Sunday, December 7

Tag: essential

Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads
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ENVIRONMENT, VIDEO REELS

Coping with Western wildfires: 5 essential reads

Intense wildfires are raging in California, Oregon and Washington state, spurring mass evacuations and leaving charred towns in their wake. A regional heat wave is keeping temperatures high and humidity low, creating difficult conditions for firefighters. These five articles from The Conversation’s archive explain what’s driving Western fires and how they’re affecting residents. 1. Welcome to the Pyrocene Age Many factors have combined to create conditions for today’s epic wildfires, including climate change, land use patterns and decades of fire suppression. Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne, a historian of fire, argues that Earth may be “entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lak...
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Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts
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Journalism

Black and Latino essential workers experience greater safety concerns than their white counterparts

The big idea Black and Latino essential workers are more likely to feel stressed over job safety and security as well as family pressures than white workers, according to a recent survey of essential workers we conducted in Massachusetts, among them doctors, sanitation workers and grocery employees. Specifically, 70% of Black workers and 78% who are Latino reported that they didn’t feel safe on the job, compared with 58% of white people. This is not simply because Latino and Black workers were more likely to be in low-wage jobs. When we analyzed low-wage workers separately, Latino and Black people in this group were still far more likely to feel unsafe in the pandemic than their white counterparts. We found that access to benefits on the job is critical to maintaining personal and famil...
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Who’s at risk of not being counted in the 2020 census: 6 essential reads
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Journalism

Who’s at risk of not being counted in the 2020 census: 6 essential reads

The census aims to count everyone in the U.S. Of course, that’s not so easy. Overall, the 2010 census was accurate, with a net overcount of just 0.01%. Still, some 16 million people were likely omitted from the final count. The data that the Census Bureau gathers is used to make important decisions about congressional apportionment and federal funding. So, if one county is undercounted more than another, that may mean that they are less well represented politically, or that they get less than their fair share of money over the next decade. A few groups are at particular risk of being undercounted. African Americans Demographers first realized that the census was not counting everyone equally in World War II, and that places with large nonwhite populations were being underrepresented. “...
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Journalism

9 Essential Reads For Your Racial Justice Conversations

By now we know that racism is a discussion that everyone needs to have, yet it’s easy to become overwhelmed by it all. These discussions can challenge what we know. There is still much we don’t know about each other and the impact of race and racism in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, our local governments. Many of our families and communities are simply microcosms of the greater society that often miseducates us. When we enter school, we learn about the fact of slavery but too often without context or judgment. We don’t learn about the resistance movements. Or the full stories of Nat Turner or John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth. This is changing slowly. Small groups of people of all racial backgrounds are discovering the centuries of literature that do tell these stor...
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