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LISTEN: Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice research

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Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Dr. Greer Hamilton joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss how she uses the arts to engage and involve communities around environmental justice research.Hamilton, a transitional postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, is a current fellow in the Agents of Change program. She also talks about how she found her passion in social work, her activism on reproductive justice, tips on meaningfully involving communities in research, and some of her favorite spots in Detroit.The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.Listen below to our discussion with Hamilton, and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice researchTranscript Brian BienkowskiHello and welcome back to the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast, a partnership between Environmental Health News and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. I'm your host, Brian Bienkowski, editor of Agents of Change and senior editor at Environmental Health News. Welcome back to all of our regular listeners, and welcome to anybody new. We are here every two weeks talking to up-and-coming and established leaders in environmental justice. Please find us wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe. Well, I am so excited for today's episode. Last month, our leadership team traveled to Philly and we met our fifth cohort fellows. And today we have our very first guest from this latest round of environmental justice rockstars that we are working with. today's guests is Dr. Greer Hamilton, a transitional Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Greer is doing fascinating work, she talks about how she got into social work, tips on meaningfully engaging communities in your research, what it means to be an art space researcher, and what changes she would like to see in the field of social work. And just a quick warning that we nerd out on Detroit a little bit here and there. But I'm sure you're all used to me doing that every time we have a Detroit-based guest. Enjoy. All right, I am super excited to be joined by our very first fellow from this cohort to join me on the podcast. Greer Hamilton. Greer, how are you doing today?Greer Hamilton I'm doing well. How are you?Brian Bienkowski I'm doing great. We won't talk about all the technical difficulties that we had before we connected now they don't need to know about that. So where are you today?Greer Hamilton I'm in Detroit, Michigan.Brian Bienkowski Detroit, Michigan. As all the listeners know, that is a place very near and dear to my heart. So I'm glad you're down there. In fact, when we met and you told me where you're at down there, I was looking around a little bit. And it's not too far from some of my old house. So I'm hoping to come visit you sometime. But you of course did not grow up in Detroit. You're there now for schooling and such. So you mostly grew up in New York state, from what I understand. So can you tell me a bit about your upbringing and where the interest in the environment and health came into your life?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so you're right, I mostly grew up on Long Island, in a town called Limbrick. But I also spent eight or so years of my childhood living in Alabama, where my mother's family is from. And to be honest, I think environment and health issues really didn't kind of come to the focus until college. And when I started taking a lot more interest in like thinking more about like, you know, the saying of like, "oh, well zip codes matter."– like, we're zip code is can like be a big proxy for like other things. Like that was kind of like the thing that like made me want to think more about environmental and health issues. And I know I mentioned this at like the retreat, but like, one of the things that kind of came full circle to me was about like my town Valley Stream on Long Island being a sundowntown. And how almost kind of short sighted like that zip code as proxy statement is because right zip codes aren't the things that matter. Right? Those other factors, right, like racism or other structural issues are the things that create, right, zip codes mattering. And so like when I kind of started making those connections, I began to become more interested in like, how does like a public park or like how to neighborhood, right? factor into like, our conversation about environment and health, and what do they do? You know, in terms of people's well being.Brian Bienkowski Can you explain to listeners what a sundown town is?Greer Hamilton Yeah, they were pretty prevalent between like, 1940 and 1960 throughout the country you know. Like, we talk poorly about the South, but like, they were in northern places like New York, and they were towns that were predominantly white. And after sundown, they were locations where non-white people were meant to not be and sometimes they were were murdered right for being in the town after sundown. Or they were chased out. But they're just like really, like harmful relics, right of that that time period.Brian Bienkowski You say relics, but men, if you think about the, you know, the 40s to the 60s, I mean, that was long ago, but it's not that long ago. I mean, that's grandparents and stuff, you know, that were around then so that is you know, and being in Detroit there I often think of the zip code that always gets thrown out is 48217 –I have it memorized because that is southwest Detroit – and they deal with some of the worst air in the city and in the state and in the country. So the there's been a lot written and talked about, not too far from you right there a zip code that is really determinant of people's health. So. So you went on to get a dual bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Buffalo. So what was it about social work as a career that spoke to you?Greer Hamilton Yeah, to be honest, my parents went through a divorce in high school, and I went to a social worker. And it was, at the time like thinking about going into pre med. I always kind of planned to be a medical doctor. And, but at the time, my life cannot imagine also doing that. And I was talking to my social worker about like, her job, and like, what were those opportunities, and she thought social work could be a good option for me, because it was still helping. And it's also a really broad profession, right? So I could still, you know, be interested in health and, and make a career out of that. And so that's kind of what like pushed me into social work and found it and then like, really developed like a love and appreciation for it.Brian Bienkowski That is so cool. That you know, in pursuing support for yourself, you not only found support, but a career, passion. That is that is really cool and turned something that was maybe difficult, into, you know, something that is very, it's very positive now, so very cool. I've been asking everybody this, what is a moment or event that has shaped your identity up to this point? I know, that's big and unwieldy.Greer Hamilton Yeah, I'm thinking about this. And I think in my master's program, one that sticks out to me was, I worked in a student-run health clinic on the east side of Buffalo, which is a predominantly Black part of the city. And in my experience, it was really interesting because, right, I had to reflect on my blackness, right. And like about also my privileges, because I grew up middle middle class, and we were working with people who were uninsured and low income. And, you know, they saw me as like a similar person to them. And also, they were things that really like I didn't share in terms of like lived experience. But also it like made me really want to, like pursue research, right, related to health. And so I think at that time, it was like, you know, about a year of working every Wednesday night and this clinic, but it was really cool to work with, like medical doctors and community members to like, try to figure out ways to improve their, their health and well being.Brian Bienkowski So this leads me really nicely in my next question, so before you returned to get your PhD was, which is where you're at now, you were, you know, working in social work in Buffalo, and I know this was meaningful, obviously, to you. But can you talk about why you wanted to get your PhD? why research spoke to you as something that you could maybe do more good, or, you know, additional good in this space?Greer Hamilton Yeah. Um, so after my master's, I went on to work at a nonprofit that was focused on actually increasing representation of non-white and low-income people in health professions, including social work and medicine. And then after that, did some work with a local foundation, doing community capacity building work with nonprofits. And in both of those experiences, both program managing a nonprofit and working with other nonprofits, I realized how there was like this weird cyclical kind of nature of like funding and research where nonprofits needed funding funders wanted research or evaluation. But those nonprofits didn't have either the staff person or the money, right to then go out and do research or evaluation. And so then it ended up putting large organizations that had that type of resource ahead, right, and then smaller, more grassroots organizations behind. And so I was like, "Oh, well, I like research will maybe this is something I could pursue, and then eventually come back with it to Buffalo or somewhere else and be that person who can provide that type of research or evaluation, support to organizations that they can do more," right? and get the funding they need in order to do the great work that they were doing.Brian Bienkowski So you went from one, Rust Belt city to another. And we talked about our love of rust belt cities, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Buffalo. I used to really like the Buffalo Bills football team when I was okay. And now you know, of course, the Lions because that's where I'm from, but it's just really cool to be working in those in those cities. I just find them fascinating, the kind of industrial history and all of that, and you mentioned something there that I want to just talk to you a little bit about and that's representation in healthcare settings, kind of having non-white representation. Can you talk about maybe an example or just why that's important, what that means to people to go into, you know, what can be kind of a vulnerable setting and see people like them or at least see people that represent their community?Greer Hamilton Yeah. I think like it also I think ties back to this my interest in like history and its relationship to health because I think, right, so much of like the current conversations about Black people in healthcare settings are about how medical doctors often don't like consider them capable of pain, right? And like that has kind of shown up in maternal mortality related situations recently, and how all of those things are like so directly tied back to our history of enslavement in this country. And so I think when people –and I can speak for myself– and I am able to find a Black doctor who is truly able to kind of understand that history, but also to be like, the one to ask more questions, right? And not assume that like, because I have a PhD or because of certain things that like maybe I'm not capable of experiencing certain issues, the person like to ask those questions just really matters. And so I think it's sometimes helpful to have a person who is like you in some way, and being your care provider or kind of being another person in your life.Brian Bienkowski So you've been doing a lot of your research is fascinating. And the way you put your research out is fascinating. And when I read your application, I think it's okay for me to admit that you are the one that I was telling the staff like, "No, we need her. She's, she's part of this cohort." I was really excited because you're doing a lot of cool stuff. And I want to get into that. But let's start first kind of take a step back and talk about the research that you're doing so. And you're also again, into unique ways of communicating it. So can you tell me about the research, you're co-leading looking at indoor air pollution in affordable housing and transportation pollution in the Boston area? What are you all doing and what have you found so far?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so our affordable housing project wrapped up last year was called Stainable air quality in affordable housing, and it was with engineering researchers at Tufts University. And I worked with them over the past four or five years. And then collectively, those engineers and Alok Shuhada and John Durant, and I applied for a grant with this group called Mystic River Watershed Association. And we have now a community-based air quality study in East Boston, Charlestown, Everett, and Malden to monitor the air quality over three years, and then to also work with residents to understand their own understandings of air quality, and how it's affected them. We chose those four communities because they are communities that are most overburdened by air pollution, because of where the highways are, the airport, and also they have the most are like they have a large population of non-white and linguistically-isolated people. And so they're often not represented in in this type of research. But should be, right? And so I think that's what we're trying to kind of do in our work. It's a community-engaged study that goes through 2026. And I hope to do all the community engaged research, which is, you know, exciting, and fun.Brian Bienkowski Yeah, before we get into some of that outreach, have there been Do you have findings yet? Have you looked at kind of air quality and seen, you know, bad things in the air compared to other neighborhoods and stuff? Are there any findings? Oh, yeah.Greer Hamilton Not from our project. But like Boston has done a lot of air quality research over the past 10 years or so. So there is some research like, I always forget the acronym but or like the full name, but it's called Cafe, there was a study done in Chinatown, right? where they found that people living in Chinatown, right were greatly affected by air quality. And also then didn't have like the resources to monitor or to do some of the mitigation strategies. So Chinatown has been doing a lot of research in those years following. For our project we started last April. So we have some preliminary survey data that finds that like a lot of people are concerned about air pollution, but either don't understand what are the sources of pollutants, or don't understand what to do to make improvements, right, whether that is by personal behavior changes, or advocacy work. And so that's kind of what we're hoping to do next.Brian Bienkowski We just did a big investigation, our newsroom with the Texas Tribune, looking at air quality in certain neighborhoods, certain Latino neighborhoods. And one of the things that we found was that even when there is data, it's not the first of all, it was often not in Spanish. And a lot of these are Spanish-speaking communities. And then you go to these websites, and I've been a reporter for a while and use the TRI from the EPA and stuff. And it's just a mess. I mean, you almost need a PhD to understand the data in the first place. So I think I really want to get at this kind of community engagement. And that's where a lot of your work comes in. So let's take this this study as a way to understand that, can you talk about your role in getting community members involved in the project, and making sure that they're engaged and aware of what you guys are finding and doing?Greer Hamilton Yeah. So the first kind of part of like our community engagement efforts were to develop a community advisory board. This is an 11 person board that is made up of young people under 18 and adults who live in those four communities. They are people who are not researchers, they are moms, they are nurses, they are students, right? And we really wanted to prioritize people who live there, and had lived there for a long time. And in order to kind of like contextualize the research that we're doing. We meet with them quarterly, and they give us guidance on kind of all facets of our work. We also have a community survey that is out, I'm in all four communities where we're asking people about, what is air quality to them? How do they know that poor air quality is occurring in their neighborhood? Is it smelling does it like look bad? and where are kind of the sites that they would want us to do follow up research in. And then we've also linked back to the language conversation you were just having have been really like intentional about making sure that our work is able to reach communities that we want. So we translate all of our work, whether that's the surveys to materials for like community meetings, into seven different languages including English, with the ones that are most represented by those four, so like Arabic, Haitian, Creole, Spanish, Portuguese, for example. And then we've also really been trying to, like build out like educational kind of workshop series for both our community advisory board members, but also residents. So we've been working with organizations to host like air quality one-on-one workshops, so they can like, start learning how to deconstruct the air quality data that we might be producing, and also to like, do like do DIY, kind of like air filtration types of projects. And then we're also beginning to offer your policy and advocacy