Toward flourishing.

Posted on December 24, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

Sustainable development means using our unlimited mental and creative resources, not our limited natural resources. If this is true, as I believe it to be, then we need to develop more constructive ways to unleash these phenomenal mental and creative resources, and quickly. Currently, around the globe we waste human potential as wantonly and comprehensively as we lay waste to our environmental potential, and this is no surprise, as both actions are directly related. We need to understand that while there is growing human inequality, there will never be environmental quality.

We need to redouble our efforts toward flourishing: developing the capabilities and potential in all humans in order to live productively in a convivial manner within environmental limits. Failure to do so will end our ability to approach anything near the just and sustainable futures we are fully capable of.

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New agricultures, cultural diversity and foodways.

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

 

A Liberian immigrant picks African peppers at the Bowling Farm. Credit Marina Dominguez/NPR

Two agriculture related stories caught my attention recently.

One, on National Public Radio’s ‘All Things Considered’ entitled ‘Some US Farms Trade Tobacco for a Taste of Africa’ reported on George Bowling’s 60 acre farm in southern Maryland which has started growing African crops for the region’s 120,000 strong African population. The other, a piece in the New York Times, ‘When the Uprooted Put Down Roots’, highlighted the growth across the US in ‘refugee agriculture‘ among for example Somalis, Cambodians, Liberians, Congolese, Bhutanese and Burundians.

Together, these stories gave me pause to think about some research my students and I did last year on the potential in new agricultures to help us re-imagine what constitutes ‘local foods.’ Is it for example, what our increasingly diverse populations want to buy locally as culturally appropriate foods, or is it what should be grown locally according to the predominantly ecologically-focused local food movement?

Consider the following from the NYT article:

“New Roots [San Diego], with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego”.

Absent however in much of the popular discourse surrounding the local food movement and local food systems, has been an explicit recognition of the social justice and cultural concerns involving the ability of refugee, minority, economically marginalized and ‘new’ populations to produce, access and consume healthy and culturally appropriate foods. The local food movement has used ecological arguments in the main to tell us what should be grown, and has tended to focus on growing native food plants, especially plants local to a given (bio)region. It has also catered to mostly middle and upper income populations, with its food earning the moniker “Yuppie Chow,” due to the niche market status of organic and local foods, and the common focus on providing ecological sustainability, and sustainable incomes for small scale farmers rather than affordable healthy food and culturally appropriate foods for low income, ‘new’ and refugee populations.

In its most physically and spatially extreme form these low income, ‘new’ and refugee populations live in areas called food deserts (Wrigley, 2002). These ‘food deserts’ are the result of a history of disinvestment in and neglect of mostly low income urban (and rural) areas which have not been recognized as profitable sites for supermarket and grocery store location and have therefore been left with limited and often less healthy options for food access, such as corner stores and fast food establishments. The residents of these neighborhoods, such as City Heights, San Diego, where New Roots Community Farm is located, are more vulnerable to food insecurity and have less ability to determine their access to healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food as a result. As the NYT article notes: “In City Heights, where half the residents live at or below the federal poverty line, the three-year-old farmer’s market was the city’s first in a low-income neighborhood, a collaboration between the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and the San Diego County Farm Bureau.”

But food is far more than a product which merely sustains life. In our book ‘Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability‘, Alison Alkon and I note that:

“Winson (1993) refers to food as an “intimate commodity” that is literally taken inside the body and imbued with heightened significance. Not only is it a physiological necessity, but food practices—what scholars often call foodways —are manifestations and symbols of cultural histories and proclivities. As individuals participate in culturally defined proper ways of eating, they perform their own identities and memberships in particular groups (Douglass 1996). Food informs individuals’ identities, including their racial identities, in ways that other environmental justice and sustainability issues—energy, water, garbage and so on—do not”.

Food, food production, food access…. these are not the solely ecological concerns foregrounded by the dominant narrative, reducible to questions of environmental sustainability, vitally important though this is. Food and foodways are fundamental to peoples’ individual and collective identities, and these are even more to the fore in ‘new’ populations and other marginalized populations who are invisiblized by, and in the dominant culture.  As we move towards a more intercultural America, the local food movement(s) should recognize, embrace and celebrate cultural diversity as much as it currently celebrates biodiversity. As an ecology student in the 1970s, what was it our professors kept telling us about ecosystems? Oh yes, in ecosystems ‘diversity equals stability‘. I think this maxim works as well for social movements, like the local food movement, as it does for ecosystems………

References:

Douglass, M. (1996) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Purity and Taboo. New York: Taylor.

