Racism as a Motivator for Climate Justice

Mark A. Mitchell

In the wake of the recent unjustifiable deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and
several other African Americans at the hands of police, we have witnessed persistent
and widespread protests against systemic racism, even during the COVID-19 pan-
demic, which has killed African Americans and Latinos at two to three times the
rate of Whites. Racism is undeniably an evil, pervasive, destructive force in our so-
ciety, yet it can also be a great motivating force. This essay is a personal story of how
being the subject of racism led one person to acquire and leverage his professional
privilege to help create and change institutions to act on climate and environmental
injustices while countering the systemic racism that he witnessed and experienced in
childhood.

D o you believe in a parallel universe? I do. I live in one. This is not the

“fake news” universe, but rather the universe of racism. Racism is per-
vasive in American society and is a strong but silent social determinant
of health, wealth, and general welfare. It creates a parallel universe where people
living in the same environment have very different lived experiences. It can also
be a powerful motivator for good or evil. This essay describes how my experience
with overt, institutional, and systemic racism motivated me to become a witness-
ing professional for the health effects of climate change, and how I brought along
other health professionals to that task.

In 1964, my family was the first African American family to move into one of
the all-White suburbs of St. Louis. There, as a young boy, I experienced extreme,
overt racism. At the age of seven, I did not understand why certain random strang-
ers hated me and others were scared of me. I was called hateful names that I didn’t
understand by children from passing school buses or on the playground. Women
twice my size would slam the door in my face in terror when I asked for dona-
tions for the March of Dimes. Virtually everyone would stare at me, smile, and
lock their car doors when I crossed the street, clearly but silently letting me know
that I did not belong. Relatives would complain that on their way to visit us they
were frequently stopped by the police.

Over the next few years, I struggled to figure out how to keep people from hat-
ing me or being scared of me. I tried getting to know some of the haters, so that
I could understand them, and they could understand me. I tried smiling and be-

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coming the class clown. I tried fighting and arguing with those who bullied me,
but this only seemed to encourage some to try to provoke me further. I also tried
becoming the teacher’s pet and excelling in my schoolwork to show that I was just
as good as my classmates. Nothing seemed to work, and I became frustrated and
depressed by the time I reached nine years old.

In my first year attending a more diverse high school, which was only 90 per-
cent White, I woke up one day–as if struck by lightning–and decided that I would
change my life. I decided that it doesn’t matter what others think of me, I will
do what makes me happy and stop trying to please everyone else or to be what I
thought that they wanted me to be. I decided that it was too emotionally draining
to be angry or to try to conform to unattainable expectations. I decided that I would
create the life that I wanted. I decided that I would not judge others and would not
worry about how they judged me, because I could never satisfy everyone. I decided
that just because something was a rule or a norm didn’t make it right. I decided to
defy social norms by rotating among the cliques that ate together in the cafeteria.
One day I would eat with the jocks, the next with the thespians, the druggies, the
intellectuals, the elites, the Black students, the nerds, and so on. However, I still
disdained those who spouted racial slurs and jokes, and I knew that I was always
being watched, always being judged, and always at risk of upsetting White people
for little or no reason, which could get me in trouble or put me in danger.

To my surprise, despite or because I stopped trying to please everyone, I be-
came popular, particularly among students who did not fit in. I found that others
wanted the same things that I did, and although life is unfair, together we could
change the unfair institutions and make them more just. I started organizing stu-
dents to oppose perceived injustices. I joined the student council and restarted
the Black Student Union during my Freshman year and continued being active in
these and several other organizations over the course of my matriculation there.
I was surprised that, in my Senior year, my classmates created a special Student
Council officer’s position for me to serve as a platform to organize students to ad-
dress injustices.

I had decided that I wanted to go into medicine from a very young age as a way

to help others and to challenge myself academically. I was accepted into a six-
year medical school upon graduation from high school, and continued my
student activism there in Kansas City, Missouri, through the student council and
the Student National Medical Association (which represents African American
medical students), and by participating in medical school policy-making bodies,
such as the admission committee. Because my youthful experiences led to various
levels of success and appreciation from others, I decided that I wanted to focus my
life on changing policy, fighting racism, and pursuing social justice. I tried to fig-
ure out how to combine this with a career in medicine. One day, one of my profes-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell

sors advised me to explore Preventive Medicine and Public Health as a specialty.
He helped me to locate Dr. Richard Biery, the Director of the Kansas City Health
Department and one of only five public health–trained physicians in the 1.5 mil-
lion-person Kansas City metropolitan area. I arranged a meeting with Dr. Biery,
who taught me that the philosophical basis of science is to find truth; the philo-
sophical basis of medicine is to apply science to health; and the philosophical ba-
sis of public health is to apply social justice to medicine.

