Hi!

Hi Everyone,
I am Natalia Bialkowska - a senior at Brandeis (it still sounds really weird to me!) I am very excited to be a part of our mind-blowing E.J. Crew!!

Also, I want to share a little bit about the readings on the environmental justice for tomorrow. I have just finished them and I am absolutely shocked. To be honest, I have never realized the extent of injustice existent between various districts depending both on the income/economic status and the race/ethnicity – which apart from being separate factors of the injustice, are also distinctively related between each other. I was particularly interested in the correlations (evident mostly in the introductory chapters and the actual summary) between the amount of money spent as life expenses (let’s say, a family of two in Worcester needs to spend: $40,000 for a decent living and meanwhile, in Greater Boston area: $52,000) and the exposure to hazardous waste sides (which is more prevalent in Worcester than Greater Boston). The bottom-line really is that the more the inhabitants spend in one district, the richer the district is (since the items needed for living are also more expensive), and simultaneously, the less at environmental hazard such a district is.

Also, the numbers and graphs presented in the “Executive Summary” part of the article reminded me about the data presented by Rachel Carson in her book. They both create the unbreakable aura of indisputable facts which fully portray the current mind-boggling problems – for Carson, of the destruction done upon the environment, while for Study with Executive Summary, of the shocking environmental injustice stemming from the socio-economic discrepancies between districts.