trainings over the summer, so that our county advisory board members can then take that information back to their community, and really start to like work with other organizations around like, what are those strategies we want to implement? Knowing that policymakers right, have a lot of responsibility for regulating air pollution, whether it's like idling buses, or, you know, a truck, right, that stuck on the on the, on the 93, right? and so really kind of trying to work with residents around that. So those are some of the ways that we're thinking about community engagement.Brian Bienkowski That's really great. Because I mean, it takes everything from "Okay, let's find out what's in the air" all the way through to "Okay, now you are armed with this information here, we're going to train you to advocate for yourself." And I think making that holistic connection like that is, it's really exciting. It's really cool to hear about that. So what are some tips that you would have for other researchers who are trying to do this kind of community engagement, but are having trouble or finding people reluctant or busy? That's probably a big one, too. What are some tips you might have?Greer Hamilton I think you have to know that it's going to be slow from the very beginning. I work with people who wanted to communicate research, but don't want to invest the time. And you can't do this work without investing time. Time not only in like, learning what people's needs are, right? Like, let's say that like air pollution actually wasn't the top need for people like that means that we might have to shift right like kind of our priorities until we can get there. And it means like showing up to events that like you don't think are relevant to your work, right, like a block party, or you know, an event that's happening in a local college. And also listening, I think, like, my goal always is to do more listening than I am talking. So if a resident is telling me like something that matters to them, or something that like I've done that maybe was not in line of how they think it should be done. My job is not to like, talk down to them, right? Because I'm in a certain position and just to like, really listen and hear kind of what are the concerns that they're bringing up so that I can either shift what I'm doing or shift my thinking or approach around something.Brian Bienkowski And so you call yourself an arts-based researcher, which is, I love that title. I think it's really cool. And so can you give some examples of the ways that you used arts to engage with communities around environmental justice research and issues? And what are some artistic outlets or methods that you haven't used yet, but that you'd like to try?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so beginning of my PhD, I worked with students in the School of Arts to work on puppetry. So we made some stop motion work about green gentrification, which was kind of the environmental work that I was working on at that time. And it was really cool, because it was a really like disarming way of like talking about gentrification, which can be such a heavy topic. And people like, were able to kind of see like the horrors, right? of like, what happens when neighborhoods changed without people being able to participate in and then that shifted to my dissertation where I began to include more like visual arts and storytelling, so like doing like oral history collections, and like walking tours as a way to kind of engage people like, like in their total bodies around these topics. And then now, I have a small project that's working on a comic book and an animated film about transportation-related air pollution that we hope to kind of build out to like bleed into like, some curriculum for like K through 12 people in particular. But as a way to kind of start getting people to be aware of terms be aware of like air pollution and how it can like, affect them and even lead to like premature death, right? We want people to be more aware of like the health pieces. And you know, I think we've talked about this or I know we've talked about this, but like, also have interest in like soundscapes, and we'd love to, like think about how can we use soundscapes really to like traffic Navy, or just like the neat like nature, with electronic music or either like classic music, classical music. So it's like, uh, hopefully, within the next year, I can move into that. But those are some things I'm working on. But Fine Arts to be like a really great way to kind of communicate either environmental science or communicate like topics that people are thinking about, but maybe don't have like the language or are scared, right? to talk about it.Brian Bienkowski There's also I mean, we always hear growing up, or at least most of us did, that we all kind of learn differently. You know, some of us like to touch and get into stuff, some of us like to read or watch a YouTube video, whatever it is, and the you know, the soundscapes the one you mentioned, I am just very sensitive to audio, it really kind of resonates with me, it really... and in the kind of stuff that you're talking about, I actually, you know, I do some of that, like, you know, we talked about that. So I do think it's a really good way to kind of spread the message around in all these different ways. And who knows what's going to stick, right? Who knows what, how people learn and stuff? Where does that come from, where you always are the arts and kind of being creative, something that was prior to research, or did it kind of dovetail with some of this research that you're doing?Greer Hamilton It was prior to research, I like had a phase in like high school where I thought maybe I'll be a documentary filmmaker, and I took classes at NYU, they have a really great film school. And so it was like me, this will be what I will do, that did not obviously end up being what I'm doing. But it is a full circle thing to kind of come back to the arts now and include it in research.Brian Bienkowski And do you find that, you know, I don't know so much about your advisors, or how that works. But you know, I know just kind of historically, academia and stuff hasn't put a lot of, you know, it's like published in the journal and move on with your life kind of thing. Do you find that you're you're finding support, and that people are maybe kind of changing in that regard and open to kind of some of these different methods?Greer Hamilton I do. I do think that people are opening, becoming more open to arts. And that's why I ended up at University of Michigan. So they actually put out a call for arts-based research position last year when I was on the job market. And that was what drew me I was like, Oh, how cool it is to see a school like Michigan be interested, right in arts work. You know, I will also say that there are evolving flaws, right? Like they're like, right, because people have for so long thought of like research as like one thing and, and publishing as the only kind of output, right? Like, they are having to change kind of their own metrics to figure out how my work fits into that. But I will say they've been really supportive of like, encouraging of me, using the arts in my research. So I hope that more schools will, will do that.Brian Bienkowski And, you know, I have a brother in law, just as an example here, who wasn't really environmentally engaged. He's a tribal police officer up here. And he watched a documentary about I believe it was about dairy, I don't know what the documentary was about, he quit eating dairy. Like immediately, that was it like no more for him after he saw, I don't know if it was animal abuse, you know, some kind of animal rights issue. He's done. And it just spoke to me that like, oh, gosh, you can put all of the articles out in the world. And you can write all of the stories and send all of the tweets. But if you can find that kind of storytelling aspect, in this case, it was a really well-done documentary, I assume, I mean, it had a profound impact on his life. So I'm just such a, I'm just such a fan of this. And I'm really excited to see where you take some of this stuff. So, very cool. Another avenue that you're interested in, I know you have some different activist tendencies and things that you're very interested in. And I know reproductive justice is something that you're interested in, have engaged in, and it opened your eyes to the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental injustice, of course. So can you talk about your work in this space? And how it shows these issues as interconnected?Greer Hamilton Yeah, um, when I was in my master's program, that was actually my first research experience. I did abortion-access research with a professor, and this was before Roe vs. Wade was ended. And I learned like how profoundly like geographical location informs was people's access to abortion, right? So like people were having to travel really long, like distances in order to get an abortion, or like the wait times at the time. And I think for me, it really reinforced like the role of place in terms of health and environmental issues, that these are also the same communities that are likely to be overburdened or experienced overburdened by environmental toxins. And these are also the same people who are less likely to be able to access like a basic health care need, like an abortion. And I think it also was a good reminder that things like Roe versus Wade, which we you know, I think for a long time people kind of claimed was the ultimate dream of abortion rights actually had its flaws – like that people were not getting the care they needed. And so, you know, now that, you know, Roe versus Wade has been overturned, it's been even more kind of painful to see the ways in which geography informs people's or restricts people's right access to abortions, and how those geographical barriers are deeply tied right back to like colonialism and capitalism and racism, right, that those things were created intentionally right for people to not be able to access services that you need, whether it's like in their local area, or within a larger state. And so I'm hoping for more people to like, learn more about those barriers that people face, because it's not as easy as people think, to get an abortion, even in 2024. And even with like medical or abortion pills being readily available, right? those pills are also sometimes constrained right by location. So yeah, it's a issue that's really near and dear to my heart. And I'm glad to have seen over the past couple of years, people learn more about abortion restrictions in the country, and reproductive justice.Brian Bienkowski And it's another one of those really frustrating issues, I should say, as we speak right now, you know, Arizona just turned back the clock this week in such a archaic way, on this on this very issue and, and Florida, right. And it's one of those things, it's kind of like gun rights, where it's so frustrating that when you actually look at the, the electorate, you know, the it's not really that controversial of an issue, there really is kind of mostly broad support for this. And to see how our, you know, the system has been perverted in a way that allows people to make decisions for others is, is really something. But I think you're right, you have seen kind of a groundswell of awareness, if nothing else, after Roe fell. So I guess we will see what happens. Do you still is this work that you still engage in now that you're in Detroit and in Michigan? Are you too busy? No.Greer Hamilton Um, so I've been on the board of boards of abortion funds for the past couple years first of Eastern Massachusetts abortion fund. But now that I'm in Detroit, I'm with the Midwest Access Coalition, which is a practical support fund, actually, which people may not know about. But, um, practical support is to tends to be hotels, airfare, childcare, you know, food support, like the other things, right that, that people will require in order to access an abortion. And so I'm really proud of the work that Midwest Access Coalition does. And I'm just proud to be a board member. And also I will just put a plug it is funding season, it is the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for abortion funds across the country and some international ones. But if you go to nn, like Nancy, a f.org, you will find or you should be able to find your local abortion fund. And they likely are having some sort of event or a fundraising effort for the next month or so. So a great time to give because people's money are drying up. And now that people have decided that the Roe decision no longer takes precedent.Brian Bienkowski Thank you so much for that it is a great time for people to get involved in this, especially, you know, as we head into another election season, and this is top of mind. Hopefully everybody can check that out. So when it comes to social work writ large here, what would you like to see change? I mean, I get the sense that you're you're wanting to do things a little bit differently than have been done historically. So what would you like to see the field change? And how do you see yourself as part of that change?Greer Hamilton Yeah, as much as I love social work, I find it to be a pretty a-historic profession. I think it often forgets like, context matters in terms of like, the social issues that we're working on. And so for me, I really try to include history as much as I can in my work. And so we'd love to see more social workers like integrating and interrogating our history and its relationship to other things. But also, I think we're sometimes reactionary in terms of our engagement with social action. Sometimes it is right like other people who start doing social actions. And then social work is like, "Oh, hey, actually, we should care about it." Environmental issues, I think being an example of this. And so would love to see more social workers just like less scared, right of what other social professionals right are thinking, counselor social work, and to be more, be more open right to like what what social it can be and the issues that we should be focused on. And to, like, take that risk of, of just being more vocal and more active in issues that matter to you, but also to your community.Brian Bienkowski I spoke to, I'm forgetting the fellow right now. But she was a city in this kind of City Planning and had a very similar response that there's, there's a tendency to want to stick within the what the professional parameters have always been, instead of kind of integrating yourself in the community. And I think there's I think there's definitely some lessons there. So this has been a largely positive conversation. But I know environmental justice is not positive all the time, even though we're seeing some progress. So what are you optimistic about?Greer Hamilton I am really proud of the students that are organizing at University of Michigan where I'm at, there's been a lot of like, attempt to like stop them from organizing, but they're making really crucial connections, right to militarization and militarization and how it relates to like environmental issues or public health issues. And I'm just like always deeply proud of young adults who are willing to kind of take risk, even when there are like potential harms, not only to like their physical body, but also to their ability to graduate. And so I think that makes me really optimistic.Brian Bienkowski Excellent. Well, now we get to do some of the fun stuff before we get you out of here. So I have three rapid-fire questions, and you can just give me one word, or a phrase. My favorite hangout in Detroit isGreer Hamilton Kitab coffee.Brian Bienkowski Oh, tell me about it. Where is it at?Greer Hamilton They may have on Hamtramck but they also just built one in Midtown. It's an Arab on coffee shop that just is doing really cool community based work and also has really good coffee.Brian Bienkowski So I think I've seen the one in Hamtramck is it wood paneled?Greer Hamilton Yeah, in Midtown too. It's just Edmonton. So okay.Brian Bienkowski Okay, so we're getting away in the weeds here. And you can tune out listeners for a second. But I've seen the one in Hamtramck because it's on my walk when I walk to cafe 1923 which is my coffee shop that I go to down there. So I will have to definitely try a new one. If I could have dinner with anyone in this can be living or past it would beGreer Hamilton Spike LeeBrian Bienkowski that's a fun one. My go to comfort musician or albumGreer Hamilton Lianne La Havas.Brian Bienkowski I don't know this one. Tell me about tell me about this person.Greer Hamilton She's from London. She has a really beautiful soulful voice and, and she got me through the pandemic. So it'sBrian Bienkowski High praise. Excellent. Well, I will definitely check her out. I've got two recommendations from this. So Greer, this has been a whole lot of fun. I'm really glad we got to connect. And hanging out with you in Philly. It was just, it was so much fun. There's never enough time at those retreats with everybody. And my last question before we get you out of here is what is the last book that you read for fun?Greer Hamilton The City of Dispossession, by Kyle T. Mays, you would also really like it. It's about indigenous andBblack history of Detroit. And just a really good read. Awesome.Brian Bienkowski Well, I'm gonna give a short plug for Book Suey is the bookstore in Hamtramck where I tried to get all my books, even though I live so far away from there now, but they carry a whole local section. So I'm hoping and it's in there next time I'm down there. And Greer, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for your time, and I will talk to you soon.Greer Hamilton Take care.

