A New Editor,and a Renewed Focus on Environmental and Work Environment Justice with Diversity,Inclusion,and Equity

Welcome Darius Sivin

As of this issue of New Solutions (Volume 32, Issue 1), Darius Sivin has taken the reins as Editor in Chief. Since receiving his PhD from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Darius has spent twenty years in the labor movement, giving him a wealth of experience with occupational health on the shop floor, at the bargaining table and at the policy level. In this time, he has worked with environmental justice advocates, policymakers and with academic researchers. He brings all of this experience with him to New Solutions.

Charles Levenstein was the journal's founding editor and built it from the ground up, working closely in the first seven years (1990–1997) with the founding publisher, Tony Mazzocchi, Secretary Treasurer of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) at the time. In 1997, the OCAW discontinued publishing the journal, which was successfully moved to Baywood Publishing, a small publisher of academic journals which included the International Journal of Health Services, a politically similar journal founded by Vincente Navarro. In 2007, a transition team of Craig Slatin, Beth Rosenberg, and Eduardo Siqueira worked to sustain the journal as Charles prepared to step down as editor. In 2011, Craig became the editor. In 2015, Baywood Publishing restructured and sold its journals to SAGE Publications which has been the publisher of New Solutions since that time. Along the way the journal has been supported by a broad network of board members, authors, reviewers, and friends. Karla Armenti and Michael Lax have long-served as the editorial board's co-chairs. So many people at different times have made valuable contributions to the journal, organizing conferences, engaging in planning retreats, bringing in new authors, guest editing special issues, working as part of the editorial and advisory boards and the editorial team, and so many more efforts too numerous to list. Now, at the start of our thirty-second year, we are grateful to all those who have made the journal what it is today, and we look forward to the work that these networks will do with Darius to sustain New Solutions’ mission as set out by Charles Levenstein in the first issue.

Too frequently… the scientists and public health professionals dealing with these [occupational and environmental public health] problems view the citizen activists and trade unionists who have been stirred to action as barbarians or hysterics who get in the way of “good science.” Professionals miss great opportunities to educate and, equally as important, to learn from this public health movement.

Environmental and Work Environment Justice With Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity

The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others who were targeted in 2020 for the crime of breathing while Black in America, opened a space that allowed many white people to see and understand what had always been the lived reality for people of color. In January 2021, the New Solutions Editorial Board opened a discussion regarding the journal's efforts (and lack of efforts) to address structural racism and inequality as a foundation of occupational and environmental health injustices. Jora Trang, Chief of Staff & Equity at Worksafe, helped us initiate a discussion and process to diversify the New Solutions community. From that discussion we established a committee to address our need to be inclusive and recruit individuals from communities of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). One of our goals is to center authors and reviewers who will publish papers analyzing occupational and environmental health and safety within the context of structural racism and will focus on environmental and work environment justice (EJ/WEJ).

The committee has met several times and reviewed the composition of the journal's leadership, boards, authors, and readership/broader community. We have considered how to emphasize the need to address structural racism in papers published in New Solutions. The next steps will be to initiate inclusive diversification of the editorial board. As a journal of environmental and occupational health policy, we will recruit individuals engaged in the work of EJ/WEJ—researchers, activists, and advocates from programs and organizations addressing these concerns. We will continue to include representation by women and those with a strong feminist analysis, and we will include individuals who can help us to broaden our capacity to address LGBTQ community occupational and environmental health concerns. New Solutions needs to strengthen its presentation of workplace and community environmental health impacts upon individuals across the spectrum of ability. Structural racism uniquely shapes the impacts upon women, LGBTQ communities, and for disability rights across BIPOC communities and populations, and we will aim to reach authors and reviewers with expertise in these areas.

Rich and conclusive science and investigative reporting has documented (and continues to document) the evidence of harm to populations of workers and those living in what are now called environmental justice communities. Decades of research, surveillance, and grass-roots organizing has documented disparities and inequities suffered by BIPOC communities and low wage working class communities. This research has been too often a low priority for funding, and researchers, particularly those of color, have struggled to overcome institutional barriers to conduct this work. The findings have consistently shown that racism is a strong contributor to the oppressive working and living conditions that result in excess morbidity and premature mortality.

Where has New Solutions Been on These Issues?

The work to end these hazardous conditions and their associated elevated risks for illnesses, injuries, and fatalities is a component of liberation struggles. New Solutions is relatively unique in maintaining a perspective that frames environmental and occupational health policy in a liberation framework.

In February 2022, the New York Times reported concerns at the EPA that the Supreme Court of the United States may rule against the use of affirmative action criteria in admissions to higher education institutions. The concerns are that such a ruling could be used against the EPA regulations and programs that use race as a criteria for reviewing environmental injustices. ² For these reasons, the Biden Administration intends to use data on income, unemployment, and pollution sources, but not race or ethnicity. The article reports criticism from Robert Bullard:

“When you look at the most powerful predictor of where the most industrial pollution is, race is the most potent predictor,” said Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and a pioneer in the environmental justice movement. “Not income, not property values, but race. If you’re leaving race out, how are you going to fix this?”

