Environmental Justice

PROJECT AREAS:

Socioeconomic Monitoring and Assessment

Environmental Justice

Ecosystem Workforce—
Mobile and Local

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

RECENT PROJECTS:

Community-based Projects

Staff Research

How We Select Projects

Environmental Justice (EJ) means equal protection under the law and the right to live, work, and play in a safe and clean environment. The Pacific West Center works to increase rural participation in water and forestry venues particularly focused on low-income and minority communities.

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, are threatened by water exports, development, and chemical contamination from spraying, abandoned mines, illegal waste dumping, and abandoned industrial sites.

The PWCFC Environmental Justice Sourcebook

The Pacific West Center has developed a web-based "sourcebook" on environmental justice. It provides a primer on environmental justice, a summary of current literature and relevant legislation and a growing database of community and policy resources related to rural environmental justice.

PDF: This sourcebook is available as an Adobe Acrobat file here (124 KB - PDF).

Microsite: To visit the PWCFC's Environmental Justice Sourcebook microsite, click here.

The Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW)

The Pacific West Center participates in the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water (EJCW), a California grassroots network working to address water issues and their impacts on low-income and minority groups.

The EJCW is currently working to:

• Increase EJ representation on water boards
• Link local EJ efforts to state water policy and water management projects
• Build rural-urban dialogues on environmental justice and water
• Facilitate participatory workshops on such topics as pollutant mapping, safe water access, water and fish contamination, and funding projects for environmental justice
• Explore third party effects of water transfers from rural basins to urban centers, such as loss of fishing and farmworker jobs and increased groundwater pollution