Originally begun in the early 2010s as a publicly accessible home for interviews and witness seminars on environmental dangers, this website is now being transformed into a platform for stories, history, and teaching about environmental and climate justice, also the cumulative impacts and risks faced by environmental justice communities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Phase 1: <\/strong>An initial goal of this website was to house and make accessible a series of witness seminars conducted between 2013 and 2017 by the historian Christopher Sellers<\/a> in industrial communities in Texas and Mexico. Two of these took place in towns long centered around lead smelters, one in each nation; two others, in regions long harboring petrochemical complexes. Heidi Hutner<\/a> and Marianne Sullivan<\/a> also recorded and contributed interviews appearing here. Additions to the website such as “Mapping Sandy’s Inequalities” came out of group research projects by students in Christopher Sellers’ undergraduate research classes for history majors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The witness seminars seminars were supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant #0924783 and a grant from Baylor University’s Oral History Program. Website-building work was supported by Stony Brook’s Teaching and Learning with Technology Lab, along with a grant from Stony Brook’s Faculty in the Arts, Humanities and lettered Social Sciences (FAHSS) program to Heidi Hutner and Christopher Sellers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Phase 2<\/strong>: Beginning in 2024 the website is being revamped by Mark Chambers<\/a> and Christopher Sellers to offer a broader array of resources for teaching as well as research on environmental and climate justice.\u00a0 Many of the additions have come from more local and community-centered materials gathered in an ongoing investigation into the history of the United States Environmental Protect Agency’s (EPA) handling and mishandling of the cumulative impacts faced by environmental justice communities.\u00a0 Other investigators, Jessica Varner<\/a> and Gretchen Gehrke<\/a>, are\u00a0 turning the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative<\/a> (EDGI) website\u00a0 “A People’s EPA<\/a>” into a companionate public platform for this investigation, featuring more agency-centered sources and history.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our work in this phase has been supported by another NSF grant # 2218553, by a 2024-26 Faculty Fellowship offered to Chambers and Sellers by Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CELT), and by Stony Brook’s Geospatial Center and Teaching and Learning with Technology Lab. <\/p>\n\n\n\n