Environmental Health

"“Unprecedented fire.” “Devastating consequences.” “Substantially destroyed.” Those were among the ways Oregon Gov. Kate Brown described the catastrophic wildfires blazing through large swaths of western Oregon Wednesday. The last statement was a reference to a handful of communities, including Phoenix and Talent in southern Oregon, Blue River and Vida in Lane County and Detroit at the foot of Mt. Jefferson."

"The EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention is significantly reorganizing at the end of the month to respond to the department’s changing work, agency leaders said Tuesday."

"The greenwashing continues. Don’t fall for it." "President Donald Trump continues to greenwash his dismal environmental record ahead of the 2020 presidential election, most recently with a speech Tuesday in Jupiter, Florida, touting his “environmental accomplishments.”"

"The illegal dump is southern Dallas’ most visible environmental justice crisis. It’s far from the only one."

"Yersinia pestis killed millions of people across Europe in the middle ages. Today it remains a deadly threat to one of the US’s most endangered species"

"U.S. Gulf Coast communities got no assurance from the EPA that the agency’s second round of chemical risk evaluations will examine whether the groups’ particularly high exposures put them at high risk for asthma, cancer, or other diseases."

"A record-smashing heat wave sent temperatures in areas across the Bay Area well over 100 degrees Sunday, choking the region with the smoke of weeks’ worth of wildfires and putting more than 2 million customers under the threat of rolling blackouts as the state’s energy grid neared capacity."

"For the communities of the Amazon, a land defined by its rivers, fish has always been an important part of the diet. ... But small-scale gold mining has turned these fish into an often deadly health hazard."

"Work has begun to stop a decades-old problem of millions of gallons of sewage from Tijuana, Mexico, flowing into the United States and polluting San Diego County beaches, the Trump administration’s top environmental protection official said Wednesday."

"An advocacy group on Thursday sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its decision not to regulate a chemical that has been linked to fetal and infant brain damage."