Episode 54: Racism and the Modern Environmental Movement with Faith Briggs (Global Works Community Fund)

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Episode Intro Notes

What We Will Cover

• Why are we talking about racism and the American environmental movement, and why is this important?

• Racist history of the environmental movement in the US

• How that history influenced the development of the American environmental movement

• Current BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) perspectives toward the environmental space

• Dismantling racism within environmental organizations

• Organizations pushing this forward / what you can do

• Background on Faith Briggs, Director of Development, Global Works Community Fund

Before we get started, quick note on the use of the word BIPOC. Some people prefer it because it acknowledges the unique history and experience of Black and Indigenous peoples in the United States. Each has their own struggles and historic atrocities perpetrated against them. However, others argue that the term comes with a loss of nuance between the two groups and that people want to be named and recognized, not as part of an amalgam. We like that it acknowledges each group so that is what we plan to use, but we will say each group so that they are recognized.

Why are we talking about racism and the environmental movement, and why is this important?

• First, we’re talking about racism because we simply can’t afford not to. The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and countless others, in addition to the protests that have rippled across the United States and around the world, have shined a light on a system that continues to explicitly and implicitly disadvantage people of color. This systemic exploitation is unequal, unjust, and must be actively combated. We feel it’s our responsibility to use this platform to spotlight this critical issue, as well as provide organizational strategies and resources that move beyond baseline awareness.

• As we stated in our podcast’s racial justice statement that we aired a couple months back and you can read on our website, “The reality is that we’re part of the problem because while we may not consciously take actions against people of color, we also have not been conscious of the racist system we are operating in, nor have we taken action against it. Exhibit A of that is that if you look back at our 51 episodes, not one has been with a black person. Frankly, our lack of self-awareness and anti-racism is embarrassing.” We plan to do future episodes as well focused on racism and in all of our episodes intend to consider the connections to historic and structural racism.

• Second, social justice and environmental justice are inextricably linked. Environmental justice is defined as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.

  • In short, as urban revivalist Majora Carter puts it, “Environmental justice means that no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.”

  • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a lot of great resources online and Dr. Robert Bullard, considered by many to be the father of environmental justice, has a whole website as well.

• You’ve probably heard the stats by now that highlight how communities of color are disproportionately impacted by climate change and are more likely to have the environmental burdens of unjust development and environmental degradation imposed upon them. 

  • For example, Black and Latinx communities are more likely as compared to their white counterparts to live near toxic facilities that produce toxins that shorten and impact quality of life. They’re also more likely to live in places that are susceptible to floods and sea level rise and with less access to medical services. A good example here is New Orleans, Louisiana, as evidenced by the impacts of Hurricane Katrina.

    • By the way, we say Latinx because it is a gender-neutral way of referring to the Latin community.

  • Additionally, studies have shown that Black and Latinx communities in the US are exposed to far more air pollution than they produce. By contrast, white Americans experience better air quality than the national average, even though their activities are the source of most pollutants.

  • Yet another stat is the nature gap--Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities are three times more likely than white communities to live in nature-deprived places.

• The topic of race and the environment is far too complex for any single podcast episode to even try to tackle. We just gave a bunch of stats about todays inequities, and of course underlying all of that is a shameful history in this country that includes slavery, forced removal from historic lands, voting rights violations, jim crow laws, forced assimilation, rising income inequality, denial of equal or earned government services to people of color, and so many other important threads that help explain the structural racism that continues to exist even though most overt racism in the law no longer exists.

• Since the history of racism in the United States cannot be properly explained in the short intro to this episode, we have focused this episode specifically on racism within the modern American environmental movement, mainly environmental advocacy organizations, as well as U.S. public lands. We have a page on our website where we are collecting useful resources on racism generally, and we invite listeners to send us more. Our hope is that after this episode you will feel like you better understand how conservation and environmentalism have developed to today and how we can help change them for the better.

• A small silver lining in all of this? We’re not the only ones interested in talking about race. In fact, sales of anti-racism books have jumped over 2000% since this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests kicked off. Also, as you’ll hear, a number of environmental organizations are taking steps to be more anti-racist. We hope this episode contributes to and furthers these discussions. 

• And a quick note, let’s discuss what it means to be anti-racist. We’re going to quote Ibram X. Kendi author of How To Be Antiracist, to explain. “To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right -- inferior or superior -- with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races.”

• This sounds to us like Ibram is saying you’re antiracist if you see people as they are and that you realize you only see people as acting as a certain race more generally because of a social construct or racial policy. We think being antiracist also goes a step further, taking action to combat the effects of racist policy and thinking.

• We had several external reviewers of these intro notes but no doubt we’ve missed some important pieces here. We apologize for any mistakes or omissions, and we encourage any and all feedback. We’ll modify our show notes online as needed to be more fair and comprehensive. We believe the best way to make progress in this issue is honest, open dialogue, even if it’s not quite perfect.

• We’re donating all sponsorship proceeds from this episode to a variety of the organizations doing wonderful work to address and combat racism.