Winson, A. (1993) The Intimate Commodity. Toronto, Canada: Garamond Press.

Wrigley, N. (2002) “‘Food deserts’ in British cities: Policy context and research priorities’, Urban Studies, vol. 39, no. 11, pp. 2029-2040.

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The (frighteningly) fierce urgency of now.

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

Three years ago today, on October 10 2008, I wrote a blog for Britain’s Forum for the Future whose strapline is ‘action for a sustainable world’. They asked me as a British person, living in the U.S.A. (or Unsure State of America, as I then called it) to comment on the later stages of the 2008 Presidential Campaign and my response was this piece, The Fierce Urgency of Now:

“Thankfully, the 2008 presidential campaign just got a whole lot more serious. In fact the stakes really couldn’t be higher for the U.S. and for the whole planet. In the past month or so, we’ve moved smoothly and thankfully from lipstick on pigs, via Tina Fey (Saturday Night Live) on Governor Palin’s foreign policy experience, namely “I can see Russia from my house”, to debate the nitty-gritty policy positions of each respective campaign. Not a moment too soon in my book.

In my blog of July 7th, I wrote: “basically the American dream is fast becoming the American nightmare and the problem is that neither presidential candidate is prepared to redefine and dematerialize the dream”. I wrote that before the Wall Street and consequent global financial meltdown. That redefinition is even more crucial now.

The materialist, greed-driven meltdown is widely accepted as an indicator that our whole human enterprise on this planet is badly out of control. As Al Gore said in San Jose recently “I actually do think that the green revolution is the solution to the financial crisis, the national security crisis, the debt crisis and the climate crisis—they’re all connected.”

But is either presidential candidate really ready to go before the American people and talk down, dematerialize the dream? Is either prepared to emphasize the need for quality of life increases that would confer a sense of individual and community wellbeing, rather than tax giveaways that are somehow supposed to increase our standard of living? Are they really ready to say, in effect, less is more?

In his historic “Our moment is now” speech in Des Moines, Iowa on December 27 2007 in which he invoked Dr Martin Luther King’s notion of “the fierce urgency of now”, Obama said “we are at a defining moment in our history. Our nation is at war. Our planet is in peril. Our health care system is broken, our economy is out of balance, our education system fails too many of our children, and our retirement system is in tatters.” This was a wonderful set up to what I thought might be a joined-up discussion of the need for a more sustainable America. I waited, and waited………..

Yet a quick and dirty search of both candidate websites revealed that neither candidate is talking about sustainable development as a strategic overarching policy agenda recognizing as Gore does the interrelatedness of the crises we face and spanning a concern for both people and the planet. To be fair, Obama’s website does mention sustainable communities but only as a subset of his environmental policies. Even the Pope gets it. As he said on his recent tour of Australia there needs to be “agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the wellbeing of all while respecting environmental balances”.

The U.S. is clearly at a tipping point. We are in a paradigm shift. As ‘Earth Scholar’ Thomas Berry wrote: “It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story-the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it-is not functioning properly and we have not learned the new story”. The old dominant social paradigm, the neo-liberal story of how things are and came to be so, simply isn’t working. We need to write the new story, and quickly. Here, out of these cascading crises, I think we have a golden opportunity.

Obama has in many ways lifted us, filled us with hope and with a constellation of phrases that hint, but only hint, at an understanding of the real need for a new story. In one of those phrases he says: “together we will begin the next great chapter in the American story”. My question to you Barack is this: are we going to simply read a prewritten chapter, or are we going to start afresh, writing the chapter ourselves along more sustainable lines? That, Mr President-in-waiting, is the really fierce urgency of now.”

Yesterday, walking around the Occupy Boston site in Dewey Square in the October heatwave, with around 300 residents and many more sympathetic visitors, the message is no less vociferous than that of Occupy Wall Street. It’s a message that’s getting louder and clearer by the day: too many people are hurting, change is needed quickly and we need to write that new chapter along more just and sustainable lines. The question is, now President Obama, who will write that new chapter?

