“I Can’t Breathe:” An Environmental Justice Case Study in Minneapolis
Presentation Type
Long presentation (faculty/staff) 15-20 minutes
Campus
Daytona Beach
Status
Faculty
Faculty/Staff Department
Civil Engineering
Start Date
13-11-2023 2:30 PM
Presentation Description/Abstract
Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his utterance, “I can’t breathe,” reverberated internationally as the world population grappled with the twin specters of life-threatening COVID-19 respiratory morbidities and mounting years under increasingly polarized racist regimes. Despite crisis fatigue, national and international outpourings of solidarity trended on social and mainstream media. However, in this moment, the legacy of structural and slow violences against the living, breathing Minneapolis–St. Paul communities of color were obscured. This study addresses Environmental Justice in this mid-sized American city to integrate the three pillars of sustainability (1) environmental indicators (concentrations of atmospheric criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), (2) traffic indicators (Minnesota Department of Transportation permanent traffic monitoring station data), and (3) social indicators (community responses in newspaper and Twitter archives), ultimately making visible how Floyd’s utterance reflects much deeper patterns of stratified urban public health risks and socio-environmental airscape politics.
Keywords
Sustainability, Environmental Justice, Air Quality, Traffic, COVID-10 pandemic
“I Can’t Breathe:” An Environmental Justice Case Study in Minneapolis
Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, his utterance, “I can’t breathe,” reverberated internationally as the world population grappled with the twin specters of life-threatening COVID-19 respiratory morbidities and mounting years under increasingly polarized racist regimes. Despite crisis fatigue, national and international outpourings of solidarity trended on social and mainstream media. However, in this moment, the legacy of structural and slow violences against the living, breathing Minneapolis–St. Paul communities of color were obscured. This study addresses Environmental Justice in this mid-sized American city to integrate the three pillars of sustainability (1) environmental indicators (concentrations of atmospheric criteria pollutants including particulate matter and gaseous pollutants), (2) traffic indicators (Minnesota Department of Transportation permanent traffic monitoring station data), and (3) social indicators (community responses in newspaper and Twitter archives), ultimately making visible how Floyd’s utterance reflects much deeper patterns of stratified urban public health risks and socio-environmental airscape politics.