Opinion: Chevron has decimated the environment, and is now decimating the judiciary

Opinion: Chevron has decimated the environment, and is now decimating the judiciary

“Contempt of court” took on a whole new meaning for a human rights lawyer who led a three-decade-long fight against the gas giant Chevron. Former attorney Steven Donziger shed light on the company’s control of the American courts, but ended up being disbarred, being subjected to more than 800 days of pretrial house arrest and serving a sentence of six months of federal prison time, which began on Oct. 27.

Donziger was the lead attorney representing 30,000 plaintiffs in a legal battle against Chevron (then called Texaco) for dumping excessive amounts of oil onto Indigenous land and water in Ecuador from the 1970s to the 1990s. According to the Yale MacMillan Center, the spill led to an epidemic of cancer and other related health problems to the extent that it was dubbed the “Amazon Chernobyl.”

COVID-19 booster shots become widely available in the United States

COVID-19 booster shots become widely available in the United States

In mid-October, both the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration released statements on their websites that endorsed a booster shot for COVID-19 in certain populations. The CDC stated that people who are 65 years and older, as well as those who are over 18 years old and live in a long-term care setting, work or live in high-risk settings and/or have underlying medical conditions, are eligible to get the shot. Some states, such as Colorado, Kentucky and Michigan, are allowing anyone 18 or older to receive the booster shot.

Climate Activist Spotlight: Nadia Nazar

Climate Activist Spotlight: Nadia Nazar

Nadia Nazar is a 19-year-old artist and climate justice organizer from Baltimore County, Maryland. She is the co-founder of climate justice and activist organization Zero Hour. According to The Baltimore Sun, Nazar was in a middle school environmental science class when she learned about climate change. Part of what inspired her to pursue climate activism was her mother’s work as a marine biologist, according to an interview with the YouTube channel, In the Know Through her mother’s work, she was able to learn about how climate change was impacting animals and the greater world.

Climate Activist Spotlight: Xiye Bastida

Xiye Bastida is a 19-year-old Otomi-Toltec climate justice activist. She is currently a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. In an article in Penn Today, Bastida described the flood that forced her family to immigrate from San Pedro Tultepec, Mexico, to the United States in 2015.

College introduces new sustainability plans which include divestment from fossil fuels

In a letter shared with the community on Oct. 18, Mount Holyoke President Sonya Stephens outlined several new “climate action commitments,” including the decisions to divest from fossil fuels and take steps toward carbon neutrality. The letter was sent via email soon after the Board of Trustees’ October meeting. In addition to announcing new commitments and initiatives, Stephens enumerated past actions taken by the College towards achieving the recommendations of the Sustainability Task Force, which convened in 2017. The Task Force’s recommendations were approved by the Board of Trustees in 2018. They included achieving carbon neutrality by 2037, improving the energy efficiency of campus buildings and utilizing the campus as a “living laboratory for cross-disciplinary teaching, research and learning.”

Mount Holyoke hosts global conference on sustainability in higher education

Organized by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, the Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education is an annual conference that engages students, administrators, business partners and political leaders in critical discussions on the role of higher education and institutions in overcoming the challenges posed by climate change.

New York City Board of Health declares racism a public health crisis

New York City Board of Health declares racism a public health crisis

The New York City Board of Health and Mental Hygiene passed a resolution as of Monday last week declaring racism a public health crisis. The step was taken six months after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared racism a serious health threat, a fact which became more apparent over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The resolution, passed on Oct. 18, went into effect immediately.

Add to the history of ghost hunting by trying the latest technology 

The beauty in ghost-hunting is its simplicity — and the wide availability of the technology it relies on. Take the case of the temperature gun: on a dark, cold night in the spring of 2019, I paraded around campus with a group of students from my Campus Sustainability course. Our mission was to identify buildings on campus that leaked heat due to insufficient insulation. In the tiny window of the temperature gun, we observed spine-chilling temperature changes around window frames and in the mortar between bricks where heat was escaping. The lack of energy efficiency in the College’s ancient buildings was not paranormal, but it certainly gave us a fright. With some extra time and the power of scientific discovery in our hands, we visited the famed “ghost room” on the fourth floor of Wilder Hall.

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