Week 4 Reflection

The readings this week were primarily concerned the way in which certain voices, particularly black people, women, and people of color, have been silenced, while others, such as middle-class white males, have been elevated to a point where they don't understand the limits they've imposed on their own agendas by being so uninclusive.  Earlier in the week, this was demonstrated in Peggy Franklin's article in which she discussed the role of mothers' voices.  Women, especially women with children, in environmental justice roles tend to focus on care for their communities and the health and wellness of children.  These women historically have been disregarded and ignored due to societal controls on knowledge production, meaning that some people (i.e. powerful white men) are considered experts and praised and supported in their production and distribution of knowledge, whereas average citizens or marginalized peoples are treated as if their knowledge is not valuable or valid.  That's not to say that activist mothers cannot work around this rigged system, as Dolores Huertas serves as an example of a mother who became the face of a movement for farmers' rights.  Since women from all different backgrounds often find themselves silenced, Kurtz's article about gender and environmental justice acts as an example of women coming together across racial lines to organize and advocate for themselves.  In the Thursday readings, some of the focus shifts towards highlighting the unfair power dynamic in environmental justice primarily between middle-class white men and black women.  According to Dorceta Taylor, the history of environmentalism has really just been whitewashed as a history of middle-class white men, despite the innumerable revolutionary contributions black women and other people of color have made to the movement.  In order for the overall movement to be effective, all of the smaller grassroots movements need to organize together and be included in the mainstream efforts.  The white men in charge, however, are uninclusive and do not see the limits they put on their own agenda by refusing to understand the intersectional class, gender, sexual orientation, occupational, and political identities that affect non-cishet white males.  

One of the articles that struck me the most was the Project Muse article because it discussed the need to use the language of human rights to frame discussions on environmental justice.  The article talked about Gay McDougal and how she believed that this language empowers people and reminds them that they do have rights that deserve to be protected and enforced.  This made me think more about how climate justice is more than just an issue of protecting our planet or changing our government policies.  By not actively pursuing a more just strategy for combatting climate change, we are essentially trampling on the human rights of the people who will feel the biggest impacts and burdens from climate change.  The people who feel these affects the most tend to be women in the Global South, people of color in communities in America that have become dumping sites for environmental waste, and LGBTQ+ communities.  The people making laws and deciding whose human rights are worth protecting are predominantly privileged white men, which means their rights are the only ones really being considered in those conversations.  

One keyword and example from the text that stuck with me was the "toxic tours" that McDougal would conduct to draw attention to affected areas in southeast Chicago.  These tours, amongst her other achievements and protests, earned her the title "Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement."  The same article also discussed "witnessing", which is essentially a practice used by black people in the Christian faith in which someone shares their spiritual beliefs publicly through personal testimonials.  This practice influenced the later practice of people in EJ meetings who have been affected coming forward and sharing their devastating, impactful stories regarding their own experiences with environmental racism and injustice.  It is both an emotional and spiritual way to express the ways in which one has been hurt by climate change and racist climate policies in a humanistic way.  In these testimonials, these victims are witnesses to the truth.  In Unger's article for Tuesday, the concept of selective reproduction is discussed in which women make reproductive choices based on the goal of maintaining their relationship to the land and keeping that balance.