Purpose and scope
Environmental justice and its corollary, environmental racism are at the heart of the issues that we study in this course. Whether were talking about the construction of wilderness (Week 2), risks from natural disasters (Week 6), or hazardous waste and pollution (Week 7), it is poor and marginalized communities of color who are disproportionally affected by environmental harm and dispossession. Moreover, this unequal distribution of harm does not happen passively; often, those in power explicitly target (or strategically ignore) marginalized people of color when making decisions about siting factories, storing toxic waste, planning freeways, or outright pollution. Yet, communities are fighting back against environmental injustice and racism through longstanding organizing and activism. There are several success stories, but the struggle continues.
The aim of this second synthesis essay is to analyze this ongoing struggle for environmental justice among communities of color in Los Angeles. You will use an online environmental justice tracker to explore the distribution of environmental harm across the region. You will read a scholarly article that traces the distribution of toxicity in L.A. to white privilege and (racialized) decisions by those in power. Your essay will then synthesize your insights from the tracker, the reading, and what we have learned in the course so far.
Write an essay that examines historical and current environmental racism in L.A.
To prepare to write your essay, you will need to complete two tasks:
Visit the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) environmental justice screening and mapping tool, called EJSCREEN (epa.gov/ejscreen). Follow these steps:
Zoom in on the Los Angeles region (I will give a demo in class).
Choose an environmental indicator from the list to add to your map. You can only choose one indicator at a time, but you should examine several. You will probably need to zoom in closer on your map to see detail.
Choose a demographic indicator from the list and add to your map. You can only choose one indicator at a time, but you should examine several. Indicators of particular interest are race (minority population) and class (low-income).
Think about the distribution of harms and their correlation with race and class. What areas of L.A. are more exposed to harm? Which are less exposed? What are the characteristics of the people that live there?
Read the 2000 article Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California (pp. 20-34 only) by Laura Pulido.
In your essay, address the following questions:
Choose one or two indicators. What is their source? What is their distribution?
What areas of Los Angeles are most affected by the indicators you chose?
What are the race and class characteristics of the affected areas?
What does Pulidos account of environmental racism and white privilege tell you about the patterns that you see? [Be specific, and spend most of your time/words on this question.]
A link to the EJSCREEN tool and a PDF of the article are on Brightspace in the Assessment tab.
Essays should be uploaded as a PDF document through the submission portal in the Assessment tab on Brightspace. You may upload as many versions as you like; only the last version will be kept. All submissions will be run through Turnitin.
Note that you do not need to use any additional sources for this essay: just the EJSCREEN tool and the Pulido article. Citations and a bibliography are not required. If you use a quote from the Pulido article in your essay, you should include its page number in parentheses. You can of course draw upon other readings from the course or from other courses if you wish.
this is the EJSCREEN website https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/
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