Rachel Morello‐frosch
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 266014 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Rachel Morello‐frosch |
| PRENOMES | Rachel |
| SOBRENOME | Morello‐frosch |
| ASSINATURA | FROSCH R M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of California, Berkeley |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1153-7287 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 53 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 644 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1999 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Non-inclusive language in human subjects questionnaires
Adverse health outcomes disproportionately affect marginalized populations. Utilizing culturally and socially conscious research materials that are inclusive of various identities and experiences is necessary to help remediate these disparities. Our review finds compelling evidence of bias in many widely used data collection instruments. Recommendations for conducting more inclusive science are discussed
Wildfire-specific fine particulate matter and preterm birth
Comparative Measurements
Wildfires increasingly threaten oil and gas wells in the western United States with disproportionate impacts on marginalized populations
The western United States is home to most of the nation's oil and gas production and, increasingly, wildfires. We examined historical threats of wildfires for oil and gas wells, the extent to which wildfires are projected to threaten wells as climate change progresses, and exposure of human populations to these wells. From 1984-2019, we found that cumulatively 102,882 wells were located in wildfire burn areas, and 348,853 people were exposed (res…
How a Community-Academic-Government Partnership for Drinking Water Justice Strengthens the Rigor, Relevance, Reach, and Reflexivity of Science
This practice brief presents lessons learned through the Water Equity Science Shop (WESS), a community-academic-government partnership seeking to address drinking water challenges in California through community-engaged research and knowledge dissemination. Formed in 2017, WESS is comprised of Community Water Center, a community-based organization (CBO) working towards realizing California’s Human Right to Water; researchers at the University of …
Access for sale? Overlying rights, land transactions, and groundwater in California
Climate change intensifies longstanding tensions over groundwater sustainability and equity of access among users. Though private land ownership is a primary mechanism for accessing groundwater in many regions, few studies have systematically examined the extent to which farmland markets transform groundwater access patterns over time. This study begins to fill this gap by examining farmland transactions overlying groundwater from 2003-17 in Cali…
Do small effects matter more in vulnerable populations? an investigation using Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (Echo) cohorts
Vulnerable sub-populations with greater baseline percentages at high risk fare worse when exposed to a small insult compared to the general population. This illustrates another facet of health disparity in vulnerable individuals
The Influence of Gentrification on Adverse Birth Outcomes in California
Evidence has documented the effects of place on perinatal outcomes, but less is known about the sociopolitical mechanisms, such as gentrification, that shape neighborhood context and produce spatialized inequities in adverse birth outcomes. Leveraging a diverse sample in California, we assessed the associations between gentrification and birth outcomes: preterm birth, small-for-gestational-age, and low birth weight. Gentrification was measured us…
Developing a National-Scale Exposure Index for Combined Environmental Hazards and Social Stressors and Applications to the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (Echo) Cohort
Tools for assessing multiple exposures across several domains (e.g., physical, chemical, and social) are of growing importance in social and environmental epidemiology because of their value in uncovering disparities and their impact on health outcomes. Here we describe work done within the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO)-wide Cohort Study to build a combined exposure index. Our index considered both environmental hazards…
Neighborhood gentrification, displacement, and severe maternal morbidity in California
Gentrification, a racialized and profit-driven process in which historically disinvested neighborhoods experience an influx of development that contributes to the improvement of physical amenities, increasing housing costs, and the dispossession and displacement of existing communities, may influence the risk of severe maternal morbidity (SMM). Leveraging a racially diverse population-based sample of all live hospital births in California between…
Historical Redlining Is Associated with Present-Day Air Pollution Disparities in U.S. Cities
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Communities of color in the United States are systematically exposed to higher levels of air pollution. We explore here how redlining, a discriminatory mortgage appraisal practice from the 1930s by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), relates to present-day intraurban air pollution disparities in 202 U.S. cities. In each city, we integrated three sources of data: (1) detailed HOLC se…
Multiple Dimensions of Environmental Justice and Oil and Gas Development in Pennsylvania
We observed distributive environmental injustice with respect to well waste disposal and benefit-sharing environmental injustice related to oil and rights owner's residential locations across Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale. These results add evidence of a disparity between exposure and benefits resulting from OGD
Applying the hierarchy of controls to oil and gas development
The Drinking Water Tool
