Environmental Justice
This chapter discusses the importance of environmental justice and issues of equity within urban environmental education. Urban environmental education engages with environmental justice through topics such as disparities in access to nature and ecosystem services and in exposure to industrial pollution and other environmental risks. There are many approaches to addressing injustice, including food sovereignty, political mobilization, and climate justice. The chapter first provides a brief history of the environmental justice movement before presenting three case studies illustrating educational responses to environmental injustice in cities: Green Guerrillas Youth Media Tech Collective and Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice in New York City, and the Equity and Environment Initiative in Seattle, Washington. These initiatives demonstrate the ways in which race, colonization, poverty, and other social issues overlap with access, understandings, benefits, and related considerations of urban place, as well as how urban environmental education is addressing these intersections.