Gaia Desert

Last thursday there was a Public Meeting where the desert sun quoted our Environmental Justice workshop.  The article is entitled " Proposal for Whitewater River trail system draws mixed response ". Our workshop was summarized as:  "On Dec. 29, a coalition of more than a dozen valley community groups held a workshop in Coachella, where they prioritized environmental health issues related to air quality in the valley.  The groups ranked the cleaning of illegal dumps, such as the notorious Mount San Diego sludge pile in Thermal and the Larson dump, once the state's largest illegal dump site, as their top air quality-related problems. The Thermal Chamber of Commerce, Torres-Martinez tribe, Building Health Communities Eastern Coachella Valley and Planned Parenthood all attended the Dec.  29 workshop. A cross-valley parkway didn't even come up in that discussion, according to Ryan Sinclair, a Loma Linda University environmental healt

Here is the summary from our workshop on Dec 29th, 2011 Participatory Priority Ranking of EJ issues in Coachella Valley Ryan G. Sinclair PhD, MPH – rsinclair@llu.edu Loma Linda University Department of Environmental Health and Geoinformatic Sciences Purpose - A Loma Linda University team from the department of Environmental Health held a participatory priority-ranking workshop with several Community groups from the Coachella Valley (Table 1). The purpose of this workshop was to prioritize environmental justice issues that relate to air quality in the Coachella valley.  An output of the workshop was to develop a list of air quality EJ priority issues and then rank those priorities. This method is published in anthropological literature as the Participatory Analysis for Community Action (PACA) technique. The method is also known as “free lists” and “pile sorting”.    Methods - The December 29 th morning workshop took approximately four hours to complete and come to a cons