EJP At a Glance, 2007-2009
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The Environmental Justice Project
2007 - 2009
Quarterly Speaker Series on Engaged Scholarship and Environmental Justice
2007 Campus Community Partnership Convening
- Members of the UC Davis environmental justice faculty interest group and a number of environmental justice activists working in the Central Valley meet to begin a conversation about environmental justice issues in the Central Valley and what the EJP’s role could be.
Support of Emerging Scholars
Environmental Justice Research Inventory, 2008
Project Funding
- EJ Research Inventory: $69,000 Ford Foundation.
- Participatory Action Research: $130,000, Ford Foundation.
- 25 Stories Project: $14,000
- Collaborative Research on the Delta: $30,000
Peer-Reviewed
- Towards More Democratic Water Management in California: Assessing CalFed’s Evolving Environmental Justice Initiative. Shilling, F, and London J., 2009.
- Marginalization by Collaboration: Environmental Justice as a Third Party in and beyond CALFED. Shilling, London, Lievanos. 2009.
- Contaminated Fish Consumption in California’s Central Valley Delta. Shilling, F.M., White, A., Lippert, L., and Lubell, M.N. 2009.
- Forthcoming: Uneven Transformations and Environmental Justice: Regulatory Science, Street Science, and Pesticide Regulation in California. Lievanos, London, Sze. 2009
- Environmental Justice at the Crossroads. Sze and London, 2008
- Problems, Promise, Progress, and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California. Sze, London, Lievanos, 2008.
Non Peer-Reviewed
- Building Collaborative Communities: the Center for Regional Change and the Environmental Justice Project at UC Davis. LaRochelle, London, Sze, 2009.
- The State of the States: Environmental Justice Programs. Working paper for the Ford Foundation. Sze, 2004.
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The Barn, 122B
University of California
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616-8527
530.752.JMIE (5643)
FAX 530.754.9141
25 Stories from the Central Valley
http://twentyfive.ucdavis.edu
Graduate student Tracy Perkins began the 25 Stories project as a series of oral history interviews that were designed to serve two purposes: to provide data to analyze for her master’s thesis, and to collect the stories of the women leaders of California’s environmental justice movement and share them with a wider public audience.
While Ms. Perkins worked on completing her thesis, (“Becoming Political: Environmental Justice and Women in California’s Central Valley”) she and EJP Director Julie Sze applied for funding to create the public component of the project. This evolved into a multi-pronged approach to presenting the stories, using not only excerpts from the oral history interviews, but also photography and theater.
An exhibition of Ms. Perkins’s photography at the Buehler Alumni Center at UC Davis displayed from March to August of 2009; an interactive theater performance was hosted at the Beuhler Alumni Center on May 8th that invited activists, academics, and the public to come together for an evening to honor the stories of the women and experience them in a unique dramatic setting; finally, the environmental justice teaching tools, which make use of the photos and interview excerpts, target a variety of learning styles and help bring the knowledge generated through these diverse forms back into the college classroom.
25 Stories has grown out of the expertise of students, staff and faculty at UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, actors from the San Francisco Bay Area, and many others. In particular, the project has benefited from the oversight of its advisory committee of environmental justice activists living and working in the San Joaquin Valley. Much of the work done by everyone involved was on a volunteer or part-volunteer basis. The project pays tribute to the Central Valley environmental justice movement and to the opportunities that the movement creates for a cleaner, safer, more beautiful home state for us all. Please visit the project website at http://twentyfive.ucdavis.edu.
Engaged Scholarship: Campus-Community Events
Water Justice: Local and Global Perspectives (Link)
Panel featuring Govind Gopakumar, Raoul Lievanos and Debbie Davis.
June 2, 2009
Mapped Out of Local Democracy: Exclusion and Environmental Justice at the Urban Fringe (Link)
Michelle Wilde Anderson, UC Berkeley
January 21, 2009
Partnerships for Environmental Justice: Fish Contamination in the Delta (Link)
Workshop with LaDonna Williams, Laura Leonelli and Fraser Shilling.
May 8, 2007
New Directions for Environmental Justice Policy and Advocacy in the Central Valley (Link)
Panel featuring The Honorable Dean Florez, Enrique Manzanilla, Debbie Davis and Rey Leon.
