HERE Center

Critical Race Theory Resources

Environmental Studies

Sentences that come directly from the article are in quotation marks. CSUN students, faculty, and staff can access most articles through the University Library using CSUN credentials. Please use the library’s interlibrary loan services if an article of interest is not available.

 

Arreguín-Anderson, M. G., & Kennedy, K. D. (2013). Deliberate language planning in environmental education: A CRT/LatCrit perspective. The Journal of Environmental Education, 44(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2012.665098

  • The authors discuss the first Project WILD environmental workshop conducted in Spanish. Using CRT and critical Latino theory, they “explore ways in which an environmental program can be infused with Latino culture and Spanish language to address the linguistic and cultural make-up of the local audience.”

 

Baldwin, A. (2013). Racialisation and the figure of the climate-change migrant. Environment & Planning A: Economy and Space, 45(6), 1474–1490. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45388

  • Drawing on CRT, Baldwin argues that “the figure of the climate change migrant is racialized to the extent that it is made to bear racial connotations.” This paper thus “traces the racialization of the figure of the climate-change migrant through three specific racial tropes evident in the discourse on climate-change and migration: naturalization; the loss of political status; and ambiguity.” Baldwin calls for “an interpretation of climate change that is sensitive to racialization as a key social process in the configuration of climate-change and migration discourse.”

 

Hardy, R. D., Milligan, R. A., & Heynen, N. (2017). Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea-level rise. Geoforum, 87, 62–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2017.10.005

  • The authors “combine the theory of racial formation with the geographical study of environmental justice and point to the ways racial formations are also environmental.” They examine “vulnerability to sea-level rise through the process of racial coastal formation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, specifically analyzing its deep history, the uneven racial development of land ownership and employment, and barriers to African American participation and inclusion in adaptation planning.”

 

Miller, H. K. (2018). Developing a critical consciousness of race in place-based environmental education: Franco’s story. Environmental Education Research, 24(6), 845–858. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1357802

  • Environmental education (EE) has a history of support for critical place-based pedagogy as a means of learning through engagement in space, both cultural and biophysical. This paper tells the story of how Franco—a non-White, non-American undergraduate—engaged with local discourses in a watershed-focused EE program in the rural Midwestern US. It also examines how CRT can be used to interpret Franco’s experience, where he encountered multiple instances of racism and xenophobia.

 

Mohai, P., Pellow, D., & Roberts, J. T. (2009). Environmental justice. Annual Review of Environment & Resources, 34(1), 405–430. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-082508-094348

  • The article “reviews two decades of scholars' claims that exposures to pollution and other environmental risks are unequally distributed by race and class.” The authors “engage the contentious literature on how to quantitatively measure and document environmental injustice, especially the complex problems of having data of very different types and areas around polluting facilities or exposed populations. They also consider the value of perspectives from CRT and ethnic studies for making sense of these social phenomena.

 

Muhammad, M., De Loney, E. H., Brooks, C. L., Assari, S., Robinson, D., & Caldwell, C. H. (2018). “I think that’s all a lie…I think it’s genocide”: Applying a critical race praxis to youth perceptions of Flint water contamination. Ethnicity & Disease, 28(Suppl. 1), 241–246. https://doi.org/10.18865/ed.28.S1.241

  • In April 2014, the emergency manager of Flint, Michigan switched the city’s water supplier from Detroit’s water department to the Flint River. The change in water source resulted in the Flint Water Crisis (FWC) in which lead (Pb) from the city’s network of old pipes leached into residents’ tap water. Residents of Flint reported concerns about the water to officials; however, the concerns were ignored for more than a year. This study investigates how over 60 Black youth in Flint conceptualize, interpret, and respond to racism they perceive as part of the normal bureaucracy contributing to the FWC. CRT guided the development of the interview protocol and Public Health Critical Race Praxis served as an interpretive framework during qualitative data analysis.