After he explained that to me, I was hooked. I decided I wanted to go into pub-

lic health as a career.

I studied public health and completed my medical residency in Preventive
Medicine. I entered the field and practiced public health in senior positions at
the Kansas City, Missouri, and later, Hartford, Connecticut, health departments.
Through this experience, I found that although social justice is the philosophical
basis of public health, this is not how things work in reality. I found that there are
many constraints on public health practitioners–namely, political constraints–
particularly if you lead a health department. Health departments are sometimes
described as the fourth-most political department in local government, after po-
lice, fire, and public works.

There were political pressures from a variety of constituencies, including City
administration, state, and local elected officials, the three employee unions in our
department, regulated businesses, health care organizations, community activ-
ists, and the media. We were often in the local news. Some of the issues that were
highlighted in the media included: protests of cutbacks in child health programs;
measles, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted infection outbreaks; immuniza-
tion campaigns to stop measles; needle exchange programs to combat HIV; clos-
ing popular restaurants that failed inspections; protests that claimed the family
planning program somehow promotes sexual activity and abortions; and remov-
ing families from apartments where children have been lead poisoned.

In addition to these normal public health issues, we also encountered a num-
ber of extraordinary activities. These included drug charges against employees,
embezzlement, arson investigations, and several fatalities of employees and their
families, including a mass murder-suicide. This was a stressful four years, indeed.
Yes, I went into public health, but once there, I learned how stressful and politi-
cal it can be and how many limitations there are on what you can do (although these
vary from place to place around the country and according to the level of govern-
ment–local, state, federal–in which you serve). Because of political limitations,
it is not easy to be a witnessing professional or to promote change in public health.

O ne concern I observed that calls for witnessing professionals is that the

people who need the resources the most are not necessarily the ones who
get them, even though philosophically that should be the case. Often-

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRacism as a Motivator for Climate Justice

times the people who complain the most–those with the most political power
and money–are prioritized for getting resources and services. For example, al-
though we know that cancer rates and toxic exposures are higher in low-income
communities, and even higher in communities of color, the state health depart-
ment unit that investigates cancer clusters spends most of its time investigating
whether there are cancer clusters in suburban and rural communities; they sel-
dom find any. Why focus on these communities? Because suburban and rural res-
idents are more likely to complain and to engage powerful interests to support
their complaints. The lesson I learned from this is that the people who wield the
most power and influence are those who represent business interests or those who
work in advocacy groups that engage politicians and voters. In addition, powerful
political interests often operate to create state policies that disadvantage urban
interests. One example of this is how waste disposal is regionalized in Connecti-
cut and concentrated in the cities with the highest percentages of People of Color.
Although Hartford is the state capital of the wealthiest state, it is among the
lowest-income cities with over one hundred thousand people in the United States.
It is 80 percent African American and Latino. In the 1990s, when I was health di-
rector, Hartford had the largest landfill in the state, and it was poorly managed.

It also had the largest trash incinerator in the state, which took trash from over
seventy municipalities in three states to burn in Hartford. It was the fifth-largest
trash-to-energy incinerator in the country, by capacity. Incineration produces
toxic gases, which include nickel and phthalates that are associated with asthma.
Hartford had the highest asthma hospitalization rate in Connecticut.

The landfill and trash-to-energy incinerator were both run by a quasi-govern-
mental agency controlled by the Governor. Their Board was composed of current
and former elected officials and was chaired by the Governor’s Chief of Staff. It
had state legislators as employees and contracted with companies of major po-
litical donors. It was supposed to be regulated by the state environmental agency,
but when they tried to do so, the legislature enacted laws that exempted the quasi-
governmental agency from the regulations. The landfill created odors that were so
strong that on several occasions they made employees in the nearby Hartford Pub-
lic Works garage so sick that they had to close their operations. Actions by com-
munity groups were able to exert enough pressure to get the facility to meet envi-
ronmental standards. Although the landfill eventually closed, the trash-to-energy
facility is currently in discussions to be gutted and rebuilt in the same location,
perhaps with a larger capacity than it currently has to become one of the three
largest facilities in the United States.

