Environmental advocacy is on the rise worldwide, and encouraging as that fact is, keeping track of where and what environmental justice initiatives are taking place is challenging given the quantity and sometimes disconnected nature of different initiatives. Environmental Justice Atlas was founded in 2015 by Leah Temper and Joan Martinez Alier at ICTA-UAB, the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals in Barcelona, Spain. Environmental justice initiatives are voluntarily contributed by founders or members of the initiative, along with a description of their goal and location of operations. The result is a map with dots representing movements on every continent. Initiatives are sorted into different categories, such as those focusing on nuclear waste, deforestation, and all types of waste: their dot on the map is colour-coded and symbolized according to the category the initiative falls under. The goal is that different initiatives and concerned citizens can gain greater awareness of the advocacy taking place around them and become involved, as well as engaging concerned consumers to look into whether the source of their most commonly used products is a source of local discontent and environmental degradation. Because all information is offered voluntarily, there is no way to say for certain if the map shows every single initiative taking place worldwide, though that should not detract from the fact that this is the first known map of environmental justice initiatives worldwide.
Categories
Citizen Science, Data, Psychology, Regulation
Air Pollution Robot
The dangers of air pollution to human health are well documented, though the traditional methodology of collecting and reporting on sample lags behind the need to keep abreast and regulate air pollution in a meaningful amount of time. The use of drones and robots have been identified by researchers as resources that can be tweaked […]
Artificial Life, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Industry/Natural Commodities, Lifestyle, Monitoring
Telematic Rivers
Erica Kermani’s artwork seeks to answer a central question: if rivers were seeing an equal, living entity, would humans take issues like climate change threatening them more seriously? In his year-long art exhibition in 2017, Kermani, in collaboration with Diana Salcedo & Jeana Chesnik, created a new forum of interaction between humans and rivers to […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies
Co-occupied Boundaries
Art is easily found in nature but rarely is what considered art today inherently natural. The concept of co-occupied mediums that serve to be both functional for nature and aesthetically pleasing to people is being actively explored by Asya Ilgun and Phil Ayres, from the CITAstudio at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies