GEO 210 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

The Environmental Justice Learning Center is a one-stop training portal of online resources to build the capacity of EPA’s partners to advance environmental justice. These resources offer a broad range of knowledge on topics relevant to the practice of environmental justice.

Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Its effects, however, are disproportionately distributed, in particular affecting vulnerable and socially marginalized population groups. Indigenous peoples are among the first to face the direct impacts of global warming on the ecosystems or landscapes they inhabit, owing also to their dependence upon, and close relationship with the environment and its resources.

Poisoned tap water in Flint, Michigan. Toxic waste dumps in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. A town in China where 80% of children have been poisoned by old computer parts. What do these things have in common?

A Black civil rights activist by the name of Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. came up with the term environmental racism in 1982. He defined environmental racism as, “racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of colour from leadership of the ecology movements”.

Many Native people were forced into the most undesirable areas of America, first by white settlers, then by the government. Now, parts of that marginal land are becoming uninhabitable.

Short clips of life for families across the country and how much they live on a month - some are under $40, some are over $7,500. Good resource for your storymaps!