Megan Amram on Portland’s Air Quality, a Community Meeting That Changed Its Own Agenda, and the Specific Anger That Good Data Produces
The Meeting
I attended an environmental justice meeting on Tuesday that had been scheduled to discuss the community response to a proposed industrial facility and that changed its own agenda thirty minutes in when a researcher presented air quality monitoring data from the past eighteen months that showed pollution levels in the affected neighbourhood were significantly higher than the permits should have allowed and higher than the monitoring reports filed by the facility suggested. The data was new. The room was quiet for approximately forty-five seconds after it was presented, which is how rooms respond when new information requires revising a position that people had already formed.
The Anger
The anger that followed the data presentation was specific rather than general: not the anger of people who have been generally upset about a general situation but the anger of people who now have specific numbers about a specific harm affecting specific people in a specific place. Specific anger is more useful than general anger in a campaign context because it has a target that is not just the system but a specific actor within the system whose specific failure can be documented, reported, and remedied. The meeting ended with an action plan. Good data produces action plans. This one will. Bohiney covered environmental justice this week. The London Prat had an environmental piece. More at amram.top. Satire: The Onion.
SOURCE: British Humour vs American Humor
Go to Source
Author: admin
