EJ Icons: Decades of Protecting Community and Public Health

Perspectives on Sustainable Development

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About four years ago I was giving a talk in Ohio and someone in the crowd asked me, "EJ just kind of sprang up, where did it come from, how did this start?" At first I was pretty taken back by the comment since the environmental justice movement began around the time I was born, but this gentleman simply had not heard about it until that point, until it was tied into his operations.

My two guests this episode are Vernice Miller-Travis (EVP of the Metropolitan Group and Co-Founder of WeAct for Environmental Justice) and Adrienne Hollis, PhD, JD, VP of EJ, Health, and Community Resilience and Revitalization at the National Wildlife Federation. They have been at this for a long time and describe multiple situations that drove them to get into this work. Having to wipe oil smears off windshields so they could drive, swimming in polluted waterways, and seemingly having no say in what happened in their communities. Thankfully, much has changed over the last decades and nearly all environmental metrics have improved, but there are still many areas that need to be addressed sustainably.

If you are going to do this work, you have to try and understand sense of place, community, and heritage and how environmental and public health impacts can affect each. Paraphrasing something from the episode, the community will know if there's a problem, the science will identify the source (s), and hopefully collaboration among all parties can bring on solutions.