Environmental Justice Close to Home

By Allison Greener, Matt Jones and Sydne Tursky

Each quarter, a group of students, faculty, and staff at WWU join together to read and discuss recent environmental justice texts. In Spring 2021, the group is reading Harriet A. Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste. This post reflects and extends our discussion.

This quarter, while reading A Terrible Thing to Waste by Harriet Washington, our class learned about environmental and racial injustice through health hazards. The reading was heavy and depressing, and often made us feel hopeless as we read about how communities have been failed by matters outside their control. To combat our feelings of despair, we discussed examples of organizations that do environmental justice well, and we will be sharing more about some local examples in the paragraphs to follow.

Community to Community

Community to Community Development (C2C) is a women-led organization local to Bellingham that focuses on systemic change and food sovereignty with respect to environmental justice. C2C’s current projects include fighting for farmworker rights and transforming the food system in their fight for food sovereignty. Improving the ability to which people can have control over the food that they eat is a large priority for C2C. This may be as simple as knowing where your food came from, or being able to create your own food sources. C2C has also worked with immigrant voters to educate them on democratic participation and fighting for the legalization of and equal rights for undocumented immigrants in their fight for participatory democracy. One of C2C’s primary missions as an organization is to “strive to reclaim our humanity by redefining power in order to end structural racism and all of its manifestations…” (http://www.foodjustice.org/mission).

Common Threads

While reading Harriet Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste, we learned just how important nutrition is to growing bodies. Not acquiring proper nutrition can weaken a child’s immune system, causing them to be more susceptible to illness, disease, and other environmental onslaughts. One non-profit organization located here in Bellingham, the Common Threads Farm, is working to combat childhood malnourishment.

Common Threads Farm considers their approach to be “seed to table,” by helping to educate children about food production, as well as environmental stewardship, through school gardening programs, after-school cooking and gardening classes, and programs in affordable housing complexes. This group works to ensure that kids have access to healthy food, but also get kids excited to learn about healthy food and get involved in the production of the food themselves. In one parent’s testimonial, they observed that their child was so much more excited about eating kale when they were able to grow and prepare it themselves.

Common Threads Farm acknowledges that injustices in regards to food are intertwined with issues of racial justice. Their equity statement and more information about how they commit to fighting racial injustice in their work can be found here: https://commonthreadsfarm.org/about/equity-statement/

Camp 210/BOP Mutual Aid

Houselessness is often viewed as a social problem, but unsafe or unclean living conditions can lead to serious health problems for affected individuals as they are literally exposed to their surrounding environment in ways housed people are not. Here in Bellingham, houselessness has been at the forefront of local conversation for the past year. Camp 210 began in November 2020 as a protest dedicated to raising awareness about houselessness in Bellingham. Housing activists and unhoused people occupied the lawn of Bellingham City Hall until police cleared the area in late January. Though that protest is over, BOP (Bellingham Occupied Protest) Mutual Aid is using Instagram to raise money and gather donations to care for unhoused people. They currently provide food and other supplies to community members with the ultimate goal of reforming housing policy in the area. Check out their work HERE.

Examples of environmental injustice are all around us, but we hope that these examples provide some relief from the constant onslaught of negative news. Activists are tirelessly working to promote environmental equity and justice, even in our own backyard. We encourage you to continue learning, continue growing, and to get involved wherever and however you can.