Abstract:

This article explores women’s pathways to participation in environmental justice advocacy in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Many scholars find that women become environmental justice activists according to a common set of experiences in which apolitical women personally experience an environmental problem that launches them into a life activism to protect the health of their families. Although a small group of the 25 women the author interviewed fit this description, overall the interviews reveal a much more diverse array of paths into environmental justice activism. The author’s data complicate the idea that environmental justice activism is the first political activity for most women environmental justice activists and that they are motivated to become activists primarily in order to protect the health of their families. The author discusses the significance of these findings and concludes with a call for scholars to revisit the question of women’s pathways into environmental justice activism.

Perkins, Tracy. 2012. “Women’s Pathways into Activism: Rethinking the Women’s Environmental Justice Narrative in California’s San Joaquin Valley.” Organization & Environment 25(1):76-94.

Since it was my first time teaching the class, I focused on getting the syllabus and lectures in order and didn’t get particularly creative with the class assignments and evaluations (5 pop quizzes, a take-home midterm and a take-home final).  Hopefully there will be opportunities for that later.  Instead, I chose a fairly straightforward lecture format interspersed with discussion, small group-work, movies and multi-media clips.

I’ve pasted the readings below, and added links and short descriptions of some of the things I did in class.  You can also find a complete version of the syllabus with the rest of my syllabus collection here.

I.       Understanding Environmental Inequality

January 9^th               Introduction

• Perkins, Tracy and Julie Sze. 2011. “Images from the Central Valley.” Boom:  A Journal of California 1(1):70-80.

Ice-breaker: Share Squares

Video: Youth On Fire

January 11^th             Toxic distribution

• Lerner, Steve. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Introduction
• Bullard, Robert, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries.
  • Ch. 4: A Current Appraisal of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States – 2007

Lecture activity: My Town, Your Town.  I adapted the activity for use in lecture as described at the bottom of the link.

Visual: I showed some of my photos from the 25 Stories from the Central Valley exhibit

January 13^th               Conceptualizing the environment and environmentalism

• Gottlieb, Robert. 1993. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
  • Introduction: Where We Live, Work and Play
• Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
  • Ch. 1, pgs 22-25.
  •  Letter, Circa Earth Day 1990.
  • Principles of Environmental Justice. The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. 1991

Lecture aid: What Is the Environment and What Do People Do There?

Video: Bird Like Me (5:48). I asked the students the following questions to get discussion going: What tensions did you see in the film? What different conceptions of the environment did you see? How does Wyatt Cenac feel about the Audubon Society’s involvement in Turkey Creek?  How do the residents feel? You can read my other posts on using this Daily Show clip in the classroom here and here.

January 16^th              Holiday

January 18^th             Cumulative impacts of toxic exposure      

Guest speaker: Jonathan London (UC Davis)

• London, Jonathan, Ganlin Huang and Tara Zagofsky. 2011. Land of Risk/ Land of Opportunity: Cumulative Environmental Vulnerability in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Davis, CA: UC Davis Center for Regional Change.

January 20^th             Resource Extraction

Guest speaker: Flora Lu (UCSC – Latin American and Latino Studies)

• Lu, Flora. “Petroleum Extraction, Indigenous People and Environmental Injustice in the Ecuadorian Amazon.” In International Environmental Justice.  Frederick Gordon and Gregory Freeland, Co-Editors. ILM Publishers. Forthcoming.       

January 23^rd              Accidents and Disasters

• Harrison, Jill. 2006. “’Accidents’ and Invisibilities: Scaled Discourse and the Naturalization of Regulatory Neglect in California’s Pesticide Drift Conflict.” Political Geography, 25(5), 506-529.

Activity: I asked the students to 1.) create a definition of an accident and come up with examples and 2.) discuss and take notes on when something ceases to be an accident and becomes ‘something else,’ and to come up with more examples of what the ‘something else’ might look like.

