Environmental Justice

I learned from the readings how a lot of facilities that contribute to pollution and poor living conditions can be found in areas where many African-Americans live. This puts them at an unfair disadvantage in being exposed to harmful substances than their White counterparts. It's very common to see discrimination and racism through words and actions, but it's very difficult to see these problems occur in things such as living environment and where certain facilities are placed.

 "As one important pair of environmental justice scholar-activists wrote, the environments we most care about should be 'the places where we live, work, learn, and play,' whether they are natural or built."

 This was a line from the The Atlantic article that stood out to me. Ideally, it would speak to everyone, regardless of race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, etc. Everyone has a right and a responsibility to the environment. However, I can see that most of the time, the "we" in the statement pertains to just one group of people. We can lose sight of the fact that the "we" does not just mean "us", but also the others around us. We forget that "we" includes those who don't have a voice and are unfairly treated. Yes, we believe that the places where we live, work, learn, and play should be safe for us. That same belief applies to those who are often mistreated in society. They have the right to that, too.

Comments

  1. Emebet AkliluSeptember 11, 2018 at 10:11 PM

    From the videos and the readings we can see that even the way our societies are built is not equitable, but I wonder if this sense of instability extends to a class based society. What happens when we take the race piece out of the picture. I think the same types of issues persist, mainly because we have eliminated the idea of equal access. I think it would be very interesting to do a comparison of these different kinds of societies just to see if the same issues persist.

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  2. UnknownNovember 19, 2018 at 5:26 PM

    I agree with the finding, however I think that many facilities that contribute to pollution and poor living conditions are simply find in communities with any minorities, including Hispanics as well. I definitely think that this kind of discrimination is horrible and we should be more focused on how to prevent this. Many times the "we" does make people think of mainly one group of people and not society as a whole. I think that changing this kind of thinking would allow people to more consciences about environmental inequalities.

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