Examples of Efforts Within the Modern Environmental Justice Movement

PART I: ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Introduction

Chemicals

Land Use

Rural Environmental Justice: Summary

Solutions

A Brief History of Environmental Justice

Examples

Resources

PART II: HOW CAN RESEARCH HELP?

Participatory Research and Environmental Justice



Microsite Credits

I. Rural Development Leadership Network

The Rural Development Leadership Network (http://www.rdln.org) is an independent degree program in which participants continue to do community-based work while earning their higher education degrees. RDLN self-consciously promotes environmental justice-related research and advocacy. Of the current group of participants, one student is researching bringing black history into the curriculum of Southern schools to reverse textbook racism. This black history education project may include an environmental history as told from a minority perspective—describing working on the land first as a slave and then as a freeholder, but still facing institutional racism within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Another RDLN participant is involved in documenting a community-organizing project that followed a hazardous waste incinerator from impacted rural community to impacted rural community—never allowing it to locate anywhere that it could be hazardous to the local population.

II. Partnerships Providing Alternatives

Environmental justice activists are partnering with community groups, agencies, non-profits, and other organizations to end environmental injustices by developing project alternatives. This proactive approach includes using environmentally friendly technologies and incorporating environmentally and economically positive benefits for the affected community into the project's design. For example, in Bayview-Hunters Point, a largely low income, African American area of San Francisco, community advocates have spearheaded an Alternative Community Energy project. With this project, organizers aim to educate community members on alternative energy, promote alternative energy for communities like and including their own, become leaders in the transition to alternative energy, and install 54 solar water heaters in local homes, and five photovoltaic systems in local homes and churches. Helping low-income and minority rural and urban communities become involved in cleaner systems of energy can be empowering, exemplary, and healthful. For rural farmworkers, solar powered water treatment devices could eliminate dependence on uncooperative water districts or agencies. Working with tribes to develop innovative water treatment strategies is an area where universities and tribes can partner to create outcomes that fit with tribal goals.

When providing alternatives to proposed actions, partners must research potential impacts, or demand that the project proponent help with this work, and offer alternatives specifying mitigations, rather than leaving these to the discretion of private companies or permitting agencies. If the project alternative is not incorporated wholly or partially into a revised project design, then it becomes a basis for negotiations about the mitigation package or about the community benefits package, binding conditions in the project's permits. For example, the Pacific Institute's Brownfields Program works in facing environmental injustices, integrating water and land clean up and recycling with community empowerment and employment. By helping the communities participate from the beginning of the process, and by sharing lessons that have been learned and precedents that have been set by other communities, communities are empowered to seek more beneficial outcomes as remediation programs are developed for brownfields sites in their neighborhoods.

III. Alliances with Universities and Research Organizations

Examples of university-community collaborations are increasing. One precedent-setting partnership is the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, housed at the historically black Xavier University of Louisiana. Here, researchers, residents, and decision makers collaborate on programs and projects that promote the rights of all people to be free from environmental harm as it impacts health, jobs, housing, education, and quality of life. The university is close to both rural and urban nexuses of environmental injustice, and works to address health inequities in "Cancer Alley," the lower Mississippi River industrial corridor. For more information, see www.xula.edu/dscej. Other programs include the Environmental Justice unit at Clark-Atlanta University, led by Dr. Robert Bullard, and the University of Michigan program in Environmental Advocacy.

For many universities, environmental justice related work falls into different programs and disciplines. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, students and professors are engaged with communities on environmental justice issues through the schools of Public Health, Social Welfare, Urban Planning, and Environmental Science and Policy. At Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona, students in the Applied Indigenous Studies major are trained and then encouraged to return to their communities to do empowering, groundbreaking work for their tribes.

However, the collaboration between universities and community groups has a mixed history, due to imbalances of power and differing goals. Many communities are mistrustful because of past experiences with researchers who came into the community, took information and knowledge, and left the community with no benefits or further contact. Some proposed alliances with universities may have more to do with the old model of extractive research and less to do with community empowerment and assistance. Academics were taken to task at the second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit for their lack of real service to the movement. At a regional meeting of Bay Area environmental justice activists, one participant criticized the number of academics who were at the meeting, in contrast to the small number of community members, calling this the "gentrification of the movement."

Activists want researchers to know that the environmental justice movement is not a "think tank," but an active force taking on issues that are threatening the livelihood and survival of communities. Environmental justice issues are community based and require community-based solutions, including solutions that link specific communities across regions. University researchers can make fruitful partners for communities, and even obtain important social data through observation and participatory research, but the research itself must be subordinate to community goals and overcoming environmental injustices.

The Pacific West Community Forestry Center has been involved in supporting a growing collaboration between the Maidu people and agency and university researchers entitled the Maidu Science Team. The team brings together Maidu practitioners with Western scientists to discuss the differences and commonalities between the two approaches to land management. The team will ultimately conduct treatments on the Maidu Stewardship Project, a pilot project on 1200 acres of National Forest land. The science team is a unique effort to increase communication between Western science and traditional knowledge holders. This collaboration places traditional ecological knowledge and Western science on equal footing as management approaches, begins key conversations about stewardship, and may result in long term research and study area designation for the stewardship project. Such a designation would provide the Maidu community with a land base.

The Pacific West Community Forestry Center is charged with providing partners and community members with research information that can be applied to local issues. As such, the PWCFC provides research for use by rural, resource-based communities, providing information to those engaged in fighting environmental injustices. Often, PWCFC work also includes community capacity building to help the group organize to define its goals and research questions. This work has been supported by the PWCFC with Latino forest workers and brush harvesters, particularly in Washington State, and with Southeast Asian mushroom harvesters in southern Oregon and northern California.