Why is it so important to learn about environmental justice? Bren’s EJ club has the answer.

A conversation with four members of Bren’s environmental justice club sheds light on why students need to account for people when solving environmental problems

This article will soon be published in the Bren Newsroom.

“In the Bay Area,” says Laurel Wee, “there’s a freeway, the 580, where big trucks aren’t allowed to drive.” Farther from the hustle and bustle of the city and the ports, the 580 passes through wealthy neighborhoods.

“The other freeway,” Wee continues, “is the 880, which connects the South Bay with the East Bay. Big trucks are allowed on that one.”

Because the 880 allows commercial traffic, it passes through communities with higher concentrations of industrial areas. As a result, residents living in these communities are exposed to higher air pollution levels due to all of the traffic, depressing real estate prices. A quick Zillow search of homes around each freeway indicates that it’s difficult to find a home priced below $1 million around the 580, while it’s difficult to find a home priced above $1 million around the 880.

“People who are black and brown mostly live near the 880 and experience more air pollution,” says Wee, “while [the 580] is where more white people live.”

This is an example of environmental injustice, where certain communities bear a disproportionate share of our pollution burden. All too often, these injustices fall along racial lines, which highlights the need to understand how environmental decisions affect different communities. In this example, white people live in wealthier communities with less pollution, while black and brown people live in less wealthy communities with more pollution.

The discipline seeking to remedy these inequities is called environmental justice, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”

The truth is, it’s hard for me to write about environmental justice without disclosing my former positionality as a white male with a savior complex for the environment. While I care about social justice issues, I originally chose a career in the environmental field because I wanted to save melting glaciers, depleted fisheries, and razed rainforests. Before coming to graduate school and learning about environmental management, I had never considered that different solutions impact different communities. “Couldn’t we just save nature,” I thought, “because it’s our duty as humans? And if that affects some of us unequally, isn’t that the price we have to pay to save the planet?” Little did I know how wrong I was.

If I’m being honest, I had never heard the term “environmental justice” until I came to Bren. And for that, I can thank the 60+ dedicated members of the EJ club, one of whom is Laurel Wee.

Wee, who grew up in Northern California camping and hiking with her family, had long harbored a love for nature and obtained an undergraduate degree in environmental science from UC Santa Cruz. Yet she was also interested in social justice issues and found that her undergraduate program lacked diversity. They learned about EJ issues, mostly from case studies, but she found that this was “mostly white students trying to solve problems, who had a different relationship with the content than students who were BIPOC or non-white.”

This isn’t to say that white students can’t be part of the solution, but that they likely have blind spots when they don’t know the history or social customs of the communities they’re working with. “A big part of this work,” says Wee, “is listening and seeing how you can work with these communities. You’re not there to serve them—you’re there to work in collaboration with them.”

She came to graduate school to build a career where she could do just that—work with marginalized communities to solve environmental problems without harming them. Wee, who fervently desires to see environmental justice programming implemented at every level of environmental science and management, found several kindred spirits in the EJ club. That includes three other EJ club members I spoke to for this article: Halina Do-Linh, Cristina Mancilla, and Elena Ortiz.

“EJ is everything in the environmental field,” says Do-Linh, who is pursuing a master’s degree in environmental data science. “If you’re not looking at problems through an EJ lens, you’re missing a big part of the picture because EJ centers the debate around people. In lots of environmental movements, people have been siloed out of the problems and solutions—EJ helps center those who have been historically and currently marginalized and discriminated against.”

It is, perhaps, especially important for students like Do-Linh to keep people in mind when solving environmental problems using data. Data is a powerful tool, but one must consider whether there is any bias in how the data was obtained, visualized, or presented. According to Do-Linh, “there are so many steps where bias can be added in data science, which gives me a lot of power. But you have to think critically about the data in front of you. Where did it come from, and how was it collected? What were their intentions and motivations? Critically thinking about these questions helps equitable data science.”

Equitable data science is important since it’s often all too easy for decision-makers to focus on the bottom line—let’s say, our total greenhouse gas emissions—and not on the distributional impacts of their decisions.

In ESM 207, Jim Salzman’s Environmental Law and Policy class, MESM students learned about two kinds of environmental justice: distributional justice, where a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards or undesirable land uses are borne by low-income and minority communities; and procedural justice, which is the discriminatory manner in which decisions with environmental consequences are made. We also learned that the first landmark environmental laws of the 1970s did not account for distributional impacts—the only considerations were the total pollution load. Environmental justice seeks to remedy that.

Yet environmental justice is not just about how communities are burdened with negative environmental effects, such as air pollution. EJ also considers whether and how various communities can access positive environmental benefits, such as access to open recreational spaces and natural places.

“Environmental justice is also about having access to the outdoors and feeling safe outside,” says Christina Mancilla, a first-year MESM student studying conservation planning. Mancilla is from a small town in south Texas, where border patrol agents are everywhere. “There’s only one state park, which you can’t access without passing border patrol vehicles and being questioned. If you are undocumented, you aren’t going to use the parks because border patrol is standing at the entrance with big guns. You literally cannot go there without risking deportation—it’s not subtle, and it’s actually quite threatening.”

