Keith Ellison Quotes

When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack.

Clean air shouldn't be a privilege dictated by where you can afford to live but a right to which we are all entitled.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

Obesity is a societal issue. We have to come together with government, business, civil society, and NGOs to create solutions for this.

We can all agree that government can't solve the obesity crisis alone. It's an ongoing issue that will require a collaborative effort across private and public sectors if we want to see some long-term success.

I want to thank the efforts of the American Public Health Association and its 200-plus partners who have organized events around the Nation that serve to raise everyone's awareness of the need to improve public health.

I brought together experts from health care, business, academic institutions, and the community to develop a comprehensive blueprint for eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care in the City of Boston.

But if you're asking my opinion, I would argue that a social justice approach should be central to medicine and utilized to be central to public health. This could be very simple: the well should take care of the sick.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality - what a joke. In my district, we caught them lying to us about the results of air quality studies in the Barnett Shale. They are playing with the health and safety of our communities, and we are going to tell them that is not acceptable.

Moreover, environmental health at the local level has become narrowly focused, very much defined around regulations and the attendant regulatory debates.

The costs of not doing these things dwarf the costs of doing them. The problem is that people don’t think about ‘Oh you saved my life’ and they don’t say thank you for that—and they don’t want to spend any money for the possibility of saving their life unless they are actually facing something. What government should be about is leading from the front and explaining … that people don’t want to spend any money, but … it costs more money to not do it... New York City’s average life expectancy is three years longer than any place else in America.

Too many members of Congress seem willing to give corporate polluters, many of whom happen to be major political donors, a free pass to poison the air.

As someone who lives with adult-onset asthma, I know how bad air quality in the capital has become. I want to be the greenest mayor London has ever had - it is not acceptable that 10,000 people die in London every year because our air is so filthy.

We've sued out-of-state power plants that are polluting our air and led a coalition of attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts against efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to remove critical environmental regulations that protect New York communities from toxic pollution.

We have lived with deadly levels of air pollution for years, which have made us more vulnerable to coronavirus.

As we draw bad fumes into our nostrils, let our suffering lungs issue a call to serious action. Let's fight for all, not just some Indians to breathe and live free.

Effective public-private partnerships will help drive the development of new products to meet the particular health needs of the poor and other vulnerable populations.

Health is the one thing we all have in common regardless of race, creed, or income. Everyone should participate in creating the solutions.

I was recruited to sort of be the doc to advocate for communities that were struggling with polluting incinerators, polluting coal plants, toxic waste sites, etc.

People say that I'm a tree hugger, but I do a lot more than hug trees. I like having my drinking water without faecal matter, that's really nice. Or acceptable levels of strychnine. I'm an air breather, I've gotten used to that over the years.

I’m just some white guy in California, and nobody in Flint is going to pay any attention to what I’m saying. I don’t blame them. Nor do doctors want to publicly agree with me, because nobody wants to downplay the effects of lead poisoning. I get that too. I can already imagine the number of tweets and emails I’m going to get demanding to know why I think Flint is no big deal.

I mean, I really loved the mix of personal health and, kind of, community health and justice, and I really saw how they were inseparable.

It's survival of the fittest. You can't have everything perfect, that's impossible, but the fit survive. The fit can handle the impurities in the air and in the water, but the poor people who are sick, it really affects them more.

We are rarely able to interact only with folks like ourselves, who think as we do. No matter how much some of us deny this reality and long for the safety and familiarity of sameness, inclusive ways of knowing and living offer us the only true way to emancipate ourselves from the divisions that limit our minds and imaginations.