The Drinking Water Tool (DWT) is a community-driven online tool that provides diverse users with information about drinking water sources and threats to drinking water quality and access due to drought. Development of the DWT was guided by the Community Water Center (CWC) as part of the Water Equity Science Shop (WESS), a research partnership integrating elements of community-based participatory research and the European Science Shop model. The W…
Associations between combined exposure to environmental hazards and social stressors at the neighborhood level and individual perinatal outcomes in the Echo-wide cohort
Inequities in Drinking Water Quality Among Domestic Well Communities and Community Water Systems, California, 2011‒2019
Objectives. To evaluate universal access to clean drinking water by characterizing relationships between community sociodemographics and water contaminants in California domestic well areas (DWAs) and community water systems (CWSs). Methods. We integrated domestic well locations, CWS service boundaries, residential parcels, building footprints, and 2013–2017 American Community Survey data to estimate sociodemographic characteristics for DWAs and …
Redlines and Greenspace
Introduction: Redlining, a racist mortgage appraisal practice of the 1930s, established and exacerbated racial residential segregation boundaries in the United States. Investment risk grades assigned >80y ago through security maps from the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) are associated with current sociodemographics and adverse health outcomes. We assessed whether historical HOLC investment grades are associated with 2010 greenspace, a healt…
Associations between historical residential redlining and current age-adjusted rates of emergency department visits due to asthma across eight cities in California
Background Asthma disproportionately affects communities of colour in the USA, but the underlying factors for this remain poorly understood. In this study, we assess the role of historical redlining as outlined in security maps created by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), the discriminatory practice of categorising neighbourhoods on the basis of perceived mortgage investment risk, on the burden of asthma in these neighbourhoods. Methods W…
Sea level rise and coastal flooding threaten affordable housing
The frequency of coastal floods around the United States has risen sharply over the last few decades, and rising seas point to further future acceleration. Residents of low-lying affordable housing, who tend to be low-income persons living in old and poor quality structures, are especially vulnerable. To elucidate the equity implications of sea level rise (SLR), we provide the first nationwide assessment of recent and future risks to affordable h…
A Pilot Biomonitoring Study of Cumulative Phthalates Exposure among Vietnamese American Nail Salon Workers
Many California nail salon workers are low-income Vietnamese women of reproductive age who use nail products daily that contain androgen-disrupting phthalates, which may increase risk of male reproductive tract abnormalities during pregnancy. Yet, few studies have characterized phthalate exposures among this workforce. To characterize individual metabolites and cumulative phthalates exposure among a potentially vulnerable occupational group of na…
Petro-riskscapes and environmental distress in West Texas
Towards a People’s Social Epidemiology
Social epidemiology has made critical contributions to understanding population health. However, translation of social epidemiology science into action remains a challenge, raising concerns about the impacts of the field beyond academia. With so much focus on issues related to social position, discrimination, racism, power, and privilege, there has been surprisingly little deliberation about the extent and value of social inclusion and equity wit…
The body language of place
Research on place and health has grown rapidly in recent years, including examining the physiological embodiment of place-based exposures. While this research continues to improve understanding of why place matters, there is particular need for work capable of revealing: 1) which places matter, i.e. spatially-specific notions of "place"); 2) how these places matter-processes and mechanisms of the physiological embodiment of place; and 3) potentia…
Research altruism as motivation for participation in community-centered environmental health research
Race, Ethnicity, Income Concentration and 10-Year Change in Urban Greenness in the United States
Background: Cross-sectional studies suggest urban greenness is unequally distributed by neighborhood demographics. However, the extent to which inequalities in greenness have changed over time remains unknown. Methods: We estimated 2001 and 2011 greenness using Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite-derived normalized difference vegetative index (NDVI) in 59,483 urban census tracts in the contiguous U.S. We fit spatial er…
Embodied health movements
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experie…
Environmental Justice and Southern California’s “Riskscape
Past research on “environmental justice” has often failed to systematically link hazard proximity with quantifiable health risks. The authors employ recent advances in air emissions inventories and modeling techniques to consider a broad range of outdoor air toxics in Southern California and to calculate the potential lifetime cancer risks associated with these pollutants. They find that such risks are attributable mostly to transportation and sm…
The Three Rs
In the last few decades, community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as an important approach that links environmental health and justice advocates with research institutions to understand and address environmental health problems. CBPR has generally been evaluated for its impact on policy, regulation, and its support of community science. However, there has been less emphasis on assessing the ways in which CBPR (re)shapes and poten…
The Air Is Always Cleaner on the Other Side
Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then cons…
