Course Details

This course examines how policy interacts with race and class to affect differentially people's access to a clean, safe, productive environment. Reviews history of the environmental justice movement, and community, policy, and legal responses. Develops students' ability to work across diverse social groups to advance environmental justice and sustainability.

Outcomes: Describe the history, central aims, practices, and continuing evolution of modern-day environmental justice movements; Identify theories of justice underlying environmental justice movements; Analyze structures and processes of inequality, exclusion, colonization, capitalism, and speciesism as they relate to environmental degradation; Describe how communities build power to address environmental injustices; Reflect upon your own social positionality and consider the value of environmental justice theory and action for your own life.