Another example that I observed as Hartford Health Director of how politi-
cal power creates state policies that disadvantage communities of color was with
electric power plants. New electric power plants, which were among the most pol-
luting facilities in the state of Connecticut, were mostly placed in the communi-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell

ties with the lowest incomes and highest percentages of People of Color. These
communities were the most densely populated portions of the state with the most
air pollution and the highest rates of pollution-induced asthma hospitalizations
and deaths. These communities were home to the state’s largest existing power
plants that already produced more electricity than these cities needed, and yet
were the site for proposed new and expanded power production. This electricity
was needed because of the growing wealthy suburbs with larger and larger man-
sions that needed to be air-conditioned in the summertime. Wealthy suburban-
ites wanted electricity, but refused to have the smoke stacks, air pollution, and
electric power lines (with their “dangerous” electromagnetic waves) that would
accompany electric power plants in their exclusive communities. In fact, they op-
posed high-voltage electric lines that would bring electricity to their communities
from far away because they “obstructed the view of the woodlands,” according to
the well-heeled Woodland Coalition, an organization that sprung up to oppose
power plants in wealthy suburbs. Therefore, the only possible outcome was to lo-
cate these new power plants in the nearby low-income, majority–People of Color
urban areas. According to their logic, suburban residents have a right to as much
electricity as they can afford, but no obligation to bear the negative consequences
of it.

These are examples of institutional racism: although the policies are not racist on

their face, they have disparate effects on communities of color.

While I was at the Hartford Health Department, I observed that although most
diseases were decreasing in frequency, those that were related to environmental
exposures–like cancer and respiratory conditions–were increasing. This ap-
peared to be even more pronounced in African Americans and Latinos, contrib-
uting to increased health disparities. Yet it was the regulated community–not the
public–that voiced their opinions on the health effects of environmental expo-
sure, and it was to complain about perceived overregulation, when it was clear
to me that they were not being regulated enough to prevent environmentally in-
duced illness. I realized that at that time, the public had no idea they were suffer-
ing from environmentally related diseases.

S hortly after I left the Hartford Health Department, I was asked to con-

duct camp physicals for a group of about thirty Latino children for an ur-
ban church camp. I found that about one-third of the children had asthma,
which is much higher than the national rates of less than 10 percent. I contacted a
colleague at the state health department who was responsible for investigating en-
vironmentally related diseases. I was told that they would not investigate whether
there was an environmentally related cluster of asthma because there were only
thirty children examined, and it is not unusual for inner-city children to have
asthma. I was outraged. I decided that I was going to do something about it.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRacism as a Motivator for Climate Justice

This experience motivated me to start an environmental justice organization
in 1998. At that time, environmental justice was a new concept. People didn’t
know what environmental justice was. They did not know that communities
of color bear a disproportionate share of environmental hazards and suffer the
health consequences from exposure to those environmental hazards. So I founded
the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice and was able to educate the
public about the links between environment and health and the disproportionate
burden of exposure to environmental hazards on African Americans, Latinos, and
low-income people of every race. The low-wealth residents who I was training did
not know that it was unusual for people to have that level of exposure to environ-
mental toxins, as it was a normal part of their lives. Few of these people had con-
fidence that they could get powerful people to change their situation. But we were
very successful: we were able to change a substantial amount of environmental
health policy over the ten years or so that I was there.

We saw proof of our effectiveness in influencing policy when a city council
member came up to me and said, “Mark, you’ve got old ladies talking about things
we can’t even pronounce, so this MUST be important.” Well, I had warned the
council about the dangers of that exposure before, but when an individual scien-
tist or physician says something it is often not enough. When an organized group
representing constituents say the same thing, policy-makers more often perceive
it as important, and decide to act.

In addition, we were able to get substantial actions on asthma. We got Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency (EPA) funding to conduct a community-based ran-
domized, door-to-door survey on asthma prevalence and environmental health
symptoms. In a reversal, we had the city and state health departments and hos-
pitals named to an advisory committee to advise the community, which decided
on the questions that went in the survey. The survey eventually determined that
the city-wide asthma rates were upwards of 20 percent. Other accomplishments
were that:

• We were able to get the Hartford City Council to declare an “asthma emer-

gency,” which included the actions that we had decided.