Who's Minding the Kids? Pollucion, Public Schools, and Environmental Justice in Los Angeles
Objective . Although previous environmental justice research has focused on analysis of the disproportionate burden of environmental hazards on minority residents, few studies have examined demographic inequities in health risks among children. This article evaluates the demographic distribution of potentially hazardous facilities and health risks associated with ambient air toxics exposures among public schoolchildren in the Los Angeles Unified …
Pollution Comes Home and Gets Personal
We report on interviews conducted with participants in a novel study about environmental chemicals in body fluids and household air and dust. Interviews reveal how personal and collective environmental history influence the interpretation of exposure data, and how participants fashion an emergent understanding of environmental health problems from the articulation of science and experience. To the illness experience literature, we contribute a fr…
Breathless
The exposure of children to environmental disamenities has emerged as a key policy concern in recent years, with some analysts and activists suggesting that minority children are disproportionately impacted. Utilizing a dataset that combines air toxics at the census tract level with school‐based demographic and other information, this article indicates disparate exposures for students of color in California schools and suggests that there may be …
A Lab of Our Own
There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional model to situate changes in scientific controversy concerning environmental causes of breast cancer. We identify three paradigm challenges posed by activists and some scient…
Integrating Environmental Justice and the Precautionary Principle in Research and Policy Making
Two policy frameworks, environmental justice and the precautionary principle, have begun to transform traditional approaches to environmental policy making and community organizing related to public health. Despite having several important overlapping policy goals, little effort has been made to purposefully integrate these two frameworks. This article discusses preliminary research on environmental inequality in ambient air toxics exposures and …
Waiting to Inhale
Objectives. We examine the spatial distribution of toxic air releases and residential demographics in California using 2000 Census data and coeval information from the Federal Toxic Release Inventory for evidence of disproportionate exposure. Methods. We use spatial analysis using GIS, and multivariate regression analysis, including ordered and multinomial logit regressions, in our study. Results. Analytical results suggest a pattern of dispropor…
Labor-Environmental Coalition Formation
This article examines the formation of a cross-movement coalition between elements of the labor and environmental movements in New Jersey. We explain the successful formation and initial political campaign of the New Jersey Work Environment Council with an expansion of the theoretical perspective of frame analysis. We propose a model of a coalition collective action frame that offers several important insights into the active role coalition actor…
Research altruism as motivation for participation in community-centered environmental health research
Reflexive Research Ethics for Environmental Health and Justice
Community-engaged research on environmental problems has reshaped researcher-participant relationships, academic-community interaction, and the role of community partners in human subjects protection and ethical oversight. We draw on our own and others' research collaborations with environmental health and justice social movement organizations to discuss the ethical concerns that emerge in community-engaged research. In this paper we introduce th…
Disentangling the Exposure Experience
This article examines participants' responses to receiving their results in a study of household exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds and other pollutants. The authors study how the 'exposure experience'-the embodied, personal experience and understanding of chronic exposure to environmental pollutants-is shaped by community context and the report-back process itself. In addition, the authors investigate an activist, collective form of expo…
The body language of place
Research on place and health has grown rapidly in recent years, including examining the physiological embodiment of place-based exposures. While this research continues to improve understanding of why place matters, there is particular need for work capable of revealing: 1) which places matter, i.e. spatially-specific notions of "place"); 2) how these places matter-processes and mechanisms of the physiological embodiment of place; and 3) potentia…
Linking Exposure Assessment Science With Policy Objectives for Environmental Justice and Breast Cancer Advocacy
Objectives. We compared an urban fence-line community (neighboring an oil refinery) and a nonindustrial community in an exposure study focusing on pollutants of interest with respect to breast cancer and environmental justice. Methods. We analyzed indoor and outdoor air from 40 homes in industrial Richmond, California, and 10 in rural Bolinas, California, for 153 compounds, including particulates and endocrine disruptors. Results. Eighty compound…
Improving Disclosure and Consent
The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform ac…
Petro-riskscapes and environmental distress in West Texas
Inequities in Drinking Water Quality Among Domestic Well Communities and Community Water Systems, California, 2011‒2019
Objectives. To evaluate universal access to clean drinking water by characterizing relationships between community sociodemographics and water contaminants in California domestic well areas (DWAs) and community water systems (CWSs). Methods. We integrated domestic well locations, CWS service boundaries, residential parcels, building footprints, and 2013–2017 American Community Survey data to estimate sociodemographic characteristics for DWAs and …
Scientific contestations over “toxic trespass”
