Environmental Justice in Humboldt County

May 23, 2023

Catriona Barr, Claire Anderson, Tina Orton-Owens, and Winston Grady (Cal Poly Humboldt)

Figure 1. Word cloud created using responses to the question , “In your own words, please define what environmental justice means to you.”

BACKGROUND

The Northcoast Environmental Center (NEC) is at a turning point. Founded and subsequently focused on conservation issues for more than fifty years, it is time to expand the organization’s mission to one that makes connections between environmental issues and social justice issues. However, the specifics of what this shift to environmental justice looks like for the NEC is unclear.

Over the past few months, the NEC has partnered with a team of Cal Poly Humboldt graduate students to create and distribute a survey aimed at better understanding perceptions of environmental justice held by the Cal Poly Humboldt student body and the NEC’s members. The data collected from the survey will be used to inform the NEC’s actions and forms of engaging with the community moving forward.

THE RISE OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

When most people think of environmentalism, they think of protests denouncing logging of old growth forests or calls to save the whales. Environmental laws and organizations founded in the 1970s emphasized conservation: protecting the biodiversity of wildlife and preserving natural habitats as untouched wilderness.

However, in the 1980s, the modern environmental justice movement emerged as a counterpoint to this “mainstream environmentalism,” which activists critiqued as too elite, too white, and too focused on beautiful scenery and charismatic species. Sparked by opposition to the disposal of PCB-laced soil in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Warren County, North Carolina, the environmental justice movement draws attention to the uneven distribution of environmental harms and benefits, based on markers of social position like race, ethnicity, class, and gender.

Overall, the environmental justice movement centers equity as its main concern and advocates for expanding conceptions of environmental problems to include not just the “wilderness” but the full range of natural and built environments where people “live, work, learn, and play.”

Rather than focusing on elite forms of advocacy like litigation or lobbying, the strategies of the environmental justice movement center around grassroots activism and empowering poor people and people of color who live with the most severe environmental problems.

SURVEY CREATION AND DISTRIBUTION

For the NEC to effectively engage with the Humboldt County community on issues of environmental justice, a few knowledge gaps needed to be addressed. To do so, the NEC and the Cal Poly Humboldt graduate students crafted a survey with 17 open-ended and multiple choice/short response questions. These questions prompted respondents to consider their own definition of environmental justice and the injustices they may have witnessed in their community.

The survey was distributed to the NEC’s internal mailing list, a randomly generated list of 300 Cal Poly Humboldt students, and through in-person tabling events on Cal Poly Humboldt’s Campus. Over 200 responses were collected.

QUESTIONS AND RESPONSE

Overall, respondents self-identified as familiar with environmental justice: 78 percent indicated they felt moderately to extremely familiar with the term. This knowledge came from a range of sources, with school and the media holding the top two spots (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Response to the question “where does your knowledge of Environmental Justice come from?”

Respondents were asked how concerned they are about environmental justice after being provided with the following definition:

A social movement to address the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to harms from hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses. It arose in response to environmental racism and unequal distribution of environmental harm experienced by communities of color and low-income communities and seeks 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.

A majority of respondents were at least moderately concerned about environmental justice, with 48 percent identifying as extremely concerned (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Response to “Based on the previous definition, how concerned are you about environmental justice?

Despite major concern for environmental justice issues, several barriers prevent students in particular from joining local environmental groups.

Unsurprisingly, a lack of time was identified as the biggest barrier preventing respondents from joining a local environmental organization. A lack of familiarity with local organizations and other knowledge constraints was the second biggest barrier.

Respondents were asked to identify the environmental justice issues of most importance to them out of the provided list (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Response to the question “Which of the following Environmental Justice issues are most important to you? Please choose 3.”

Water contamination and climate change were overwhelmingly identified as the biggest concern. The respondents that selected “other” identified urban planning, logging, wildlife habitat, and watershed restoration as issues of concern as well.

NEXT STEPS

For updates on upcoming events visit yournec.org.