Politics, pollution of Tijuana River will be Russel’s topic for NAS Seminar

The next free public lecture in the Natural and Applied Sciences seminar series takes place at 3 p.m. this Friday (Nov. 21) in Room 301 of the Environmental Sciences Building. The speaker is Assistant Prof. Rachel Russell of the Public and Environmental Affairs program. The attention-grabbing title of her seminar is “Sh!t Flows Downhill: Investigating trans-border untreated household wastewater in the Tijuana/San Diego mega-region.” She’ll describe efforts to deal with pollution and public health problems in the Tijuana River Watershed straddling the U.S./Mexico border just south of San Diego, as rapid and unplanned urbanization in Tijuana has increased pressure on that city’s aging wastewater infrastructure to meet the demands for collection and treatment. Russell’s research uses urban political ecology, environmental justice, and sustainable development literature to examine the unequal availability of household wastewater collection, media discourse on the issue, and the prospect of sustainable wastewater treatment technology mitigating human and ecosystem degradation. The 3 p.m. presentation, free and open to the public, is followed by an informal reception at 4 p.m. in ES 317.