Dr. Greer Hamilton joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss how she uses the arts to engage and involve communities around environmental justice research.Hamilton, a transitional postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, is a current fellow in the Agents of Change program. She also talks about how she found her passion in social work, her activism on reproductive justice, tips on meaningfully involving communities in research, and some of her favorite spots in Detroit.The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.Listen below to our discussion with Hamilton, and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice researchTranscript Brian BienkowskiHello and welcome back to the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast, a partnership between Environmental Health News and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. I'm your host, Brian Bienkowski, editor of Agents of Change and senior editor at Environmental Health News. Welcome back to all of our regular listeners, and welcome to anybody new. We are here every two weeks talking to up-and-coming and established leaders in environmental justice. Please find us wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe. Well, I am so excited for today's episode. Last month, our leadership team traveled to Philly and we met our fifth cohort fellows. And today we have our very first guest from this latest round of environmental justice rockstars that we are working with. today's guests is Dr. Greer Hamilton, a transitional Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Greer is doing fascinating work, she talks about how she got into social work, tips on meaningfully engaging communities in your research, what it means to be an art space researcher, and what changes she would like to see in the field of social work. And just a quick warning that we nerd out on Detroit a little bit here and there. But I'm sure you're all used to me doing that every time we have a Detroit-based guest. Enjoy. All right, I am super excited to be joined by our very first fellow from this cohort to join me on the podcast. Greer Hamilton. Greer, how are you doing today?Greer Hamilton I'm doing well. How are you?Brian Bienkowski I'm doing great. We won't talk about all the technical difficulties that we had before we connected now they don't need to know about that. So where are you today?Greer Hamilton I'm in Detroit, Michigan.Brian Bienkowski Detroit, Michigan. As all the listeners know, that is a place very near and dear to my heart. So I'm glad you're down there. In fact, when we met and you told me where you're at down there, I was looking around a little bit. And it's not too far from some of my old house. So I'm hoping to come visit you sometime. But you of course did not grow up in Detroit. You're there now for schooling and such. So you mostly grew up in New York state, from what I understand. So can you tell me a bit about your upbringing and where the interest in the environment and health came into your life?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so you're right, I mostly grew up on Long Island, in a town called Limbrick. But I also spent eight or so years of my childhood living in Alabama, where my mother's family is from. And to be honest, I think environment and health issues really didn't kind of come to the focus until college. And when I started taking a lot more interest in like thinking more about like, you know, the saying of like, "oh, well zip codes matter."– like, we're zip code is can like be a big proxy for like other things. Like that was kind of like the thing that like made me want to think more about environmental and health issues. And I know I mentioned this at like the retreat, but like, one of the things that kind of came full circle to me was about like my town Valley Stream on Long Island being a sundowntown. And how almost kind of short sighted like that zip code as proxy statement is because right zip codes aren't the things that matter. Right? Those other factors, right, like racism or other structural issues are the things that create, right, zip codes mattering. And so like when I kind of started making those connections, I began to become more interested in like, how does like a public park or like how to neighborhood, right? factor into like, our conversation about environment and health, and what do they do? You know, in terms of people's well being.Brian Bienkowski Can you explain to listeners what a sundown town is?Greer Hamilton Yeah, they were pretty prevalent between like, 1940 and 1960 throughout the country you know. Like, we talk poorly about the South, but like, they were in northern places like New York, and they were towns that were predominantly white. And after sundown, they were locations where non-white people were meant to not be and sometimes they were were murdered right for being in the town after sundown. Or they were chased out. But they're just like really, like harmful relics, right of that that time period.Brian Bienkowski You say relics, but men, if you think about the, you know, the 40s to the 60s, I mean, that was long ago, but it's not that long ago. I mean, that's grandparents and stuff, you know, that were around then so that is you know, and being in Detroit there I often think of the zip code that always gets thrown out is 48217 –I have it memorized because that is southwest Detroit – and they deal with some of the worst air in the city and in the state and in the country. So the there's been a lot written and talked about, not too far from you right there a zip code that is really determinant of people's health. So. So you went on to get a dual bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Buffalo. So what was it about social work as a career that spoke to you?Greer Hamilton Yeah, to be honest, my parents went through a divorce in high school, and I went to a social worker. And it was, at the time like thinking about going into pre med. I always kind of planned to be a medical doctor. And, but at the time, my life cannot imagine also doing that. And I was talking to my social worker about like, her job, and like, what were those opportunities, and she thought social work could be a good option for me, because it was still helping. And it's also a really broad profession, right? So I could still, you know, be interested in health and, and make a career out of that. And so that's kind of what like pushed me into social work and found it and then like, really developed like a love and appreciation for it.Brian Bienkowski That is so cool. That you know, in pursuing support for yourself, you not only found support, but a career, passion. That is that is really cool and turned something that was maybe difficult, into, you know, something that is very, it's very positive now, so very cool. I've been asking everybody this, what is a moment or event that has shaped your identity up to this point? I know, that's big and unwieldy.Greer Hamilton Yeah, I'm thinking about this. And I think in my master's program, one that sticks out to me was, I worked in a student-run health clinic on the east side of Buffalo, which is a predominantly Black part of the city. And in my experience, it was really interesting because, right, I had to reflect on my blackness, right. And like about also my privileges, because I grew up middle middle class, and we were working with people who were uninsured and low income. And, you know, they saw me as like a similar person to them. And also, they were things that really like I didn't share in terms of like lived experience. But also it like made me really want to, like pursue research, right, related to health. And so I think at that time, it was like, you know, about a year of working every Wednesday night and this clinic, but it was really cool to work with, like medical doctors and community members to like, try to figure out ways to improve their, their health and well being.Brian Bienkowski So this leads me really nicely in my next question, so before you returned to get your PhD was, which is where you're at now, you were, you know, working in social work in Buffalo, and I know this was meaningful, obviously, to you. But can you talk about why you wanted to get your PhD? why research spoke to you as something that you could maybe do more good, or, you know, additional good in this space?Greer Hamilton Yeah. Um, so after my master's, I went on to work at a nonprofit that was focused on actually increasing representation of non-white and low-income people in health professions, including social work and medicine. And then after that, did some work with a local foundation, doing community capacity building work with nonprofits. And in both of those experiences, both program managing a nonprofit and working with other nonprofits, I realized how there was like this weird cyclical kind of nature of like funding and research where nonprofits needed funding funders wanted research or evaluation. But those nonprofits didn't have either the staff person or the money, right to then go out and do research or evaluation. And so then it ended up putting large organizations that had that type of resource ahead, right, and then smaller, more grassroots organizations behind. And so I was like, "Oh, well, I like research will maybe this is something I could pursue, and then eventually come back with it to Buffalo or somewhere else and be that person who can provide that type of research or evaluation, support to organizations that they can do more," right? and get the funding they need in order to do the great work that they were doing.Brian Bienkowski So you went from one, Rust Belt city to another. And we talked about our love of rust belt cities, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Buffalo. I used to really like the Buffalo Bills football team when I was okay. And now you know, of course, the Lions because that's where I'm from, but it's just really cool to be working in those in those cities. I just find them fascinating, the kind of industrial history and all of that, and you mentioned something there that I want to just talk to you a little bit about and that's representation in healthcare settings, kind of having non-white representation. Can you talk about maybe an example or just why that's important, what that means to people to go into, you know, what can be kind of a vulnerable setting and see people like them or at least see people that represent their community?Greer Hamilton Yeah. I think like it also I think ties back to this my interest in like history and its relationship to health because I think, right, so much of like the current conversations about Black people in healthcare settings are about how medical doctors often don't like consider them capable of pain, right? And like that has kind of shown up in maternal mortality related situations recently, and how all of those things are like so directly tied back to our history of enslavement in this country. And so I think when people –and I can speak for myself– and I am able to find a Black doctor who is truly able to kind of understand that history, but also to be like, the one to ask more questions, right? And not assume that like, because I have a PhD or because of certain things that like maybe I'm not capable of experiencing certain issues, the person like to ask those questions just really matters. And so I think it's sometimes helpful to have a person who is like you in some way, and being your care provider or kind of being another person in your life.Brian Bienkowski So you've been doing a lot of your research is fascinating. And the way you put your research out is fascinating. And when I read your application, I think it's okay for me to admit that you are the one that I was telling the staff like, "No, we need her. She's, she's part of this cohort." I was really excited because you're doing a lot of cool stuff. And I want to get into that. But let's start first kind of take a step back and talk about the research that you're doing so. And you're also again, into unique ways of communicating it. So can you tell me about the research, you're co-leading looking at indoor air pollution in affordable housing and transportation pollution in the Boston area? What are you all doing and what have you found so far?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so our affordable housing project wrapped up last year was called Stainable air quality in affordable housing, and it was with engineering researchers at Tufts University. And I worked with them over the past four or five years. And then collectively, those engineers and Alok Shuhada and John Durant, and I applied for a grant with this group called Mystic River Watershed Association. And we have now a community-based air quality study in East Boston, Charlestown, Everett, and Malden to monitor the air quality over three years, and then to also work with residents to understand their own understandings of air quality, and how it's affected them. We chose those four communities because they are communities that are most overburdened by air pollution, because of where the highways are, the airport, and also they have the most are like they have a large population of non-white and linguistically-isolated people. And so they're often not represented in in this type of research. But should be, right? And so I think that's what we're trying to kind of do in our work. It's a community-engaged study that goes through 2026. And I hope to do all the community engaged research, which is, you know, exciting, and fun.Brian Bienkowski Yeah, before we get into some of that outreach, have there been Do you have findings yet? Have you looked at kind of air quality and seen, you know, bad things in the air compared to other neighborhoods and stuff? Are there any findings? Oh, yeah.Greer Hamilton Not from our project. But like Boston has done a lot of air quality research over the past 10 years or so. So there is some research like, I always forget the acronym but or like the full name, but it's called Cafe, there was a study done in Chinatown, right? where they found that people living in Chinatown, right were greatly affected by air quality. And also then didn't have like the resources to monitor or to do some of the mitigation strategies. So Chinatown has been doing a lot of research in those years following. For our project we started last April. So we have some preliminary survey data that finds that like a lot of people are concerned about air pollution, but either don't understand what are the sources of pollutants, or don't understand what to do to make improvements, right, whether that is by personal behavior changes, or advocacy work. And so that's kind of what we're hoping to do next.Brian Bienkowski We just did a big investigation, our newsroom with the Texas Tribune, looking at air quality in certain neighborhoods, certain Latino neighborhoods. And one of the things that we found was that even when there is data, it's not the first of all, it was often not in Spanish. And a lot of these are Spanish-speaking communities. And then you go to these websites, and I've been a reporter for a while and use the TRI from the EPA and stuff. And it's just a mess. I mean, you almost need a PhD to understand the data in the first place. So I think I really want to get at this kind of community engagement. And that's where a lot of your work comes in. So let's take this this study as a way to understand that, can you talk about your role in getting community members involved in the project, and making sure that they're engaged and aware of what you guys are finding and doing?Greer Hamilton Yeah. So the first kind of part of like our community engagement efforts were to develop a community advisory board. This is an 11 person board that is made up of young people under 18 and adults who live in those four communities. They are people who are not researchers, they are moms, they are nurses, they are students, right? And we really wanted to prioritize people who live there, and had lived there for a long time. And in order to kind of like contextualize the research that we're doing. We meet with them quarterly, and they give us guidance on kind of all facets of our work. We also have a community survey that is out, I'm in all four communities where we're asking people about, what is air quality to them? How do they know that poor air quality is occurring in their neighborhood? Is it smelling does it like look bad? and where are kind of the sites that they would want us to do follow up research in. And then we've also linked back to the language conversation you were just having have been really like intentional about making sure that our work is able to reach communities that we want. So we translate all of our work, whether that's the surveys to materials for like community meetings, into seven different languages including English, with the ones that are most represented by those four, so like Arabic, Haitian, Creole, Spanish, Portuguese, for example. And then we've also really been trying to, like build out like educational kind of workshop series for both our community advisory board members, but also residents. So we've been working with organizations to host like air quality one-on-one workshops, so they can like, start learning how to deconstruct the air quality data that we might be producing, and also to like, do like do DIY, kind of like air filtration types of projects. And then we're also beginning to offer your policy and advocacy trainings over the summer, so that our county advisory board members can then take that information back to their community, and really start to like work with other organizations around like, what are those strategies we want to implement? Knowing that policymakers right, have a lot of responsibility for regulating air pollution, whether it's like idling buses, or, you know, a truck, right, that stuck on the on the, on the 93, right? and so really kind of trying to work with residents around that. So those are some of the ways that we're thinking about community engagement.Brian Bienkowski That's really great. Because I mean, it takes everything from "Okay, let's find out what's in the air" all the way through to "Okay, now you are armed with this information here, we're going to train you to advocate for yourself." And I think making that holistic connection like that is, it's really exciting. It's really cool to hear about that. So what are some tips that you would have for other researchers who are trying to do this kind of community engagement, but are having trouble or finding people reluctant or busy? That's probably a big one, too. What are some tips you might have?Greer Hamilton I think you have to know that it's going to be slow from the very beginning. I work with people who wanted to communicate research, but don't want to invest the time. And you can't do this work without investing time. Time not only in like, learning what people's needs are, right? Like, let's say that like air pollution actually wasn't the top need for people like that means that we might have to shift right like kind of our priorities until we can get there. And it means like showing up to events that like you don't think are relevant to your work, right, like a block party, or you know, an event that's happening in a local college. And also listening, I think, like, my goal always is to do more listening than I am talking. So if a resident is telling me like something that matters to them, or something that like I've done that maybe was not in line of how they think it should be done. My job is not to like, talk down to them, right? Because I'm in a certain position and just to like, really listen and hear kind of what are the concerns that they're bringing up so that I can either shift what I'm doing or shift my thinking or approach around something.Brian Bienkowski And so you call yourself an arts-based researcher, which is, I love that title. I think it's really cool. And so can you give some examples of the ways that you used arts to engage with communities around environmental justice research and issues? And what are some artistic outlets or methods that you haven't used yet, but that you'd like to try?Greer Hamilton Yeah, so beginning of my PhD, I worked with students in the School of Arts to work on puppetry. So we made some stop motion work about green gentrification, which was kind of the environmental work that I was working on at that time. And it was really cool, because it was a really like disarming way of like talking about gentrification, which can be such a heavy topic. And people like, were able to kind of see like the horrors, right? of like, what happens when neighborhoods changed without people being able to participate in and then that shifted to my dissertation where I began to include more like visual arts and storytelling, so like doing like oral history collections, and like walking tours as a way to kind of engage people like, like in their total bodies around these topics. And then now, I have a small project that's working on a comic book and an animated film about transportation-related air pollution that we hope to kind of build out to like bleed into like, some curriculum for like K through 12 people in particular. But as a way to kind of start getting people to be aware of terms be aware of like air pollution and how it can like, affect them and even lead to like premature death, right? We want people to be more aware of like the health pieces. And you know, I think we've talked about this or I know we've talked about this, but like, also have interest in like soundscapes, and we'd love to, like think about how can we use soundscapes really to like traffic Navy, or just like the neat like nature, with electronic music or either like classic music, classical music. So it's like, uh, hopefully, within the next year, I can move into that. But those are some things I'm working on. But Fine Arts to be like a really great way to kind of communicate either environmental science or communicate like topics that people are thinking about, but maybe don't have like the language or are scared, right? to talk about it.Brian Bienkowski There's also I mean, we always hear growing up, or at least most of us did, that we all kind of learn differently. You know, some of us like to touch and get into stuff, some of us like to read or watch a YouTube video, whatever it is, and the you know, the soundscapes the one you mentioned, I am just very sensitive to audio, it really kind of resonates with me, it really... and in the kind of stuff that you're talking about, I actually, you know, I do some of that, like, you know, we talked about that. So I do think it's a really good way to kind of spread the message around in all these different ways. And who knows what's going to stick, right? Who knows what, how people learn and stuff? Where does that come from, where you always are the arts and kind of being creative, something that was prior to research, or did it kind of dovetail with some of this research that you're doing?Greer Hamilton It was prior to research, I like had a phase in like high school where I thought maybe I'll be a documentary filmmaker, and I took classes at NYU, they have a really great film school. And so it was like me, this will be what I will do, that did not obviously end up being what I'm doing. But it is a full circle thing to kind of come back to the arts now and include it in research.Brian Bienkowski And do you find that, you know, I don't know so much about your advisors, or how that works. But you know, I know just kind of historically, academia and stuff hasn't put a lot of, you know, it's like published in the journal and move on with your life kind of thing. Do you find that you're you're finding support, and that people are maybe kind of changing in that regard and open to kind of some of these different methods?Greer Hamilton I do. I do think that people are opening, becoming more open to arts. And that's why I ended up at University of Michigan. So they actually put out a call for arts-based research position last year when I was on the job market. And that was what drew me I was like, Oh, how cool it is to see a school like Michigan be interested, right in arts work. You know, I will also say that there are evolving flaws, right? Like they're like, right, because people have for so long thought of like research as like one thing and, and publishing as the only kind of output, right? Like, they are having to change kind of their own metrics to figure out how my work fits into that. But I will say they've been really supportive of like, encouraging of me, using the arts in my research. So I hope that more schools will, will do that.Brian Bienkowski And, you know, I have a brother in law, just as an example here, who wasn't really environmentally engaged. He's a tribal police officer up here. And he watched a documentary about I believe it was about dairy, I don't know what the documentary was about, he quit eating dairy. Like immediately, that was it like no more for him after he saw, I don't know if it was animal abuse, you know, some kind of animal rights issue. He's done. And it just spoke to me that like, oh, gosh, you can put all of the articles out in the world. And you can write all of the stories and send all of the tweets. But if you can find that kind of storytelling aspect, in this case, it was a really well-done documentary, I assume, I mean, it had a profound impact on his life. So I'm just such a, I'm just such a fan of this. And I'm really excited to see where you take some of this stuff. So, very cool. Another avenue that you're interested in, I know you have some different activist tendencies and things that you're very interested in. And I know reproductive justice is something that you're interested in, have engaged in, and it opened your eyes to the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental injustice, of course. So can you talk about your work in this space? And how it shows these issues as interconnected?Greer Hamilton Yeah, um, when I was in my master's program, that was actually my first research experience. I did abortion-access research with a professor, and this was before Roe vs. Wade was ended. And I learned like how profoundly like geographical location informs was people's access to abortion, right? So like people were having to travel really long, like distances in order to get an abortion, or like the wait times at the time. And I think for me, it really reinforced like the role of place in terms of health and environmental issues, that these are also the same communities that are likely to be overburdened or experienced overburdened by environmental toxins. And these are also the same people who are less likely to be able to access like a basic health care need, like an abortion. And I think it also was a good reminder that things like Roe versus Wade, which we you know, I think for a long time people kind of claimed was the ultimate dream of abortion rights actually had its flaws – like that people were not getting the care they needed. And so, you know, now that, you know, Roe versus Wade has been overturned, it's been even more kind of painful to see the ways in which geography informs people's or restricts people's right access to abortions, and how those geographical barriers are deeply tied right back to like colonialism and capitalism and racism, right, that those things were created intentionally right for people to not be able to access services that you need, whether it's like in their local area, or within a larger state. And so I'm hoping for more people to like, learn more about those barriers that people face, because it's not as easy as people think, to get an abortion, even in 2024. And even with like medical or abortion pills being readily available, right? those pills are also sometimes constrained right by location. So yeah, it's a issue that's really near and dear to my heart. And I'm glad to have seen over the past couple of years, people learn more about abortion restrictions in the country, and reproductive justice.Brian Bienkowski And it's another one of those really frustrating issues, I should say, as we speak right now, you know, Arizona just turned back the clock this week in such a archaic way, on this on this very issue and, and Florida, right. And it's one of those things, it's kind of like gun rights, where it's so frustrating that when you actually look at the, the electorate, you know, the it's not really that controversial of an issue, there really is kind of mostly broad support for this. And to see how our, you know, the system has been perverted in a way that allows people to make decisions for others is, is really something. But I think you're right, you have seen kind of a groundswell of awareness, if nothing else, after Roe fell. So I guess we will see what happens. Do you still is this work that you still engage in now that you're in Detroit and in Michigan? Are you too busy? No.Greer Hamilton Um, so I've been on the board of boards of abortion funds for the past couple years first of Eastern Massachusetts abortion fund. But now that I'm in Detroit, I'm with the Midwest Access Coalition, which is a practical support fund, actually, which people may not know about. But, um, practical support is to tends to be hotels, airfare, childcare, you know, food support, like the other things, right that, that people will require in order to access an abortion. And so I'm really proud of the work that Midwest Access Coalition does. And I'm just proud to be a board member. And also I will just put a plug it is funding season, it is the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for abortion funds across the country and some international ones. But if you go to nn, like Nancy, a f.org, you will find or you should be able to find your local abortion fund. And they likely are having some sort of event or a fundraising effort for the next month or so. So a great time to give because people's money are drying up. And now that people have decided that the Roe decision no longer takes precedent.Brian Bienkowski Thank you so much for that it is a great time for people to get involved in this, especially, you know, as we head into another election season, and this is top of mind. Hopefully everybody can check that out. So when it comes to social work writ large here, what would you like to see change? I mean, I get the sense that you're you're wanting to do things a little bit differently than have been done historically. So what would you like to see the field change? And how do you see yourself as part of that change?Greer Hamilton Yeah, as much as I love social work, I find it to be a pretty a-historic profession. I think it often forgets like, context matters in terms of like, the social issues that we're working on. And so for me, I really try to include history as much as I can in my work. And so we'd love to see more social workers like integrating and interrogating our history and its relationship to other things. But also, I think we're sometimes reactionary in terms of our engagement with social action. Sometimes it is right like other people who start doing social actions. And then social work is like, "Oh, hey, actually, we should care about it." Environmental issues, I think being an example of this. And so would love to see more social workers just like less scared, right of what other social professionals right are thinking, counselor social work, and to be more, be more open right to like what what social it can be and the issues that we should be focused on. And to, like, take that risk of, of just being more vocal and more active in issues that matter to you, but also to your community.Brian Bienkowski I spoke to, I'm forgetting the fellow right now. But she was a city in this kind of City Planning and had a very similar response that there's, there's a tendency to want to stick within the what the professional parameters have always been, instead of kind of integrating yourself in the community. And I think there's I think there's definitely some lessons there. So this has been a largely positive conversation. But I know environmental justice is not positive all the time, even though we're seeing some progress. So what are you optimistic about?Greer Hamilton I am really proud of the students that are organizing at University of Michigan where I'm at, there's been a lot of like, attempt to like stop them from organizing, but they're making really crucial connections, right to militarization and militarization and how it relates to like environmental issues or public health issues. And I'm just like always deeply proud of young adults who are willing to kind of take risk, even when there are like potential harms, not only to like their physical body, but also to their ability to graduate. And so I think that makes me really optimistic.Brian Bienkowski Excellent. Well, now we get to do some of the fun stuff before we get you out of here. So I have three rapid-fire questions, and you can just give me one word, or a phrase. My favorite hangout in Detroit isGreer Hamilton Kitab coffee.Brian Bienkowski Oh, tell me about it. Where is it at?Greer Hamilton They may have on Hamtramck but they also just built one in Midtown. It's an Arab on coffee shop that just is doing really cool community based work and also has really good coffee.Brian Bienkowski So I think I've seen the one in Hamtramck is it wood paneled?Greer Hamilton Yeah, in Midtown too. It's just Edmonton. So okay.Brian Bienkowski Okay, so we're getting away in the weeds here. And you can tune out listeners for a second. But I've seen the one in Hamtramck because it's on my walk when I walk to cafe 1923 which is my coffee shop that I go to down there. So I will have to definitely try a new one. If I could have dinner with anyone in this can be living or past it would beGreer Hamilton Spike LeeBrian Bienkowski that's a fun one. My go to comfort musician or albumGreer Hamilton Lianne La Havas.Brian Bienkowski I don't know this one. Tell me about tell me about this person.Greer Hamilton She's from London. She has a really beautiful soulful voice and, and she got me through the pandemic. So it'sBrian Bienkowski High praise. Excellent. Well, I will definitely check her out. I've got two recommendations from this. So Greer, this has been a whole lot of fun. I'm really glad we got to connect. And hanging out with you in Philly. It was just, it was so much fun. There's never enough time at those retreats with everybody. And my last question before we get you out of here is what is the last book that you read for fun?Greer Hamilton The City of Dispossession, by Kyle T. Mays, you would also really like it. It's about indigenous andBblack history of Detroit. And just a really good read. Awesome.Brian Bienkowski Well, I'm gonna give a short plug for Book Suey is the bookstore in Hamtramck where I tried to get all my books, even though I live so far away from there now, but they carry a whole local section. So I'm hoping and it's in there next time I'm down there. And Greer, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for your time, and I will talk to you soon.Greer Hamilton Take care.