Assessment of estimated 1990 air toxics concentrations in urban areas in the United States
Environmental Justice and Southern California’s “Riskscape
Past research on “environmental justice” has often failed to systematically link hazard proximity with quantifiable health risks. The authors employ recent advances in air emissions inventories and modeling techniques to consider a broad range of outdoor air toxics in Southern California and to calculate the potential lifetime cancer risks associated with these pollutants. They find that such risks are attributable mostly to transportation and sm…
Environmental justice and regional inequality in southern California
Environmental justice offers researchers new insights into the juncture of social inequality and public health and provides a framework for policy discussions on the impact of discrimination on the environmental health of diverse communities in the United States. Yet, causally linking the presence of potentially hazardous facilities or environmental pollution with adverse health effects is difficult, particularly in situations in which diverse po…
Who's Minding the Kids? Pollucion, Public Schools, and Environmental Justice in Los Angeles
Objective . Although previous environmental justice research has focused on analysis of the disproportionate burden of environmental hazards on minority residents, few studies have examined demographic inequities in health risks among children. This article evaluates the demographic distribution of potentially hazardous facilities and health risks associated with ambient air toxics exposures among public schoolchildren in the Los Angeles Unified …
Integrating Environmental Justice and the Precautionary Principle in Research and Policy Making
Two policy frameworks, environmental justice and the precautionary principle, have begun to transform traditional approaches to environmental policy making and community organizing related to public health. Despite having several important overlapping policy goals, little effort has been made to purposefully integrate these two frameworks. This article discusses preliminary research on environmental inequality in ambient air toxics exposures and …
Waiting to Inhale
Objectives. We examine the spatial distribution of toxic air releases and residential demographics in California using 2000 Census data and coeval information from the Federal Toxic Release Inventory for evidence of disproportionate exposure. Methods. We use spatial analysis using GIS, and multivariate regression analysis, including ordered and multinomial logit regressions, in our study. Results. Analytical results suggest a pattern of dispropor…
Embodied health movements
Social movements organised around health-related issues have been studied for almost as long as they have existed, yet social movement theory has not yet been applied to these movements. Health social movements (HSMs) are centrally organised around health, and address: (a) access to or provision of health care services; (b) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality; and/or (c) disease, illness experie…
The Air Is Always Cleaner on the Other Side
Environmental justice advocates have recently focused attention on cumulative exposure in minority neighborhoods due to multiple sources of pollution. This article uses U.S. EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment (NATA) for 1996 to examine environmental inequality in California, a state that has been a recent innovator in environmental justice policy. We first estimate potential lifetime cancer risks from mobile and stationary sources. We then cons…
The Environmental “Riskscape” and Social Inequality
BACKGROUND: Research indicates that the double jeopardy of exposure to environmental hazards combined with place-based stressors is associated with maternal and child health (MCH) disparities. OBJECTIVE AND DISCUSSION: Our aim is to present evidence that individual-level and place-based psychosocial stressors may compromise host resistance such that environmental pollutants would have adverse health effects at relatively lower doses, thus partial…
Breathless
The exposure of children to environmental disamenities has emerged as a key policy concern in recent years, with some analysts and activists suggesting that minority children are disproportionately impacted. Utilizing a dataset that combines air toxics at the census tract level with school‐based demographic and other information, this article indicates disparate exposures for students of color in California schools and suggests that there may be …
A Lab of Our Own
There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional model to situate changes in scientific controversy concerning environmental causes of breast cancer. We identify three paradigm challenges posed by activists and some scient…
School Custodians and Green Cleaners
Coalitions between labor unions and environmental organizations often dissolve in class tensions that appear to force unions to choose between job security and occupational or environmental health. This article examines a successful blue—green coalition that worked to substitute cleaning products used in Boston public schools with safer alternatives. The coalition succeeded in part through the role of bridge builders, who unified a diverse group …
Improving Disclosure and Consent
The recent flood of research concerning pollutants in personal environmental and biological samples—blood, urine, breastmilk, household dust and air, umbilical cord blood, and other media—raises questions about whether and how to report results to individual study participants. Clinical medicine provides an expert-driven framework, whereas community-based participatory research emphasizes participants’ right to know and the potential to inform ac…
Pollution Comes Home and Gets Personal
We report on interviews conducted with participants in a novel study about environmental chemicals in body fluids and household air and dust. Interviews reveal how personal and collective environmental history influence the interpretation of exposure data, and how participants fashion an emergent understanding of environmental health problems from the articulation of science and experience. To the illness experience literature, we contribute a fr…