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What did your great-grandmother eat?

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

 

“Feminist social scientists use the term positionality to refer to the understanding that our lived experiences, particularly those of race, class, and gender, shape our worldviews. The food movement narrative is largely created by, and resonates most deeply, with white and middle class individuals. For example, Michael Pollan’s recently offered list of food rules (2007) is intended to guide consumers toward eating practices aligned with the food movement.

However, when Pollan begins his first rule by telling us not to “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food,” he ignores the fact that “our” great-grandmothers come from a wide variety of social and economic contexts that may have informed their perceptions of food quite differently. Some were enslaved, transported across the ocean, and forced to subsist on the overflow from the master’s table. Others were forcibly sent to state-mandated boarding schools, in which they were taught to despise, and even forget, any foods they would previously have recognized. And those who have emigrated from various parts of the global south in the past few generations may have great-grandmothers who saw the foods they recognized demeaned, or even forbidden, by those who claimed their lands. Of course it is not these histories that Pollan intends to invoke when he urges readers to choose fruits and vegetables over processed foods. But because of his privileged positionality, Pollan fails to consider the effects of race on food access and the alternative meanings his words may hold for people of color in the United States. In this same way, whites in the food movement often simply do not see the subtle exclusivities that are woven into its narrative.

This is not to say that some of the food movement’s insights, particularly those regarding the destructive nature of industrial agriculture, are not important. Indeed, many of the authors included in this volume are supporters and consumers of local and organic food. Among us are individual and community gardeners, former farm apprentices, members of community-supported agriculture projects, and farmers market shoppers. Nevertheless, for many of us, our involvement with the food movement, along with our academic training, has contributed to the belief that the dominant narrative described earlier, compelling as it may be to some, might drown out other stories. In these additional stories, food is not only linked to ecological sustainability, community, and health but also to racial, economic, and environmental justice.

Our goal in highlighting these additional stories is not to chastise the food movement, but to work toward building a stronger and deeper critique of industrialized agriculture, which includes injustice along with environmental and social degradation. If activists in the food movement are to go beyond providing alternatives and truly challenge agribusiness’s destructive power, they will need a broad coalition of supporters. We argue that such support can best be found in the low-income communities and communities of color that have been, and are currently, most deeply harmed by the food system. But this alliance will require that the food movement reach beyond its own dominant narrative to understand the experiences and perspectives of its potential allies”.

Excerpt from ‘Introduction: The Food Movement as Polyculture’ by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman from our book Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability

Reference.

Pollan, Michael (2007). Unhappy Meals. The New York Times Magazine, January 28. http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=87 (accessed October 27, 2009).

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“A new redundant elevator is installed”………

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

For those of you who read my recent Blog Danger. Overhead Catenary Wires are Alive!? you’ll understand I’m not an MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority), or more simply ‘T’ basher. I love it. We need it. I get it. I use it. But who’s in charge of communications? Read the notice above at Porter T Station.

Someone at MBTA Customer Communications please, please put me out of my abject and oxymoronic misery and tell me just what is a “new redundant elevator”………?

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The new leaders are waiting: Scaling up inclusion and diversity in environmental organizations.

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

 

Former Tufts student, TogetherGreen Fellow and Brooklyn Food Justice Activist Ajamu Brown's 2010 Earth Day Address, Times Square, NYC.

A posting by Helen Whybrow in ‘Saving Land’ the Land Trust Alliance’s newsletter entitled  2042 Today: Cultivating Conservation Leaders of the Future (Fall 2011) described a 2010 leadership retreat for diverse conservation leaders under 35 where ”for most of them, this [was] the first time they [had] been in a group of conservationists where people of color [were] the majority”.

The event, developed as an ongoing collaboration between the Portland, OR based Center for Diversity and the Environment, and the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont, got me thinking about some research my Tufts Masters Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning students and I did for the Massachusetts Audubon Society (Mass Audubon) in 2005. The premise of 2042 Today is similar to the focus of our research for Mass Audubon: in 2042 the population of U.S. metropolitan areas will be predominantly people of color, the current leaders of conservation organizations will have retired, so who are the new leaders? How should conservation organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere respond to the demographic and cultural shifts that are unfolding and will gain pace? What strategies for the inclusion of a more diverse base should be developed now that this is not only a moral question, but one of organizational effectiveness and even survival?

