the NUANCE // a community health podcast. · Medicine Explained.

100: Eco-Anxiety, Environmental Justice, & the Climate Change Movement. 🌎 | Wawa Gatheru

·39 min·2 clips

Black Girl Environmentalist began as a viral Vice op-ed and a call on Instagram with almost 100 people.

1. the NUANCE // a community health podcast episode 100 centers on Eco-Anxiety, Environmental Justice, & the Climate Change Movement with Wawa Gatheru. 2. Amanda and Dan host Wawa Gatheru, who founded Black Girl Environmentalist and brings lived experience from Kenya, Oxford, and the U.S. climate movement. 3. The episode asks how climate change connects to health, justice, and who gets to shape environmental solutions. 4. Wawa says everyone is an environmentalist because clean air, clean water, and a healthy community matter. 5. She connects that view to her family’s farming history, her mother and grandmother’s backyard garden, and oral history from both sides of her Kenyan family. 6. An environmental science class she took at 15 changed her path and led her to study abroad in Thailand on a State Department program. 7. Mrs. Rose introduced her class to the history of the environmental justice movement and broadened her understanding beyond melting ice caps. 8. Wawa defines environmental justice as a legal framework and a movement, including equal protection under environmental law and equal participation in decision making. 9. She says the movement emerged because the post-Rachel Carson mainstream environmental agenda missed distributive justice, racial justice, and leadership. 10. Warren County, North Carolina, becomes her historical example, where PCB toxins were dumped in a predominantly Black community despite NAACP-backed resistance. 11. Wawa says extreme heat now intensifies the Black maternal health crisis and other existing health injustices. 12. She links hotter Black neighborhoods to 1940s redlining and says some Black communities in cities like Philly and New York City are 5 to 13 degrees hotter. 13. Amanda adds a Los Angeles example involving unhoused and lower-income patients with little shade and limited air conditioning. 14. Wawa says Black Girl Environmentalist began after a 2020 Vice op-ed drew responses from Black women across generations. 15. She describes an Instagram call that led to a Zoom meeting with almost 100 people from around the world who cried, laughed, and bonded for hours. 16. She says the group later relaunched in 2023 as a nonprofit with the Hazel M. Johnson Fellowship Program, 12 city hubs, and a college mentorship program. 17. The conversation is warm, reflective, and highly specific, with Amanda asking direct follow-ups and Wawa giving detailed examples. 18. Wawa shifts easily between personal story, policy history, and program design, while the hosts keep the pace conversational. 19. People interested in climate justice, Black women’s leadership, and health equity. 20. People wanting a purely technical climate or policy discussion.

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