About the Environmental Justice Project

The UC Davis Environmental Justice Project (EJP) defines environmental justice broadly, to encompass environmental issues as they pertain to race, as well as to class and gender in California's Central Valley.

The Central Valley is strategic to California and the nation, economically and politically. It is a supplier of up to 20% of U.S. agricultural production in dairy, fruits, vegetables and other specialty crops. Unfortunately, it is also what Isao Fujimoto calls the "back stage" of California, where the richness of the land contrasts dramatically with the poverty of the people who produce its abundance, and with the poisoned state of its air, water and land. Not surprisingly, it is the low-income communities of color who bear the brunt of these environmental problems, drinking contaminated water (often at high prices), breathing pesticide-laden air, living in substandard housing, and facing a gauntlet of obstacles to receiving quality health care, education and other services. The individuals and communities most affected by these issues are typically least included in decision-making and policies meant to address them.

Public agencies are just now beginning to incorporate environmental justice values and analyses as part of their policies and procedures. As a glimmer of hope, an environmental justice movement has developed in the region that is challenging the marginalization of affected communities and struggling to represent their interests on local, regional, state and federal scales.

Despite these developments, there has been little sustained attention from academia to environmental justice in the Central Valley. Researchers at outside universities study the Central Valley, but there is no academic base within the region dedicated to environmental justice problems in communities of color. This project is an attempt to close a gap between academic institutions and the community-based organizations (as well as agencies) engaged with environmental justice issues on the ground.

The mission of the Environmental Justice Project is based on interdisciplinary and applied research in response to the challenges and opportunities outlined above. The goals of the EJP are to:

• Increase the visibility of environmental justice issues at UC Davis;
• Encourage student (undergraduate and graduate) and faculty research and campus community on environmental justice and expand the environmental equity issues, building on existing campus strengths in environmental research in the Central Valley;
• Help build campus and community partnerships on environmental justice issues;
• Advance 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;
• Promote 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.

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