Environmental Justice at the National Museum of Mexican Art

From the June 26 2011 blog item at Science is Everyone’s Story

…The National Museum of Mexican Art, which I visited in May, has some powerful pieces related to environmental justice.

The final room in the museum begins with an installation about César Chávez, who organized a boycott to oppose toxic pesticides on grapes in the 1980s.

In the gift shop, I saw a reproduction of “Sun Mad.” This controversial painting shows Ester Hernandez‘s anger about the chemicals workers face in the grape industry.

Sun Mad (photo from the Smithsonian American Art Museum)

 

In the painting “Blue Collar,” Oscar Moya depicts a worker in a safety mask and gloves surrounded by an ominous red glow. It isn’t clear that the piece is related to chemical safety, but the atmosphere suggests it.

Salvador Vega’s “Mother Earth” reminded me of Salvador Dali’s depiction of the Spanish civil war – but the subject is our planet.

A reviewer from The Onion describes this exhibit as depressing. It did not have that effect on me. When I see art like this, it motivates me to think about social change. People shouldn’t be afraid to go to work because of concerns about chemical safety.

Related articles

• Air pollution: An environmental justice issue for Hispanics (texasvox.org)
• No Justice, No Peace! (powerlineblog.com)

Working With Pesticides May Affect Memory and More

From a December 2, 2010 Health Day news item by Robert Preidt

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 1 (HealthDay News) — Being exposed to pesticides over a long period of time might be linked to dementia, a new study of agricultural workers suggests.

The research effort included 614 vineyard workers in France who were in their 40s and 50s and had worked for at least 20 years in the agricultural sector. Their intellectual abilities were assessed twice, using nine tests designed to measure memory and recall, language retrieval, verbal skills and reaction time.

The workers’ exposure to pesticides during the six-year span of the study varied. About 20 percent were never exposed to pesticides and more than half had been directly exposed, which included mixing or applying pesticides and cleaning or repairing spraying equipment. The rest had either been indirectly exposed by coming into contact with treated plants or possibly indirectly exposed through their work in buildings, offices, cellars and the like.

On seven of the nine tests, workers who had been exposed to pesticides were most likely to do worse the second time they were tested, the researchers found. The study also reported that pesticide-exposed workers were up to five times more likely than the others to have lower test scores on both occasions and were twice as likely to show a drop of two points in the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), which tests cognitive functioning and is frequently used to determine if a person has dementia.

The decline in MMSE score “is particularly striking in view of the short duration of follow-up and the relatively young age of the participants,” Isabelle Baldi, of the Institute de Sante Publique d’Epidemiologie et de Developpement in Bordeaux, France, and colleagues wrote in the report published in the Dec. 2 online edition of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

“The mild [cognitive] impairment we observed raises the question of the potentially higher risks of injury in this population and also of possible evolution towards neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease or other dementias,” the study authors added.

Related Articles

• Types of Pesticides (everydayhealth.com)
• Dangerous Exposure: Farmworker Children And Pesticides (Medical News Today)