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

This is reported to be a safe way to kill all the bacteria in your mouth. It is reported to be effective against dental hygienists, halitosis, or root canals. It may also whiten your teeth.  Your dentist and dental hygienist may not approve.   "patients may use a diluted solution of sodium hypochlorite (bleach) (0.1% (1000 ppm available chlorine) or less dependent upon the patient's taste tolerance), This is about 1 teaspoon of bleach in 200ml of water. Here is the reference: Slots J: Primer for antimicrobial periodontal therapy. J Periodont Res 2000; 35: 108: 14

This is recently launched: USAID Global Waters

The recent NPR and UN press on the 7 billionth person From an environmental microbiology perspective Here is how the world population has grown in the last 1000 years: Source: U.N. Population Division Credit: NPR NPR Video on how the population grows to 7 billion :

I’m headed to a few different local conferences during the fall quarter. Each has a water emphasis: The WEFTEC conference in Los Angeles from October 17 to 19. I’m presenting on Oct 18. https://wef.expoplanner.com/index.cfm?do=expomap.sess&event_id=2&session_id=47 Students can get into this conference for $30.  This is an amazing deal considering the free lunch you get as a student, the career connections workshops, and the competitions/exhibitions that you can watch. Registration info http://www.weftec.org/packages/ Student opportunities: http://www.weftec.org/syp/ The Healthy Communities by Design on Nov 14 & 15 http://www.llu.edu/public-health/hcbd/index.page This is a GIS conference at LLU and ESRI. I'm presenting on crowdsourcing. The Imperial County 4th annual Environmental Justice leadership summit Nov 16 & 17 http://www.ejleadershipsummit.org/ This is more of a workshop with a bus tour on day 1 and workshops on day 2.  I'm presen

I'm at KALLPA in Lima Peru.  We are listening to Dr. André deQuadros discuss "theatre of the oppressed" and how theatre is used as a big structure for our work in public health. Theatre allows us to create the structure with all other arts.  Why the arts? Its part of human life.    Provides an imaginary space where people can invent their solutions.    This is from Theatre of the oppressed website :  Theatre of the Oppressed is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life. Dr. De Quadros emphasized how actors are the interface we have between our public health project and the community. Using a theatre program can provoke imagination, create inve