After we discussed their work, I asked the students to consider why it matters if something is determined to be an accident or not. We then made two lists of words on the chalkboard.  In one column we put words that are used to describe problems as individual and unique, and in the other column we put words used to describe broad societal problems.  Column A filled up with words like “bad apple,” “bad actor,” “individual,” “accidental,” “the exception, not the rule,” “local,” and “outlier.”  Column B filled up with words like “structural,” “widespread,” “patterned,” “everyday,” etc.

January 25^th             International development

• Agyeman, Julian, Robert D. Bullard, and Bob Evans, eds. 2003. Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Ch. 1: “Environmental Space, Equity and the Ecological Debt” by Duncan McLaren

January 27^th              Barriers to political participation

• Cole, Luke and Sheila Foster. 2001. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
  • Ch. 5. Processes of Struggle: Grassroots Resistance and the Structure of Environmental Decision-Making

• Corburn, Jason. 2005. Street Science: Community Knowledge and Environmental Health Justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Introduction
• Shearer, Christine. 2011. Kivalina: A Climate Change Story. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
  • Ch. 1: Blueprint for Denial

Video: A Debilitating Medical Mystery (7:23) I asked the students to analyze the video based on the content of the reading assignment.

February 1^st               Women and advocacy

• Wallace, Aubrey. 1993. Eco-Heroes: Twelve Tales of Environmental Victory. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House.
  • Mrs. Gibbs Goes to Washington.
• Perkins, Tracy. 2012. “Women’s Pathways Into Activism: Rethinking the Women’s Environmental Justice Narrative in California’s San Joaquin Valley.” Organization & Environment 25(1):76-94.

February 3^rd                 Take home midterm

II.      What Causes Environmental Inequality?

February 6^th               Regulations, the market, social capital and discrimination

• Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
  • Ch. 3: Theories of Causation 

Activity: The Story of Luis.  See pages 3-4 in chapter 26 of Helping Health Workers Learn.  I used this story to help train the students to analyze root causes of social problems. I read the story aloud and then asked the question, “Why did Luis die?” However, since I did not think the students would answer in the linear fashion modeled on pg. 4, I had them call out as many possible causes of Luis’s death as they could think of in no particular order.  As they called them out, I wrote down their answers on the board in loose columns. The columns on the left were the most individualized (“he stepped on a thorn”) and the columns on the right were the most social (“global capitalism fosters social inequality”).

February 8^th               Regulatory Failure

• Bernstein, M. 1955. Regulating Business by Independent Commission. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pgs. 74-95.
• Rechtschaffen, Clifford, Eileen Gauna and Catherine A. O’Neill. 2009. Environmental Justice: Law, Policy and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.
  • Ch. 5: Regulation and the Administrative State, pgs. 140-143

February 10^th             Colonialism                                                    

• Cronon, William. 1983. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang.
  • Ch. 4: Bounding the Land
  • Ch. 5: Commodities of the Hunt

Movie: In the Light of Reverence (77 min., available on Netflix)

February 13^th             Commodification of land and labor

• Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
  • Chapters 3-6 

February 15^th             Capitalism

• Faber, Daniel. 2008. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
  • Ch. 1: “Not All People Are Polluted Equal: The Environmental Injustices of American Capitalism.”

Video: Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground (20:29)

III.          What is being done?

February 17^th             Protecting individual communities

• Cole, Luke and Sheila Foster. 2001. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press.
  • Preface: We Speak for Ourselves: The Struggle of Kettleman City

February 20^th             Holiday

February 22^nd            Policy advocacy, electoral politics and the courts in the US

• Website: Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment. http://www.crpe-ej.org/crpe/. Read entries under “Campaigns” including: Civil Rights, Clean Air, Dairies, Climate Justice, National, Forgotten Voices, Don’t Waste the Valley, Pesticides, and Power to the People.
• Website: The Women’s Foundation of California – Women’s Policy Institute. http://www.womensfoundca.org/site/c.aqKGLROAIrH/b.982359/k.8397/Womens_Policy_Institute.htm
• Website: Communities for a New California. http://www.anewcalifornia.org/
• Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Ch. 10: “Environmental Justice and the Legal System” by Holly D. Gordon and Keith I. Harley.