• We were able to get funding for a City environmental health educator.
• We were able to get funding for the State Health Department to hire two

asthma specialists.

• We were able to launch a successful anti-diesel campaign, which increased
public awareness, reduced school and transit bus idling, and replaced the
whole Hartford school bus fleet with buses that were 90 percent cleaner.
• We were able to get state funding and launch a grassroots asthma education

campaign.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell

• We were able to get the trash-to-energy incinerator to reduce air pollution.
• We were able to get the state environmental agency to deny an air permit
for an electric power station in New Haven, based on environmental justice
impacts, for the first time in its history.

• We were able to pass a state environmental justice law, which is still one of

the strongest community notification laws in the country.

And, most important, we were able to build a multiracial organization led by
grassroots People of Color and low-income people who became community lead-
ers and engaged citizens. Most of our leaders said that they had never voted be-
fore joining our organization because they didn’t know how or why, and, although
this was not our intention, we started swaying elections in Hartford and New Ha-
ven. In both cities, they elected the first Green Party candidates in their history
when the Democrats and Republicans opposed our agenda. The New Haven May-
or’s Chief of Staff told me that part of his duties was to determine our agenda so
that the city could co-opt it. At one point, we were getting at least one state law
passed per year. As we trained community residents to speak about their experi-
ence and needs at public hearings and in meetings with elected officials, they ob-
served what officials were or were not doing to support these community efforts.
The issues that our group decided to focus on proved to be of concern to much of
the community. As our members talked to their relatives, friends, and neighbors,
they told them about what was occurring and how elected officials were respond-
ing or not responding. These actions and word-of-mouth discussions eventually
built up to the level that it began to make a difference in the election outcomes as
well as in achieving more policy successes, especially on the local level.

T he climate justice movement started developing in the early 2000s. It was

based on applying the environmental justice principles of fighting struc-
tural and institutional racism to climate pollution. We fought laws that
did not appear to be racist on their face, but were in fact racist in their effect. One
example is a proposed law to give tax breaks to build unwanted, greenhouse gas–
spewing power plants in economically distressed communities. These facilities
create very few jobs but have high rates of pollution with resulting respiratory dis-
ease and death and contribute to global warming.

We also experienced differential applications of the same laws, such as those
that determined which power plants were required to be upgraded to modern pol-
lution controls rather than being grandfathered in. Public hearings for a major
pollution source in Bridgeport were held the week of Christmas, which predict-
ably led to minimal public participation. Bridgeport is Connecticut’s largest city
and its population is also majority People of Color. These types of activities would
never be tolerated in wealthy, White suburban communities.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRacism as a Motivator for Climate Justice

The movement to address climate change was an easy transition for environ-
mental justice groups: we were used to trying to fight sources of air toxics that
posed existential threats that killed many of our neighbors, friends, and families.
We defined the environment as where we live and understand how our health
is affected by that environment. Our concerns about how laws are commonly
manipulated against our communities were often ignored by the larger climate
organizations and health organizations whose members did not face the same
threats. For example, the big environmental groups supported cap-and-trade
policies to reduce greenhouse gas. Our experience in Connecticut was that when
we finally won pollution reductions from our trash-to-energy facility in Hartford,
the city with the greatest percentage of People of Color in the state, the facility
operator was allowed to trade pollution credits with the trash-to-energy facility
in Bridgeport, the city with the second-largest percentage of People of Color, so
that they did not have to reduce their pollution there. To add insult to injury, they
then bragged that the EPA says that they are so clean that they can sell air pollu-
tion credits–even though they were, by far, the largest polluter in Hartford.

So when the large environmental organizations tried to promote cap-and-
trade legislation in Congress, environmental justice organizations sided with Re-
publicans to oppose it. The legislation did not pass. The approach that environ-
mental justice organizations favored, carbon tax and dividend, has since become
much more popular.

It was clear that the people who contributed least to climate change were the
most affected, both on a national level–as evidenced by who was left behind during
Hurricane Katrina–as well as on an international level, with small island nations
being ravaged by hurricanes and existentially threatened by sea level rise. Yet their
views and experiences are often not taken into account in policy development.
When they are not invited to the decision-making tables, the policy solutions tend
not to benefit those who are suffering the most and are often less likely to be suc-
cessfully implemented. The most effective policy seeks and incorporates the knowl-
edge of those who are most impacted. The “experts” don’t know that many people
will not get on an evacuation bus without their pets and without knowing where it
is going. They don’t know that children sneak through the holes in the fence and
play on the contaminated site, which their mothers, who have been kept in the dark
about its dangers, think is safer than playing in the streets. They don’t know that
even though there are two roads shown on the map that can be used for emergency
evacuation, one is a dirt road that is overgrown with weeds and blocked by barri-
cades, and the other crosses the railroad tracks that are often blocked by trains.