For Mass Audubon, of which I am now a Board Member, our aim was to understand how to engage diverse audiences and to identify the barriers that keep under-represented groups from regularly visiting the Society’s two major urban sanctuaries Boston Nature Center (BNC) and Broad Meadow Brook (BMB) in Worcester. Massachusetts, like the nation generally, is diversifying rapidly with half of all new immigrants coming from Latin America and the Caribbean, and another quarter coming from Asia. These new immigrants come from precisely those under-served groups Mass Audubon seeks to attract to its sanctuaries, both urban and rural. The good news is that we have excellent data on who these new Commonwealth residents are, the bad news is that most environmental and conservation organizations are not yet mainstreaming or scaling up inclusion and diversity or changing their operating paradigm and work practices in line with their changing client populations, although many with more foresight, and perhaps an enlightened sense of self preservation such as Mass Audubon, recognize the need for such change and are acting on it.

After our data gathering which included focus groups, interviews, online surveys and a literature review, and as a first step in helping them think about mainstreaming and scaling up inclusion and diversity, we advised Mass Audubon to decide on its core focus, as there were at least two core operating paradigms which were influencing work practices, based on our research at the BNC and the BMB:

  • The ‘People’s needs and nature’ paradigm, typical of the BNC.

Here, the emphasis was on meeting people’s needs through nature. The sanctuary had an idea of who ‘the community’ was (or rather who the communities were) through undertaking a community needs analysis, listened to what their needs were, and had, in the main, fashioned its programs and practices around these needs. This picture of the ‘teen ambassadors’ is the only one on Mass Audubon’s BNC webpage and reflects the BNC paradigm:

  • The ‘Nature’s needs and people’ paradigm, typical of the BMB.

Here, the emphasis was on a more traditional approach to nature conservation and land management around which programs for local people were fashioned by staff. This picture is the only one on Mass Audubon’s BMB webpage and reflects the BMB paradigm:

We emphasized strongly that both paradigms were Mass Audubon mission-related (“to protect the nature of Massachusetts for people and for wildlife”). One was not better nor worse than the other and we argued that both paradigms were operative within Mass Audubon generally, not just in the two centers we were studying. Indeed our research showed that they represented ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ approaches within the organization.

In short, in our report Mainstreaming Diversity: From Policy to Practice we argued that pursuing the ‘People’s needs and nature’ (progressive) as opposed to the ‘Nature’s needs and people’ (traditional) paradigm would produce very different outcomes over the longer term. Given both the changing demographics of Massachusetts, and the related need, both moral and effectiveness/survival-related, for conservation and environmental organizations to mainstream and scale up inclusion and diversity, we argued that the ‘People’s needs and nature’ paradigm was the most appropriate strategic choice. It was best suited to facilitating conversations about inclusion, diversity and cultural identity (interpreted more broadly than just ethnicity or religion) that are clearly essential if Mass Audubon wants to retain the support, political, funding and otherwise, of a majority in this rapidly changing Commonwealth.

Based on our research, we recommended that Mass Audubon needed to:

  • Institutionalize cultural competency. All cultures can’t be treated the same. They are different with different perceptions, expectations, aspirations and customs. The cultural competency approach was suggested as a way for the Centers and Mass Audubon generally to begin to understand cultural difference and to integrate it into their strategic approach and programs.
  • Develop better organizational clarity and communication. There needed to be more organizational clarity and better communication about the need to attend to diversity and cultural issues, especially about both the aims and goals of this.
  • Diversify staffing. Staff must reflect the communities served and the wider Commonwealth, in racial, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic ways.
  • Develop systematic and systemic community outreach. Community outreach needs to become both systematic and systemic. It needs to be based not only on educating people and communities, but more importantly, on listening to them. It needs to employ many techniques such as word of mouth, community TV (especially ethnic channels) and use many locations such as health clinics, markets, places of worship, cultural and ethnic festivals.
  • Develop a ‘community relevant’ curriculum. Literature, focus group and user data suggested that the curriculum should become more related to life issues faced by local people and communities.
  • Formalize diversity in writing. Diversity was a word on most staff members’ lips, but was more difficult to find in written form. Diversity should not be solely related to verbal aspirations, it must permeate all levels of the sanctuary/organization, from staff recruitment and review to marketing, from curriculum to community outreach. [Note: In discussions following the research, the word diversity was followed by the word inclusion, and the Diversity Committee became the Diversity and Inclusion Committee].