Dr. Greer Hamilton joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss how she uses the arts to engage and involve communities around environmental justice research.


Hamilton, a transitional postdoctoral fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, is a current fellow in the Agents of Change program. She also talks about how she found her passion in social work, her activism on reproductive justice, tips on meaningfully involving communities in research, and some of her favorite spots in Detroit.

The Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast is a biweekly podcast featuring the stories and big ideas from past and present fellows, as well as others in the field. You can see all of the past episodes here.

Listen below to our discussion with Hamilton, and subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or Spotify.


Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Greer Hamilton on arts-based environmental justice research

Transcript 


Brian Bienkowski

Hello and welcome back to the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast, a partnership between Environmental Health News and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. I'm your host, Brian Bienkowski, editor of Agents of Change and senior editor at Environmental Health News. Welcome back to all of our regular listeners, and welcome to anybody new. We are here every two weeks talking to up-and-coming and established leaders in environmental justice. Please find us wherever you get your podcasts and please subscribe. Well, I am so excited for today's episode. Last month, our leadership team traveled to Philly and we met our fifth cohort fellows. And today we have our very first guest from this latest round of environmental justice rockstars that we are working with. today's guests is Dr. Greer Hamilton, a transitional Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work. Greer is doing fascinating work, she talks about how she got into social work, tips on meaningfully engaging communities in your research, what it means to be an art space researcher, and what changes she would like to see in the field of social work. And just a quick warning that we nerd out on Detroit a little bit here and there. But I'm sure you're all used to me doing that every time we have a Detroit-based guest. Enjoy. All right, I am super excited to be joined by our very first fellow from this cohort to join me on the podcast. Greer Hamilton. Greer, how are you doing today?

Greer Hamilton

I'm doing well. How are you?

Brian Bienkowski

I'm doing great. We won't talk about all the technical difficulties that we had before we connected now they don't need to know about that. So where are you today?

Greer Hamilton

I'm in Detroit, Michigan.

Brian Bienkowski

Detroit, Michigan. As all the listeners know, that is a place very near and dear to my heart. So I'm glad you're down there. In fact, when we met and you told me where you're at down there, I was looking around a little bit. And it's not too far from some of my old house. So I'm hoping to come visit you sometime. But you of course did not grow up in Detroit. You're there now for schooling and such. So you mostly grew up in New York state, from what I understand. So can you tell me a bit about your upbringing and where the interest in the environment and health came into your life?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, so you're right, I mostly grew up on Long Island, in a town called Limbrick. But I also spent eight or so years of my childhood living in Alabama, where my mother's family is from. And to be honest, I think environment and health issues really didn't kind of come to the focus until college. And when I started taking a lot more interest in like thinking more about like, you know, the saying of like, "oh, well zip codes matter."– like, we're zip code is can like be a big proxy for like other things. Like that was kind of like the thing that like made me want to think more about environmental and health issues. And I know I mentioned this at like the retreat, but like, one of the things that kind of came full circle to me was about like my town Valley Stream on Long Island being a sundowntown. And how almost kind of short sighted like that zip code as proxy statement is because right zip codes aren't the things that matter. Right? Those other factors, right, like racism or other structural issues are the things that create, right, zip codes mattering. And so like when I kind of started making those connections, I began to become more interested in like, how does like a public park or like how to neighborhood, right? factor into like, our conversation about environment and health, and what do they do? You know, in terms of people's well being.

Brian Bienkowski

Can you explain to listeners what a sundown town is?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, they were pretty prevalent between like, 1940 and 1960 throughout the country you know. Like, we talk poorly about the South, but like, they were in northern places like New York, and they were towns that were predominantly white. And after sundown, they were locations where non-white people were meant to not be and sometimes they were were murdered right for being in the town after sundown. Or they were chased out. But they're just like really, like harmful relics, right of that that time period.

Brian Bienkowski

You say relics, but men, if you think about the, you know, the 40s to the 60s, I mean, that was long ago, but it's not that long ago. I mean, that's grandparents and stuff, you know, that were around then so that is you know, and being in Detroit there I often think of the zip code that always gets thrown out is 48217 –I have it memorized because that is southwest Detroit – and they deal with some of the worst air in the city and in the state and in the country. So the there's been a lot written and talked about, not too far from you right there a zip code that is really determinant of people's health. So. So you went on to get a dual bachelor's and master's degree at the University of Buffalo. So what was it about social work as a career that spoke to you?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, to be honest, my parents went through a divorce in high school, and I went to a social worker. And it was, at the time like thinking about going into pre med. I always kind of planned to be a medical doctor. And, but at the time, my life cannot imagine also doing that. And I was talking to my social worker about like, her job, and like, what were those opportunities, and she thought social work could be a good option for me, because it was still helping. And it's also a really broad profession, right? So I could still, you know, be interested in health and, and make a career out of that. And so that's kind of what like pushed me into social work and found it and then like, really developed like a love and appreciation for it.

Brian Bienkowski

That is so cool. That you know, in pursuing support for yourself, you not only found support, but a career, passion. That is that is really cool and turned something that was maybe difficult, into, you know, something that is very, it's very positive now, so very cool. I've been asking everybody this, what is a moment or event that has shaped your identity up to this point? I know, that's big and unwieldy.

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, I'm thinking about this. And I think in my master's program, one that sticks out to me was, I worked in a student-run health clinic on the east side of Buffalo, which is a predominantly Black part of the city. And in my experience, it was really interesting because, right, I had to reflect on my blackness, right. And like about also my privileges, because I grew up middle middle class, and we were working with people who were uninsured and low income. And, you know, they saw me as like a similar person to them. And also, they were things that really like I didn't share in terms of like lived experience. But also it like made me really want to, like pursue research, right, related to health. And so I think at that time, it was like, you know, about a year of working every Wednesday night and this clinic, but it was really cool to work with, like medical doctors and community members to like, try to figure out ways to improve their, their health and well being.

Brian Bienkowski

So this leads me really nicely in my next question, so before you returned to get your PhD was, which is where you're at now, you were, you know, working in social work in Buffalo, and I know this was meaningful, obviously, to you. But can you talk about why you wanted to get your PhD? why research spoke to you as something that you could maybe do more good, or, you know, additional good in this space?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah. Um, so after my master's, I went on to work at a nonprofit that was focused on actually increasing representation of non-white and low-income people in health professions, including social work and medicine. And then after that, did some work with a local foundation, doing community capacity building work with nonprofits. And in both of those experiences, both program managing a nonprofit and working with other nonprofits, I realized how there was like this weird cyclical kind of nature of like funding and research where nonprofits needed funding funders wanted research or evaluation. But those nonprofits didn't have either the staff person or the money, right to then go out and do research or evaluation. And so then it ended up putting large organizations that had that type of resource ahead, right, and then smaller, more grassroots organizations behind. And so I was like, "Oh, well, I like research will maybe this is something I could pursue, and then eventually come back with it to Buffalo or somewhere else and be that person who can provide that type of research or evaluation, support to organizations that they can do more," right? and get the funding they need in order to do the great work that they were doing.

Brian Bienkowski

So you went from one, Rust Belt city to another. And we talked about our love of rust belt cities, and I have a soft spot in my heart for Buffalo. I used to really like the Buffalo Bills football team when I was okay. And now you know, of course, the Lions because that's where I'm from, but it's just really cool to be working in those in those cities. I just find them fascinating, the kind of industrial history and all of that, and you mentioned something there that I want to just talk to you a little bit about and that's representation in healthcare settings, kind of having non-white representation. Can you talk about maybe an example or just why that's important, what that means to people to go into, you know, what can be kind of a vulnerable setting and see people like them or at least see people that represent their community?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah. I think like it also I think ties back to this my interest in like history and its relationship to health because I think, right, so much of like the current conversations about Black people in healthcare settings are about how medical doctors often don't like consider them capable of pain, right? And like that has kind of shown up in maternal mortality related situations recently, and how all of those things are like so directly tied back to our history of enslavement in this country. And so I think when people –and I can speak for myself– and I am able to find a Black doctor who is truly able to kind of understand that history, but also to be like, the one to ask more questions, right? And not assume that like, because I have a PhD or because of certain things that like maybe I'm not capable of experiencing certain issues, the person like to ask those questions just really matters. And so I think it's sometimes helpful to have a person who is like you in some way, and being your care provider or kind of being another person in your life.

