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Grassroots Activism: An Exploration of Women of Color's Role in the Environmental Justice Movement
Abstract
Women of color are the precious jewels of the environmental justice movement because without them the movement would be stagnant, non-existent or similar to other social movements in the United States. Women make up the majority of the Environmental Justice Movement and they are the engine that drives the movement. This exploratory article provides the history of how women of color have taken the lead in the environmental justice movement and places their contributions in the broader context of race and class inequalities and social injustice issues.
... The United States (U.S.) has been plagued by a history of oppressive environmental and educational policies and practices that have disproportionate impacts on people of color (Voyles 2015) and women and girls (Lowe 2017;Mitten et al. 2017;Rainey and Johnson 2009). As awareness of these biases and injustices gradually increases, there has been a fieldwide reckoning in science and environmental education, calling out the pervasive ways in which in the field has historically uplifted Western ways of knowing, thus perpetuating the exclusion of communities of color (Atwater 2010;Bratman and DeLince 2022;McLean 2013;Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy 2014). ...
... A critical question facing the OEE field, however, is the extent to which OEE experiences have positive outcomes for youth that have been historically excluded and alienated in both science and environmental education, namely girls, youth of color, and girls of color. OEE experiences have not been equally accessible and welcoming to all, particularly to people of color (Finney 2014;Lewis and James 1995;McLean 2013;Romero et al. 2022a) and girls/women (Lowe 2017;Mitten et al. 2017;Rainey and Johnson 2009). OEE programs are at the intersection of three broader fields that all have deep histories of exclusion and discrimination: science (e.g. ...
... In addition to contributing to literature on the value of OEE programs for supporting youth to develop positive dispositions, this study adds new insights in an area previously underexplored: the impact of OEE programs for youth of color, girls, and girls of color. The need to expand this body of literature is imperative given the history of exclusion, erasure, and marginalization of women/girls and communities of color in the environmental education field, as well as in STEM fields more broadly (Haluza-Delay 2013; Lowe 2017, Rainey and Johnson 2009;Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy 2014;Voyles 2015). Results showed an outsized impact for girls and youth of color on science and environmental dispositions compared with their male and White peers, respectively, these findings point to the value of OEE experiences to provide a positive and affirming space for youth who frequently feel erased and excluded within STEM learning opportunities and career pursuits. ...
Outdoor environmental education (OEE) programs can provide a valuable entry point for youth of color and
girls who may have felt excluded and/or marginalized from traditional science learning experiences. This study
investigated: (1) Can OEE programs contribute to the development of positive dispositions toward science and
the environment?, and (2) Are there differences in effects by racial/ethnic and gender identity, or interactions
thereof? Youth (n = 457; grades 4-6, approximate ages 9-12) reported their dispositions toward science and the
environment along 5 scales before and after participating in OEE programs. Results found growth across all
subscales for youth overall. Girls showed stronger effects than boys, and youth of color showed stronger
effects than White youth. Girls of color showed particularly strong growth in Comfort in Nature. The
implications of these results, particularly as a challenge to long-standing biases and inequities in the field, are discussed.
... International policymaking organizations like the United Nations are influenced by the dominant green movement whose core concern is conservation (Rainey & Johnson, 2009;United Nations, 1968). The green movement in the US and Europe is predominantly white as can be seen from the recent climate marches in those regions. ...
... communities of color all across the world (Martiskainen et al., 2020;Rainey & Johnson, 2009). MOS research can focus on climate grassroots organizing and study multistakeholder collaborations that prioritize the voices and needs of communities of color. ...
In this paper, we are situated in postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist epistemologies to study environmental racism in the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch where human activity has changed the functioning of the earth. Drawing from critiques of the Anthropocene, the concept of racial capitalism, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship, we show how proposed solutions to the climate crisis overlook and may even exacerbate racial injustices faced by communities of color. We contend that a climate justice agenda that is grounded on racial justice is necessary for our scholarship to develop a racially just management and organization studies (MOS). To accomplish this agenda, we propose three shifts: from studying elite institutions to researching grassroots organizations concerned with climate and racial justice, from uncritical endorsement of global technologies to studying local adaptation by communities of color, and from offering decontextualized climate solutions to unraveling racial histories that can help us address racial and climate injustices. We discuss the implications of these shifts for management research and education and argue that MOS cannot afford to ignore climate justice and racial justice—they are both inextricably linked, and one cannot be achieved without the other.