Racist History of the American Environmental Movement

• It honestly came as a surprise to us (and not a particularly good one) as we researched this episode exactly how much of the American environmental movement’s history is rooted in racism. This was an area where we’d been largely unaware because given that we are both white, we have had the privilege to sidestep this issue. We also stopped at the noble purpose at the surface of environmental protection and did not ask questions or search out more information that would have helped us discover the racist history.

• By American Environmental Movement, we mean the people and organizations that started advocating in the late 19th century that lands need to be protected and that the Industrial Revolution had harmful public health effects. That movement has led to today's many environmental organizations that are active in the courts, in the legislatures, and on our lands to protect the environment and public health.

• So anybody, especially white folks, listening to this episode who are relatively unaware of the racism of the environmental movement, it’s time to reckon with reality. Stanford historian Richard White sums it up succinctly: “the way we created the wilderness areas we now rightly prize was racist.” Let’s explore.

• Get this: early American conservationists were often overtly racist. As the New Yorker notes in an article called Environmentalism’s Racist History, “it was an unsettlingly short step from managing forests to managing the human gene pool.”

• For example, Madison Grant, a conservationist active in political circles around the turn of the 20th century, founded the first organizations dedicated to preserving American bison and the California redwoods. However, he is more often remembered for his 1916 book called “The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History,” a pseudo-scientific work of white supremacism that warns of the decline of the “Nordic” peoples. His work even influenced the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe and Africa and banned migrants from the Middle East and Asia.

• And Madison Grant is just one of many racist early conservation leaders. Even the beloved Teddy Roosevelt publicly praised Madison’s book, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, who headed the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History, wrote a foreword to Grant’s white supremacist book. Osborn argued that “conservation of that race which has given us the true spirit of Americanism is not a matter either of racial pride or of racial prejudice; it is a matter of love of country.”

• And of course, John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and so-called “father of our national parks”, has had his racist views come to light recently. In a post titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments”, the Sierra Club recently came forward to call attention to its founder’s derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes. Muir referred to Black people as “dirty” and Indigenous peoples as “savages.” His comments show that someone can both love the environment and possess hate for people of color. The Sierra Club states that as the most iconic figure in its history, Muir’s words and actions “carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.”

• These early founders of the American environmental movement equated wild nature with the aristocracy, prioritizing things like the “lordly” and “noble” elk with little to no regard for equality of access to nature by all people nor the Indigenous peoples that lived there. And of course this doesn’t even begin to contend with the long history of Indigenous peoples that were forcibly displaced from their homelands to make away for our national parks.

How that history influenced the development of the environmental movement

• That racism took root in the form of Jim Crow laws, which actually preceded President Woodrow Wilson’s establishment of the National Park Service in the US in 1916. With these Jim Crow laws in place as the cultural setting for the establishment of the Park Service, it was immediately clear who was allowed into these national parks and who wasn’t. Jim Crow laws remained in place at parks across the country through the end of World War II. 

• Here’s a 1922 Quote from NPS park superintendents at Shenandoah National Park: “We cannot openly discriminate against [African Americans], [but] they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care for them.” In fact, Black travelers to campgrounds and picnic areas at public sites such as Rocky Mountain and Shenandoah National Parks might come across posted signs that read “For Whites Only.”

  • This reminds me of our interviewee Faith Briggs’ quote, “People think because public lands are for the public, all people are welcome there and that's not true.”

• Where African American parks did exist, they were either severely limited in size and quality, or attached as inferior sections of white parks and lacked access to historically significant places. During the New Deal Era, southern states added 150 state parks and excluded African Americans from nearly every one. Many facilities were built in the south for blacks between World War II and the Brown v. Board of Education decision but that was only as a deviant strategy to defend the “separate but equal” approach.

• In 1945, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes mandated desegregation in all national parks. However, it still took years for that to be accomplished throughout the parks system. In a piece written in National Geographic, James Edward Mills notes that despite their desegregation, the national parks remained every bit as exclusionary as any public institution through much of the early 20th century.

• Mills shares that during this time, travel on the open road between the national parks also included the very real threat of racially motivated mistreatment, physical abuse, or even violence perpetrated against Black Americans. From 1936 through 1966, The Negro Motorist Green-Book showed where people of color could receive travel services without having to suffer the indignities of racial discrimination. This included campsites near Yosemite and other national parks that catered to a Black clientele.

• The fact that this even had to exist is chilling…

• Many of the highways themselves are racist. Many were built to separate black neighborhoods from white ones. Highways, and the noise and pollution that come with them, were almost always routed through low-income and minority neighborhoods. 

• More recently, while explicit racism through policy has begun to wane, Grist reports that many environmental groups have focused a disproportionate amount of resources on wildlife and land conservation without sufficient investment in creating policies that protect communities of color from air pollution, water security, extreme weather, etc. This may have been in part due to a fundraising strategy. Pandas and polar bears sell. It may also be a reflection of the fact that the leadership, staff, and volunteers of green organizations are overwhelmingly white.

• We can see this underrepresentation pretty clearly. In 2014, Dorceta Taylor, a professor of environmental justice and food systems and the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, published a landmark study of racial diversity in green NGOs, government agencies, and foundations. She reported that 16% or fewer of staff in these organizations were people of color and less than 12% occupied leadership positions.

