This article highlights a group of four undergraduate students that are leading the charge for environmental justice at UVA, seeking to make our sustainability spaces more safe, equitable, and dynamic. Three students formed and lead the Environmental Justice Collective at UVA. Another is an Eco-Leader on the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Subcommittee.
By Cydnie Golson and Jasmyn Noel, UVA Office for Sustainability Student Employees (Energy & Water Team)
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”1 It can mean protesting against fossil fuel infrastructure that is to be placed near historically Black neighborhoods, further subjugating them to health risks from increased pollution. It can also mean fair and transparent inclusion in decision-making, as the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality states, “Everyone whose health and environment may be potentially affected by activities should be sought out and included in decision-making. To be successful we must find a way forward – together – using a transparent and inclusive process.”2 A number of entities beyond the Virginia DEQ, including the Southern Environmental Law Center, Virginia Conservation Network, and Virginia Environmental Justice Collaborative are expanding this work across the state.
It's important to highlight the young people who are at the forefront of this work on Grounds, demanding action and inspiring others to get involved.
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE COLLECTIVE: JACQUELYN KIM, LAUREN PRINCE, VALENCIA LAGBO
Jacquelyn Kim is a second year double majoring in Global Development Studies and American Studies. She is a co-founder and member of the logistics team in the Environmental Justice Collective. Other organizations where she has spent her time at UVA include undocUVA, The Cavalier Daily and Asians Revolutionizing Together.
Lauren Prince is a third year double majoring in Political and Social Thought and Women, Gender and Sexuality with a minor in Global Sustainability. She is a co-founder and member of the logistics team in the Environmental Justice Collective. Also, she is a member of undocUVA with Jacquelyn, working on climate migration. She says that “undocUVA in relation to EJC gives us an opportunity to look at the ways climate change may shape or influence migration. But also community responses and centering how people respond and resist these different forms of violence and injustice.” Lauren previously wrote for the Virginia Review of Politics on climate justice and asylum law.
Valencia Lagbo is a third year double majoring in Batten’s Public Policy & Leadership program and Global Development Studies with a minor in Global Sustainability. She is a co-founder and member of the logistics team in the Environmental Justice Collective. Also she is a resident advisor at Hereford Residential College, a dorm space at UVA made up of students with passions in the environment, sustainability, and mindfulness. She also is a peer advisor through the Office of African American Affairs.
The Environmental Justice Collective at UVA formed when Lauren, Jacquelyn, and Valencia came together during the summer of 2020. "[A] lot of us have worked in other environmental organization spaces and noticed that it is a very white-dominated environment," says Lauren. "We came together and thought, 'How do we center and focus on the relations and intersections of environmental justice with BIPOC communities?' And we felt that it would be best to have a place that was centered on and for BIPOC students within environmental justice. So I think that one of our biggest goals is to create a safe space for students of color to engage with environmental issues [given] the context of us having, at least for me, trouble not feeling comfortable in previous spaces as a Black person."
Valencia added that another important aspect was their choice to create a true collective. "We just wanted to have people understand that there is no sense of hierarchy like in some other organizations on Grounds," Valencia explained. “We call [our leadership team] a ‘logistics team’ instead of an exec[utive] team because we set up the structure of the meetings but people still have the ability to bring or share because we want to have the basis of collective learning and education and the idea that no one is above anyone else. We’re all learners in this space with environmental justice.” Jacquelyn also mentioned that the main theme of their work is focusing “on the intersectionality of environmental justice and situating our conversations within larger global systems about colonialism, capitalism, and racism.”
With their diverse backgrounds, Jacquelyn, Lauren, and Valencia add different lenses to tackling this intersectional issue. Both Lauren and Jacquelyn started with an interest in environmental science that expanded to environmental justice. Lauren reflected, “In terms of environmental justice, I think in high school I was really into environmental science and then I realized that the science aspect sometimes ignores the people.” She explained that she “really wanted to get at [these aspects] and the social justice issues, like issues of equity and inequality and overlapping oppressions.”
On the other hand, Jacquelyn found a passion for environmental justice through her interest in preservationism, nature, and lowering individual carbon footprints. She went on to say “[A]s I have been learning over the past couple of years, I think for me the most important thing has been expanding the way we think about environmental injustices, so not just natural disasters, but thinking about indigenous sovereignty and decolonization...That would entail a radical shifting of the way we relate to land and to each other.”
Valencia added that she was drawn to the opportunity to “understand why and how people have been respected or disrespected in their place and space. It’s just something that is very interesting and something we should often think about when we are engaging in any sort of conversations.”
Jacquelyn described work done by other student organizations linked to environmental justice, explaining, “PLUMAS [Political Latinxs United for Movement and Action in Society] last year did an event where they talked about wildfires in Brazil, and the political climate there and how that was intersecting with the environmental justice movement there. Also CAFE [Central Americans for Empowerment at UVA] did an event on voluntourism and brought in an environmental justice aspect there. So there have been other BIPOC organizations that have done singular events linked to environmental justice but there hasn’t really been an environmental organization specifically dedicated to environmental justice in this way.”
Valencia perceived that the current environmental groups on Grounds “may touch on diversity and things like that but then lack that next step to really unpacking our own experiences with the environment and how we can better shape the world around us through an environmental justice lens.”