Brian Bienkowski

So you've been doing a lot of your research is fascinating. And the way you put your research out is fascinating. And when I read your application, I think it's okay for me to admit that you are the one that I was telling the staff like, "No, we need her. She's, she's part of this cohort." I was really excited because you're doing a lot of cool stuff. And I want to get into that. But let's start first kind of take a step back and talk about the research that you're doing so. And you're also again, into unique ways of communicating it. So can you tell me about the research, you're co-leading looking at indoor air pollution in affordable housing and transportation pollution in the Boston area? What are you all doing and what have you found so far?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, so our affordable housing project wrapped up last year was called Stainable air quality in affordable housing, and it was with engineering researchers at Tufts University. And I worked with them over the past four or five years. And then collectively, those engineers and Alok Shuhada and John Durant, and I applied for a grant with this group called Mystic River Watershed Association. And we have now a community-based air quality study in East Boston, Charlestown, Everett, and Malden to monitor the air quality over three years, and then to also work with residents to understand their own understandings of air quality, and how it's affected them. We chose those four communities because they are communities that are most overburdened by air pollution, because of where the highways are, the airport, and also they have the most are like they have a large population of non-white and linguistically-isolated people. And so they're often not represented in in this type of research. But should be, right? And so I think that's what we're trying to kind of do in our work. It's a community-engaged study that goes through 2026. And I hope to do all the community engaged research, which is, you know, exciting, and fun.

Brian Bienkowski

Yeah, before we get into some of that outreach, have there been Do you have findings yet? Have you looked at kind of air quality and seen, you know, bad things in the air compared to other neighborhoods and stuff? Are there any findings? Oh, yeah.

Greer Hamilton

Not from our project. But like Boston has done a lot of air quality research over the past 10 years or so. So there is some research like, I always forget the acronym but or like the full name, but it's called Cafe, there was a study done in Chinatown, right? where they found that people living in Chinatown, right were greatly affected by air quality. And also then didn't have like the resources to monitor or to do some of the mitigation strategies. So Chinatown has been doing a lot of research in those years following. For our project we started last April. So we have some preliminary survey data that finds that like a lot of people are concerned about air pollution, but either don't understand what are the sources of pollutants, or don't understand what to do to make improvements, right, whether that is by personal behavior changes, or advocacy work. And so that's kind of what we're hoping to do next.

Brian Bienkowski

We just did a big investigation, our newsroom with the Texas Tribune, looking at air quality in certain neighborhoods, certain Latino neighborhoods. And one of the things that we found was that even when there is data, it's not the first of all, it was often not in Spanish. And a lot of these are Spanish-speaking communities. And then you go to these websites, and I've been a reporter for a while and use the TRI from the EPA and stuff. And it's just a mess. I mean, you almost need a PhD to understand the data in the first place. So I think I really want to get at this kind of community engagement. And that's where a lot of your work comes in. So let's take this this study as a way to understand that, can you talk about your role in getting community members involved in the project, and making sure that they're engaged and aware of what you guys are finding and doing?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah. So the first kind of part of like our community engagement efforts were to develop a community advisory board. This is an 11 person board that is made up of young people under 18 and adults who live in those four communities. They are people who are not researchers, they are moms, they are nurses, they are students, right? And we really wanted to prioritize people who live there, and had lived there for a long time. And in order to kind of like contextualize the research that we're doing. We meet with them quarterly, and they give us guidance on kind of all facets of our work. We also have a community survey that is out, I'm in all four communities where we're asking people about, what is air quality to them? How do they know that poor air quality is occurring in their neighborhood? Is it smelling does it like look bad? and where are kind of the sites that they would want us to do follow up research in. And then we've also linked back to the language conversation you were just having have been really like intentional about making sure that our work is able to reach communities that we want. So we translate all of our work, whether that's the surveys to materials for like community meetings, into seven different languages including English, with the ones that are most represented by those four, so like Arabic, Haitian, Creole, Spanish, Portuguese, for example. And then we've also really been trying to, like build out like educational kind of workshop series for both our community advisory board members, but also residents. So we've been working with organizations to host like air quality one-on-one workshops, so they can like, start learning how to deconstruct the air quality data that we might be producing, and also to like, do like do DIY, kind of like air filtration types of projects. And then we're also beginning to offer your policy and advocacy trainings over the summer, so that our county advisory board members can then take that information back to their community, and really start to like work with other organizations around like, what are those strategies we want to implement? Knowing that policymakers right, have a lot of responsibility for regulating air pollution, whether it's like idling buses, or, you know, a truck, right, that stuck on the on the, on the 93, right? and so really kind of trying to work with residents around that. So those are some of the ways that we're thinking about community engagement.

Brian Bienkowski

That's really great. Because I mean, it takes everything from "Okay, let's find out what's in the air" all the way through to "Okay, now you are armed with this information here, we're going to train you to advocate for yourself." And I think making that holistic connection like that is, it's really exciting. It's really cool to hear about that. So what are some tips that you would have for other researchers who are trying to do this kind of community engagement, but are having trouble or finding people reluctant or busy? That's probably a big one, too. What are some tips you might have?

Greer Hamilton

I think you have to know that it's going to be slow from the very beginning. I work with people who wanted to communicate research, but don't want to invest the time. And you can't do this work without investing time. Time not only in like, learning what people's needs are, right? Like, let's say that like air pollution actually wasn't the top need for people like that means that we might have to shift right like kind of our priorities until we can get there. And it means like showing up to events that like you don't think are relevant to your work, right, like a block party, or you know, an event that's happening in a local college. And also listening, I think, like, my goal always is to do more listening than I am talking. So if a resident is telling me like something that matters to them, or something that like I've done that maybe was not in line of how they think it should be done. My job is not to like, talk down to them, right? Because I'm in a certain position and just to like, really listen and hear kind of what are the concerns that they're bringing up so that I can either shift what I'm doing or shift my thinking or approach around something.

Brian Bienkowski

And so you call yourself an arts-based researcher, which is, I love that title. I think it's really cool. And so can you give some examples of the ways that you used arts to engage with communities around environmental justice research and issues? And what are some artistic outlets or methods that you haven't used yet, but that you'd like to try?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, so beginning of my PhD, I worked with students in the School of Arts to work on puppetry. So we made some stop motion work about green gentrification, which was kind of the environmental work that I was working on at that time. And it was really cool, because it was a really like disarming way of like talking about gentrification, which can be such a heavy topic. And people like, were able to kind of see like the horrors, right? of like, what happens when neighborhoods changed without people being able to participate in and then that shifted to my dissertation where I began to include more like visual arts and storytelling, so like doing like oral history collections, and like walking tours as a way to kind of engage people like, like in their total bodies around these topics. And then now, I have a small project that's working on a comic book and an animated film about transportation-related air pollution that we hope to kind of build out to like bleed into like, some curriculum for like K through 12 people in particular. But as a way to kind of start getting people to be aware of terms be aware of like air pollution and how it can like, affect them and even lead to like premature death, right? We want people to be more aware of like the health pieces. And you know, I think we've talked about this or I know we've talked about this, but like, also have interest in like soundscapes, and we'd love to, like think about how can we use soundscapes really to like traffic Navy, or just like the neat like nature, with electronic music or either like classic music, classical music. So it's like, uh, hopefully, within the next year, I can move into that. But those are some things I'm working on. But Fine Arts to be like a really great way to kind of communicate either environmental science or communicate like topics that people are thinking about, but maybe don't have like the language or are scared, right? to talk about it.

Brian Bienkowski

There's also I mean, we always hear growing up, or at least most of us did, that we all kind of learn differently. You know, some of us like to touch and get into stuff, some of us like to read or watch a YouTube video, whatever it is, and the you know, the soundscapes the one you mentioned, I am just very sensitive to audio, it really kind of resonates with me, it really... and in the kind of stuff that you're talking about, I actually, you know, I do some of that, like, you know, we talked about that. So I do think it's a really good way to kind of spread the message around in all these different ways. And who knows what's going to stick, right? Who knows what, how people learn and stuff? Where does that come from, where you always are the arts and kind of being creative, something that was prior to research, or did it kind of dovetail with some of this research that you're doing?

Greer Hamilton

It was prior to research, I like had a phase in like high school where I thought maybe I'll be a documentary filmmaker, and I took classes at NYU, they have a really great film school. And so it was like me, this will be what I will do, that did not obviously end up being what I'm doing. But it is a full circle thing to kind of come back to the arts now and include it in research.

Brian Bienkowski

And do you find that, you know, I don't know so much about your advisors, or how that works. But you know, I know just kind of historically, academia and stuff hasn't put a lot of, you know, it's like published in the journal and move on with your life kind of thing. Do you find that you're you're finding support, and that people are maybe kind of changing in that regard and open to kind of some of these different methods?

Greer Hamilton

I do. I do think that people are opening, becoming more open to arts. And that's why I ended up at University of Michigan. So they actually put out a call for arts-based research position last year when I was on the job market. And that was what drew me I was like, Oh, how cool it is to see a school like Michigan be interested, right in arts work. You know, I will also say that there are evolving flaws, right? Like they're like, right, because people have for so long thought of like research as like one thing and, and publishing as the only kind of output, right? Like, they are having to change kind of their own metrics to figure out how my work fits into that. But I will say they've been really supportive of like, encouraging of me, using the arts in my research. So I hope that more schools will, will do that.

Brian Bienkowski

And, you know, I have a brother in law, just as an example here, who wasn't really environmentally engaged. He's a tribal police officer up here. And he watched a documentary about I believe it was about dairy, I don't know what the documentary was about, he quit eating dairy. Like immediately, that was it like no more for him after he saw, I don't know if it was animal abuse, you know, some kind of animal rights issue. He's done. And it just spoke to me that like, oh, gosh, you can put all of the articles out in the world. And you can write all of the stories and send all of the tweets. But if you can find that kind of storytelling aspect, in this case, it was a really well-done documentary, I assume, I mean, it had a profound impact on his life. So I'm just such a, I'm just such a fan of this. And I'm really excited to see where you take some of this stuff. So, very cool. Another avenue that you're interested in, I know you have some different activist tendencies and things that you're very interested in. And I know reproductive justice is something that you're interested in, have engaged in, and it opened your eyes to the intersection of colonialism, capitalism, and environmental injustice, of course. So can you talk about your work in this space? And how it shows these issues as interconnected?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, um, when I was in my master's program, that was actually my first research experience. I did abortion-access research with a professor, and this was before Roe vs. Wade was ended. And I learned like how profoundly like geographical location informs was people's access to abortion, right? So like people were having to travel really long, like distances in order to get an abortion, or like the wait times at the time. And I think for me, it really reinforced like the role of place in terms of health and environmental issues, that these are also the same communities that are likely to be overburdened or experienced overburdened by environmental toxins. And these are also the same people who are less likely to be able to access like a basic health care need, like an abortion. And I think it also was a good reminder that things like Roe versus Wade, which we you know, I think for a long time people kind of claimed was the ultimate dream of abortion rights actually had its flaws – like that people were not getting the care they needed. And so, you know, now that, you know, Roe versus Wade has been overturned, it's been even more kind of painful to see the ways in which geography informs people's or restricts people's right access to abortions, and how those geographical barriers are deeply tied right back to like colonialism and capitalism and racism, right, that those things were created intentionally right for people to not be able to access services that you need, whether it's like in their local area, or within a larger state. And so I'm hoping for more people to like, learn more about those barriers that people face, because it's not as easy as people think, to get an abortion, even in 2024. And even with like medical or abortion pills being readily available, right? those pills are also sometimes constrained right by location. So yeah, it's a issue that's really near and dear to my heart. And I'm glad to have seen over the past couple of years, people learn more about abortion restrictions in the country, and reproductive justice.

Brian Bienkowski

And it's another one of those really frustrating issues, I should say, as we speak right now, you know, Arizona just turned back the clock this week in such a archaic way, on this on this very issue and, and Florida, right. And it's one of those things, it's kind of like gun rights, where it's so frustrating that when you actually look at the, the electorate, you know, the it's not really that controversial of an issue, there really is kind of mostly broad support for this. And to see how our, you know, the system has been perverted in a way that allows people to make decisions for others is, is really something. But I think you're right, you have seen kind of a groundswell of awareness, if nothing else, after Roe fell. So I guess we will see what happens. Do you still is this work that you still engage in now that you're in Detroit and in Michigan? Are you too busy? No.

Greer Hamilton

Um, so I've been on the board of boards of abortion funds for the past couple years first of Eastern Massachusetts abortion fund. But now that I'm in Detroit, I'm with the Midwest Access Coalition, which is a practical support fund, actually, which people may not know about. But, um, practical support is to tends to be hotels, airfare, childcare, you know, food support, like the other things, right that, that people will require in order to access an abortion. And so I'm really proud of the work that Midwest Access Coalition does. And I'm just proud to be a board member. And also I will just put a plug it is funding season, it is the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign for abortion funds across the country and some international ones. But if you go to nn, like Nancy, a f.org, you will find or you should be able to find your local abortion fund. And they likely are having some sort of event or a fundraising effort for the next month or so. So a great time to give because people's money are drying up. And now that people have decided that the Roe decision no longer takes precedent.

Brian Bienkowski

Thank you so much for that it is a great time for people to get involved in this, especially, you know, as we head into another election season, and this is top of mind. Hopefully everybody can check that out. So when it comes to social work writ large here, what would you like to see change? I mean, I get the sense that you're you're wanting to do things a little bit differently than have been done historically. So what would you like to see the field change? And how do you see yourself as part of that change?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, as much as I love social work, I find it to be a pretty a-historic profession. I think it often forgets like, context matters in terms of like, the social issues that we're working on. And so for me, I really try to include history as much as I can in my work. And so we'd love to see more social workers like integrating and interrogating our history and its relationship to other things. But also, I think we're sometimes reactionary in terms of our engagement with social action. Sometimes it is right like other people who start doing social actions. And then social work is like, "Oh, hey, actually, we should care about it." Environmental issues, I think being an example of this. And so would love to see more social workers just like less scared, right of what other social professionals right are thinking, counselor social work, and to be more, be more open right to like what what social it can be and the issues that we should be focused on. And to, like, take that risk of, of just being more vocal and more active in issues that matter to you, but also to your community.

