Appendix 2 – Guide to Doing Local Toxic Heritage Research

Identify local and regional environmental advocacy organizations.

What NGOs and nonprofits are operating in your community? What sites are they monitoring and what policies or issues are they advocating for? Do they offer educational programming or ways for people to get involved?

National and international environmental advocacy organizations may also provide useful information. For example, in the USA see Environmental Defense Fund, National Resources Defense Council, Earthjustice, Society of Environmental Journalists, In Europe, see EEB (European Environmental Bureau), and the Climate Action Network Europe (CAN),

Identify local media and journalism sources.

What newspapers, blogs, social media sites follow environmental issues in your community? These sources may help identify issues and sites that present risks. They may also be sources for understanding community concerns and experiences.

Identify governmental regulatory agencies (local, regional, national, international).

Governmental entities may have monitoring and mapping resources. For example, in Europe, explore the European Environment Agency (EEA), an EU agency. In the USA, each state has an environmental agency with local information about sites such as brownfields and underground storage tanks. The national Environmental Protection Agency has tools such as:

• • EJScreen: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool
  • My Environment to learn about local air and water quality, superfund sites, etc.
  • EnviroAtlas – Brownfields Featured Collection

Identify archives, libraries, museums, and heritage organizations that have relevant collections or that interpret environmental issues.

Heritage organizations may be a source of both primary sources (photographs, art, documents, oral histories, etc.) and insight into how environmental issues intersect with memory practices in your community. Be sure to pay attention to programs, exhibits, publications, blogs, and any other media capturing heritage interpretation. Multinational resources such as the European Route of Industrial Heritage may have information related to your locale.

Primary documentation may not be explicitly tagged for environmental issues, so it may be helpful to search for relevant industries and sites, as well as broader topics like water management and air quality. Similarly, public records about zoning, land use policies, urban development, and transportation may lead you to relevant information for understanding the history of toxic heritage in your community. For example, in the USA discriminatory lending practices such as redlining has been a significant part of environmental racism and the Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America may be relevant.

Locate relevant scholarship.

What research has been done about environmental issues in your community? Search peer reviewed literature in journals and scholarly books. Are there any online projects and dataset sources or media such as documentaries or public history projects such as the Climates of Inequality relevant to your locale?