems that have become deeply ingrained as “business as usual.” They have exceptionally inspiring coalitions behind them, composed of professionals, activists, and others, who have worked out a range of highly technical challenges and are ready to run with what they’ve learned, and plans and policy proposals they have developed.
In “Anchors in Action: Building a Future Towards the Food System We Envision,” SEHN’s Ted Schettler and I describe an initiative to which Ted has contributed that will “harness the economic power of institutional food procurement, dramatically strengthening efforts to reverse the harms of the current global food system.” In “Towards a Rapid Shift to Healthy and Climate Safe Buildings,” Yu Ann Tan of RMI and I discuss efforts moving toward “decarbonizing” our building stock, through an equitable approach that is “a multi-solve of sorts, addressing many urgent interrelated health, environment, and climate problems, all of which have strong justice dimensions.” SEHN’s program, Concerned Health Professionals of New York, intends to increase its commitment to building decarbonization in New York State.
Most simply and immediately: Anchors in Action will mean better food and safer jobs. Building decarbonization will mean homes with improved indoor air quality. Ultimately, both contribute to a more just society and a more stable climate. Thank you for reading!
Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN P.S. My graduate school mentor, Dr. John Froines, passed away on July 13, 2022, from complications related to Parkinson’s disease. Over the course of his career in toxicology and exposure assessment, his phenomenal commitment to addressing harmful exposures—from the regulatory level (he authored landmark federal standards for cotton dust and lead) to assisting and literally standing with environmental justice communities in Los Angeles—improved the lives of countless people in countless ways. In 2013 he received the Collegium Ramazzini Award recognizing his global contributions in occupational and environmental health research and policy, and for being a “public health hero.” He was also an anti-war activist and one of the Chicago 7, who stood trial after protesting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. His memory will always be an inspiration.
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Anchors in Action:
Building a Future Towards the Food System We Envision
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By Carmi Orenstein and Ted Schettler, SEHN
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Imagine if we and our children could eat institutional meals—whether in schools, universities, or hospitals—that were nourishing as well as reflective of our values? Many of us have delighted in changes we’ve been fortunate to see on at least a small scale, such as on-site school gardens that involve the students and supply the cafeteria’s kitchen. But we also recognize that food system change is needed on a much larger scale in order to truly address problems ranging from poor nutrition, to food production workplace health and safety, to impacts on land, water and climate. We have new data that shows just how profound these impacts are, and how expensive. Fortunately, there are exciting new developments that aim to harness the economic power of institutional food procurement, dramatically strengthening efforts to reverse the harms of the current global food system.
“The food system is the single largest economic sector causing the transgressing of planetary boundaries,” according to Swedish environmental scientist Johan Rockstrom, one of the co-chairs of the international “EAT-Lancet Commission.” In 2019 The EAT-Lancet Commission created the first assessment of the changes required of global food systems to promote human health without violating planetary boundaries—the biophysical processes of the Earth required for healthy humans beings and ecosystems. Four of the boundaries—climate thresholds, biosphere integrity, land systems, and biogeochemical cycles (phosphorus and nitrogen)—have already been breached. But in that first report (they are now working on a second, due out in 2024), the EAT-Lancet Commission determined that it is entirely possible for 10 billion people to eat diets that support their own health and are produced within sustainable limits. “Because food systems are a major driver of poor health and environmental degradation,” they wrote, “global efforts are urgently needed to collectively transform diets and food production.” They called for a “Great Food Transformation.”
Continue Reading
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Towards a Rapid Shift
to Healthy and Climate Safe Buildings
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By Yu Ann Tan, RMI, and Carmi Orenstein, SEHN
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"The house is a machine for living in," famously said Le Corbusier, a pioneer of architectural modernism and a major influence on the field of urban planning, in his 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture. And that house “is only habitable when it is full of light and air..." In his Radiant City plan in the 1930s he foresaw the indoor and outdoor air pollution risks of “the exhaust fumes” of cars, asking what harmful health effects they may have on inhabitants since they “seem to destroy all trees down the street.” Le Corbusier was interested in urban housing problems, access to nature, and functionality for human comfort and well-being. He was interested in a dwelling’s relationship to the climate, though the climate crisis has forever changed what that may connote to us. The metaphor of the machine—something designed to make processes more efficient—was meant to illustrate the need for science- and logic-based standards for housing that would address the problems of the day. Those standards would relate “not only to individual bodily comfort but also related to the wider issues of healthy living.” Regardless of the ultimate successes, failures, controversies, and contradictions of these 100-year-old ideas, they are an interesting frame for discussing a significant source of indoor and outdoor air pollution and threat to our climate now: buildings. In the United States, exposure to poor indoor air quality remains a significant health threat, especially for low income households and communities of color. Outdoor air pollution from burning fuels in buildings (gas, oil, wood, biomass) is now linked to more negative health impacts than coal in many states, according to research from Harvard School of Public Health. And the burning of fossil fuels in the building sector is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, at about 10 percent of US carbon emissions. Continue Reading
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Grassroots: How microplastics memes took over: The expertise and insights of Rebecca Altman, writer, sociologist, and SEHN board member, are woven throughout this E&E News piece on the “memeification” of microplastics. While visual campaigns in the decades before the internet were corporate-driven—emphasizing the littering public as the problem, rather than the product itself—“Social media opened up an alternative way for the public to connect and express their own feelings,” including disagreement and disgust.
Amid Climate Change, BU Researchers Study Chelsea’s “Heat Island” “Summertime living not only isn’t easy, it’s potentially deadly when it gets that hot.” The collaborative project of Madeleine Scammell, Boston University School of Public Health associate professor of environmental health and SEHN board member, is featured in the school’s publication BU Today. With other colleagues and students, a local non-profit, and municipal officials, research and action are coupled to solve the urban problem of heat islands. The work takes place in the majority Latinx city, Chelsea, Massachusetts, where summer temperatures can be 20 to 50 degrees higher than in the leafy suburbs. Rather than the type of intervention that tests one thing at a time, Dr. Scammell says this project’s orientation is, “let’s characterize the hot areas in the city, and then think about solutions.”
SEHN Social Media Campaign In July, SEHN launched a social media campaign in cooperation with the carbon capture and storage (CCS) plenary group we convene, designed to bring people to our new website, Carbon Capture and Storage Facts. Digital content creator Mo Banks is designing “memes” drawing attention to the multitude of potential harms and injustices inherent to the nation’s CCS plans. Viewers can then go to the website to learn much more and connect with our coalition members. We are rolling these out over several weeks, on SEHN’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram platforms. If you use social media, we invite you to learn from them and share!
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