Brian Bienkowski

I spoke to, I'm forgetting the fellow right now. But she was a city in this kind of City Planning and had a very similar response that there's, there's a tendency to want to stick within the what the professional parameters have always been, instead of kind of integrating yourself in the community. And I think there's I think there's definitely some lessons there. So this has been a largely positive conversation. But I know environmental justice is not positive all the time, even though we're seeing some progress. So what are you optimistic about?

Greer Hamilton

I am really proud of the students that are organizing at University of Michigan where I'm at, there's been a lot of like, attempt to like stop them from organizing, but they're making really crucial connections, right to militarization and militarization and how it relates to like environmental issues or public health issues. And I'm just like always deeply proud of young adults who are willing to kind of take risk, even when there are like potential harms, not only to like their physical body, but also to their ability to graduate. And so I think that makes me really optimistic.

Brian Bienkowski

Excellent. Well, now we get to do some of the fun stuff before we get you out of here. So I have three rapid-fire questions, and you can just give me one word, or a phrase. My favorite hangout in Detroit is

Greer Hamilton

Kitab coffee.

Brian Bienkowski

Oh, tell me about it. Where is it at?

Greer Hamilton

They may have on Hamtramck but they also just built one in Midtown. It's an Arab on coffee shop that just is doing really cool community based work and also has really good coffee.

Brian Bienkowski

So I think I've seen the one in Hamtramck is it wood paneled?

Greer Hamilton

Yeah, in Midtown too. It's just Edmonton. So okay.

Brian Bienkowski

Okay, so we're getting away in the weeds here. And you can tune out listeners for a second. But I've seen the one in Hamtramck because it's on my walk when I walk to cafe 1923 which is my coffee shop that I go to down there. So I will have to definitely try a new one. If I could have dinner with anyone in this can be living or past it would be

Greer Hamilton

Spike Lee

Brian Bienkowski

that's a fun one. My go to comfort musician or album

Greer Hamilton

Lianne La Havas.

Brian Bienkowski

I don't know this one. Tell me about tell me about this person.

Greer Hamilton

She's from London. She has a really beautiful soulful voice and, and she got me through the pandemic. So it's

Brian Bienkowski

High praise. Excellent. Well, I will definitely check her out. I've got two recommendations from this. So Greer, this has been a whole lot of fun. I'm really glad we got to connect. And hanging out with you in Philly. It was just, it was so much fun. There's never enough time at those retreats with everybody. And my last question before we get you out of here is what is the last book that you read for fun?

Greer Hamilton

The City of Dispossession, by Kyle T. Mays, you would also really like it. It's about indigenous andBblack history of Detroit. And just a really good read. Awesome.

Brian Bienkowski

Well, I'm gonna give a short plug for Book Suey is the bookstore in Hamtramck where I tried to get all my books, even though I live so far away from there now, but they carry a whole local section. So I'm hoping and it's in there next time I'm down there. And Greer, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for your time, and I will talk to you soon.

Greer Hamilton

Take care.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers

Few environmental documentaries boast the star power of Common Ground, a forthcoming sequel to Netflix’s award-winning 2020 documentary Kiss the Ground, which presented regenerative agriculture as the “first viable solution to the climate crisis.” Executive produced by Demi Moore with narration from Jason Momoa, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, and other celebs, the new film is set to be released on Amazon Prime Video this Earth Day. It features a diverse mix of food and farming activists, wellness influencers, and even two U.S. senators (Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Mike Braun), all linked by a common narrative that farming should work with nature rather than against it to save our food system. The film is just one example of the increasing popularity of this thesis among everyone from Hollywood A-listers to lefty food sovereignty activists to right-leaning podcasters and the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. Nowhere are regenerative ag’s claims bolder than when it comes to “regenerative” beef, whose evangelists insist that by capturing carbon in the soil, natural cattle grazing can completely eliminate the climate impact of raising ruminants, which currently contributes somewhere between 11 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately for the planet, these claims don’t pan out. Earlier this month, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new study that found grass-fed beef has no climate benefits over industrial beef and likely doesn’t help much with arable soil carbon sequestration, either. For those who follow the peer-reviewed literature on agriculture and climate, this is no surprise. Proponents of regenerative agriculture have several useful ideas worth pursuing, but at the end of the day, cows are still cows and they still belch lots of methane, so beef is not and never will be a “solution” to the climate crisis.And yet, no matter how many studies get published, the hype around this and other “natural” fixes for environmental and health problems shows few signs of slowing down, winning adherents from across the social and political spectrum, and now finding its way into the executive branch. New Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken about regenerative farming in near-magical terms, claiming that “the best thing that you can do for climate is to restore the soils.” He has also boosted the supposed health benefits of fries cooked in beef tallow (as opposed to seed oils), championed raw milk, called for a “let it rip” bird flu strategy, in the hopes of promoting “natural immunity” among chickens, and proselytized about remedies like cod liver oil to stop the measles outbreaks spreading among primarily unvaccinated people in Texas and New Mexico.The proponents of these approaches tend to get one thing right: There are countless problems with the U.S. food and health systems. Industrialized animal agriculture harms the environment, workers, and animals; chronic diet-related disease has reached epidemic proportions; and powerful corporate interests are blocking change. But where they go wrong is believing that there is a simple, “natural” solution that will solve all of these issues in one swoop. The problem is not just the way that natural is equated with good—a dynamic that has a long and storied history. The bigger issue—and one that goes beyond regenerative beef—is an emerging ideology of nature-based solutionism, where all things “natural” are proposed as a sure fix for complex problems. Be it Common Ground or MAHA, the adherents of this ideology assume that a better world will emerge from letting “nature” run its course, no matter what the experts or regulators say.Troubled by the ambitious and even outlandish promises emerging from the tech sector in the Obama era, writer Evgeny Morozov popularized the term solutionism to describe the shared belief across government and industry that Silicon Valley capital and know-how could revolutionize the modern world—that blood tests could be instantly performed from a single drop, that predictive policing algorithms would end crime as we know it, and that if only billions of people logged onto Facebook then digital connection would lead to mutual understanding. It’s not that these pitches were overly optimistic. Optimism suggests some recognition that things might not go as planned, which wasn’t what prospective investors and TED audiences wanted to hear. No, the tech industry’s disruptors had to be sure that their technology was world-changing—or at least sound like they were sure.These solutions rarely if ever lived up to the hype, and some were outright failures. Most stumbled over the all-too-common mistake of not taking the time to understand the problems they were trying to solve; assuming that a technological solution was always needed, largely because that’s what they had on hand. They depended too much on the technocratic application of science, forgetting that the social sciences matter too, eschewing policy reform and cultural change as too messy, only to realize later that the success of any technology depends on policy and culture. Several books and countless articles have now been written about technological solutionism’s failures in food and agriculture, energy and the environment, and as part of the Covid-19 pandemic response. Today’s ubiquitous progressive refrain that “tech won’t save us” (to quote the name of a popular podcast) speaks to an emerging recognition of technology’s limited ability, absent a broader political strategy, to effect positive social change.But while the critics may be louder, those solutionists persist, perhaps most visibly today in the pursuit of artificial intelligence that, we are told, will solve pretty much everything, including the federal government’s alleged inefficiencies.While tech solutionism was booming, a different sort of solutionism was brewing in the background, rooted in the idea that it was modern technology that was at the root of many of our problems. But instead of scaling back tech solutionism’s delusions, this parallel revolution kept the delusions and swapped the solution: a return to our preindustrial roots could help us fix the world’s most intractable problems. On the topic of agriculture, this perspective appeared in bestselling food books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, especially in the form of its protagonist Joel Salatin, a libertarian small-scale farmer who championed free-grazing animals and opposition to federal regulations as the solution to the ills of the modern food system. It also found its way onto the TED stage, where “Rhodesian” farmer Allan Savory—also featured in Kiss the Ground—made the now-omnipresent claim in regenerative agricultural circles that so-called “holistic grazing” could reverse desertification and climate change. That TED talk has been viewed over nine million times, attracting big money support in the process. Oprah Winfrey meanwhile gave a platform to wellness gurus who touted the benefits of natural cures, including Dr. Oz, who claimed that saffron was a “miracle appetite suppressant.” And all of that was before the food and wellness influencers of the social media era took over Instagram and TikTok.Supercharged by the skepticism of the Covid-19 pandemic era, the line between legitimate critique of our public health and food infrastructures and pseudoscience grifting got increasingly blurry. Figures often celebrated as heroes within the alternative food and regenerative agriculture movements—from Joel Salatin to food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva to functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman (the latter a cast member of Common Ground)—built common cause with some of the internet’s biggest sources of health misinformation and helped lay the groundwork for the rise of MAHA, often hawking natural health products in the process. Amplified to huge audiences by the likes of Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, their claims reverberated around the internet without a fact-check in sight.The appeal of many “natural” claims is obvious. The world is complicated, confusing, and often corrupt, and those things that seem unsullied by industrial modernity can feel pure and healthful. There’s an attractive truthiness to claims that raw milk must be better than milk that was pasteurized and skimmed of fat in an industrial centrifuge, butter better than seed oil, cows grazing in the field better than those crammed into feedlots. Moreover, nature-based solutionism tantalizingly offers the prospect of a purer world without significant changes in consumption: Regenerative beef and beef tallow mean you can have natural and guilt-free burgers and fries. Each of these assumptions is rooted in a logical fallacy: the appeal to nature, or the view that a thing must be good if it is natural. This claim, of course, stands on shaky epistemological ground. Nature is far from benign, deadly pathogens being just as natural as soil-sequestering carbon. This is compounded by the fact that many appeals to nature are also appeals to an idealized past, like RFK Jr.’s desire to “reverse 80 years of farming policy,” before the advent of much modern agricultural technology. The British journalist George Monbiot calls this “storybook farming,” or a romanticization of the preindustrial past.Such claims are not only inaccurate but potentially dangerous. Where the appeal to nature really falls apart is when it is scrutinized using the scientific method, which has a decidedly unromantic way of cutting through just-so stories. Studies like the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay have shown that free-ranging cows emit just as much methane as those fattened on industrial feedlots; others have suggested that they might even emit more. Research consistently shows that raw milk is not more nutritious than pasteurized milk, will not cure asthma, and has no impact on gut health, but it is certainly less safe to drink. Recent publications suggest it’s the seed oils and not the butter that are more associated with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. And letting a disease spread to develop natural immunity is a far more risky way to do exactly what vaccines are meant to do: expose people to small amounts of a disease so that they can develop immunity to it. Furthermore, in the case of diseases like avian flu, letting the virus run wild in hopes of finding the few birds who have natural immunity risks allowing the disease to mutate further, potentially increasing the risk for both animals and humans. As RFK Jr. promotes the benefits of “pox parties” as a natural way to boost immunity to measles, doctors scramble to convince parents otherwise. For some who follow his suggestion to dose their kids with vitamin A instead of a vaccine, the liver damage has already been done.The problem with techno-solutionism was never the technology itself. The benefits of many technologies are all around us, making food abundant and keeping us safer from disease than we would otherwise be. Pasteurization and vaccines alone have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The problem, rather, was the way technology was assumed to be a cure-all and a one-size-fits-all fix.Like its technological parallel, a defining characteristic of the ideology of nature-based solutionism is that its solutions are already decided upon before the fact, their success considered inevitable—natural, as it were—if only they can be implemented, which often means rejecting most technology altogether. Changing from conventional to regenerative agriculture, for instance, is believed to solve desertification, climate change, soil health, our ailing rural economies, our woeful eating habits, and whatever other problems confront its advocates. There is a presumed lack of friction in implementing such solutions, with legitimate critiques of technical, environmental, or economic feasibility, or of trade-offs and costs, hand-waved away. Solutionisms, as articles of faith, cleave society into believers and nonbelievers: techno-zealots versus Luddites or nature’s children versus those in thrall to Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Government. But this sort of simplification doesn’t just fail to solve problems, it fails to properly identify them. The food system’s many problems are varied and have distinct causes. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock come from too much demand for meat; the overuse of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides comes partly from market and government incentives to grow more commodity crops destined for animal feed and ethanol; and chronic disease has many causes, only some of which are related to diet. Correctly identifying and addressing each of these problems takes research, time, and often a range of different solutions.But solutionists either underappreciate or openly fight the very things that help us understand problems in all their nuance and craft realistic solutions: research institutions and the regulatory state. Both of these operate on the belief that large claims require large bodies of proof. In the course of reviewing evidence, for instance, they might note that real-world examples show that the financial and labor costs of transitions to low-tech agriculture can be hefty, the benefits uncertain, and the potential for corporate co-optation and greenwashing very real. But in the world of the solutionists, expertise is treated as suspect, corrupt, or altogether illegitimate, with anecdotes and mantras replacing verifiable data.Ironically, this can lead the solutionists to overlook the real nature-based solutions demonstrably effective at improving health and food system sustainability. Eating lower on the food chain, reducing food waste, protecting ecosystems, and promoting conservation agriculture are some of the best climate solutions out there. They are not flashy, they won’t solve all of our problems, they likely don’t make for the most views on streaming platforms or the most memorable stump speeches, but at least they’re backed by science. Being wary of solutionisms is ever more crucial as solutionists permeate our media and increasingly hold political power. The embrace of AI exists side by side with the embrace of regenerative ranching. One side wants to move fast and break things, giving little consideration to what gets broken. The other side wants to eat grass-fed burgers, hoping that good vibes can capture carbon. Neither approach is going to save us.

