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GoGreenNation News: Mourning family and climate change in the age of loss and damage
GoGreenNation News: Mourning family and climate change in the age of loss and damage

The doctors told me that my mother’s hearing would be the last sense to go. My sister, a few close friends and I gathered around her hospital bed and sang “Amazing Grace,” tears rolling down our cheeks in disbelief. That morning, I’d flown back to London from Geneva, Switzerland, where I was on a summer internship program, to ensure my nanay (Tagalog for mum), Lilila, was going to be okay. Though it had been a tumultuous year, I was convinced she would be fine. She’d been diagnosed with lung cancer the previous summer, though she had never smoked and barely drank. Then, a few months later, she was unexpectedly given the all-clear by the oncologist. My sister and I were relieved. On the plane back to London, I was still operating with the mindset that she was healthy, that her persistent exhaustion was normal, that soon we could all return to regular life. By the time I arrived at the hospital, my mum wasn’t herself. She saw us, smiled, and quickly deteriorated as doctors tried to figure out what was going on. They were unable to and when she slipped away a few hours later, I was heartbroken, but also angry: with the doctors, but also with myself, at not being able to save her. Those feelings continue to this day, partly because it was never clear what happened to her. This anger complicates my memory of my mother. I wasn’t simply able to remember her as the kindest person I ever knew or the person who gave me the gifts I am most proud of; instead, her memory is darkened by the confusion of that day, the feeling of helplessness. The experience of loss and grief after a traumatic event is hard to put into words. I’ve heard therapists and friends in London and New York, where I’m now based at Columbia University, attempt to find common ground with the feeling, and it never quite lands. I have felt anger, resentment and numbness. I have felt alone and misunderstood over the past few years as a consequence of my mum’s death. But it distresses me that I can’t name the cause of her death, that there is no tidy narrative or clear answers. The inarticulable loss of my mum has also focused my research on the mental health impacts of climate-related disasters. The death of my mother might not seem obviously connected to my job as a public health researcher, but the mourning caused by the losses from climate change are comparable to the ways in which losing a loved one feels. I’m not drawing any kind of equivalence between the grief and trauma of losing a parent and losing your entire life and livelihood after a disaster. Nevertheless, grief and feelings of loss permeate many experiences we go through. Whatever the source of grief and loss, my personal experiences have taught me that we need to process and accept these feelings for the sake of our mental and physical health. This essay is also available in Spanish Grief, defined one way as “keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss,” can be applied to the feeling after losing a loved one or losing a sense of home and place after a disaster. In both ways, we lose something we can never get back. Grief is a consequence of the natural cycle of life and death, but can be exacerbated by negligence and unjust approaches to climate change. And how we rebuild is also a function of the support network we have around us, as well as the resources we have and the timing of the events. But the resources we have to cope with grief are often dependent on circumstances outside of our control. Once the headlines fade, climate change grief sets inThough my mum didn’t die directly due to a climate disaster, she was undoubtedly impacted by her environment. Growing up, she experienced typhoons and floods on her home island of Negros. After she migrated to the UK from the Philippines, she worked as a domestic worker to provide for her children.Climate-related disasters strike worldwide, with more than 200 million people impacted over the past two decades, and the acute and chronic impacts on physical and mental health can be devastating. This is only heightened in areas of the world where there are fewer resources to prepare before an event and rebuild in the aftermath of one. In the Philippines, Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 devastated communities and flattened parts of the country. Not only did thousands of people die, but millions more had their lives upended. For Typhoon Rai in 2021, many people are still living in temporary shelters, and many have lost lives. In the United States, whole communities never moved back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and mold still impacts health in low-income housing in New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.For those of us not directly affected by such climate-related disasters, it is easy to move on once the headlines fade. But for those left behind, their entire lives as they knew it could be gone. You might lose your house or a loved one all at once, or your health might decline over the weeks, months or years after a disaster. Giving appropriate attention and funding to understanding disasters’ impacts on health, locally and worldwide, is critical to the fight for social, environmental and climate justice.Climate-related disasters are unfortunately always going to happen, but we can mitigate the worst impacts with the right approach.Grasping the true climate cost of Loss and DamageWhat can be done to mitigate this grief and loss, to prevent this cycle of disaster and destruction from climate change? Solutions range from the local to the global. In New York City in the years after Hurricane Sandy, a network of emotional support was available via Project HOPE, involving individual counseling and public education. The Wildfire Recovery Fund in California supports mid- to long-term recovery efforts and provides mental health support. But post-disaster grief and loss is a worldwide phenomenon that requires coordination and cooperation.Over the years and decades, the ideas of how to adapt to climate change have included commitments by rich countries to fund adaptation to fossil-fuel-free ways of life in poorer countries during the United Nations Climate Change Conferences and the Conference of Parties (COP). But until recently, there had been little discussion of how to fund recovery after climate-related disasters.I was at the UN COP27 convention in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022. A huge issue this time around was Loss and Damage, which can be understood as the harm generated from human-caused climate change, such as destroyed lives after climate-related disasters. But climate reparations, as the restitution for Loss and Damage has been called, requires a financial flow from the Global North to the Global South. It was progress that a fund for Loss and Damage is now even being discussed. But there also needs to be solid finance behind the promises and intentions, as it remains unclear how the Loss and Damage fund will be filled. However, Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, is leading the call for reform of the global financial system via the Bridgetown Agenda. What struck me in all of the discussions of Loss and Damage was precious little discussion of the lasting mental health-related impacts, including the sense of loss and place that is hard to restore if, for example, your family and home are gone. More recognition of the long-term impacts of grief in international frameworks is necessary. This will be the only way to get to a holistic adaptation and recovery possible as restorative climate justice. Still critically missing is a general recognition of the Loss and Damage to mental health and grief that climate change is having, and the necessary funding to even begin to address this. This is where the idea of personal grief from loss meets the need for climate-relevant investment. Trying to rebuild after all is lostLosing my mum represents more than just losing a parent. My Filipino background feels lost with her passing too. I feel like I’m grasping at thin air with my culture and heritage. New people I meet, after learning that my mum was Filipina, usually can’t help but look a bit disappointed or confused when I explain that she never taught me Tagalog or Ilonggo, her regional language. Whenever I hear the few words I understand in Tagalog on the street, my instinct is to say “Kumusta!” (hello in English), but then I usually get tied up in my head, then say nothing at all. It is like the feeling of time and heritage slipping through my fingers, of being uprooted, with no true home.At the time of my mum’s death, I was in the middle of my Ph.D., and was on an internship at the Joint Office for Climate and Health of the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. I was going to (finally) make her proud and pursue a life in academia. My parents had each moved to London from the Philippines and Glasgow, met while he was a barman and she was a chambermaid, and brought me up without means but with plenty of love in social housing in London. They dreamed big for me: they impressed upon me constantly the importance of academic excellence, despite them not really knowing what education looked like beyond high school. This became even more important especially after losing my dad in my teenage years. Now sometimes all I feel left with are ghosts of memories. But that’s still more than enough to keep me wanting to make them proud.It's now been several years since my mother’s passing. Many well-meaning friends and family told me that the grief would pass. Initially I thought I was missing out on some secret cure to the grief, or that not enough time had passed. However, after further thought and reading, including “The Myth of Closure: Ambiguous Loss in a Time of Pandemic and Change” by Pauline Boss, I now understand that what I was experiencing was normal: The grief never goes away, but as a person you learn to grow and carry it with you.Hearing “Amazing Grace” still takes me back to watching my mum’s final moments. Now, when I think about my parents, though I still get a little sad, I more try to focus on how they might be proud that their son managed to build on their hard work. I have chosen to contribute to the conversation around climate change and public health to honor my family, my grief and loss, and my heritage.Robbie M. Parks is an assistant professor in environmental health sciences at Columbia University, an NIH NIEHS K99/R00 fellow at Columbia University, and lead instructor of the SHARP Workshop on Bayesian Modeling for Environmental Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

