Minorities, Media Coverage, and Environmental Justice
by Latoya Peterson
On Sunday, I attended a Digital Capital Week event called Latinos, Technology, and the Environment, hosted by my friend Kety Esquivel.
The panel description states:
According to a Sierra Club National Survey, 66% of Latino(a)s in the United States, work and live close to toxic sites, add to that, the African Americans and Asians that live in highly polluted urban neighborhoods, the farmer migrants that are exposed to pesticides when picking US food and the Indigenous peoples that are having their lands mined and degraded and we have a big hot mess that makes the US majority generally and environmentally disadvantaged. This panel will examine the opportunity presented by the digital sphere as it relates to Latinos and the environment. We will discuss our participation in the recent World’s People Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia as well as the next annual meeting of environmental ministers in Cancun in November.
However, when the assembled group (Angela, Kety, Mike, and Rich) started talking, some new questions emerged: how are environmental issues being covered, and how do nonwhites (and other marginalized voices) factor into these conversations?
Personally, I love Twitter, because it provides me with instant feedback when I am thinking through a problem. So, while in the session, I sent out a question:
Just curious – readers, how invested are you in environmental issues?
The responses were about what I expected:
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