And Justice for All?

The New York Times talks to Dr. John Mutter, an Australian geophysicist who serves as deputy director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and who believes that "some of the answers to global poverty might be found in the places where the social and hard sciences inform each other." Asked if that isn't a bit of a reach, Mutter responds:

Not when you're looking at natural disasters, climate and its local manifestation, weather. Disasters exaggerate social ills. They shine a light on them. As a seismologist, when you try to understand how strong a material is, you stress it. You can't calculate its strength from its atomic structure. You've got to try to bend it to know where it's strong and weak. I think nature does that with society.

Meanwhile, Grist interviews sociologist and environmental justice authority, Dr. Robert Bullard about many of the same social ills Mutter alludes to.

We also spoke with Bullard, author of the new Sierra Club Book The Quest for Environmental Justice, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which did indeed shine a glaring light on race and poverty issues in America. At the time, Bullard worried about whether New Orleans would be rebuilt as "something we recognize as New Orleans" or whether the result of rebuilding would be "gentrification of not just a neighborhood but an entire city." Half a year later, it's a question that remains unanswered.