• Socioeconomic Monitoring & Assessment
  
  
• Community Forestry & Natural Resources
  
  
• Environmental Justice
  
  
• Rural Community Development

Environmental Justice: Environmental Justice (EJ) means equal protection under the law and the right to live, work, and play in a safe and clean environment. The Sierra Institute works to increase the participation of rural
low-income and minority communities in environmental justice dialogues.

Often framed as an urban issue, environmental justice issues are present in the lives of low-income and minority communities in rural areas. Traditional cultural uses such as family forestry, family farming and ranching, fishing, hunting, and gathering of indigenous plants, are threatened by water exports, development, and chemical contamination from spraying, abandoned mines, illegal waste dumping, and abandoned industrial sites.

Examples of the Sierra Institute’s work to support environmental justice among underserved communities include:

• Agricultural Workers: Conducting an assessment of impacts of water transfers and farmland fallowing on farmworkers in southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District
• Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Partnering with Native American tribal communities, such as the Bishop & Big Pine Paiute and the Maidu, who are recovering and applying their Traditional Ecological Knowledge to land stewardship and community revitalization
• Natural Resource Workers and Harvesters: Many harvesters and workers in natural resources, such as Latino restoration workers and Southeast Asian mushroom harvesters, have been excluded from discussions and decisions that affect them. We work to identify and build capacity in these underserved worker communities to investigate and address their own community-identified issues.

Rural Environmental Justice Sourcebook: The Sierra Institute developed a primer on environmental justice that summarizes current literature and policy and offers a growing database of community and policy resources. It is a web-based “sourcebook” on rural environmental justice. Visit the Environmental Justice Sourcebook microsite.