February 24^th             International advocacy

• Carmin, JoAnn and Julian Agyeman. 2011. Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders: Local Perspectives on Global Injustices. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Ch. 7: “Global Environmental Governance and Pathways for the Achievement of Environmental Justice” by Beth Schaefer Caniglia
• Keefe, Patrick Radden. 2012. “Reversal of Fortune.” The New Yorker, Jan. 9, 38-49.

February 27^th             Research

• Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Ch. 4: “Mission Impossible? Environmental Justice Activists’ Collaborations with Professional Environmentalists and with Academics” by Sherry Cable, Tamara Mix, and Donald Hastings.

Activity 1: We made a list of common problems that arise between activists and academics in one column, and in a second column listed explanations for these problems.

Activity 2: Students got a chance to see a real world example of how one group of academics and activists are trying to work together productively. I handed out copies of the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project’s “Principles of Collaboration” document. You can see them here.  Students read them individually and identified where they saw the activists’ interests being protected and where they saw the academics’ interests being protected.

Lecture aid: 25 Stories from the Central Valley project overview.  An alternate example of an academic (me) trying to work productively with activist groups.

February 29^th             Market-based vs. command-and-control environmental management

• Rosenbaum, Walter A. 2008. Environmental Politics and Policy. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
  • Ch. 5: More Choice: The Battle Over Regulatory Economics

Video: The Story of Cap and Trade (9:56)  I asked the students to watch for 1) tensions between market-based and command-and-control regulation and 2) potential environmental justice implications of cap-and-trade regulation of greenhouse gases.

March 2^nd                   Government Responses

• London, Sze, Liévanos. 2008. “Problems, Promise, Progress and Perils: Critical Reflections on Environmental Justice Policy Implementation in California.” UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy 26(2):255-290.

March 5^th                   Cross-movement organizing

Guest speaker: Catalina Garzón (Pacific Institute)

• Gonzalez, Priscilla A., Meredith Minkler, Analilia P. Garcia, Margaret Gordon, Catalina Garzón, Meena Palaniappan, Swati Prakash, and Brian Beveridge. 2011. “Community-Based Participatory Research and Policy Advocacy to Reduce Diesel Exposure in West Oakland, California.” American Journal of Public Health 101(S1):166-175.

IV.   Broadening the Lens

March 7^th                   Renewable Resources

Guest speaker: Bradley Angel (Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice)

• Nath, Ishan. 2010. “Cleaning Up After Clean Energy: Hazardous Waste in the Solar Industry.” Stanford Journal of International Relations XI(2):6-15.
• Matheny, Keith. 2011. “Solar Plans Pit Green vs. Green.” USA Today, June 2. Accessed Dec. 18, 2011.  (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2011-06-01-solar-energy-tortoise_n.htmf)
• 2011. “China: Villagers Protest at Zhejiang Solar Panel Plant.” BBC News Asia-Pacific, September 18. Accessed Dec. 18, 2011. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14963354)

March 9^th                   Climate Justice

• Sze, Julie, Gerardo Gambirazzio, Alex Karner, Dana Rowan, Jonathan London, and Deb Niemeier. 2009. “Best in Show? Climate and Environmental Justice Policy in California.” Environmental Justice 2(4): 179-184.
• Conant, Jeff. 2011. “Global Warming Law Shifts Responsibility from Polluters to Communities.”  AlterNet, April 21. Accessed Feb. 29, 2012. (http://www.alternet.org/environment/150687/’landmark’_global_warming_bill_outsources_solutions,_putting_the_burden_on_poor_communities_in_california_and_mexico_[contains_photo_slideshow])

March 12^th                 Food Justice

Guest speaker: Alison Alkon (University of the Pacific)

