“Environmental justice has to do with the rights of all people to benefit equitably from the environment and to be equally protected from the effects of ... human exploitation of the environment."²

Learning Intention

This activity helps students "critically analyze messaging used by large, mainstream environmental organizations to identify settler colonial logics."¹

Overview¹

Have students research a large, mainstream climate justice and consider all the ways their messaging and actions employ notions of justice…[and] settler colonial logics. In what ways are questions of Indigenous peoples and relations to land taken up by these organizations?  Identify these logics and all the simple and complex ways they are used, for example from:

• Website design
• Language in the mission and vision statements
• Staff member demographics
• Celebrity ambassadors
• The way they process donations

Options and Reflection¹

• Contact the organization with a question you craft that relates to human-nature relationships.
• Find an organization or group whose work successfully challenges typical frameworks, and write them a letter to tell them your thoughts.
• Find that a group is performing what they think is a challenge, yet is still following a neoliberal logic. Explain this clearly in a correspondence you may wish to send to them.
• Define and discuss the term environmental racism. Research other examples of ways that environmental racism manifests in the world. How do settler colonial logics, and the logics of white superiority, manifest in environmental movements?
• What is the relationship between migration and the environment? Using examples, identify ways that environmental impacts force people around the world to leave their homes.

References

1. Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (eds.) (2018). Toward What Justice? Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education. New York: Routledge.
2. Washington, R.O., & Strong, D. (1996). A model for teaching environmental justice in a planning curriculum. College of Urban and Public Affairs (CUPA) Working Papers, 1991-2000. Paper 6.