I have tried to make a career out of addressing the areas of most need at the in-

tersection of health and anti-racism. This took me away from the tradition-
al doctor-patient medical care, and even from traditional public health and

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell

community medicine. Since I had selected such an unconventional career path, I
thought that I would be disdained by organized medicine.

In 2008, I attended a national convention of the National Medical Association
(NMA), which represents the interests of African American physicians and their
patients. I knew their history of fighting racism, which was part of the impetus for
their founding in 1895, when African American physicians were excluded from the
American Medical Association (AMA), limiting their training and practice oppor-
tunities. I knew that this continued until the 1970s in some counties in Southern
states, where African American physicians were excluded from their county med-
ical societies, preventing them from being able to join the AMA. But I didn’t know
if those in clinical practice would be interested in and supportive of environmen-
tal health and justice.

At this NMA conference, in addition to my participation in community health
and public health activities, I somehow wound up attending a luncheon of obste-
tricians. When they asked me where I practiced obstetrics, I sheepishly admitted
that I didn’t practice obstetrics, but was an environmental health and environ-
mental justice physician. To my surprise, they got very excited. They told me that
they were seeing increasing rates of congenital malformations and other maladies
that they thought were related to environmental exposures. They said that they
did not know much about environmental health but were very interested in learn-
ing about it. They asked me what I could do to help them. I thought long and hard
about this. Would I be willing to leave the grueling but spiritually rewarding work
of raising the voices of grassroots needy people at the local and state level in order
to echo their voices in Washington, backed by the credibility of African American
physicians? Could we be as effective?

In 2010, Dr. Leonard Weather was elected as the 111th President of the National
Medical Association. He was an obstetrician and gynecologist who specialized in
infertility. Because of his concern about the contribution of environmental expo-
sures to infertility, he named environmental health as one of his three top priori-
ties and re-established a long dormant Environmental Health Task Force. Because
of my interest, he named me as co-chair of the Task Force. I was thrilled with the
interest and support that the NMA provided to environmental health policy that
affected vulnerable populations. It became clear to me that although there were
not many physicians who were knowledgeable about environmental health, there
was great interest and enthusiasm; they were seeing the effects of toxic environ-
mental exposures in their patients firsthand.

I became convinced that, as an African American physician with grassroots en-
vironmental justice experience, I had a unique opportunity and responsibility. I
could bring my environmental justice and environmental health advocacy expe-
rience learned at a local level to national policy decision-making bodies by engag-
ing NMA physicians to fight unjust and racist environmental policies. I applied for

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grants and became a consultant to environmental justice organizations nationally
as well as to the NMA. I started training a lot of physicians on environment and
health, how to counsel their patients, how to speak out in public, and how to speak
on radio and TV about environment and health. I found that many physicians had
very little knowledge or interest in environmental health at first, but once I spoke
with them, I was able to help them see the connections between the diseases they
encountered in their patients and environmental exposures.

On the policy front, we again had several successes, although they were fewer
and harder to recognize. We were effective in stopping polluting industries from
misleading some civil rights groups as well as Black and Latino politicians into
supporting policies that were damaging to health: for example, opposing the in-
dustry narratives that poor people want coal because it’s cheaper (they don’t) or
that poor people need chemical flame retardants to stop the excessive rates of fires
(they don’t). We were told by staff people on Capitol Hill that we were effective in
our meetings with members of Congress and their staff, that they talked about our
visits weeks later. The Chief of Staff of a Louisiana senator stated that in his two
years there, our Louisiana affiliate was the only professional organization that had
talked to him on behalf of poor people. We lobbied against one bad bill that had
been scheduled for a vote the following week on the basis of its detrimental effects
on health. The vote was first delayed and then canceled. We were told by staff who
supported our position that we influenced this decision.

