NEW ENVIRONMENTALISM. Julie Sze, professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis, recently spoke at Portland State University about environmental justice and humanities.

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #25 (June 24, 2008), page 9.

By Ian Blazina

Julie Sze, associate professor of American Studies at the University of California (UC), Davis and director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis’s John Muir Institute for the Environment, recently spoke at Portland State University about environmental justice as a field of study and a framework for activism.

Sze, whose subtle understanding of the diverse and far-reaching facets of environmental justice is apparent in her lectures and conversations, talked about the intersection of environmental justice and humanities — how the complexities of race, class, and gender coalesce with environmental studies, urban studies, health and community activism, and social movements to mediate and inform our experience of the world. She talked about gigantic, expansive issues; ideas that are so overwhelmingly important in a world of growing disparity and dwindling resources.

"I think about environmental justice as a framework rather than a certain set of issues," said Sze. "When you think of environmental inequality as a framework instead of a case study, then you can see how the focal point of inequality changes in different contexts.

"So if you think of it as who doesn’t have power and why, it’s going to be different things in different places," she continued. "Sometimes it’s race, sometimes it’s being indigenous, sometimes it’s being a gypsy … I think about the issues, there are so many different issues around environmental pollution and also the ways in which it fits into that inequality framework, especially around occupational health. I really try to deal with the why question from as many different perspectives as possible."

Sze’s focus on the existing structural conditions that produce inequalities brings a kind of coherence to the environmental justice movement that has been long absent and direly needed. After all, these issues are not some byproduct or epiphenomenon of humanity, but instead are intimately connected to the wellbeing of our communities.

Professor Sze is the author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, a tome analyzing the culture, politics, and history of environmental justice activism in New York City and detailing how urban planning has disproportionately laid environmental problems on racial-minority and low-income communities. Her book is a clarion condemnation of the practices of privatization and deregulation that enable corporate power to continue being asserted from top to bottom — what actually trickles down. The book is also a chronicle of the transformation of the strategies of activist groups, from organizing against particular issues of siting and land-use decisions to engaging in the overarching process of community planning.