... Ecocultural identities are formed and performed within intersections -including those of race, class, gender, ability, and age (Parks, 2020;Thomas, 2020). In the present study's focus on environmental activism, especially relevant are intersections of gender, age, and race as, recently, women, often particularly young women of color, have been pivotal in leading and participating in contemporary environmental and climate movements (Fisher, 2019;Rainey & Johnson, 2009;Crandall & Cunningham, 2022). While the recent high visibility is striking, it's important to note that historically women's activism leadership roles in previous times were often backgrounded, overlooked, and under-documented. ...
... Feminist approaches have also shaped EJ organizing. This is not surprising given that women make up an estimated 90 percent of members of U.S EJ groups (Rainey and Johnson 2009), and a majority of the leadership of these organizations (Taylor 2015). Feminist or woman-centered organizing centers power relationships, and often develops political analyses and actions for women's empowerment that are grounded in their personal experience of sexism in the "private" spheres of home, work, and culture. ...
Community-Engaged Research (CER) often involves partnerships between academic or professional researchers and community organizers. Critical CER and organizing each aim to mobilize people and resources to produce actionable knowledge in order to build grassroots leadership and power that promote equity and justice for marginalized communities. This article argues that critical CER collaborations can benefit by carefully matching the choice of research methods with community partners’ organizing strategies to ensure that research aligns with and supports organizing goals. We aim to add to the CER literature a more specific rationale for why professional researchers should share control over the choice of research methods with community organizers, and more detailed guidance for how CER teams can select methods that best advance organizers’ goals. After summarizing the many ways in which collaborative research can support community organizing efforts, we argue that different CER methods align best with widely-used organizing approaches (including Alinskyite, Freirean, feminist, community building and resilience-based, and transformative approaches). We illustrate the discussion with examples of research conducted by and with organizations rooted in the environmental justice (EJ) movement, which prioritizes community organizing as a strategy and draws from multiple organizing traditions, including a case study of research techniques used by the Environmental Health Coalition, one of the oldest EJ groups in the U.S.
... The idea that people and groups least responsible for climate issues suffer the most severe consequences, despite not being responsible for causing for climate issues, is an important driving force for climate protesters (Han and Ahn, 2020). As such, protesters notice relative deprivation between social groups (the disproportionate burden of environmental hazards placed on less privileged people in terms of socio-economic status, Rainey and Johnson, 2009) and continents (the global South will be first to suffer the burden of climate change, Bond et al., 2020;Piispa and Kiilakoski, 2021). Therefore, social injustices and intercontinental injustices shape protesters' judgments of unfairness. ...
In this manuscript, we introduce a theoretical model of climate radicalization that integrates social psychological theories of perceived unfairness with historical insights on radicalization to contribute to the knowledge of individuals’ processes of radicalization and non-radicalization in relation to climate change. We define climate radicalization as a process of growing willingness to pursue and/or support radical changes in society that are in conflict with or could pose a threat to the status quo or democratic legal order to reach climate goals. We describe how perceptions of unfairness can play a pivotal role in processes of climate change related radicalization. Without taking any position or judgment regarding climate concerns and associated actions, we suggest that although these behaviors drive many people to participate in peaceful climate protest, they may also lead others to radicalize into breaking the law to achieve their climate goals, possibly in violent ways. This process of climate radicalization, we argue, can be driven by people perceiving certain situations to be blatantly unfair. Specifically, we discuss how radical attitudes and behaviors can be products of perceived unfairness stemming from the past, the future, the immediate social environments of perceivers, as well as those that are spatially distant from them. We further argue that because radicalization processes are shaped by an interaction between individuals and movements, on the one hand, and societal actors and developments, on the other, they tend to develop in non-linear and dynamic ways. We therefore propose that climate radicalization is a (1) dynamic, contingent, and non-linear process, often of an escalating (and sometimes de-escalating) kind, (2) that develops over time, (3) through various interactions between individuals and their contexts, and (4) in which people and groups move back and forth from peaceful protest, through disobedient and unlawful methods, to violent actions. Implications, strengths, and limitations of our model are discussed.
Building a beautiful China is one of the important components of the “China Dream.” To realize the dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, it is necessary to enter a new era of ecological social development, one that is characterized by respect for and protection of nature.
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