AIR JUSTICE

In late 2020, Councilwoman Keisha Dorsey of Louisville Metro Council District 3 approached me about how her constituents deal with air pollution and its detrimental effects on health. She wondered, "How might information about air pollution and the industries that contribute to this issue be made more accessible to public audiences?" Yet what began as the work of promoting environmental health literacy in plain language has broadened into an extended analysis of Rubbertown, an area of heavy industrial manufacturing plants in West Louisville with a history of toxic leaks, spills, and occasional explosions.

Analyzing Rubbertown highlights the need for environmental justice in a city presently coming to terms with its racist history and city-wide injustices. Our grant funded work, called "Air Justice," aims to 1) attend to the jargon-filled language of air pollution notices as well as the unsystematic and complex data sources around those notices and 2) fight to "get the listening," or garner attention, for environmental justice in and around Rubbertown.