Several members of the BES LTER made presentations at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Maryland Water Monitoring Council on November 18, 2010, in North Linthicum, MD. The meeting’s theme was Environmental Justice: Healthy Waters, Healthy Communities.
Participants included seasoned professionals, policy makers, government agency personnel, consultants, academics, students, and citizens.
Steward Pickett, BES lead Principal Investigator (PI), gave one of two plenary talks, introducing the research, education, and engagement activities of BES to the more than 300 people at the meeting. BES’s new theme, "From Sanitary City to Sustainable City," was particularly relevant to the meeting’s theme, and Pickett’s talk highlighted the conceptual and empirical advances that BES is making in research on environmental inequity and social-biophysical sources of environmental hazards.
Pickett’s presentation complemented that of the other plenary speaker, Ms Vernice Miller-Travis, Vice Chair of the Maryland State Commission on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities. Ms. Miller-Travis was one of the contributors to the United Church of Christ’s 1986 report that helped establish the environmental justice movement and scholarship.
BES co-PIs, Ken Belt, Morgan Grove, and Sujay Kaushal, also presented their research relating to the themes of water, watersheds, and environmental justice.