Today, Mass Audubon is leading the way in showing how conservation organizations should respond to the demographic and cultural shifts that are unfolding, and is demonstrating some the strategies for the inclusion of a more diverse base. It now has two female senior managers of color; the Director of Marketing and Communications (2011) is African American and the Director of Education (2007) is Latina where there were none when we did our research in 2005. It has a more diverse Board and Advisory Council. It has utilized my Masters students to undertake innovative research in the diverse communities of Lawrence, Framingham and Holyoke MA, to help it expand its constituency, cultivate stewardship statewide and to help it understand how best to serve these and other communities for whom traditional programming and/or sanctuary space is neither seen as relevant nor accessible. The students’ report: Nature’s New Curriculum: Creating Educational Opportunities in Urban and Diverse Communities contains creative solutions, many of which Mass Audubon is implementing. It has also hired consultants to help it meet not so much the challenge, but the opportunity presented by mainstreaming inclusion and diversity.

The number of innovative programs such as 2042 Today: Cultivating Conservation Leaders for the Future is growing. One other notable example is the Toyota/National Audubon Society Together Green program, with its Lead Green fellowship to recognize and nurture the leaders of tomorrow; Grow Green grants to support creative projects that contribute to significant gains in habitat, water and energy conservation and Go Green volunteer projects to create a call to action for real conservation impact in diverse communities.

Organizations such as Mass Audubon are committed to strategies for inclusion and diversity. Programs such as 2042 Today and Together Green are showing us who and where the new leaders are. There’s still a long way to go, but this we know: what to do, how to do it and who and where the new leaders are. Let’s not keep them waiting. Let’s scale it up now.

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Equity? “That’s not an issue for us, we’re here to save the world”

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

People often ask me “why should race, class, culture, justice and equity play a role in sustainability; isn’t sustainability about ‘green’ things, you know, ‘the environment’?” My response is usually along the lines that irrespective of whether we take a global, statewide or more local focus, a moral and ethical or practical approach, inequity and injustice resulting from, among other things, racism and classism are bad for the environment and bad for sustainability. What is more, the environmental movement with its green or environmental sustainability discourse, which includes most of the social movement and institutional discourses that dominate the sustainability and sustainable development discourse today, does not have an analysis or theory of change with strategies for dealing with current or intra-generational (in)equity and (in)justice issues. While researching a BBC TV program in the early 1990s, I asked a Greenpeace U.K. staffer if she felt that her organization’s employees reflected the diversity of multicultural Britain. She replied calmly, “Equity, that’s not an issue for us. We’re here to save the world”. I can understand what she means. She thinks as her organization is saving the world, the environment, for everyone, this is an inherently equitable act, so there’s no need to look at, for instance who’s at the Greenpeace table in terms of the workforce and who’s setting the agenda.

Let’s dig a little deeper into this issue of equity and saving the environment? In the 1990s, research showed how, globally, nations with a greater commitment to equity and a correspondingly more equitable society tend to also have a greater commitment to environmental quality (Torras and Boyce, 1998). Good examples here are the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Similarly, in a survey of the fifty U.S. states, Boyce et al. (1999) found that those with greater inequalities in power distribution (measured by voter participation, tax fairness, Medicaid access and educational attainment levels) had less stringent environmental policies, greater levels of environmental stress and higher rates of infant mortality and premature deaths. At a more local level, a study by Morello-Frosch (1997) of counties in California showed that highly segregated counties, in terms of income, class and race, had higher levels of hazardous air pollutants.