March 13, 2007
Immigrant and Refugee Leadership and Environmental Justice (Link)
Panel featuring Raoul Liévanos, Susana de Anda and Torm Nompraseurt.
October 25, 2007
The Riskscape and the Colorline: Engaging California Communities in Science-based Advocacy (Link)
Raquel Morello-Frosch and Manuel Pastor
December 11, 2006
Cal/EPA's Vision and Plans to Achieve Environmental Justice (Link)
Shankar Prasad
November 13, 2006
Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice (Link)
David Pellow
October 11, 2006
Young Scholars in Environmental Justice
Water Justice: Local and Global Perspectives (Link)
Panel featuring Govind Gopakumar, Raoul Lievanos and Debbie Davis.
June 2, 2009
Engaged Scholarship in the Central Valley: Stories from the Field (Link)
With Tracy Perkins, Maggie La Rochelle and Jonathan London.
May 5, 2009
Air Quality Activism, Environmental Justice and Spaces of Exclusion in the Big Bend Region, 1995-2007 (Link)
Francisco Dóñez
May 15, 2008
Immigrant and Refugee Leadership and Environmental Justice (Link)
Panel featuring Raoul Liévanos, Susana de Anda and Torm Nompraseurt.
October 25, 2007
San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project
The San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project (SJV CHIP) began to take shape in mid-2008, when a group of activists, community organizations and academics from UC Davis and the University of Southern California (Manuel Pastor) met in Fresno to develop a research project to look at the cumulative impacts of pollution on local communities through various research methods, including participatory (community empowering) methods and macro/statistical methodologies.
Along with the UC Davis EJP and Center for Regional Change’s active participation and support, the group defined its purpose, name, and defined guidelines for academic collaboration. In mid-2009, SJV CHIP and UC Davis created a memorandum of understanding outlining what roles and responsibilities each organization would take in an environmental justice mapping project for the San Joaquin Valley. This MOU is a powerful example of tools for community-university partnership that draw on the unique strengths and protect the interests of both parties.
The UC Davis Center for Regional Change (CRC) is now in the process of collecting and analyzing data, creating maps, and documenting cumulative health impacts in a final report, all informed by the needs and indicators as defined by SJV CHIP members. In addition, the CRC is offering a series of workshops with SJV CHIP to build community and organizational capacity in order to use maps as tools for advocacy.
In 2009, SJV CHIP expanded its mission to include five main elements: policy (focused on the SJV Air Pollution Control District), community education and awareness, research, advocacy and sustainability/structure. SJV CHIP has become a recognized leader in the region for its role in addressing cumulative health impacts and has received several small grants to continue its work. For more information on the Center for Regional Change, please visit its website at:
http://regionalchange.ucdavis.edu
The Healthy Fish Coalition
The Healthy Fish Coalition formed in 2008 when community organizations, non-governmental organizations interested in environmental justice, and UC Davis decided to formalize their loose collaboration. The collaboration formed from several directions, one of which was the California Endowment-funded project between the Southeast Asian Assistance Center, People for Children’s Health and Environmental Justice, and UC Davis researcher Fraser Shilling.
Dr. Shilling originally started working with environmental justice groups in 2002 through his interest in environmental and especially fish contamination in the region. Interest grew among organizations both in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and Bay Area to build their capacity to advocate for community-oriented solutions to fish contamination together, and the organizations collectively convened the Healthy Fish Coalition’s first meeting in 2008. The Coalition continued to meet throughout 2008 and early 2009 until the difficult economic climate coupled with internal tensions reduced effective progress.
Among its accomplishments, the Coalition was responsible for designing and hosting the first regional community-led fish contamination conference in Sacramento, attended by over 80 stakeholders, including affected residents, community organizations and government agencies. The activities of the Coalition also helped coalesce separate community organization-led efforts in the Bay Area and Delta to address fish contamination and state-organized pollution remediation.
Currently, member organizations of the Coalition have individually and collectively applied for EPA and other funding to address fish contamination and other environmental contamination in the Bay and Delta regions. They are also seeking ways to increase their presence in state government processes that are ostensibly “stakeholder-driven,” but that lack participation from any affected communities.