Few environmental documentaries boast the star power of Common Ground, a forthcoming sequel to Netflix’s award-winning 2020 documentary Kiss the Ground, which presented regenerative agriculture as the “first viable solution to the climate crisis.” Executive produced by Demi Moore with narration from Jason Momoa, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, Laura Dern, and other celebs, the new film is set to be released on Amazon Prime Video this Earth Day. It features a diverse mix of food and farming activists, wellness influencers, and even two U.S. senators (Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Mike Braun), all linked by a common narrative that farming should work with nature rather than against it to save our food system. The film is just one example of the increasing popularity of this thesis among everyone from Hollywood A-listers to lefty food sovereignty activists to right-leaning podcasters and the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement. Nowhere are regenerative ag’s claims bolder than when it comes to “regenerative” beef, whose evangelists insist that by capturing carbon in the soil, natural cattle grazing can completely eliminate the climate impact of raising ruminants, which currently contributes somewhere between 11 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately for the planet, these claims don’t pan out. Earlier this month, the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new study that found grass-fed beef has no climate benefits over industrial beef and likely doesn’t help much with arable soil carbon sequestration, either. For those who follow the peer-reviewed literature on agriculture and climate, this is no surprise. Proponents of regenerative agriculture have several useful ideas worth pursuing, but at the end of the day, cows are still cows and they still belch lots of methane, so beef is not and never will be a “solution” to the climate crisis.And yet, no matter how many studies get published, the hype around this and other “natural” fixes for environmental and health problems shows few signs of slowing down, winning adherents from across the social and political spectrum, and now finding its way into the executive branch. New Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spoken about regenerative farming in near-magical terms, claiming that “the best thing that you can do for climate is to restore the soils.” He has also boosted the supposed health benefits of fries cooked in beef tallow (as opposed to seed oils), championed raw milk, called for a “let it rip” bird flu strategy, in the hopes of promoting “natural immunity” among chickens, and proselytized about remedies like cod liver oil to stop the measles outbreaks spreading among primarily unvaccinated people in Texas and New Mexico.The proponents of these approaches tend to get one thing right: There are countless problems with the U.S. food and health systems. Industrialized animal agriculture harms the environment, workers, and animals; chronic diet-related disease has reached epidemic proportions; and powerful corporate interests are blocking change. But where they go wrong is believing that there is a simple, “natural” solution that will solve all of these issues in one swoop. The problem is not just the way that natural is equated with good—a dynamic that has a long and storied history. The bigger issue—and one that goes beyond regenerative beef—is an emerging ideology of nature-based solutionism, where all things “natural” are proposed as a sure fix for complex problems. Be it Common Ground or MAHA, the adherents of this ideology assume that a better world will emerge from letting “nature” run its course, no matter what the experts or regulators say.Troubled by the ambitious and even outlandish promises emerging from the tech sector in the Obama era, writer Evgeny Morozov popularized the term solutionism to describe the shared belief across government and industry that Silicon Valley capital and know-how could revolutionize the modern world—that blood tests could be instantly performed from a single drop, that predictive policing algorithms would end crime as we know it, and that if only billions of people logged onto Facebook then digital connection would lead to mutual understanding. It’s not that these pitches were overly optimistic. Optimism suggests some recognition that things might not go as planned, which wasn’t what prospective investors and TED audiences wanted to hear. No, the tech industry’s disruptors had to be sure that their technology was world-changing—or at least sound like they were sure.These solutions rarely if ever lived up to the hype, and some were outright failures. Most stumbled over the all-too-common mistake of not taking the time to understand the problems they were trying to solve; assuming that a technological solution was always needed, largely because that’s what they had on hand. They depended too much on the technocratic application of science, forgetting that the social sciences matter too, eschewing policy reform and cultural change as too messy, only to realize later that the success of any technology depends on policy and culture. Several books and countless articles have now been written about technological solutionism’s failures in food and agriculture, energy and the environment, and as part of the Covid-19 pandemic response. Today’s ubiquitous progressive refrain that “tech won’t save us” (to quote the name of a popular podcast) speaks to an emerging recognition of technology’s limited ability, absent a broader political strategy, to effect positive social change.But while the critics may be louder, those solutionists persist, perhaps most visibly today in the pursuit of artificial intelligence that, we are told, will solve pretty much everything, including the federal government’s alleged inefficiencies.While tech solutionism was booming, a different sort of solutionism was brewing in the background, rooted in the idea that it was modern technology that was at the root of many of our problems. But instead of scaling back tech solutionism’s delusions, this parallel revolution kept the delusions and swapped the solution: a return to our preindustrial roots could help us fix the world’s most intractable problems. On the topic of agriculture, this perspective appeared in bestselling food books like Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, especially in the form of its protagonist Joel Salatin, a libertarian small-scale farmer who championed free-grazing animals and opposition to federal regulations as the solution to the ills of the modern food system. It also found its way onto the TED stage, where “Rhodesian” farmer Allan Savory—also featured in Kiss the Ground—made the now-omnipresent claim in regenerative agricultural circles that so-called “holistic grazing” could reverse desertification and climate change. That TED talk has been viewed over nine million times, attracting big money support in the process. Oprah Winfrey meanwhile gave a platform to wellness gurus who touted the benefits of natural cures, including Dr. Oz, who claimed that saffron was a “miracle appetite suppressant.” And all of that was before the food and wellness influencers of the social media era took over Instagram and TikTok.Supercharged by the skepticism of the Covid-19 pandemic era, the line between legitimate critique of our public health and food infrastructures and pseudoscience grifting got increasingly blurry. Figures often celebrated as heroes within the alternative food and regenerative agriculture movements—from Joel Salatin to food sovereignty activist Vandana Shiva to functional medicine doctor Mark Hyman (the latter a cast member of Common Ground)—built common cause with some of the internet’s biggest sources of health misinformation and helped lay the groundwork for the rise of MAHA, often hawking natural health products in the process. Amplified to huge audiences by the likes of Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, their claims reverberated around the internet without a fact-check in sight.The appeal of many “natural” claims is obvious. The world is complicated, confusing, and often corrupt, and those things that seem unsullied by industrial modernity can feel pure and healthful. There’s an attractive truthiness to claims that raw milk must be better than milk that was pasteurized and skimmed of fat in an industrial centrifuge, butter better than seed oil, cows grazing in the field better than those crammed into feedlots. Moreover, nature-based solutionism tantalizingly offers the prospect of a purer world without significant changes in consumption: Regenerative beef and beef tallow mean you can have natural and guilt-free burgers and fries. Each of these assumptions is rooted in a logical fallacy: the appeal to nature, or the view that a thing must be good if it is natural. This claim, of course, stands on shaky epistemological ground. Nature is far from benign, deadly pathogens being just as natural as soil-sequestering carbon. This is compounded by the fact that many appeals to nature are also appeals to an idealized past, like RFK Jr.’s desire to “reverse 80 years of farming policy,” before the advent of much modern agricultural technology. The British journalist George Monbiot calls this “storybook farming,” or a romanticization of the preindustrial past.Such claims are not only inaccurate but potentially dangerous. Where the appeal to nature really falls apart is when it is scrutinized using the scientific method, which has a decidedly unromantic way of cutting through just-so stories. Studies like the one mentioned at the beginning of this essay have shown that free-ranging cows emit just as much methane as those fattened on industrial feedlots; others have suggested that they might even emit more. Research consistently shows that raw milk is not more nutritious than pasteurized milk, will not cure asthma, and has no impact on gut health, but it is certainly less safe to drink. Recent publications suggest it’s the seed oils and not the butter that are more associated with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease risk. And letting a disease spread to develop natural immunity is a far more risky way to do exactly what vaccines are meant to do: expose people to small amounts of a disease so that they can develop immunity to it. Furthermore, in the case of diseases like avian flu, letting the virus run wild in hopes of finding the few birds who have natural immunity risks allowing the disease to mutate further, potentially increasing the risk for both animals and humans. As RFK Jr. promotes the benefits of “pox parties” as a natural way to boost immunity to measles, doctors scramble to convince parents otherwise. For some who follow his suggestion to dose their kids with vitamin A instead of a vaccine, the liver damage has already been done.The problem with techno-solutionism was never the technology itself. The benefits of many technologies are all around us, making food abundant and keeping us safer from disease than we would otherwise be. Pasteurization and vaccines alone have saved hundreds of millions of lives. The problem, rather, was the way technology was assumed to be a cure-all and a one-size-fits-all fix.Like its technological parallel, a defining characteristic of the ideology of nature-based solutionism is that its solutions are already decided upon before the fact, their success considered inevitable—natural, as it were—if only they can be implemented, which often means rejecting most technology altogether. Changing from conventional to regenerative agriculture, for instance, is believed to solve desertification, climate change, soil health, our ailing rural economies, our woeful eating habits, and whatever other problems confront its advocates. There is a presumed lack of friction in implementing such solutions, with legitimate critiques of technical, environmental, or economic feasibility, or of trade-offs and costs, hand-waved away. Solutionisms, as articles of faith, cleave society into believers and nonbelievers: techno-zealots versus Luddites or nature’s children versus those in thrall to Big Food, Big Ag, Big Pharma, and Big Government. But this sort of simplification doesn’t just fail to solve problems, it fails to properly identify them. The food system’s many problems are varied and have distinct causes. Greenhouse gas emissions from livestock come from too much demand for meat; the overuse of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides comes partly from market and government incentives to grow more commodity crops destined for animal feed and ethanol; and chronic disease has many causes, only some of which are related to diet. Correctly identifying and addressing each of these problems takes research, time, and often a range of different solutions.But solutionists either underappreciate or openly fight the very things that help us understand problems in all their nuance and craft realistic solutions: research institutions and the regulatory state. Both of these operate on the belief that large claims require large bodies of proof. In the course of reviewing evidence, for instance, they might note that real-world examples show that the financial and labor costs of transitions to low-tech agriculture can be hefty, the benefits uncertain, and the potential for corporate co-optation and greenwashing very real. But in the world of the solutionists, expertise is treated as suspect, corrupt, or altogether illegitimate, with anecdotes and mantras replacing verifiable data.Ironically, this can lead the solutionists to overlook the real nature-based solutions demonstrably effective at improving health and food system sustainability. Eating lower on the food chain, reducing food waste, protecting ecosystems, and promoting conservation agriculture are some of the best climate solutions out there. They are not flashy, they won’t solve all of our problems, they likely don’t make for the most views on streaming platforms or the most memorable stump speeches, but at least they’re backed by science. Being wary of solutionisms is ever more crucial as solutionists permeate our media and increasingly hold political power. The embrace of AI exists side by side with the embrace of regenerative ranching. One side wants to move fast and break things, giving little consideration to what gets broken. The other side wants to eat grass-fed burgers, hoping that good vibes can capture carbon. Neither approach is going to save us.

Egg prices hit record highs. Are you ready to try a vegan egg?

Bird flu has apparently done what environmentalists have long dreamed of: made Americans curious about egg alternatives.

Sometimes, Josh Tetrick will quiz strangers in the dairy aisle. He’ll strike up a conversation with a fellow grocery store patron and ask if they’ve heard about “this egg that’s made from plants?” He might point out the golden-yellow boxes shaped like milk cartons sitting on refrigerated shelves, not too far from the egg cartons. Generally, he finds that people don’t know what he’s talking about. “Most people will be like, ‘What?’” The product Tetrick is referring to — which, not coincidentally, he manufactures — is called Just Egg. It’s a liquid vegan egg substitute made from mung beans, a member of the legume family, and it’s designed to scramble just like a real chicken egg when cooked over heat. (The company also sells frozen omelette-style patties that can be heated up in a toaster oven and frozen breakfast burritos.) Along with his best friend Josh Balk, Tetrick cofounded the company Eat Just, formerly known as Hampton Creek, which developed Just Egg over years of testing. On a recent call with Grist, Tetrick described the products — which are meant to look, taste, and cook like real eggs — as “definitely, definitely weird.” But lately, Tetrick says the team at Eat Just has been hearing from restaurant owners and chefs overcoming the weirdness to inquire about becoming new customers — in part because avian influenza has sent egg prices soaring in January and February in the United States. Nationally, the average cost of a dozen large eggs rose to about $5.90 last month, up almost 100 percent from a year before, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In expensive cities like New York and San Francisco, a dozen eggs could cost $10 or more. The pressure has raised prices at some bakeries, brunch spots, and bodegas slinging bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches — and has made some buyers and consumers more open to alternatives.  Tetrick has said that Just Egg’s sales are now five times higher than at this time last year, and that a majority of its customers are omnivores. The latest outbreak of avian flu has apparently done what environmentalists and animal rights activists have long dreamed of: made Americans curious about vegan eggs. It’s a development that could indicate how consumers may learn to gradually embrace more environmentally sustainable options. The environmental benefits of not eating meat or dairy have long been documented. A quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we grow and produce food; within that, livestock — which includes raising animals for eggs and dairy — is responsible for about a third.  But brands that have tried to capitalize on the climate case for eating plant-based protein have failed to win over customers. Beyond Meat has struggled to reach profitability, while the CEO of Impossible Foods says the industry has done a “lousy job” of appealing to consumers.  Producing eggs has a lower environmental impact than raising beef and other forms of animal protein — but growing feed for laying hens still requires a significant amount of land and resources. Eat Just claims that making its mung bean-based alt-egg uses significantly less land and water than the conventional chicken egg. But Tetrick said its most effective marketing strategy is highlighting the benefits of eating a “healthier protein” for breakfast. For instance, Just Egg contains zero milligrams of cholesterol per serving, while one large chicken egg contains about 180 milligrams.  Josh Tetrick, CEO of the food tech company Eat Just, said sales of its vegan egg substitute are five times higher than last year. Eat Just Over the years, Tetrick’s company, which also houses the cultivated meat subsidiary Good Meat, has received criticism for allegedly exaggerating its environmental claims and sales figures. In 2016, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that the company — then called Hampton Creek — removed the climate benefits of its vegan mayonnaise product, Just Mayo, from its website after an external audit found they were inaccurate. Previously, Bloomberg reported that Hampton Creek had instructed contractors to buy back its vegan mayo from stores. Tetrick said that the buybacks were for quality assurance purposes only, but in 2016 both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission launched inquiries into the company for potentially inflating its sales numbers. The following year, both investigations were dropped.     Those in the plant-based industry say that once vegan alternatives taste as good as real meat and cost the same or less, then sales will go up. Entrepreneurs and advocates have focused on developing the technology, supply chains, and economies of scale needed to lower the price of animal-free protein products. But the current situation with vegan eggs suggests that change can also happen when the animal-based option becomes much more expensive. Prices vary from store to store and region to region, but on the online store for the Manhattan West location of Whole Foods, one 16-ounce carton of Just Egg, the equivalent of about 10 small eggs, costs $7.89. Meanwhile, a dozen eggs, depending on the brand, run from about $7 to up to $13.  Tetrick said that the newly interested potential customers currently talking to Eat Just aren’t motivated by climate change or animal welfare. Their point of view, in his words, is that they’re tired of the unpredictability of egg prices going up and down. That exasperation, he added, “is probably the most effective lens for change.” Earlier this month, Eat Just launched a campaign in New York City advertising its vegan breakfast sandwiches, sold at bodegas, as a “Bird Flu Bailout.” The company’s website cheekily boasts, “We’re in stock.” Founders of vegan egg companies argue that the root cause of price volatility for meat, eggs, and dairy is not any one disease or policy, but the way the United States raises animals. “When you cram animals together in really tight spaces, they’re gonna get sick,” said Tetrick. “It’s not Trump’s fault. It’s not MAGA’s fault. It’s just biology.”  A 2023 report by the United Nations Environmental Programme cited alternative proteins — meaning plant-based foods, as well as cultivated meat and fermentation-derived products — as a way to reduce the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks. Raising animals for human consumption requires a lot of antibiotics, which raises the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. It also creates ideal conditions for viruses to spread, evolve, and cross over to new species. Lowering the global demand for animal protein could greatly reduce those risks. Or as Tetrick put it, “You can pack mung beans into tiny little spaces all you want. They’re not getting the flu.” Hema Reddy, who developed the vegan hard-boiled egg brand WunderEggs during the COVID-19 pandemic, offered a similar critique of industrial animal agriculture. “If the chickens are crowded together, then disease will follow,” she said. “The only solution,” she posited, “is to change the way we farm. And that’s a big step. It’s like moving the Titanic.” WunderEggs are made from almonds, cashews, and coconut milk and are currently sold in stores and online. Like Tetrick, Reddy says she has heard from plenty of newly interested restaurants in the last few months. But she is reluctant to draw long-term conclusions from it, arguing that consumer behavior doesn’t change that quickly. Many people, she argued, “probably want to eat eggs, they’re missing eggs,” and “they’re going to wait for things to get better.” Nationally, the average cost of a dozen large eggs rose to about $5.90 in February, up almost 100 percent from a year before. Zeng Hui / Xinhua via Getty Images But for some adoptees of vegan egg substitutes, the upsides of ditching chicken eggs is obvious. Chef Jason Hull, director of food services at Marin Country Day School in the Bay Area, has been using Just Egg for years. “They have nailed the delicious flavor of egg,” said Hull. He swaps out regular eggs for the plant-based version in baked goods like cookies, muffins, and quick breads, as well as in dishes like fried rice. There’s virtually no difference, he said. While he’s a longtime fan of the brand, the uptick in egg prices has validated his decision. “Especially with egg prices right now, I’m not going to use chicken eggs for baking or fried rice or things like that any time soon,” he said. Hull said some of his peers, especially those in other parts of the country, are potentially less open-minded about vegan egg substitutes. But rising costs may have them reconsidering. Other chefs are “warming up to it, absolutely,” he said. “And the high egg prices are kind of forcing that warm-up.” Wholesale egg prices are trending downward as of March, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, so this momentum could be short-lived. But it may only be a matter of time before the next price hike happens. “Because the virus is so ubiquitous in so many different environments … it’s hard to imagine the virus ever completely going away at this point,” said Maurice Pitesky, an associate professor in cooperative extension at University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Reddy insisted that taking advantage of a cost-of-living crisis to promote her product does not sit right with her, and she prefers to let consumers come to their own conclusions about what’s right for them. But if avian influenza continues to upend egg production in the U.S., that might mean the economic case for going dairy-free could become more and more evident with time. Regardless of what happens in the future, Reddy said, “I really think that now is the time for egg alternatives to shine.” This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Egg prices hit record highs. Are you ready to try a vegan egg? on Mar 31, 2025.

