On this week’s episode of Talking Radical Radio, Ingrid Waldron and Lorne Julien talk about the Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health — or ENRICH — Project, which aims to understand the health impacts of environemtnal racism on African Nova Scotian and Mi’qmak communities, and to support their struggles against it.
One of the many manifestations of how our lives, our communities, and our spaces are organized in colonial and racist ways is that, quite consistently across North America, environmentally hazardous land uses are more likley to be sited closer to and more densely in and around communities that are predominantly not white. Nova Scotia has relatively spatially distnct racialized communities, compared to many other parts of the country — in particular, longstanding African Nova Scotian communities and Mi’kmaq communities. And, tragically true to form, more sources of pollution have ended up being situated in and next to these communities than in and next to predominantly white spaces in the province.
Ingrid Waldron is a sociologist who is a professor in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She is the lead researcher in the ENRICH Project, which aims to collect solid data about the health impacts of this inequitable distribution of hazards, to build community awareness and community organizing capacity, and to help catalyze cross-community alliances to respond to it. Lorne Julien is an artist, a member of Millbrook First Nation, and a community participant in the ENRICH Project. They talk with me about environmental racism in Nova Scotia, about the effected communities, about the project, and about how they see that work fitting into broader efforts to challenge environmental racism in the province.
To learn more about the ENRICH Project, click here. (As well, to take a look at Julien’s art, you can click here.)
Talking Radical Radio brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. We give you the chance to hear many different people that are facing many different struggles talk about what they do, why they do it, and how they do it, in the belief that such listening is a crucial step in strengthening all of our efforts to change the world. To learn more about the show in general, visit its website here. You can learn about suggesting topics for future shows here.
Talking Radical Radio is brought to you by Scott Neigh, a writer, media producer, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario, and the author of two books examining Canadian history through the stories of activists.
