Environmental and climate dangers abound all around us–rampant pollution, intensifying storms and heat waves, nuclear meltdown, sea-level rise, mass extinctions—yet some of us face far greater threats and impacts than others. The manifold inequities pervading modern societies, consolidated over past decades and more, ensure that most environmental and climate challenges are unequally borne. In other words, to wield words honed by generations of activists, scholars, and policy-makers, they are about environmental and climate justice.
This website offers a unique combination of resources for teaching and research in environmental and climate justice. It attends to basic concepts and definitions and provides guidance to the broad literatures these have spawned. It encapsulates the history of movements and writings out of which the modern understanding of environmental and climate justice first arose. It also includes searchable and downloadable collections of original documents that illuminate this history.
The core purpose of this website, however, is to publicly document and convey stories about environmental and climate justice that are more personal and local. Local communities, after all, are where the inequities of pollution or flooding literally hit home, often afflicting neighborhoods that are disadvantaged in other ways. This website began as a project to cull stories—individual oral histories as well as collective witness seminars– of those whose lives have been lived in confrontation with select industrial and other environmental perils—petrochemical complexes, lead smelters, asbestos mines, and nuclear plants. We have since expanded its coverage to include mapping projects that enable discernment of evolving socioeconomic as well as environmental inequities. That includes the local impacts and inequities of events intensifying through climate change, beginning with Superstorm Sandy. Our plan is to continue to build out the stories and other materials available on this website, though student projects developed through classes and course work at Stony Brook University.
FOR TEACHERS AND STUDENTS – Readings; Multimedia resources; Assignments; Lesson plans
FOR RESEARCHERS–Case studies; Oral histories; Witness Seminars; Mapping projects; Searchable document collections.
FOR MEMBERS AND ACTIVISTS OF FEATURED COMMUNITIES- Timelines; StoryMaps and Other Mapping; Oral Histories; Witness Seminars; Mapping Projects.
The manifold inequities pervading modern societies, consolidated over past decades and more, ensure that most environmental and climate challenges are unequally borne.
[En español por Google Translate á la derecha]