About the Environmental Justice Project

Our Vision

The EJP strives to implement the principles of environmental justice in its teaching, research, and engagement. The EJP closes the gap between academic institutions and community-based organizations and regulatory agencies engaged with environmental justice issues.

Our Mission

Who We Are:

The Environmental Justice Project is a multidisciplinary collaborative of academics and students at UC Davis from the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. We work in partnership with entities that are working on diverse environmental justice issues in California, particularly in Northern California and the Central Valley.

How We Work:

The mission of the Environmental Justice Project is based on interdisciplinary and applied research on current environmental justice issues in California. The EJP:

• Builds campus and community partnerships on environmental justice issues;
• Advances state policy analyses that promote environmental justice and community perspectives on particular environmental, environmental health, or urban planning issues, drawing on campus strengths as well as our proximity to Sacramento;
• Promotes interdisciplinary conversation on environmental issues, specifically as they pertain to race, class and/or gender at the John Muir Institute of the Environment and on the UC Davis campus;
• Builds on existing campus strengths in environmental research in the Central Valley to to increase environmental justice scholarship at UC Davis;
• Values diverse forms of knowledge, including community knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and diverse forms of disciplinary knowledge in academia.

What We Do:

The EJP works to realize its mission and vision by pursuing the following actions:

• Bridge programs, institutes and centers within the university to support environmental justice skills training for communities and students, and bridge with community partners beyond the university in research, teaching, and policy engagement;
• Convene a quarterly speaker series where researchers, particularly emerging scholars, working on EJ issues present their findings;
• Sponsor student (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty research on environmental justice;
• Host an annual environmental justice book lecture;
• Support UC Davis undergraduate and graduate student internships with local EJ organizations;
• Produce relevant research products on environmental justice issues in various disciplines that are accessible to communities doing environmental justice work.

About Community Relationships

To analyze pressing issues in the Central Valley and to profile the struggles of organizations that are addressing these issues, the Environmental Justice Project is building a relationship of trust with community groups.

The Community University Research and Action Alliance for Justice (CURAJ), a coalition of researchers, legal advocates, and community activists dedicated to applying research to address issues of race and poverty in the Central Valley. Members represent the Center for Race Poverty and the Environment, California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, Latino Issues Forum, Madera Coalition for Community Justice, Youth In Focus, Boalt Hall School of Law Center for Social Justice, UC Merced, UC Sacramento Center, and UC Davis. EJP Senior Researcher Jonathan London serves on the CURAJ interim board representing UC Davis.

For more information about community partnership initiatives currently underway within the Center for Regional Change and the Environmental Justice Project, see our recent article, Building Collaborative Communities: The Environmental Justice Project and the Center for Regional Change at UC Davis, written for the Spring 2009 newsletter of the Race Equity Project.

Brief History of Environmental Justice
Social Movements, Policy, and Research

The Movement

Nationally, the environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980's as a result of the confluence of events and reports that brought the terms "environmental racism" and "environmental justice" into the public sphere and into policy discourses. Subsequent reports documented the "unequal protection" from environmental pollution by local, state and national regulatory agencies. Environmental racism describes the disproportionate effects of environmental pollution on racial minorities, while environmental justice is the name of the social movement that emerged in response to this problem. Because it describes the disproportionate balance between high levels of pollution exposure for people of color and the low level of environmental benefits they enjoy, environmental racism can be defined as the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and pollution burdens based on race.

There are numerous environmental justice organizations around the country working on a wide range of issues. The movement is structured around networks organized by geographic region, identity or issue. These include (but are not limited to):

• Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice
• Indigenous Environmental Network
• Asian Pacific Environmental Network
• Farm Labor Organizing Committee

The "founding document" that catalyzed the environmental justice movement is the Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted at the 1991 First People of Color Environmental Leadership summit and widely circulated.

The Policy - Federal, State and Local

The environmental justice movement gained mainstream political momentum when President Clinton signed an Executive Order on Environmental Justice in 1994 which mandated that all federal agencies generate agency-specific strategies to address the disproportionate pollution experienced by minority communities. In June 2005, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was removing race and class from special consideration in its definition of environmental justice, and set a controversial and abbreviated public comment period. Although EPA backed down from this position , it shows that the concept of environmental justice at the Federal Level is still quite vulnerable (see Environmental Justice in EPA's Strategic Planning Process).

States have varied widely in their environmental justice policies (see white paper on "The State of the States: Environmental Justice Programs and Policy" {PDF} working paper for the Ford Foundation, October 2004). One of the states that has gone the furthest is California. California Environmental Protection Agency’s (Cal/EPA) released a ground-breaking "Environmental Justice Action Plan" (EJ Action Plan) in October 2004. This Plan follows Cal/EPA's Intra-agency Environmental Justice Strategy which outlined the four main goals for their environmental justice policy, along with objectives, and criteria for achieving them: improving public participation and community-capacity building, environmental justice integration, research and data collection, and cross-media coordination and accountability.

The EJ Action Plan specifies a set of short-term, community-oriented projects, using the principles of "cumulative impacts" and the "precautionary approach" to guide them. The plan defines cumulative impacts as: "exposures, public health or environmental effects from the combined emissions and discharges in a geographic area including environmental pollution from all sources, whether single or multi-media, routinely, accidentally, or otherwise released. Impacts will take into account sensitive populations and socioeconomic factors where applicable and to the extent data are available." It defines the precautionary approach as "taking anticipatory action to protect public health or the environment if a reasonable threat of serious harm exists based upon the best available science and other relevant information even if absolute and undisputed scientific evidence is not available to assess the exact nature of the risk."

The Research

There is a large and growing literature on environmental racism, the environmental justice movement, and environmental equity. Its disciplinary locations are primarily located within sociology, natural resource policy, and environmental law, although environmental justice writings also appear within the disciplines of philosophy and environmental ethics, geography, and radical political economy. Excellent histories of the environmental justice movement have been published in recent years (i.e. Cole and Foster’s From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement). The literature is constantly expanding (one good on-line bibliography is: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/EnvirPol/Bib/B07-TurnerWu.pdf)

Much of the best, most interesting and timely research emerges out of environmental justice organizations, academic resource centers or reports published by private foundations. Some highlights include:

• Building Health Communities from the Ground Up: Environmental Justice in California (2003)
• On Hurricane Katrina: In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster, and Race After Katrina
  Written by Manuel Pastor, Robert Bullard, James Boyce, Alice Fothergill, Raquel Morello-Frosch, and Beverly Wright Russell Sage Foundation
• Toxic Soup Redux: Why Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Matter after Katrina.
  Written by Julie Sze
  Social Science Research Council
• Reports from the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University