A Portraiture of Environmental Justice in Communities of Concern

Environmental justice as a movement is an urgent step towards the realization of environmental equity. There is a necessity that makes environmental justice an important solution to climate change. The origin of the necessity was the damage that environmental racism was causing, and its realization in the United States and later as an international phenomenon. Through a theoretical approach, this article examined how communities of concern are denied environmental justice as a result of the current developmental models in practice and showed why they are vulnerable to the global challenge of climate change and environmental pollution. It identified the link between human rights and the environment. It explored a viable sustainable development model for communities of concern and concluded on how they can get past the economic challenges of implementing green industries.

The Salt of the Earth (Inspired by Cherokee Creation Story)

In Cherokee tradition, Selu and her husband Kana’ti are the first inhabitants of the Appalachian territory. Their tale is used to explain the Cherokee way of life (gender roles, religious traditions, and humans’ relationship with nature). In this recasting of the Cherokee creation story, the author seeks to highlight the implications of modern injustices including sexism, environmental racism, and ecological destruction. The goal of this work is to express the ills of commodifying the human body, time, and natural resources and to promote a healthy relationship between humankind and the Earth.

Pervasive structural racism in environmental epidemiology

Background Epistemological biases in environmental epidemiology prevent the full understanding of how racism’s societal impacts directly influence health outcomes. With the ability to focus on “place” and the totality of environmental exposures, environmental epidemiologists have an important opportunity to advance the field by proactively investigating the structural racist forces that drive disparities in health. Objective This commentary illustrates how environmental epidemiology has ignored racism for too long. Some examples from environmental health and male infertility are used to illustrate how failing to address racism neglects the health of entire populations. Discussion While research on environmental justice has attended to the structural sources of environmental racism, this work has not been fully integrated into the mainstream of environmental epidemiology. Epidemiology’s dominant paradigm that reduces race to a mere data point avoids the social dimensions of health and thus fails to improve population health for all. Failing to include populations who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in health research means researchers actually know very little about the effect of environmental contaminants on a range of population health outcomes. This commentary offers different practical solutions, such as naming racism in research, including BIPOC in leadership positions, mandating requirements for discussing “race”, conducting far more holistic analyses, increasing community participation in research, and improving racism training, to address the myriad of ways in which structural racism permeates environmental epidemiology questions, methods, results and impacts.

Environmental racism in the heartland

As a result of a legacy of systemic racism,communities of color and low-income communities in Kansas City face a greater risk of exposure to environmental hazards. These hazards are associated with myriad negative health outcomes including cancer, respiratory illness, and shorter life expectancy.

“La justicia ambiental es para ti y para mí”: Translating Collective Struggles for Environmental and Energy Justice in Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay Communities

Rural, coastal communities in the Jobos Bay region of southeastern Puerto Rico confront disproportionate harms as an energy sacrifice zone. This space is constituted by imported fossil fuel dependency, economic and climate injustices, environmental racism, ecocide, US colonialism and imperialism, neoliberalism, and racial capitalism. In response, many grassroots actors mobilize against the toxic assault on their communities to push for alternatives beyond the suffocating status quo via apoyo mutuo [mutual support]. This survival work and movement building occur literally in “the outdoors” and in other intertwined multispecies environments, challenging narrow, oppressive colonial, and consumerist constructs that reduce “the outdoors” to recreation and thus erase the numerous ways that people labor in, honor, and defend places and spaces to lead good lives. Thus, critical examinations of communication and race/racism/racialization in and about this colonial US territory must grapple with the brutalities and pain caused by systemic and structural cruelties and translate how, where, and with whom self-determined and potentially liberatory environmental and energy justice advocacy takes shape to refuse a trauma-only narrative. Studying these embodied and emplaced efforts positions energy and power broadly construed, including in the form of collective action. This article centers on the collaborative energies of local grassroots actors and scholars who ideologically and politically align and who value working together toward anti-colonial praxis. To provide one example of how these collaborations can yield public-facing projects that contribute to struggles tied to the survival and well-being of the most impacted communities, this essay focuses on the creation of an environmental justice children’s book. This bilingual text documents and translates the pollution caused by a US-owned, coal-fired power plant and mobilizations to topple this corporate invader. The article concludes by reflecting on some of the difficulties and possibilities that emerged during multi-year coalitional relationships that inform and exceed the children’s book. To reject racist and colonial dominant assumptions and discourses about outdoor spaces as only privileged recreational areas or as a “blank slate” devoid of people and culture, this project narrates how grassroots organizers and scholars persist in continued study and struggle for power(ful) transformations in Jobos Bay and beyond.

Environmental Racism in Indianapolis

Community-engaged research, grounded in the humanities and social sciences and rooted in ethnographic methods, can provide important insights into the ways that environmental racism impacts neighborhoods and communities. The Anthropocene Household project at the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute explores the current geological epoch, the Age of Humans, on a local level through the lens of the household in order to understand the experiences, knowledges, and practices associated with environmental change. In my research, I am looking at these experiences and understandings specifically related to environmental racism. In this paper I would like to explore two different examples of environmental racism in Indianapolis. One illustrates how white privilege plays a role in creating environmental racism and the other shows the impact of white supremacy in shaping government response to an issue of environmental racism. Both examples demonstrate the value in foregrounding the voices and experiences of the people who are living in these impacted communities. We cannot develop meaningful interventions into environmental racism without understanding these lived experiences and creating space to hear these voices.