British researchers Wilkinson and Pickett (2009) however changed the game. In their book The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone, they revealed what many of us had suspected. Based on thirty years’ research, the book convincingly demonstrates that societies which are more unequal are bad for most everyone rich as well as poor. The data the book utilizes and the comparison measures it uses allow global comparisons. The differences are striking, even among the supposedly ‘rich’ countries. Virtually every contemporary social and environmental problem from violence, obesity, drugs, illness and mental health, life expectancy, community life and social relations,  long working hours, teen birth rate, educational performance, prison populations, you name it – is more likely to occur in less equal societies.

In terms of moving toward sustainability and combatting climate change, Wilkinson, Pickett and De Vogli (2010), in a recent Comment entitled Equality, sustainability, and quality of life in the British Medical Journal argued that there are three reasons why greater equality is necessary. First, inequality drives ‘competitive consumption’ the desire for materialistic satisfaction or ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. People with materialistic values exhibit fewer pro-environmental behaviours and have more negative attitudes toward the environment. This drive to consume pushes up carbon footprints. Second, cohesion and levels of trust are higher in more equal societies, leading to more public spirited actions toward the common good. Evidence they cite includes smaller ecological footprints, higher levels of recycling, less air miles, lower levels of consumption of water and meat, and less waste production. Finally, sustainable community development needs high levels of adaptability, innovation and creativity. They cite that more equal societies show higher levels of patents granted per capita arguing that this is because people are more socially mobile and possess higher qualifications.

Educational attainment requires investment in human capital and potential. As a young geography teacher in the U.K. in the early 1980s, I was confronted by a student of mine, David, who said “Sir, what do thickies (dumb) kids like me do now we’ve finished our exams?” Nothing in my education had prepared me for this. David was not dumb, he was an average kid who felt he’d failed himself and us, his teachers. He hadn’t. We’d failed him in our inability to help him flourish and find out what he was good at. We were of course far too quick to tell him what he wasn’t good at and he’d internalized this, probably to this day. Twenty five years later I was traveling in Ghana and was stopped by a young woman selling peppers.  She asked me if I wanted to buy her peppers, and quickly assured me that I shouldn’t think of her only as a seller of peppers; she was trying to make money to pay for for her education.

Two instances, thousands of miles and 25 years apart made me realize that people around the world are simply trying to realize their potential. In the environmental movement the loss of environmental potential is lamented: “every acre of rainforest we lose might have held a cure for cancer”. To me David in the U.K., the Ghanaian pepper seller and African American men, more of whom are in prison than college, represent the tip of the iceberg of a desperate global loss of human potential. These could be the future researchers discovering cures for cancer. This wastage of human potential is every bit as profound as the loss of environmental potential as we destroy the rainforest. Of course a focus on both increasing human capital and potential and environmental capital and potential are necessary if the spirit level is to balance. It goes without saying that both are the focus of ‘just sustainabilities’.

What’s the message? From global to local, human inequality (the loss of human potential), is bad for environmental quality (the loss of environmental potential), and only a just sustainabilities approach to policy and planning has an analysis, and theory of change, with strategies to transform the way we treat each other and the planet.

References

Boyce, J.K., Klemer, A.R., Templet, P.H. and Willis, C.E. (1999). Power distribution, the environment, and public health: a state level analysis. Ecological Economics 29, 127-140.

Morello-Frosch, R. (1997). Environmental justice and California’s ‘Riskscape’. The distribution of air toxics and associated cancer and non cancer risks among diverse communities. Unpublished dissertation. Department of Health Sciences. University of California, Berkeley.

Torras, M. and Boyce, J.K. (1998). Income, inequality and pollution: A reassessment of the environmental Kuznets curve’. Ecological Economics 25. 147-160.

Wilkinson RG, Pickett K. (2010) The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone. London. Penguin.

Wilkinson RG, Pickett K and De Vogli, R (2010) Equality, sustainability, and quality of life. British Medical Journal 27 November 2010 Vol 341 pp. 1138-1140.

 

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Yale Environment 180?

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

My oh my. We’ve been here so many times before. Where do I begin?

In its July 25 Opinion: Assessing Obama’s Record on the Environment, Yale Environment 360 (hereinafter Yale Environment 180 for reasons I hope will become all too obvious) asked “a variety of environmental leaders, writers, and policy experts to answer the following questions: How would you assess President Obama’s record on energy and the environment? And what do you consider his major accomplishments and failures in these fields?”