• Alkon, Alison and Julian Agyeman, eds. 2011. Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • “Introduction: The Food Movement as Polyculture” by Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman
  • “Conclusion: Cultivating the Fertile Field of Food Justice” by Alison Alkon and Julian Agyemen

V.    Looking Back, Looking Forward

March 14^th                    Outcomes

• Pellow, David Naguib and Robert J. Brulle, eds. 2005. Power, Justice and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Ch. 1: “Power, Justice, and the Environment: Towards Critical Environmental Justice Studies” by David Naguib Pellow and Robert J. Brulle
  • Ch. 5: “Who Wins, Who Loses? Understanding Outcomes of Environmental Injustice Struggles” by Melissa Toffolon-Weiss and Timmons Roberts

March 16^th                 Moving forward

• Bullard, Robert, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright. 2007. Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: 1987-2007: Grassroots Struggles to Dismantle Environmental Racism in the United States. Cleveland, OH: United Church of Christ Justice and Witness Ministries.
  • Ch. 2: Environmental Justice Timeline – Milestones 1987-2007
• Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Hope in the Dark. New York: Verso.
  • Ch. 1: Looking into Darkness
  • Ch. 10: Changing the Imagination of Change
  • Ch. 12: The Angel of Alternate History
  • Ch. 14: Getting the Hell Out of Paradise

Take home final

Bixler’s photos are entirely devoid of people – they depict industrial agriculture through the landscape and built environment it creates.  Matt Black’s photos, on the other hand, center on the immigrants and farmworkers living and working in the San Joaquin Valley.  They are entirely human. I enjoyed checking his captions to see if the small towns he has depicted were places I’ve spent time in too (mostly not).  He has also created a powerful digital project about the birth defects in Kettleman City.

David Bacon’s work doesn’t focus on the San Joaquin Valley per se, but he has a number of photo collections of farmworkers, immigrants, and UFW advocacy set there.  See his work here and here.

Finally, Ken Light’s new photographic book, Valley of Shadows and Dreams, will be published soon by Heyday Press.  I saw some of his work on this project when I took his documentary photography class several years ago at UC Berkeley, and can’t wait to see the finished product.  Check out the photo on the book’s cover, it’s gorgeous.

And, here’s a link to my own humble efforts to photograph the San Joaquin Valley.  I try to show the grave environmental health problems facing this region, but also the hard work being done by its residents to change things. I also try to convey my sense of this under-appreciated part of our state as beautiful in its own right. An updated version of this collection will be online soon, as well as a nifty new collage that combines new photos with oral history.

I first began working with Greenaction when I was conducting my master’s research at UC Davis.  I approached Greenaction’s executive director, Bradley Angel, as well as leaders at a number of other organizations active in the Central Valley, to pitch them my research project and ask for help finding people to interview.  Bradley became a member of the advisory committee that later helped me develop the 25 Stories from the Central Valley project, and we’ve stayed in touch since.

My new role on the Greenaction board will provide interesting new opportunities and challenges.  The risk for scholars who are actively involved with the populations that they research is that they might find it difficult to step outside the group’s dominant views on their research topic to pursue their own analysis.  On the other hand, more intimate involvement often provides researchers access and insight into their research topic at a level that far exceeds what is available to more distant observers.  So far I’ve felt that the benefits outweigh the risks in my own work.  I’ve been explicit with my new colleagues that the opinions I express in my writing may not always agree with their own.  Certainly activists groups are very familiar with internal disagreement, so in a way this is nothing new.  Still, UCSC Prof. Flora Lu and I are the first scholars to ever sit on Greenaction’s board, so we’ll be taking things one step at a time.

Greenaction just celebrated their 15 year anniversary, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the rich history of West Coast environmental justice activism of which they’ve been an integral part. I’m also excited about this opportunity to give back to the community that has shared their lives and stories so generously with me.

Greenaction board members, staff and friends. Dec. 9, 2011.