The group is interested in reaching out to groups in Charlottesville who are doing this type of work in order to “support, listen to, and highlight the work they’ve been doing.” Jacquelyn qualified that they are a “bit wary of institutionalizing activism, being very conscientious of the relationships we do want to establish with organizations and working with people who we feel are aligned with our mission. There are some organizations in Charlottesville that are environmentalist-oriented but are still very white-dominated and not approaching this work with the same intersectional lens that I think we really want to foreground in the kinds of things that we are doing.” She went on to describe that “another goal for us in the near future is to maybe establish some kind of relationship or find ways we can support the Monacan Nation and acknowledge their community here and the ongoing violence they are facing not only from the Charlottesville community but also the University.”
For interested students who want to get involved with the Environmental Justice Collective at UVA, Lauren suggests reaching out through Instagram (@ejcatuva), emailing members of the logistics team, or joining the Groupme chat. “We would love to have new members; it makes us happy to see new faces in the meetings,” affirmed Lauren.
For students wanting to get involved in environmental justice generally, Lauren felt like taking environmental justice courses at UVA has provided her “with an opportunity to learn more about the environmental justice field. The courses helped me refine my interests within environmental justice and afterwards, I sought out organizations that are doing the work that I’m passionate about.” Specifically, Lauren recommends the class “Race, Class, Politics, and the Environment” taught by Professor Kimberly Fields, as it “gave [her] an opportunity to study specific issues within the environmental justice field, such as analyzing how government responses, or lack thereof, to hurricanes are examples of environmental injustice.” Jacquelyn also recommends Intro to Native American Studies taught by Professor Kasey Jernigan. She said,“That class was so impactful for me in shifting the way I think about relationships to land, and land as a much more all-encompassing thing instead of just nature.”
Jacquelyn then concluded with an important notion about the concept of studying environmental justice and getting involved. “[S]tudy can occur within university classes, but you can also study on your own too, through a lot of great books out there and accounts on social media that are engaging [in] this kind of education online. But I think with the study aspect, it's important to move beyond just [thinking about] individual capacity … There needs to be some kind of context of larger systems...[and] moving beyond individualism... In order to truly combat environmental injustice, we need to combat these overall structural and systemic things that are currently existing.”
ECOLEADERS DIVERSITY, EQUITY, AND INCLUSION SUBCOMMITTEE: MAILLE BOWERMAN
Maille Bowerman is a first year, thinking of double majoring in Environmental Thought and Practice and Global Studies in Security and Justice. She is an intern for the Green Dining program where she focuses on food justice initiatives such as food security and sustainability. In addition to being a member of the Environmental Justice Collective, Maille is also part of the Eco-Leaders Program under the Office for Sustainability where she serves on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion subcommittee.
For Maille, environmental justice means “the removal of and reparations for the disproportionate placement of environmental hazards in underserved and marginalized communities.”
She went on to describe that as a child she experienced a case of environmental injustice when her community was hit by Hurricane Sandy: “I was like 10 or 11 and that was very devastating to my area and the towns around me that are low-income with high minority populations. We didn’t see a lot of government aid or government intervention and that really went to a lot more wealthy communities, so always having that in the back of my mind has been a wake-up call that there is no reason why being interested in that stuff has to stop when I get to college.”
For Maille, the hometown connections to environmental justice did not stop with Hurricane Sandy. “I’m from Long Island New York, and about 10 or 15 minutes away from my hometown, there is a landfill and it's located in a historically Black and Indigenous community,” she explained. “They recently in the past year have created more organized legal challenges to the existence of the landfill so I’ve tried to go to as many meetings as I can, but it’s gotten hard moving back down here with school and stuff but I still try to follow the cause as much as I can.”
At UVA, Maille expressed that “the most environmental justice opportunities have to come from CIOS or Off-Grounds organizations” and that she still thinks it is “a little bit harder to find opportunities within UVA, or at least meaningful opportunities, where you can unlearn and learn the systems and things that go into putting environmentally racist practices into place.”
Nonetheless, Maille helped to organize an environmental justice social media campaign as part of the Eco-Leaders group. In Charlottesville, Maille has worked for the Community Climate Collaborative (C3) “researching information for their upcoming project about transportation, specifically making transportation more equitable and sustainable and especially in regards to expanding existing services to help better serve the underserved and under-transported areas of Charlottesville.” She has also “done some research on Cultivate Charlottesville, which is a food justice network within Charlottesville that works a lot on community gardens.” According to Maille, “C3 and Cultivate Charlottesville are always looking for volunteers and internships, [paid and unpaid]” in addition to being a “great way to make connections with the community, especially if you’re from out of state.”
To conclude, there are a number of ways to engage with environmental justice in your local community, in Charlottesville, and at UVA. Here is a list of the resources and opportunities covered in these interviews as well as some of our own recommendations:
At UVA
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Eco-Leaders Subcommittee
- Environmental Justice Collective
- Central Americans for Empowerment at UVA (CAFE)
- Political Latinxs United for Movement and Action in Society (PLUMAS)
- Virginia Student Environmental Coalition (VSEC)
- undocUVA
- Environmental Justice Around the Globe (AAS 3500), and Intro to Race, Class, Politics, & the Environment (AAS 3500) with Professor Kimberly Fields
- Introduction to Native American Studies: (Mis)Representations (AMST 3280) with Professor Kasey Jernigan
- Global Ethics and Climate Change (RELG 3820), and Religion, Ethics, & Global Environment (RELG 2210) with Professor Willis Jenkins
- Air Pollution Environmental Justice (EVSC 4559) with Professor Sally Pusede
In Charlottesville
- Cultivate Charlottesville
- Community Climate Collaborative (C3)
- Southern Environmental Law Center’s Breaking Ground podcast
Sources:
1 https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice
2 https://www.deq.virginia.gov/get-involved/environmental-justice