The Nontoxic Link Between Public Health & Environmental Justice
Did you know that nontoxic living is about more than ensuring the products you use are safe for your home and your health? Here at Artisan Home Health, we believe that nontoxic living and environmental justice are connected because the products we choose to use either support or discourage the manufacturing of things that poorly affect our health at home AND how they impact the environmental health and safety of communities in which they’re made.
Understanding How Home Location & Health Are Connected
Many of us don’t realize that where our homes are located geographically can have an impact on health outcomes. Details about your home’s proximity to certain industry practices can, in fact, influence higher rates of disease over time. This can be from the production of plastics, oil and gas production, or even toxic waste dumping. While understanding all industry practices that can impact your home health is a multi-layered topic, we can start by exploring the relationship between home location and health by seeing where some of this movement began.
Environmental justice, in the context of nontoxic living, is best defined as a person’s equal access to protection from environmental hazards such as chemicals and heavy metals, regardless of race, income, and culture. Afterall, each of us should have the right to a safe home and to live in clean and healthy places protected from environmental pollution.
Environmental justice aims to instill this right and ensures that marginalized communities are not further impacted by high levels of harm from industry practices. Historically, harmful industry practices have been more densely placed in low-income communities, and what is released into the air, water, and soil can cause higher rates of cancer. If we can choose to purchase from companies that protect human health and value transparency then we all become aligned with the environmental justice ethos.
Learn About Hazel Johnson, A Pioneer for Environmental Justice
Hazel Johnson is best known as the Mother of Environmental Justice. She inspires the integrative nontoxic living work that Artisan Home Health does today and has had a direct impact on our values.
Hazel Johnson was born in 1935 in New Orleans, LA, and later moved into a region known as “Cancer Alley,” named after the health impacts of the chemical industry. Hazel was the only one of four siblings to survive past their first birthday, and while she continued to lose family members to illnesses, she started to see a pattern in her community. She discovered that where she lived had the region’s highest cancer rates, and she then vowed to uncover why.
It turned out that her community sat on top of a former industrial waste dump and lay at the center of a 14-square-mile ring of pollution that housed more than 50 landfills, a chemical incinerator, a water and sewage treatment facility, steel mills, paint factories, scrap yards, and abandoned industrial dump sites. As she uncovered that the health issues in her community were directly related to the environment, she began to fight for residents’ rights. Her victories included the removal of asbestos & PCB, lead abatement, prevention of new landfills, and the creation of a health clinic. Hazel’s trailblazing work provided irrevocable proof that the toxicants in the environment were directly linked to poor health outcomes.
She worked tirelessly for many years against environmental racism, and during her tenure, she worked with President Obama and was instrumental in having an Executive Order passed concerning environmental justice. Her organization was also honored with distinction by President Clinton. Her story was inspiring then, just as it continues to be today.
Make Informed Choices to Have a Positive Impact
By staying informed and voting with our dollars, we can protect our own communities and make an impact on communities living with environmental pollutants. We can learn how these chemicals affect home locations and also understand how the use of that same chemical can impact our very own health within our homes. We are all connected, so our voices and our choices matter.
If we demand transparency in the things that we buy and consider where it all comes from, we can start to see our interconnectedness. Small changes really do matter! In creating a nontoxic life, you’re also carving out a place at the table for environmental justice.