Minding the Climate Gap
Analyses on the equity issues associated with climate change and the mitigation strategies that aim to attenuate it tend to focus on the international scale. These analyses tend to cite developing countries as the most vulnerable and disproportionately affected, and thus, the most likely to benefit from sound policies. However, fewer studies focus on the intra-national context within industrialized countries and the potential disparate impacts an…
Linking Exposure Assessment Science With Policy Objectives for Environmental Justice and Breast Cancer Advocacy
Objectives. We compared an urban fence-line community (neighboring an oil refinery) and a nonindustrial community in an exposure study focusing on pollutants of interest with respect to breast cancer and environmental justice. Methods. We analyzed indoor and outdoor air from 40 homes in industrial Richmond, California, and 10 in rural Bolinas, California, for 153 compounds, including particulates and endocrine disruptors. Results. Eighty compound…
Labor-Environmental Coalition Formation
This article examines the formation of a cross-movement coalition between elements of the labor and environmental movements in New Jersey. We explain the successful formation and initial political campaign of the New Jersey Work Environment Council with an expansion of the theoretical perspective of frame analysis. We propose a model of a coalition collective action frame that offers several important insights into the active role coalition actor…
Understanding The Cumulative Impacts Of Inequalities In Environmental Health
Racial or ethnic minority groups and low-income communities have poorer health outcomes than others. They are more frequently exposed to multiple environmental hazards and social stressors, including poverty, poor housing quality, and social inequality. Researchers are grappling with how best to characterize the cumulative effects of these hazards and stressors in order to help regulators and decision makers craft more-effective policies to addre…
Community Voice, Vision, and Resilience in Post-Hurricane Katrina Recovery
Hurricane Katrina has mobilized community-based environmental justice organizing and advocacy and injected a strong social justice analysis of extreme weather events and disaster recovery. Using interviews and observations with New Orleans activists and organizations, we examine three community and advocacy-based rebuilding and organizing projects that arose as a result of diminished local and federal government infrastructure and regulatory enga…
Playing It Safe
Regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and state authorities like the California Air Resources Board (CARB), have sought to address the concerns of environmental justice (EJ) advocates who argue that chemical-by-chemical and source-specific assessments of potential health risks of environmental hazards do not reflect the multiple environmental and social stressors faced by vulnerable communities. We propo…
Disentangling the Exposure Experience
This article examines participants' responses to receiving their results in a study of household exposure to endocrine disrupting compounds and other pollutants. The authors study how the 'exposure experience'-the embodied, personal experience and understanding of chronic exposure to environmental pollutants-is shaped by community context and the report-back process itself. In addition, the authors investigate an activist, collective form of expo…
Reflexive Research Ethics for Environmental Health and Justice
Community-engaged research on environmental problems has reshaped researcher-participant relationships, academic-community interaction, and the role of community partners in human subjects protection and ethical oversight. We draw on our own and others' research collaborations with environmental health and justice social movement organizations to discuss the ethical concerns that emerge in community-engaged research. In this paper we introduce th…
The Racial/Ethnic Distribution of Heat Risk–Related Land Cover in Relation to Residential Segregation
OBJECTIVE: We examined the distribution of heat risk-related land cover (HRRLC) characteristics across racial/ethnic groups and degrees of residential segregation. METHODS: Block group-level tree canopy and impervious surface estimates were derived from the 2001 National Land Cover Dataset for densely populated urban areas of the United States and Puerto Rico, and linked to demographic characteristics from the 2000 Census. Racial/ethnic groups in…
The Three Rs
In the last few decades, community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as an important approach that links environmental health and justice advocates with research institutions to understand and address environmental health problems. CBPR has generally been evaluated for its impact on policy, regulation, and its support of community science. However, there has been less emphasis on assessing the ways in which CBPR (re)shapes and poten…
The Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Health of Everyone
A growing body of literature suggests that more unequal societies have more polluted and degraded environments, perhaps helping explain why more unequal societies are often less healthy. We summarize the mechanisms by which inequality can lead to environmental degradation and their relevance for public health. We review the evidence of a relationship between environmental quality and social inequality along the axes of income, wealth, political p…
Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (31 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Environmental health (27 obras) · Medicine (27 obras) · Geography (26 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Environmental justice (16 obras) · Air Quality and Health Impacts (15 obras) · Population (13 obras) · Economics (12 obras)