In 2014, I was approached by Dr. Mona Sarfaty, a physician from George Ma-
son University, to gauge the NMA’s interest in climate and health. She wanted to
test the hypothesis that climate would affect health to see if it was already happen-
ing or if physicians were expecting it to do so. We teamed up and conducted the
first national physician survey on climate and health. We found that 88 percent
of NMA physicians were already seeing the health effects of climate in their pa-
tients. To our surprise, tied with exacerbation of cardiac and respiratory disease,
the leading health effect of climate was injury from severe weather events, which
of course varies a lot from place to place. On the West Coast, it manifested as lung
injury from smoke inhalation from wildfires. In the Northeast, it was an increase
in flood and snow-related injuries. In addition, almost 90 percent of NMA doc-
tors said that they wanted more education on climate and health, and a full one-
third of respondents said they wanted to be engaged in community education and
policy advocacy. About 80 percent said that it was relevant to patient care, and
that they wanted the National Medical Association to engage more in climate and
health.

I have found that professional associations, such as medical societies, are im-
portant to witnessing professionals. One emerging trend in medical practice is
that more physicians are working for hospitals or insurance companies rather
than engaging in independent private practice. This trend limits their ability to

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell

speak out publicly without risk to their jobs and livelihood. However, being in-
volved in a professional organization, such as the National Medical Association
or another medical society, allows them to speak out as a group, without jeopar-
dizing their hospital privileges. In addition, if views have gone through the vetting
process and are condoned by established professional societies, they are, by defi-
nition, mainstream views and are credible. So medical societies and other profes-
sional organizations are important vehicles for the expression and acceptance of
responses to new challenges.

It also turns out that medical societies are important for motivating action on
climate change. The George Mason University Center for Climate Change Com-
munication found through their research that physicians and nurses are some
of the most trusted voices on climate change, and that they have the ability to
change opinions and motivate climate action through educating the public and
policy-makers on the effects of climate change from a health perspective. George
Mason University put these research results into practice by starting the Medical
Society Consortium on Climate and Health in 2016. In four years, it has increased
from eight member medical societies to twenty-nine member medical societies,
representing more than 60 percent of all physicians in the United States. In addi-
tion, the Consortium has more than fifty affiliate health organizations and a doz-
en state affiliates. I am now the Director of State Affairs for the Consortium. We
train health professionals to speak out through op-eds, radio/TV, and social me-
dia about the health effects of climate change, the need to adapt to and develop
resilience against climate change and its health effects, and the health and health
equity benefits of climate mitigation through reduction of fossil fuel use. We en-
courage the adaptation of climate policies that reduce racial disparities. We iden-
tify clinicians who are willing to be out front, to be witnessing professionals.

M y experience of racism and my commitment to medicine as a child have

served to motivate me toward dedicating my life to fighting individual,
institutional, and structural racism in health, and toward the achieve-
ment of health equity. My ability to live in several cultures and institutions but not
be tethered to any one of them has provided me with the perspective to imagine a
world that is different and better; to use my professional knowledge, experience,
and privileges to identify the institutional change that is needed; and to connect
with those who can help me make that world a reality.

I have faced many challenges, made many sacrifices, and achieved many suc-
cesses as well as failures. I have made my own path to address pressing, unmet
needs that I have identified throughout my career. There are many more challeng-
es ahead. As a witnessing professional with a national viewpoint, I am heartened
by the depth and breadth of the recent awakening of people of all races and ethnic
groups in the United States and internationally to racial injustice in the aftermath

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesRacism as a Motivator for Climate Justice

of the indefensible death of George Floyd at the hands of police. This awakening is
not only to criminal justice policies and practices, but also to health policies, with
the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, to environmental poli-
cies, to climate policies, and throughout the institutions that govern our lives. As
a witnessing professional, I invite you to join me and seize this moment to deepen
our understanding of this parallel universe of injustice, and what is required to
dismantle it. We need every voice.

about the author

Mark A. Mitchell is a Senior Member of the George Mason University Center
for Climate Change Communication Program on Climate and Health. He is also
the Co-Chair of the National Medical Association’s Commission on Environmen-
tal Health and Principal of Mitchell Environmental Health Associates, a consulting
firm on environmental health and environmental justice issues. A preventive med-
icine physician trained in environmental health and health policy, he has worked
in the public health sector and with environmental justice communities to prevent
and reduce environmentally related diseases and change policies that are detrimen-
tal to environmental health.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Mark A. Mitchell
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