Not Built For Us Angela Y. Zhang

Summer is the best season in Rhode Island. It makes us forget all the slushy, slippery days of the dark winter. People are outside all the time at the beach, running on trails, at outdoor events, and cooling off under the shade of big, lush trees. But what happens when you don’t have shade to cool off in? Some neighborhoods have less shade than others - and it’s no coincidence that these are usually neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Black folx. It’s also no coincidence that urban heat maps overlay with redlining maps almost perfectly.

How can we start thinking of shade as a resource just like food, housing, and transportation? And how does the current pandemic and the looming climate crisis widen these disparities?

Interviewed Experts:

Max Jordan Nguemeni Tiako - MS4 at the Yale School of Medicine
I mean, among many things I think environmental health should be part of what we learn about. If it's not in med school, it ought to be in residency training. Just to think about the context in which people live in, right? People don't live in a vacuum, you know. Someone shows up in your clinic; there is a context in which they are coming from and it's important to think about things like temperature, safety, shade, all those kind of like built environment factors that truly have an impact on sometimes whether someone is going to recover more quickly versus not. And then, you know, in this age, climate change is really, you know, wreaking havoc just about everywhere.
Eugenia C. South - Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Presbyterian Medical Center of Philadelphia
Jennifer Vanos - Senior Sustainability Scientist, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability & Assistant Professor, School of Sustainability at Arizona State University
Greg Wellenius - Professor of Environmental Health at Boston University School of Public Health
Chelsea Graham - Dr. Graham is a recent graduate of the Brown Family Medicine Residency. She completed a Global Health Fellowship in 2019 and practices family medicine with a focus on gender and sexual health at Thundermist Health Center. She is also a clinical instructor for family medicine residents at Brown and Kent/Thundermist. In addition, she has done teaching surrounding family planning in Mexico where she collaborates with Compañeros En Salud/Partners In Health. She is a bilingual provider and volunteers at Clinica Esperanza. She is also involved in anti-racism work with Alpert Medical School and completed their BASCE fellowship in 2019: Brown Advocates For Social Change and Equity.
Jeremy Hoffman - Chief Scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia and an Affiliate Faculty in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs and the Center for Environmental Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Kufa Castro - Program Coordinator for Groundwork RI, focusing on incorporating creative practices to spread environmental awareness, specifically about climate change resiliency in urban communities. Kufa is also a Project Assistant at Rhode Island Latino Arts working on a cultural history tour of the South Side and West End of Providence. Originally from the Dominican Republic and raised in Pawtucket, Kufa is an artist, actor, and media producer currently working on a new adaptation of “Comedy of Errors/Comedia de Equivocaciones” for Trinity Rep’s touring production for the summer of 2019. The play will tour public libraries and parks across Providence County. Kufa also worked as an Agricultural Apprentice with the Southside Community Land Trust from April to September 2018.
Frank from Shea High School
Everett Pope - community activist, organizer with Sunrise RI
Jay Hazen - South Providence resident
Sam Bloch - Writer at The New Food Economy. Also written for the New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, CityLab, Art in America, Artnet, Commercial Observer, blogged for Artsy, Art Los Angele

Medicine is all about lighting-speed pattern recognition. Parsing out what's important in a patient encounter, piecing together the puzzle of symptoms, labs, and imaging - these techniques medical school equips us with can often save lives. What happens when we teach medical professionals to make the same snap judgments about race?