On Saturday 11/12 Cole, Jack and I went to a conference at Columbia University called Urban Communities for Environmental Resilience run by We Act for Environmental Justice (WEACT). We Act is an organization of scientist and lawyers to help make all communities clean and safe. We helped David Chang, the environmental health coordinator at WEACT, hand out flyers and direct people through the building. We were also listening to the conference and taking notes on the different subjects they were talking about, which ranged from Hurricane Sandy to Harlem heat and buses idling.

When the panel started, they began to talk about poor housing projects that were affected by sandy. One fact I learned that I would like to remember for the social justice teach-in was an interesting idea that sort of looks like this.screenshot-2016-11-28-at-9-26-16-am

The idea is that as humans pollute the environment the environment will then go on to harm humans (ex. Increased temperatures). Then because of this humans will harm the environment (by using AC), which starts the cycle over again. They also talked about how to save time many of the building tenants during the super storm would mark their buildings evacuated even though there were (in many cases) still people inside the building.

Another cool project we learned about was the Harlem Heat Project. This project is dedicated to looking at the temperature in Harlem, as well as the effects of busses idling. One thing they learned was that child asthma rates in East Harlem are 19% compared to the upper east side which was 7%. When measuring the heat inside the houses they noticed that it was one always hotter than outside and two much higher than the fatigue rate, which means that just by sitting in your house you run the risk of passing out.