Cinema Verde interviews Casey Beck
Cinema Verde interviews Casey Beck

Cinema Verde presents an interview with Casey Beck the director of "The Great Divide." Twenty minutes outside of Visalia, amidst the seemingly endless rows of citrus trees, Yolanda Cuevas packs enchiladas with shredded chicken for her husband Benjamin, their adult daughters and two teenaged grandchildren in her modest single-story home. Their house is the first one off the main drag, one of 83 lining the two crumbling roads that comprise the tiny town of Tooleville. Yolanda must wash the tomatoes for the salsa first in the sink and then again with a splash of clean water from a 5-gallon jug. The process is arduous, and though she’s resigned to do it, she’s not happy about it. Along with Tooleville’s several hundred other residents, Yolanda’s family has survived on bi-weekly delivery of water to their homes for the past 12 years. It’s an annoyance for the family, and it’s expensive for the State of California, which has been paying for the replacement water since the discovery of Chromium-6 (the same chemical featured in Erin Brokovich) in the water. The simpler solution would be to consolidate the town’s water system with that of its larger, affluent neighbor to the west, Exeter. And for this purpose, Yolanda has become a reluctant activist, attending community meetings in Tooleville and lobbying for consolidation at Exeter’s city council meetings under the expert guidance of Pedro Hernandez, an organizer with the Leadership Counsel. While Exeter has resisted the consolidation since it was first proposed, organizers like Pedro feel that this could be the year Exeter finally succumbs to the growing community pressure and brings Tooleville into the fold. The decision will echo around the Central Valley and across the state, as hundreds of similar community water systems find themselves in a nearly identical predicament. Our full catalog of video interviews and streaming films is available to members at cinemaverde.org.