Each of you are responsible for finding a news article, short video, cartoon, photo collection or other piece of media relevant to our readings once during the quarter. Your assignment is to select a media piece (10 min. max) that will help the rest of the students relate what we are reading about to current events, or help them understand one of the week’s theories better in its historical context.  E-mail me a link to this item the Friday before discussion section, along with a one page type-written paper describing how you suggest using the item in class and what its strengths and limitations are for understanding the relevant theory. 

I really liked this assignment.  I designed it primarily to give me ideas to use as a starting place for what to do in class each week, but it has educational value for the students too.  Each week I had between 5-8 one-page papers to skim for ideas.  I didn’t always end up using something that the students suggested, but they always got my mind moving in the right direction.

Sometimes I organized the entire class around one or more media pieces, and other times they played much more marginal roles.  I used them in a variety of ways:

When everything works well, the media pieces help make theory less abstract and more memorable, help students relate to theory by showing its relevance to current events, and test the boundaries of student understanding of theory by asking them to apply it in a new context and identify what parts of the theory fit and what don’t.

Next time I use this approach, I’d like to spend more time discussing the limitations of using the theory in question to interpret the media piece.  I expect this would help the students understand the theories in a more nuanced way, but I often ran out of time to do it.

Mini media library

Here are my favorite pieces. Some of these were submitted by students, some I found myself, and some are from other teaching assistants and faculty.  I did not use all of them in class.

Feudalism

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail clip

Marx

• Primitive accumulation: The Simpson’s Lard of the Dance episode, minutes 9:48-10:55
• Commodity fetishism:  The Meatrix
• Surplus labor: cartoon
• Estrangement/alienation: Against Nostalgia editorial on Steve Jobs, paragraphs 7 and 8; Simpsons opener by Banksy
• Relative and absolute surplus value: Against Nostalgia editorial on Steve Jobs, paragraphs 7 and 8; Modern Times featuring Charlie Chaplin
• Species-being: Rodin’s The Thinker
• Crises of capitalism: Occupy Wall-Street statement; animated lecture by David Harvey

Weber

• The iron cage of bureaucracy: Skeleton in Cubicle cartoon
• The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: The Rockefellers, minutes 21-23 and 30-34:45; The Call of the Entrepreneur news coverage and trailer; Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The god Factor); photo of church reflected in commercial building (skip the article it accompanies)
• Charismatic, traditional and rational-legal authority: online portraits of Ward Cleaver, Mother Teresa, George W. Bush,  Pope Benedict, Queen Elizabeth, JFK, Cesar Chavesz, and Andy Szasz (the professor teaching the lecture section of the course)
• Charismatic authority: speech by Martin Luther King Jr.; Cult of Personality music video by In Living Color

Durkheim

• Mechanical society: Baraka clip

The enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment

• Creation trailer
• Miss USA 2011 delegate interviews: “Should evolution be taught in schools?”
• The U.S. Bill of Rights

Foucault

• The docile/disciplined body; enclosure; normalizing judgement; partitioning; etc.: Another Brick in the Wall music-video by Pink Floyd; Social Studies reading by Tuli Kupferberg; mural of brains replaced with military helmet
• The panopticon: photo of Occupy Wall Street police tower; 1984 is already here news footage

This report was created by the authors with partners from the San Joaquin Valley through the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project.  I attended one or two of the group’s earliest meetings several years ago and have tracked their progress through conversations with the lead author (my former advisor Jonathan London) and the environmental justice advocates that are part of my own research.  I also donated a few of my photographs for use in the final report.

When I give guest-lectures on divisions between campus-community divides, I often use this project as an example of ways that scholars and activists can work together productively.  In particular, I find it helpful to show students the detailed agreements that the group worked out ahead of time to guide their collaboration.  Because the work of scholars and activists are judged in different ways, these kinds of guidelines can go a long way toward anticipating and resolving the tensions that often come up.  You can see their agreements (shared with the lead author’s permission), in this post.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers, which cannot be give you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything -
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will… gradually,
without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke