Becoming Involved in Environmental Justice Projects

By Sylvia Hood Washington,

Editor, Environmental Justice

When I was working on my Ph.D. in the history of technology and science, I developed an interest in environmental history because it seemed to me that a large cohort of environmental historians were engaged in scholarship that elucidated the role of humans in transforming nature through technology and engineering systems. Just as important to me at this time, however, was the growing interest and focus of environmental historians like Hurley, Melosi, Steinberg, Tarr, Merchant, and Stein on how human environments and public health were being affected by technologies and public policies.  Environmental history struck a responsive chord in me because its intent was to elucidate our past with the objective of understanding a pressing and perennial global issue for present and future generations – environmental pollution.  The work of environmental historians today will continue to be an asset to academicians, environmental policy makers, and lay communities alike. The scholarship of environmental historians, as the founder of modern environmental justice (EJ) research  sociologist Robert Bullard has alluded to in his previous publications, can be an asset to EJ communities who have borne a disproportionate burden of having environmental waste dumped into their backyards.

Through their archival research and analytical skills, environmental historians can help unravel the persistent environmental and legal “chicken and egg” question for EJ communities.  Who came first:  the people or the polluters?  This question is at the heart of many EJ struggles. Are EJ communities responsible for their own environmental problems? Today there are a significant number of scholars and legal opponents of EJ who argue that individuals chose to live in EJ geographies for economic gain or increased opportunities.  Or are EJ community residents the victims of long-term patterns and practices of unjust or uncaring public and environmental and planning policies? Environmental historians can help answer why pollution was allowed to be disproportionately concentrated in particular communities (versus others) and whether race, ethnicity, or socio-economic status were critical factors in environmental and public policy decisions that shaped these environmental geographies.  Oral histories can be used to elucidate the historical “bottom up” or on-the-ground perspectives of EJ community members, who witnessed their landscapes change and evolve over time to become places of environmental inequalities rife with environmental health problems.

We have much to offer to the EJ communities as environmental historians, but we must also be careful how we interface and interact. Since the EJ movement began in 1982, numerous EJ communities have become reticent and leery of working with scholars and academicians. Many leaders in EJ communities today believe that they have been used and exploited by outsiders, particularly academics.  They are now all too familiar with dissertation, thesis, and book projects, which disproportionately benefit academics and their graduate students.  They also point out these academics do not believe in the “trickle down” theory, since they and their students rarely, if ever, come from these communities. They see us graduate, get tenure or the new job, and publish the book based on our study of their communities, but all too frequently the research rarely alleviates their struggle in a significant way.

As EJ scholars and environmental historians, we need to focus our efforts on developing studies that yield outcomes that could potentially change the course of these communities. One approach is the development of spatial temporal analyses based upon a cogent historical research of EJ geographies using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). GIS models of EJ communities can help residents understand in a concrete way how their communities have changed environmentally, bringing many potential benefits – legal as well as psychological. Training EJ communities how to use GIS from a historical perspective is even more empowering and would have long term benefits for members who chose to stay in the community and fight for environmental justice.

These potential benefits for GIS in EJ scholarship and for EJ communities will be explored in a workshop at ASEH’s upcoming Tallahassee conference.  Activities of the workshop will include a hands-on GIS project involving EJ communities selected in advance by Florida A&M’s Center for Environmental Justice and Equity. The workshop will bring together environmental historians and EJ activists to discuss the past environmental issues that these communities have faced, and how historians can effectively participate and work with them to impact their future environmental experiences.

(ASEH News, fall 2008)