Sacrifice Zones: ProPublica Takes Us Inside America’s Toxic Hotspots

How to Save a Planet

Gimlet

Science, News, Society & Culture

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2022

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All across the United States, industrial polluters are emitting toxic air... and people who live near those polluters are breathing it in. Kendra spoke to journalists from investigative newsroom ProPublica about the communities most affected by carcinogenic air pollution, often referred to as “sacrifice zones”: where they are, why they matter, and how you can find out if you and your loved ones are living in one. Guests: Al Shaw, Maya Miller, John Beard Jr. Calls to Action: If you want to learn more about Propublica’s series and the sacrifice zones they studied, you can see the entire project on their site here. If you’re interested in finding out whether the place YOU live is on ProPublica’s map, you can see that, too— just search this map by address, city, or zipcode, and see the industrial pollution risks in your area. The EPA data that Propublica’s investigative team used when they made the site is from the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators model. You can check it out for yourself here. Finally, if you’re interested in going beyond just industrial pollution, Al recommends looking at a database called the National Air Toxics Assessment, put out by the EPA. Check out our Calls to Action archive for all of the actions we've recommended on the show. Send us your ideas or feedback with our Listener Mail Form. Sign up for our newsletter here. And follow us on Twitter and Instagram. This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn. Our star moderator, is Kendra Pierre-Louis. The rest of our reporting and producing team includes Anna Ladd, Rachel Waldholz, Daniel Ackerman, and Meg Driscoll. Our supervising producer is Katelyn Bogucki. Our editor is Caitlin Kenney. Our fact checker for this episode is James Gaines. Sound design and mixing by Peter Leonard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to How Does It Planet, I'm Alex Bloomberg, and this is the podcast where we talk about
0:06.5	what we need to do to address the climate crisis, how to make those things happen.
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1:52.4	Today on the podcast, we have something a little different. We are going to be playing audio from an event we co-hosted a few weeks ago
1:59.0	with the newsroom ProPublica. ProPublica, if you don't know, is a non-profit investigative news outlet,
2:06.1	and they do lots and lots of groundbreaking amazing work. They've won many, many awards.
2:11.3	And this conversation was about the ProPublica teams investigation into industrial air pollution.
2:17.5	So about six months ago, they published an analysis of data from the EPA and they created a map of more than 1,000 hotspots of air pollution across the United States.
2:28.0	These are places where a pollution is so high that it becomes really dangerous to people's health.
2:33.1	There's greater risks of developing asthma or heart disease or even cancer.
2:38.2	And those risks are so great that these places, these hotspots, have acquired the name sacrifice zones.
2:45.0	ProPublica investigated those sacrifice zones, dove into the data all across the country,
2:49.4	and we talked to them about what they found. And we're going to be sharing some of that conversation with you on the podcast today.
2:55.2	Welcome to today's session, sacrifice zones, communities and the path of industrial pollution.
	...

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