A love for nature and the outdoors led Mancilla to major in environmental studies as an undergraduate, where she began learning about environmental racism. “Once I learned these terms,” she says, “I realized that’s exactly what I had been going through and seeing…what drives all of these problems is racism and income inequality. It’s important to say the term [environmental racism] and get uncomfortable with it. We have to acknowledge that we’re living and working within a racist system, and until we do, we can’t really get anywhere.”

This is a clear example of procedural injustice, where a decision with environmental consequences (access to nature) is made in an overtly discriminatory manner. Yet what are we, as students, to do when our system has stacked the cards against countless communities based on their race, class, income, and skin color? How can we ensure that once we begin our professional careers, we’re taking the time to learn about these issues and work to resolve them?

One solution, says Mancilla, is to “make environmental justice a core class. Market-based solutions can’t fix problems that were created by markets in the first place. If you don't know the injustices people are subjected to because of environmental planning, you’re doing a huge disservice to the communities students work with. Most of us now recognize that these are big issues and have come to a professional program to deal with them.”

This focus on educating the student body about the distributional impacts of pollution, inequitable access to outdoor spaces, and the systems and structures that contribute to EJ issues is one of the main focuses of the environmental justice club. Their hallmark event, the Environmental Justice Symposium, aims to do just that.

This year’s keynote speaker was Sarah Biscarra Dilley, an indigenous scholar who delivered a searing lecture on the legacy of colonialism and the abhorrent treatment of Natives by settlers (“the federal government paid settlers to murder natives—scalping was what you turned in to receive your bounty”), building relationships with people and tribes (“building relationships is slow. It’s not about change that happens on someone else’s timeline, it’s about working to be in a good relationship with others”), and land use (“Western conservation prizes untouched wilderness, but a landscape that is not in relation with its people is untenable”).

A sober yet appreciative audience delivered a minute-long round of applause, giving thanks not only for their time but for their unflinching views and courage to deliver them to a mostly-white audience working within the very systems that have oppressed Native peoples for so long.

The EJ symposium also featured flash talks, an EJ career panel, and a food justice panel moderated by second-year MESM student and EJ club co-lead Elena Ortiz, who conducted the panel entirely in Spanish. Translation services were provided, and English-only speakers listened on small headsets as the panelists discussed water contamination, pesticide use, and making organically-grown food accessible to all.

The symposium, says Ortiz, “is a chance for students who don’t normally engage in EJ issues to be exposed to them. Second, it’s a chance for students who do engage in EJ to dive more deeply into a particular subject. Third, it’s a great chance for the club members to get experience by putting on an event by talking to scholars and activists, to speak on panels, and to network.”

Ortiz has long been passionate about food systems and first became engaged with EJ issues while working on a community farm in her hometown of Tucson, AZ. She found that the garden was where people talked about issues relevant to the community—politics, economics, racial oppression, issues surrounding documentation status, and access to food.

“In the garden,” Ortiz says, “stories came out about water contamination or communities not having enough green space or tree canopy. In these conversations, I saw food justice issues, which were environmental justice issues. But I didn’t feel as though the work I was doing in the garden was enough to address the larger systemic issues.”

So she decided to come to graduate school to find a way to meaningfully involve groups that have historically been excluded from environmental planning and decision making. “To me,” she says, “that’s what environmental justice is.”

The four students I spoke with for this article—Wee, Do-Linh, Mancilla, and Ortiz—all chose to pursue a career in environmental science and management for different reasons; their interests lie in economics, public land access, conservation, and data science. Yet what has united them as steadfast advocates for environmental justice programming is a deep-seated belief that you cannot solve environmental problems without considering how they impact communities, especially those who have long been marginalized. For individuals like me, who chose this field because they wanted to stop glaciers from melting, their work has profoundly impacted how I think about environmental solutions. More than anything, I’ve learned that humans are inextricably intertwined with their environment, and that you can’t solve environmental problems without involving communities affected by the solutions in the decisionmaking process.

We can’t stop glaciers from melting without considering who has benefitted from an economy powered by fossil fuels—and who has been forced to live with poor air quality from those emissions.

We can’t save depleted fisheries without considering who has benefitted from our overharvesting of the ocean—and which communities have no other option but to get their protein from the sea.

We can’t stop the rainforest from being destroyed without considering who has gotten rich from clearing land—and the indigenous communities that have long depended on these forests.

As Biscarra Dilley said, it’s untenable to have a landscape not in relation with its people. We can’t have solutions without first considering who makes decisions, what bias they might have, and how those decisions will impact different communities. It’s clear that environmental waste shouldn’t just be discarded in poor neighborhoods and that parks shouldn’t be just concentrated in affluent spaces. Still, we must also make sure that communities who have historically been marginalized have a seat at the decision-making table—and that this seat isn’t tokenized.

“Environmental justice isn’t hard,” says Do-Linh. “It should not be challenging or confrontational for us to think about other people who are part of the system we live in. We should feel empowered to know why something is occurring because, arguably, we should know how to fix it. That’s science, right? Find out how and why something is happening so we can provide a solution.”