For long time readers of New Solutions, this was not news. They had heard Bullard say something substantially similar on the pages of the journal, in response to an earlier administration's refusal to recognize race as a major cause of environmental injustice. In the Spring 1993 issue, New Solutions reprinted Robert Bullard's review of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Environmental Equity Report:

The systematic omission [from EPA's Equity Report] of the published works that document the impact of discriminatory land use planning, differential enforcement of environmental regulations and laws, inequitable facility siting on communities of color is telling. The report makes only a passing reference to a handful of studies that have documented a relationship between sociodemographic characteristics of communities and environmental quality. However, numerous books have been written on this subject dating back to the early 1970s … The research findings in these books show clear patterns where racial and ethnic minorities bear greater health and environmental risks than the larger society. These books were not cited in the Equity Report.

Bullard and other environmental justice researchers find themselves still battling resistance to acknowledging structural racism as the central barrier to environmental justice. New Solutions has been a space for making those arguments in peer reviewed science and commentaries. We have been referred to as a journal for movement researchers. The journal has consistently aimed to publish scientific and policy articles regarding racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination that have resulted in adverse health outcomes for these populations. We have also published historical articles and interviews. A look at our initial statements and articles provides evidence of the journal's perspective. It was intended to be a space in which movements, their participants and their academic allies could hash out their differences and advance a collective way forward.

In the first issue (1990), Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers’ Union (OCAW), the Journal's founding publisher wrote:

We are committed to the journal because we are committed to finding a way for our members [OCAW] to escape the cruel choice between their livelihood or their lives, now forced upon them by both industry and government policy alike.…We are also committed to it because we believe that only if and when scientists and policy makers submit their research and proposals for action to the scrutiny of the general public, can we find acceptable solutions to our common problems. We want New Solutions to be a place where all the different issues of environmental and occupational health policy that we now face, and that we will have to face in the coming years, can be argued out. Whatever the current tension between the interests of the workplace and those of the community, from the standpoint of workers, they are, in the long run, inseparable. New Solutions is intended to be an opportunity to stake out and then to share that common ground on a wide range of issues of concern to us all. ⁴

The journal's first issue included “Women's Occupational Health Agenda for the 1990s” by Klitzman, et al., a powerful statement that, like Bullard's observations above, is, sadly, every bit as relevant thirty-one years later, as the day it was written. The agenda addressed women of color specifically, if insufficiently:

The occupational health problems that are specific to women workers primarily result from patterns of employment rather than from physiological sex differences. Women's position in the labor force and in society limits their ability to obtain protection from and compensation for work-related illness and injury…. This double burden limits many women's ability to participate in educational, union, and political activities that could empower them to improve health and safety conditions. Finally, women of color, lesbians, older, and physically handicapped women often face additional educational and employment discrimination that may lead to their being placed in more hazardous and stressful working conditions. ⁵

Barry Commoner, an ideological and political compass for the journal, addressed the harsh risk-benefit calculus that neoliberal economics imposes on the study of environmental injustices:

The risk-benefit analysis requires that a value be placed on a human life. Some economists have proposed that the value should be based on a person's lifelong earning power. It then turns out that a woman's life is worth much less than a man's, and that a black's life is worth much less than a white's. In effect, the environmental harm is regarded as smaller if the people it kills are poor - a standard that could be used to justify situating operations that are heavy polluters in poor neighborhoods. And, in fact, this is an all-too-common practice... Thus, thinly veiled by a seemingly straight-forward numerical computation, there is a profound, unresolved moral question: Should poor people be subjected to a more severe environmental burden than richer people, simply because they lack the resources to evade it? Since in practice the risk/benefit equation masquerades as science, it deprives society of the duty to confront this moral question. One result of failing to adopt the preventive approach to environmental quality is that regulatory agencies have been driven into positions that seriously diminish the force of social morality. ⁶

In the journal's second issue, Gary Cohen, then co-director of the National Toxics Campaign, wrote about the environmental justice movement in the context of the historically large 1990 Earth Day event.

There are now up to 6000 grassroots environmental groups in the United States... This new breed of environmentalist tends to hail from low income and minority communities. Their interest in defending the environment is a personal one: family and community are at risk.

Next Steps Toward Diversity and Inclusion

Despite providing a peer-reviewed space for movement researchers and activists to raise and address issues that were not necessarily welcome on the pages of other journals, New Solutions has insufficiently built capacity to address EJ/WEJ as essential components of liberation from structural racism and white supremacy. Our network of authors, reviewers, and readers who study these matters has been limited because we have not made it a priority to have a diverse and inclusive editorial board.

New Solutions will undertake the following steps to become a journal that can serve as a platform for research and analysis that addresses existing and necessary policies shaping EJ/WEJ. These actions reflect our Diversity and Inclusion Committee's discussions and recommendations for establishing greater authenticity and integrity to the journal's commitment to anti-racism as well as opposing systems of supremacy that shape environmental and occupational health policies for BIPOC populations, women, LGBTQ populations, and persons with disabilities.

Recruit as editorial and advisory board members, authors, and reviewers BIPOC researchers, activists, advocates, and professionals who engage EJ/WEJ concerns and support their participation financially (to the extent NS’ funds make this possible) and otherwise. To do this, we will recruit from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health (SAAPHI), Black Caucus of Health Workers, minority serving institutions, Black and Latinx Fraternities and Sororities, as well as other organizations and networks. We will balance recruitment of more senior and junior members in the field in order to build the journal's relevancy with current as well as the next generation of leaders. Criteria for board participation and responsibilities of board members will be clearly and explicitly stated.