Portside

Mustafa Ali is stepping down from his position as head of the environmental justice program at the EPA after a 24-year career at the agency. There appear to be no plans to replace him amid reports that the Trump administration is targeting deep cuts in EPA's environmental justice and other efforts.

The actions taken recently by law enforcement at the Dakota Access pipeline site have made it plain that the climate crisis cannot be adequately addressed until we come to terms with the history that climate change and the policing of communities of color share.

All 1,100 low-income residents in the West Calumet Housing Complex in the East Chicago, Indiana are being forced to move due to the high levels of lead. And many are outraged about why the dangerous soils weren't identified and removed earlier and why a branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had assured them they and their children were safe. Test results released in August show alarmingly high concentrations of lead on every street in the complex.

For Palestinians, Honduras and Guatemala might seem too distant, too irrelevant for our struggle. And while there are some apparent stark differences in our lived realities and in the faces of our oppressors, there are commonalities as well. In Palestine as well as in many parts of Central and Latin America, the oppression is directly sponsored by US military and financial aid. And in all these places our collective survival rests upon defending and preserving our land.

From First Nations activism to innovative city initiatives, the West Coast is leading the fight against global warming even as many countries lag behind.

In spite of the growing sense of disbelief and horror surrounding the lead contamination of drinking water in the Michigan city of Flint, at least one thing is clear: that the catastrophic levels of pollution and destruction are a direct result of the extreme policies pursued by the Michigan's right-wing leadership.

Reader Comments: Noam Chomsky Says GOP Is Serious Danger To Human Survival; Trump, His Father and Woody Guthrie; Environmental Racism and Flint; Threat of a Free Haiti; Segregation in Schooling - Today; Contingent (Adjunct) Higher Education Faculty;

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan puts the responsibility on states to develop the strategies for reducing climate pollution. But states are already charged with monitoring and mitigating their air pollution, which hasn’t boded well for communities close to pollution-heavy facilities. And despite the plan’s emphasis on “community involvement and environmental justice,” the agency responsible for its implementation has a very poor environmental justice record.