Derrick Z. Jackson
Derrick Z. Jackson is a 2018 winner from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, a 10-time winner from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Pulitzer Prize finalist and co-author of Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock (2015). He can be reached at dzjphoto@gmail.com
Articles by this author
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Views Sunday, May 10, 2020 The Push to Relax COVID-19 Protections Exposes Age-Old Racial Wounds With unemployment approaching Great Depression levels, the nation is waving the white flag on controlling the coronavirus. It appears not to shock the senses at the White House or at many governors’ mansions around the country that the 76,000 deaths from COVID-19 in three months could fill the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, April 28, 2020 The EPA’s Dirty Water: New Rule Discards Science, Ignores Importance of Wetlands and Tributaries Water, water everywhere and hardly a drop is being protected by the Trump administration. In its latest act of abdication, the Environmental Protection Agency published its Navigable Waters Protection Rule in the Federal Register on April 21. The rule is scheduled to go into effect June 22,... Read more |
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Views Friday, April 10, 2020 The Election Travesty in Wisconsin Is A Wake-up Call for the Nation As much as the denial of science is a hallmark of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, Wisconsin Republicans took things to a new level with their cynical decision to hold in-person voting in the midst of a deadly pandemic. As my scientist wife, Dr. Michelle Holmes, an epidemiologist... Read more |
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Views Thursday, April 02, 2020 Fighting for a Just COVID-19 Response As much as hurricanes Katrina and Maria upended African American and Latinx families, the landfall of the coronavirus brings a gale of another order. This Category 5 of infectious disease packs the power to level communities already battered from environmental, economic, and health injustice. If... Read more |
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Views Monday, March 16, 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic: Science Sidelined in Trump Rose Garden Fiasco Having paved over the science on pandemics, the Trump administration puts up parking lots. Literally. It wasn’t enough that President Trump’s Rose Garden declaration of a national coronavirus emergency on Friday disintegrated into a self-congratulatory monologue. It wasn’t enough that he trashed... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 25, 2020 How the Trump Administration’s Polluted Policies Are Hurting Children Let the children suffocate. That is the vicious message from President Trump in his proposed budget cuts for the Environmental Protection Agency for fiscal year 2021. As the Union of Concerned Scientists last week issued its new report Endangering Generations: How the Trump Administration’s Assault... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, February 11, 2020 Asbestos, Ubiquitous and Avoidable, Is a Deadly Threat to Our Kids In the United States, gun violence kills nearly 40,000 people a year and has killed nearly 40,000 or so children and teenagers since 1999, and yet the nation is still without serious gun control. Another 40,000 people die each year in traffic accidents, including 1,200 children 14 and under. Yet we... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 24, 2020 EPA’s New Water Rule a Mockery of Science and the Clean Water Act With the Environmental Protection Agency’s own data showing that nearly half of our rivers and streams and a third of our wetlands are in “poor biological condition,” and with millions of Americans exposed to unsafe chemicals in water systems, this is a bad time to make a mockery of the Clean Water... Read more |
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Views Monday, December 16, 2019 Toxic Injustice and the Green New Deal A sobering afternoon in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago with Antonio Lopez showed what any Green New Deal must undo , let alone do. Five miles southwest of the glittering downtown Loop, this gutsy neighborhood of some 74,000 people, 85 percent of whom are Latino, is a crowning citadel of... Read more |
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Views Sunday, October 20, 2019 Natural Gas vs. Renewable Energy: Beware the Latest Gas Industry Talking Points The natural gas industry is on an aggressive public relations tear to convince Americans that for decades to come, it is the “bridge” between coal and renewable energy. The campaign is loaded with disinformation. The American Petroleum Institute (API) says it’s pushing gas as a “foundation for the... Read more |