Why TA for Environmental Justice?

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU convene an environmental justice reading group to read and discuss recent texts. This quarter (Winter 2019) the group is reading excerpts from Sharing the earth: An international environmental justice reader (Ammons and Modhumita, eds) and Between the Heart and the Land: Entre el corazón y la tierra (Cardenas and Vázquez, eds.). The following entry reflects the group’s discussion last week.

 

Why TA for Environmental Justice?

By: Andy and Riley

 

Environmental (in)justice can be seen all around us if we take the time to look. Some people and places have been disproportionately affected by environmental hazards. The environmental hazards created by some that negatively impact certain people and communities cannot be justified. Their voices deserve to be heard. Those concerns deserve to be recognized. That is what we try to engage in classes such as this.

 

Environmental justice, or any justice, isn’t an action, a set of skills, knowledge, or an outcome.  It is a process. Processes go beyond deadlines and do not stop at accomplishments. The work is done by participating, learning, embodying, creating, changing, empowering, among others. The majority of academic work is impersonal, pushed towards objectivity, and lacking in the engagement of process work.  How are we to make the world a better place as we become more capable through our time at Huxley?

 

Western is implementing an environmental justice minor. As this is an interdisciplinary program, it is difficult to form a student cohort. The Environmental Studies Department offers a new seminar that allows students with interests in environmental justice to join with others with the same interest. With students from all over Western, participating in the class as facilitators seemed like a good way to see how environmental justice expresses itself academically across campus.  As teaching facilitators for this course in Environmental Justice, we both came into it with different experiences.

 

For one of us (Andy): I wanted to participate in the Environmental Justice seminar to have a class where we can critique what is going on around us right now. I am involved in the environmental and social justice process through various roles outside of the classroom. In most of those cases, I get to participate as a listener and a learner, and in this class I get to take the role of facilitator, doing my best to offer listening and learning to the voices that we find through stories, poems, speeches, mythology, documents, and other texts from our class.

 

I like to view my own social justice process as practice related. Instead of focusing too much on myself and how I can be a “better” person, I like to think practically how I can do better things, or more frequently, do the same things in a better way. Becoming a “better” person is problematic in an unjust world, so it often seems more productive to focus my efforts on the unjust world instead of myself.

 

For the other (Riley): I wanted to facilitate teaching in environmental justice because as an undergrad I had not had the opportunity to be in a class like this. I had never heard of environmental justice specifically until coming to Western. I came from a Northern Minnesota university in the middle of the Iron Range where no one really talked about environmental justice. When the copper sulfide mines were buying land in Northern Minnesota in 2015, the hot topic was the environmental impact on the waterways and the impacts on the Boundary Waters. When I heard of this class at Western, I realized I had not been exposed to the human injustice side of environmental issues. What better way to learn, but by teaching and facilitating it? This commitment was stronger than being a student in the class for me. It has taught me how to approach these topics and talk about them with a group of people with different backgrounds and different perspectives to bring forward.

 

Facilitating this course, we are exposed to more perspectives, more stories, and more voices. These experiences are only a small amount of the giant whole, but this is where we can start.