California suspends environmental laws to speed rebuilding of utilities after L.A. fires

Gov. Newsom waived CEQA and the California Coastal Act for utilities working to rebuild, and move infrastructure underground, in the Palisades and Eaton fire areas.

In a continued effort to expedite rebuilding after Los Angeles’ devastating firestorms, Gov. Gavin Newsom this week suspended California environmental laws for utility providers working to reinstall key infrastructure. His latest executive order eliminates requirements to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act, commonly known as CEQA, and the California Coastal Act for utilities working to rebuild “electric, gas, water, sewer and telecommunication infrastructure” in the Palisades and Eaton fire burn zones. Newsom also continued to encourage the “undergrounding” of utility equipment when feasible, which he said will help minimize the future fire risk in these communities. “We are determined to rebuild Altadena, Malibu and Pacific Palisades stronger and more resilient than before,” Newsom said in a statement. “Speeding up the pace that we rebuild our utility systems will help get survivors back home faster and prevent future fires.” The move builds on Newsom’s prior executive orders that exempted work rebuilding homes and businesses destroyed or damaged by the fires as well as wildfire prevention efforts from the two environmental laws. CEQA requires local and state agencies to identify and mitigate environmental impacts of their work. The California Coastal Act, which made permanent the California Coastal Commission, lays out regulations for coastal development and protection. While the laws have been heralded by environmentalists, their processes have long been considered onerous by developers, and residents and officials have urged their requirements be lessened or waived to expedite fire recovery. The Trump administration has also taken issue with the California Coastal Commission — which typically regulates any coastal development as enumerated by the state’s Coastal Act — and has indicated further federal aid could have stipulations that target the commission’s work. “The key now is to make sure that we move quickly to address the needs to underground not just traditional utilities for electricity but also water and sewer lines, and do it concurrently,” Newsom said in a video posted on social media this week. Joshua Smith, a spokesperson for the Coastal Commission, declined to comment on the latest executive order.Previously, the commission’s executive director had clarified that coastal development permits are typically waived after disasters like the L.A. fires, as long as new construction won’t be 10% larger than the destroyed structure it is replacing. That statement, however, has since been removed from the commission’s website. In a letter sent last month, Newsom urged Southern California Edison, the area’s largest electricity provider, to do all it can to rebuild lines underground in these areas.“SCE has the opportunity to build back a more modern, reliable and resilient electric distribution system that can meet the community’s immediate and future needs,” Newsom wrote, adding that he welcomed information and suggestions that would ease such efforts and keep costs down. Installing utilities underground is much more expensive than typical above-ground construction, which has limited the practice. David Eisenhauer, an Edison spokesperson, said waiving CEQA and the Coastal Act will help the utility’s ongoing efforts to rebuild and move lines underground.“We appreciate Gov. Newsom’s action to help expedite permitting,” Eisenhauer said. “This will help us continue this process of undergrounding and help the communities rebuild stronger.”Eisenhauer said SoCal Edison is already in the process of reestablishing and moving some of its electrical wires underground in the areas affected by the fires. Some of this work had been planned — and permitted — beforehand, including moving 40 miles of line underground in Altadena and doing likewise with 80 miles in the Palisades area, he said. However, this executive order will help ease the permitting process for future work. It wasn’t immediately clear how other utilities might benefit from the executive order, if at all. Representatives for Southern California Gas Co. and the L.A. Department of Water and Power didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Newsom has previously said his executive orders waiving these environmental laws do not signal a shift in California’s support of such efforts, though many environmental activists worry such broad exemptions could have serious consequences down the road. Bruce Reznik, executive director of Los Angeles Waterkeeper, a nonprofit that advocates for clean waterways, said he understands the urgency to rebuild but those efforts need a balance that considers important environmental protections — not blanket waivers and exceptions.“We all want to see the rebuilding happen as quickly as we can … but we also have to be smart about it,” Reznik said. “We have to build recognizing the reality of today’s climate change.”He said the natural space in Altadena and Pacific Palisades was a big part of why people loved living there, and it’s important to protect those areas — as CEQA and the California Coastal Act do. “These laws play a really critical role in making sure as we rebuild we’re doing it with an eye toward climate resilience, protecting against further natural disasters … [and] the health of our waterways and ecosystems,” he said. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the way the governor has operated, and you have to worry about what that will mean.”Susan Jordan, executive director of the California Coastal Protection Network, said Newsom’s continued exemptions build on concerning environmental practices she’s seen in the fires’ aftermath, including the decision not to test soil in affected areas.“I hope that the governor will one day recognize that the Coastal Commission is a willing partner and one of the best tools he has in his toolbox to ensure a quick, informed and coordinated response to establish future long-term resiliency along the coast,” Jordan said in a statement.

Biden Administration Offshore Oil and Gas Lease in Gulf Coast Is Unlawful, Federal Judge Says

A federal judge has ruled that more than 109,000 square miles of Gulf Coast federal were unlawfully opened up for offshore drilling leases

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An expanse of Gulf Coast federal waters larger than the state of Colorado was unlawfully opened up for offshore drilling leases, according to a ruling by a federal judge, who said the Department of Interior did not adequately account for the offshore drilling leases' impacts on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and an endangered whale species.The future of one of the most recent offshore drilling lease sales authorized under the Biden administration is in jeopardy after District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta’s finding on Thursday that the federal agency violated bedrock environmental regulations when it allowed bidding on 109,375 square miles (283,280 square kilometers) of Gulf Coast waters.Environmental groups, the federal government and the oil and gas industry are now discussing remedies. Earth Justice Attorney George Torgun, representing the plaintiffs, said one outcome on the table is invalidating the sale of leases worth $250 million across 2,500 square miles (6,475 square kilometers) of Gulf federal waters successfully bid on by companies.The leases in the Gulf Coast were expected to produce up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and more than 4 trillion cubic feet (113 billion cubic meters) of natural gas over 50 years, according to a government analysis. Burning that oil would increase carbon dioxide emissions by tens of millions of tons, the analysis found.The agency “failed to take a ‘hard look’” at the full extent of the carbon footprint of expanding drilling in the Gulf Coast, the judge wrote. The auction was one of three offshore oil and gas lease sales mandated as part of a 2022 climate bill compromise designed to ensure support from now-retired Sen. Joe Manchin, a leading recipient of oil and gas industry donations. Another of the mandated oil and gas lease sales, in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, was overturned by a federal judge last July on similar grounds.“If federal officials are going to continue greenlighting offshore drilling, the least they can do is fully analyze its harms,” said Hallie Templeton, legal director at Friends of the Earth, a nonprofit that is of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “We will keep fighting to put a full stop to this destructive industry, and in the meantime, we will keep a close watch on the government to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and mandates.”The drilling would also threaten the Rice’s whale, a species with less than 100 individuals estimated to remain and which lives exclusively in the Gulf Coast, according to court records filed by environmental advocacy groups.A Department of the Interior spokesperson said the agency could not comment on pending litigation.The process did not meet the standards of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires federal agencies analyzes the environmental impacts of their actions prior to decision-making around federal lands.The American Petroleum Institute, or API, an oil and gas trade association representing more than 600 firms and a party to the Gulf Coast case, said it is evaluating its options after this week's ruling.API spokesperson Scott Lauermann said the case is an example of activists “weaponizing” a permitting process, “underscoring how permitting reform is essential to ensuring access to affordable, reliable energy.” Chevron, a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment and referred The Associated Press to the API's statement.Three offshore oil and gas lease sales are scheduled over the course of the next five years.Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Brook on the social platform X: @jack_brook96.Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Love Motels and Converted Ferries: Brazil Gets Creative to Host COP30

By Manuela Andreoni and Lisandra ParaguassuBELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - Environmental activists from around the globe have eagerly awaited Brazil's...

By Manuela Andreoni and Lisandra ParaguassuBELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - Environmental activists from around the globe have eagerly awaited Brazil's turn hosting the United Nations climate summit, known as COP30, after three years where the conference of world leaders tackling global warming was held in countries without full freedom for public demonstrations. But the so-called "People's COP" may not be as welcoming as they hoped.  Sky-high accommodation costs are threatening Brazil's stated goal of inclusion, and the government is racing to multiply the 18,000 beds now available in the Amazonian host city of Belem, turning to motels aimed at amorous couples, ferries that normally ply the rivers, and school classrooms to host visitors.  President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has said his goal in bringing COP30 to the Amazon was to focus the world's attention on a forest that both offers unique solutions to climate change, by locking away planet-warming carbon, and suffers some of its gravest consequences, in the form of wildfires and drought. While many climate change campaigners have celebrated that focus, some have also expressed fears that hosting such a major event may strain the fragile region and compromise the success of the conference. Belem, a port city of 1.3 million on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is speckled with construction sites. The Brazilian government is pouring some $1 billion into new infrastructure. But much work remains to accommodate an expected 60,000-plus visitors.Two global advocacy groups who declined to be named told Reuters that scouts they hired had found accommodation prices for the November conference were several times higher than what they paid last year in Baku, Azerbaijan. Even the cheapest rooms are going for $400, and they are averaging around $1,500 a night.Lula shrugged off the hotel crunch in a recent visit to Belem, suggesting those who cannot find accommodation should sleep "looking at the sky – it will be wonderful."At the heart of the problem is a question that has become more acute as the annual COP has grown from a gathering of world leaders and diplomats to a sprawling conference mixing activists, businesses and government officials: Who is the U.N. climate summit really for? "It feels like a mundane thing, but it's actually politically very important," said Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network. "The ability to address the accommodation problems can make or break a COP."Civil society groups say their access is key to keeping pressure on negotiators, citing the role of public advocacy in breakthroughs such as the creation of the Loss and Damage Fund in 2022 to channel resources from wealthy nations to address destruction caused by climate change in poorer countries."Everybody's been waiting for the Brazil COP," Essop said. "For civil society, it is that point where once again we're going to be at the COP with space for our actions."FEW HOTELS, PLENTY OF CREATIVITY Brazil has already shifted the dates for heads of state to attend the summit to the week before the main event, trying to ease pressure on Belem's thin hotel supply. Two hotels are being built and two cruise ships for attendees will be docked in a nearby harbor.Entrepreneurs are hard at work figuring out other creative ways to accommodate the visitors. Businesses are looking to refurbish ferries with high-end suites. Developers plan to use idle land to put up refurbished shipping containers. Schools and churches have been earmarked to serve as hostels. Love motels that usually rent rooms by the hour are being advertised as options for full national delegations. Yorann Costa, the owner of Motel Secreto, said he can tone down the "more sensual mood" of his establishment by removing erotic chairs."But the poles, for example, I can't take out," he said, adding that the ceiling mirrors would also have to stay. Setting the right price was also tough, he said, because of the fierce speculation around what people were willing to pay. Valter Correia, Brazil's special secretary for COP30, said his office is planning to launch an official booking website within weeks to organize the market. He said his office is also looking for ways to discourage price gouging. Correia said the government expects around 45,000 people to attend COP and that the government has planned enough new accommodation to meet that demand.However, the People's Summit, a side-event run by activist groups, says it expects an additional 15,000. Organizers say they are planning to help with accommodation, for example by building campsites.City and state officials are also encouraging residents to travel and rent out their homes. That has unleashed a gold rush of sorts in Belem. Ads charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent apartments and houses for the month of COP have become common. Interviews with landlords, tenants and a building manager revealed dozens of cases of people who were refused renewal of their rental lease so landlords could prepare apartments for COP visitors paying ten times or more the usual rate. Rafaela Rodrigues, a businesswoman who says she was refused renewal of her rental, said she later found the apartment advertised for several times what she used to pay."It was chaos," she said. "I had 10 days to look for a new place, rent it, move and give back my other apartment."(Reporting by Manuela Andreoni in Belem and Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia; Editing by Brad Haynes and Rosalba O'Brien)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

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