Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Political Science Veronica Hererra was a recent guest on the Sur-Ubano Podcast based at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. The episode focused on Hererra’s 2024 book, “Slow Harms and Citizen Action” (Oxford University Press), which chronicles the struggle against toxic exposure in urban Latin America. The podcast cites toxic pollution as the cause of more than 12 million deaths each year with 92 percent occurring in middle- or low-income countries, and notes that because environmental harms are often slow moving — yet long-standing problems — they can be difficult to detect and result in inaction or resignation. “I find that the strength and the success and failure of environmental movements is really tied up in this larger story of democracy building in the region, in the historical legacies of the struggle for human rights as part of the struggle for democratization…something that the book emphasizes,” Hererra said.