GCSC Seminar

GCSC Seminar: Wildfires and Air Quality

January 14, 2022

By Maria Archibald, Sustainability Office

Salt Lake City is famous for its winter inversions, which often cause residents to hunker down indoors, turn on their air filters, and avoid the dark cloud of smog hanging above the city. As climate change intensifies, residual wildfire smoke often makes summer air unsafe to breathe, too.

On Tuesday, Jan. 18 from 4-5 p.m., Dr. Heather Holmes, Associate Professor in chemical engineering, will give a GCSC seminar called “Wildfire Smoke and Air Quality in the Western U.S.,” which will address fire-related air pollution and her research in atmospheric physics.

“I study the chemistry and the physics of the atmosphere,” says Holmes, whose lab uses ground-based sensors, atmospheric models, and satellite remote sensing to identify and investigate pollution sources. “A lot of the work I do is aimed at trying to better understand the different sources of air pollution in a given area,” she explains. “That helps policy makers put into place programs where you can then…decrease that pollution.”

Holmes comes from a mechanical engineering background and studied fluid mechanics in graduate school. “Air is a fluid,” she says. “And that crosses over then a lot with meteorology.” Holmes began studying weather patterns on the city and state scale, and became passionate about air quality after completing her PhD at the University of Utah and experiencing Salt Lake’s winter inversion. “I was really motivated to understand the pollution problems, and then really wanted to understand how the pollution impacts human health,” says Holmes.

In her talk, Holmes will discuss the consequences of wildfire in the western United States and the interdisciplinary collaboration between climate scientists, hydrologists, atmospheric scientists, air pollution specialists, and other scholars to address these issues. Her talk will give listeners “an understanding of why it’s difficult to simulate fire and smoke pollution in the western US and things we’re doing to try and fix that.”

To learn more from Holmes about some of the most pressing ecological issues facing Salt Lake City and the western US, tune in on Tuesday, Jan. 18 from 4-5 p.m. for the first GCSC seminar of the semester.

New Directions for Environmental Justice

April 3, 2019

By Nicholas Apodaca, graduate assistant, Sustainability Office

Many of us who care about climate change and environmental justice take action in our daily lives to do our part: we recycle, use sustainable products, use public transportation or eat locally grown food. Yet often environmental problems play out at a larger scale, and while our personal actions can help in small ways, it is important to understand the forces at work in creating environmental hazards and injustice from the start. If we know where injustice begins, we can begin to make a change for the better.

Professor David Pellow of the University of California, Santa Barbara, is exploring new directions in environmental justice in his research. On April 16 from 4 – 5 p.m. in ASB 210, join him for his lecture, “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice: Exploring State Violence & the Settler Colonial Conflicts.”

Pellow began his research in Sociology and Environmental Justice in the 1990s when he completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Sociology,  “Black workers in green industries: the hidden infrastructure of environmental racism,” at Northwestern University. He has since taught at Colorado, UC San Diego, and Minnesota, before arriving at UC Santa Barbara in 2015. There he is the Dehlsen Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project.

In his lecture, Pellow will explore new directions in the theoretical side of environmental sociology.  He breaks it down into multiple approaches. First, he is attempting to further build on existing research that focuses on the intersection between environmental hazards and class, income, race, gender, citizenship and nationality. He sees these intersections as critical for developing nuanced solutions to the complex interactions that produce injustice. “[I am] trying to ask bigger questions about the role of government or the nation-state in producing and exacerbating environmental problems and environmental justice issues in the first place,” Pellow explains. The contradiction is one of “relying on some of the same institutions that are arguably creating the problem in the first place.”

Pellow is also concerned with questions of scale in environmental justice research. He sees environmental justice as an issue that affects us  individually as well as globally. “Environmental hazards regarding academic and policy analysis must be approached as multi-scalar,” argues Pellow. “What happens at the micro scale is almost always revealed to be linked the community or national scale.” As no environmental issues exist in a vacuum, local and regional issues are just as “global” in consequence as environmental injustice outside of the United States. Often, we can find problems in our own neighborhood. Pellow’s recent research on oil refineries located in residential areas of Richmond, California illustrates this well, showing how global economic dynamics can lead to visible environmental impacts on real people.

Lastly, Pellow will explore the ethics of environmental injustice research.”The kind of environmental research I’m doing seeks to question the expendability of ecosystems, of habitats, and of marginalized human populations,” Pellow says. Pellow believes that environmental sociology shouldn’t simply seek to expose injustice, but should fight these notions of expendability. “It’s really about declaring, loudly, the indispensability (of marginalized people). It’s about saying every voice counts. Otherwise, it’s not a democracy.”

Should you too believe that every voice counts in the fight against environmental injustice, and have an interest in the cutting edge of environmental sociology research, come to ASB 210 on April 16 at 4 PM for David Pellow’s GCSC Seminar Series lecture, “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice: Exploring State Violence & the Settler Colonial Conflicts.”