Cinema Verde Presents: The Great Divide
Cinema Verde Presents: The Great Divide

Now Playing | Twenty minutes outside of Visalia, amidst the seemingly endless rows of citrus trees, Yolanda Cuevas packs enchiladas with shredded chicken for her husband Benjamin, their adult daughters and two teenaged grandchildren in her modest single-story home. Their house is the first one off the main drag, one of 83 lining the two crumbling roads that comprise the tiny town of Tooleville. Yolanda must wash the tomatoes for the salsa first in the sink and then again with a splash of clean water from a 5-gallon jug. The process is arduous, and though she’s resigned to do it, she’s not happy about it. Along with Tooleville’s several hundred other residents, Yolanda’s family has survived on bi-weekly delivery of water to their homes for the past 12 years. It’s an annoyance for the family, and it’s expensive for the State of California, which has been paying for the replacement water since the discovery of Chromium-6 (the same chemical featured in Erin Brokovich) in the water. The simpler solution would be to consolidate the town’s water system with that of its larger, affluent neighbor to the west, Exeter. And for this purpose, Yolanda has become a reluctant activist, attending community meetings in Tooleville and lobbying for consolidation at Exeter’s city council meetings under the expert guidance of Pedro Hernandez, an organizer with the Leadership Counsel. While Exeter has resisted the consolidation since it was first proposed, organizers like Pedro feel that this could be the year Exeter finally succumbs to the growing community pressure and brings Tooleville into the fold. The decision will echo around the Central Valley and across the state, as hundreds of similar community water systems find themselves in a nearly identical predicament.

GoGreenNation News: Op-ed: It’s not just hair — fighting beauty injustice beyond the individual
GoGreenNation News: Op-ed: It’s not just hair — fighting beauty injustice beyond the individual

“Your hair is frizzy; it’s just different than ours.” Those words replayed in my head as the California coast was a blur in the distance. We were driving back from one of the last beach days in undergrad when the topic of hair came up. At that moment, it felt like all the hours of effort – specifically the approximately three hours a week of washing, blow drying and straightening my hair, which adds up to almost 625 hours or 26 entire days over the course of four years – had been wasted. I began to question what the point was of missing out on events, time with friends or extra time to sleep or study because I had to straighten my hair. Beyond time,it felt like my efforts to fit in were pointless. This essay is also available in Spanish Straightening my hair (both through chemical hair relaxers and heat throughout my life) was my attempt to reach Western society’s beauty standard, which views “good hair” as the hair closest to white people’s hair — “straight, silky, bouncy, manageable, healthy, and shiny.” It deems “bad hair” as “short, matted, kinky, nappy, coarse, brittle, and wooly.” These racialized beauty standards extend beyond hair and dictate which skin tones, facial features and body shapes are viewed as beautiful. There is real value in beauty — in terms of social, economic and physical health — and those who align with these standards benefit from beauty, while those who do not align suffer. In the workplace, for example, Black women with natural hair are seen as less professional, less competent and less likely to be recommended for a job interview compared to Black women with straight hair or white women with straight or curly hair. But the cost of beauty goes beyond social interactions and opportunities. Our physical bodies pay for it. Chemical hair relaxers (used to straighten hair), as well as other hair styling products, can contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which are manmade or natural chemicals that can interfere with the body’s hormone system, known as the endocrine system, and impact health. Being exposed to these chemicals may be linked to a variety of health outcomes such as early age of first period, birth outcomes and breast cancer, among others; all health outcomes that burden Black people more than other racial and ethnic groups. Black people are bearing the brunt of the burden of the social, economic and physical costs of beauty. This is what researchers have called beauty injustice – a system that overburdens communities of color, notably Black communities, with the mental, financial and physical health costs of beauty. At the core of beauty injustice, we blame individuals for using certain products without considering how the decision to use them is also the result of other factors at the societal, neighborhood or family level. To achieve beauty justice, we need to shift conversations, research and interventions toward considering the broader drivers of product use instead of focusing solely on the individual.Peer and family pressure about how you look My hair journey started long before college. I remember the first time I came to school with straight hair. It was the first day of sixth grade, my hair was straightened and in a low ponytail, I had silver hoops on and was wearing a black New York City shirt that I had gotten that summer during back-to-school shopping. I received compliments about my hair, and it finally felt like I might fit in. However, these compliments only came when I straightened my hair. It is clear to me now that the feeling of “fitting in” with my classmates and friends in the predominantly white community where I lived, fueled my desire to start chemically relaxing my hair when I was thirteen. My experiences are an example of how relationships or interactions with people may contribute to personal care product use. These interactions may be twofold — both the experiences of only receiving compliments with straight hair and the experiences of being told that your hair is “unprofessional,” “unkempt,” “frizzy,” or “messy” when not straightened. While we may expect comments like this from strangers, friends, family and others in our close networks are also contributing to both our hair styling and product use decisions. In fact, Black people who heard from family members that they prefer straight hair are more likely to use chemical hair straighteners compared to those whose family members did not express this preference. Looking back, I am grateful to have not experienced these pressures from within my family, but I am painfully aware that comments from friends and classmates about how they “only like my hair straight” to how they “want to touch my hair” when it was curly had an impact on my own hair styling and product use decisions. Exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals through beauty products I first learned about endocrine-disrupting chemicals through an introductory course during my first year of undergrad. We read a New Yorker article about Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a Black researcher who uncovered how atrazine, a pesticide, affects the reproductive development of frogs. The article artfully weaved together the tensions between industry and science, his experience as a Black researcher and the potential effects of chemicals on the environment and health. Upon a further dive into endocrine-disrupting chemicals, I learned that while exposure to these chemicals is ubiquitous, communities of color, specifically Black people, are more highly exposed compared to other racial and ethnic groups. And these disparities may be driven by differences in personal care product use patterns, including hair products, as we are more likely to use hair oil, hair gels, pomades, leave-in conditioners and other leave-in hair products. For a while that article was the answer to the question of how and why I entered this field; it was the easy answer. But I eventually came to the realization there was a deeper driver to my work during my time working at Black Women for Wellness, a South-LA-based Black women’s reproductive health organization. My time there was a learning experience both professionally and personally. This was one of the first times I was fully physically within a Black community, which came with its own considerations being biracial (community members would sometimes comment things like “where is the Black woman” or “Marissa will only half get it,” which sometimes made me feel more isolated than a part of the community). However, it was there I realized that the reason why I am in this field was not the article, but my own hair experiences, many of them shared by people within the Black community. Agents of Change in Environmental Justice · Marissa Chan on solutions to harmful beauty products Those experiences have led me to my current research at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the Environmental Reproductive Justice Lab. I want to understand what factors at the community and neighborhood level may be impacting access to safe hair products and influence hair product use patterns, while also proposing solutions led by communities. So far, we have found that in Boston neighborhoods that are home to predominantly communities of color and/or lower-income communities there are more harmful or unsafe hair products available in drug stores and other retail shops compared to predominantly white and higher-income communities. This research underscores the importance of understanding that, in the end, the decision to use certain personal care products is not just an individual choice – relationships, community, neighborhood and societal factors influence it. The path toward beauty justice We have seen progress in the movement toward safer products. Consumers are more frequently searching for products that do not contain certain ingredients or chemicals. Manufacturers and companies are taking public commitments toward formulating without certain ingredients. And recently, the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulations Act was signed into law, which is the first major update to federal cosmetics regulations since 1938. Ensuring that safer products are available is an important step. However, ensuring that there is access to safer products for all is not the focus of the safer product movement. Thus, there needs to be an explicit push toward ensuring that types of products commonly used by the Black community are safe.The burden is still on the individual to navigate ingredient labels, false marketing by companies, price and social pressures. So while we are pushing for safer products, it is important for us to also work toward tearing down the broader societal barriers to safer product purchasing and use. For example, the CROWN Act, which protects against race-based hair discrimination in the workplace and in K-12 public and charter schools, has been passed in 18 states and at the federal level has recently passed the House of Representatives (now on to the Senate!). While the impact of this law is largely unknown (in part due to how recently it was enacted by states), this shift is important progress toward beauty justice. I have been engaged in this field in some way for almost a decade and have been wearing my hair predominately curly since I was 21; yet I am still trying to navigate my hair texture, hair styling routine, and what products to use. My biggest insecurity is the thing people compliment me the most on. I am still facing the same pressures to straighten my hair for big events and presentations. I’ve come to understand that progress is a gradual process — my relationship with my hair has not changed overnight, but I have been working toward embracing it on both the good and bad hair days and not letting my hair get in the way of missing events, opportunities and experiences. Just like my hair journey, progress in the beauty justice movement has been gradual;but we are seeing momentum. Marissa Chan is a Ph.D. student in Population Health Sciences within the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Follow her on Twitter at @marissawchan.This essay was produced through the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice fellowship. Agents of Change empowers emerging leaders from historically excluded backgrounds in science and academia to reimagine solutions for a just and healthy planet.

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