First and foremost, how is it that in this day and age, Yale Environment 180, a publication of The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (“internationally known for its excellence”) could interview 11 people (9 men and 2 women) and call this “a variety” when there was such a gender imbalance and not one person of color? The opinions given on President Obama’s record, had a true “variety” of people been polled, may well have been the same as the 11 chosen, although I sincerely doubt it. But, unfortunately, we are not given an opportunity to test this. Instead we get a reductionist focus, albeit erudite, on very specific scientific, economic and technical issues that one would expect from these particular experts. I can think of a gender-balanced variety of experts of color that might have been approached including Angela Glover Blackwell, Carl Anthony, June Manning-Thomas, Robert D. Bullard, Simran Sethi, Greg Watson, Juliet Ellis or David Pellow amongst others, who might have rounded out the specific comments with some broader, integrative, more nuanced and searching thoughts.

Second, and I think this relates directly to my first point, how come none of the experts mentioned the appointment of the first African American, Lisa Jackson, to serve as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, and Nobel Laureate Steven Chu to serve as Secretary of Energy and only the second Chinese American to be a member of a U.S. cabinet? These people issues are not insignificant, especially for those of us who have been arguing for the past 30 years for a balanced concept of environment which is not purely about scientific, economic and technical issues, critically important though these are, but includes the fundamental democratic issues of recognition, inclusion, representation and participation. On her EPA webpage Jackson says she “has made it a priority to expand outreach to communities that are historically under-represented in environmental action“. Absolutely. In doing this she also recognizes that it is these very same communities that are being first, and will be worst affected by climate change. Despite several mentions of climate change, this was something none of the 11 interviewees thought worthy of acknowledgement. In appointing her, President Obama has thus made a commitment to environmental justice and to civic environmentalism. Could he go further? Sure, but let’s acknowledge and support Jackson’s work.

Third, what about President Obama’s Partnership for Sustainable Communities? As my blog has always argued, we cannot divorce questions of environment from wider questions of sustainability. Recognizing this, in 2009, EPA was functionally partnered with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U. S. Department of Transportation (DOT) to help improve access to affordable housing, more transportation options, and lower transportation costs while protecting the environment in communities nationwide. Using a set of livability principles the Obama Administration has recognized the need for a just sustainability in arguing: “this partnership will coordinate federal housing, transportation, and other infrastructure investments to protect the environment, promote equitable development, and help to address the challenges of climate change”. None of the 11 interviewees mentioned this attempt at integrating traditional departmental silos to, in President Obama’s own words “create safer, greener, more livable communities”.

Come on Yale Environment 180. You can do better than this slipshod and highly problematic assessment. I challenge you to really become Yale Environment 360 by representing the whole spectrum of opinion on our President’s environmental record.

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Danger. Overhead Catenary Wires Are Alive!?

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one to poke fun at public transport systems; I love them, I use them in whichever city I visit, and I visit a lot of cities around the world. I was given Mark Ovenden’s wonderful Transit Maps of the World and geekishly pore over it, memorizing details, recalling experiences I’ve had in the cities he covers. But the time has come to stand up, proud, and be counted in revealing a fundamental flaw in my local transit authority, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, MBTA, or more simply, the ‘T’ that has gone unreported for years. As a regular Boston-London passenger, I travel from my home in Central Square, Cambridge, on the Red Line, to South Station in Boston, where I transfer to the Silver Line (Line SL1) which was built as a link out to Boston’s Logan International Airport in 2005.  My gripe is that since that date I’ve had to endure a sign which frankly appalls me. What was going through the mind of the MBTA employee who declared ‘Danger Overhead Catenary Wires Are Alive!? For those of you who need a little prodding as to my indignation, the catenary wires are ‘live‘, flowing with electricity, they’re certainly not ‘alive’ as in ‘living’……

Rant over.

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Green is not sustainable!

Posted on July 4, 2011 by Julian Agyeman

The highly trumpeted ‘US and Canada Green City Index‘ reported on July 4th is a very well researched report. The ranking methodology was developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in cooperation with report sponsor Siemens. In addition, input from an independent panel of urban sustainability experts provided important insights in the development of the Index. Ultimately however, it is based on eight environmental factors (CO2, energy, land use, buildings, transport, water, waste, air) and one political factor (governance).

