ABOUT THE PROJECT

This article is an Honors in the Discipline project for the College of Arts Media and Design at Northeastern University. The goal of this project was to examine the 2017 Massachusetts Environmental Justice Policy through the lens this textbook environmental justice case in Brockton, Mass., a low-income community of color whose residents have been fighting to stop Brockton Power Co. from building a power plant in their town for more than a decade. Hopefully this article and the accompanying data visualizations, timeline and images can shed some light on the how state agencies use the EJ policy, how effectiveness it is in protecting the most disproportionately burdened communities and what the people of Brockton have at stake in this case.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rowena Lindsay is a senior journalism major at Northeastern University. She is an aspiring science and human rights reporter and is particularly interested in writing about environmental justice issues. She previously wrote an in depth article about Northeastern students’ struggle to convince the school to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. Her writing has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, WGBH, Waltham News Tribune, Cambridge Chronicle, The Huntington News and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.