Welcoming the report Eric Spiegel, president and CEO of Siemens, said that: “Cities are creating comprehensive sustainability plans, utilizing current technology and proving everyday that we don’t have to wait to create a more sustainable future”. In addition, Siemens Press Release notes that “The US and Canada Green City Index analyzes the environmental sustainability of 27 major metropolitan areas in both countries.” Herein lies a fundamental problem. The report is not about ‘comprehensive’ sustainability plans, or sustainable cities as Spiegel describes them, it is about one, albeit important aspect of sustainability and sustainable cities, namely ‘green’ cities. There is, as this blog tries to show, a very, very big difference.

I am surprised that after three decades of environmental justice activism and scholarship which put equity and justice firmly on the urban sustainability agenda, together with the post-Rio Earth Summit (1992) consensus around the ‘environmental, economic and equity’ based nature of sustainability, together with innumerable other Charters and Agreements, that this report, with the sophistication of the EIU and its august body of expert advisers, should choose not to mention ‘equity’ or ‘justice’ in the entire report, and to conflate ‘green‘ with ‘sustainable‘. This is precisely what I mean by the ‘equity deficit‘ (Agyeman 2005:44) that seems to pervade most ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ sustainability rhetoric.

Myself and many other sustainability scholars, practitioners and activists have argued that: “sustainability . . . cannot be simply a ‘green’, or ‘environmental’ concern, important though ‘environmental’ aspects of sustainability are. A truly sustainable society is one where wider questions of social needs and welfare, and economic opportunity are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting ecosystems.” (Agyeman et al. 2002:78). Thinking this way offers us more rounded view of sustainability and sustainable development: “the need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems” (Agyeman, et al., 2003:5).

This definition focuses equally on four essential conditions for sustainable communities of any scale, especially perhaps cities: improving our quality of life and well-being; on meeting the needs of both present and future generations (intra- and inter- generational equity); on justice and equity in terms of recognition (Schlosberg, 1999), process, procedure and outcome and on the need for us to live within ecosystem limits (also called one planet living) (Agyeman, 2005:92).

Last year, Pearsall and Pierce (2010) updated the research of Warner (2002:37) whose work showed that: “more than 40 percent of the largest cities (33 of 77) in the United States had sustainability projects on the web, but only five of these dealt with environmental justice on their web pages.” Pearsall and Pierce (2010:569) argued that: “while there has been an increase in the number of cities incorporating environmental justice elements into sustainability plans since the early 2000s, their conceptualizations and implementations of sustainability remain highly constrained.”

Interestingly San Francisco, the top ‘green’ city in the Economist/Siemens report, also tops out on linking green issues and equity issues in both Warner’s 2002, and Pearsall and Pierce’s 2010 work: “Warner’s (2002) study found that San Francisco consistently included environmental justice concerns in policy statements with clear action strategies for implementation. For instance, environmental justice concerns permeated long-term social goals, objectives, actions, and community indicators. San Francisco’s attempt to incorporate environmental justice into urban sustainability demonstrates a promising precedent for bringing the social dimension into better focus in public policy.” (Pearsall and Pierce 2010:572)

Let’s move on. Let’s re-conceptualize and re-imagine a ‘just’ sustainability. ‘Green‘ is a big part of the solution but in and of itself, green is really not sustainable.

References

Agyeman, J, Bullard R and Evans, B (2002) ‘Exploring the nexus: bringing together sustainability, environmental justice and equity’ Space and Polity Vol 6 No 1 pp70-90

Agyeman, J., Bullard, R. D., and Evans, B. eds., (2003) ‘Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World’ (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press)

Agyeman, J., (2005) ‘Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice’, (New York, New York University Press).

Pearsall, H and Pierce, J (2010) ‘Urban sustainability and environmental justice: evaluating the linkages in public planning/policy discourse’. Local Environment Vol 15: No.6, 569-580.

Schlosberg, D., (1999) ‘Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism: The Challenge of Difference for Environmentalism’, (Oxford, Oxford University Press)

Warner, K. (2002)  ’Linking Local Sustainability Initiatives with Environmental justice’. Local Environment Vol. 7 No.1, pp. 35-47.

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