• A follow-up study published in 2019 by Stefanie K. Johnson, at the University of Colorado Boulder, reviewed 40 green NGOs and foundations and found that green organizations were still overwhelmingly White, with only 20% of NGO staff identifying as people of color. 

  • In fact, the study found that from 2017 to 2018, the percent of senior staff positions at green foundations held by people of color fell from 33% to 4%.

• Further, a recent study by Media Matters for America found that people of color made up only 10% of people interviewed or featured in media coverage on climate change.

• So overall, we think Mustafa Santiago Ali, VP of Environmental Justice, Climate, and Community Revitalization at National Wildlife Federation says it best. He said, "When we talk about structural inequality and if you want to know if real change is happening, then look at the boards. Who are the individuals there? They’re the ones helping to set the agenda and the senior staff at these respected non-profits. It’s a curious matter when you don’t have one African-American or Latinx person who is the president of any of these organizations."

Current perspectives by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities toward the environmental space

• Of course, this is not the place to give you our take on this topic. We’re going to organize and share the thoughts of leaders in the environmental justice field.

• First, it’s important to note that some environmental organizations out there are making progress. Mustafa Santiago Ali, who we just quoted and who is one of the few people of color in a leadership position at a major environmental organization, notes that “If you read some of the early writings of some [organizations], they were very exclusionary in their worldview. So there’s an evolution that has happened. I’m not going to say it’s been an easy evolution. But now there are organizations that are building into their priorities and strategic plans, justice-centered work. There are still others that have a long way to go.”

• He then makes it clear that "If I am a person of color, and I do not see myself represented in the leadership on the boards [or in] the sets of priorities that you are focusing on, then I’ll probably make the assumption that this is not an organization for me."

• At the same time, trying to distill an entire community’s perspective into the inclusion or representation of one person is problematic as well. Hodan Barreh, a youth environmental advocate based in Austin, Texas, cautions green groups to avoid tokenization of people of color if they want to bring genuine diversity to the environmental movement.

• As she states, “They bring in that one Latinx person, that one Indigenous person, that one person of color, and they think that’s enough. They think that one perspective speaks for all of the community. That’s very problematic, because not one person can give you the full perspective of what a community entails.”

• Similarly, Peggy Shepard, co-founder and director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit organization that mobilizes underrepresented communities around environmental justice in Harlem, New York City, expands on this point. She points out that it’s important to remember that the environmental movement is more than large green groups: It also includes a constellation of community-based groups advocating for environmental justice within their localities. She emphasizes that the problem is that the media and decision-makers simply don’t consider their opinions.

• She states, “When elected officials and policymakers want to know about environmental justice, they don’t necessarily call environmental justice groups, they’ll call [the Natural Resources Defense Council] or Sierra Club. It’s the devaluing that we have expertise, that we’re knowledgeable about our own issues and about the places where we are living.”

• So zooming back out, it’s clear that prioritizing Black, Indigenous, and People of Color representation and expertise across the environmental movement is a critical step towards racial - and thereby environmental - justice.

Dismantling Racism Within Environmental Organizations

• Let’s discuss how environmental organizations can address their own internal biases that could have subconsciously been perpetuating systemic racism.

• Virginia Palacios, a climate change consultant for GreenLatinos, recommends organizations target their implicit biases, noting that unconscious bias trainings are one of the first things that White folks can do to understand how they have been programmed. She shares that “One of the things that has been the most successful in my experience is being able to go through an in-person training with your peers and then being able to have a conversation, to process things verbally.”

  • Of course, everyone holds biases. It’s what we do next after we become aware of them that’s most important.

• When it comes to hiring practices, Palacios also recommends that organizations create guidelines for the skills that are critical for a job position, and that hiring managers should “really have a rubric in mind of how you are going to be judging the person in front of you. That can help to reduce bias when you are having an interview with someone, so you don’t ask, ‘Did they go to the same school that I did? Did they play the same sports that I did?’”

• Implicit biases in hiring is a huge topic. Per the Harvard Business Journal, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t. It’s therefore critical for all organizations to understand what role they might be playing in this issue.

• Looking for additional rationale as to why organizations should target their implicit biases, over and above the obvious “because it’s the right thing to do and we’re long overdue”? McKinsey found that companies with the most ethnically diverse executive teams—not only with respect to absolute representation but also of variety or mix of ethnicities —are 33 percent more likely to outperform their peers on profitability.

Organizations and Resources Pushing this Forward / What you Can do

• The good news is that the movement to increase diversity in our natural lands is flourishing. There are many organizations forming a relatively newfound base of support for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities in the outdoors, and we’ve selected just a few favorites.

• One is Outdoor Afro, which could become one of our favorites purely for its name. Outdoor Afro is one of the leading organizations connecting black people to outdoor experiences. It is active in 30 states and has connected thousands of people to natural spaces around the country.

• Similarly, there is Latino Outdoors and Natives Outdoors, each promoting further Latinx and Native American enjoyment of America’s natural lands.

• One of our other favorites is GirlTrek. GirlTrek is the largest public health nonprofit for African-American women and girls in the United States. It encourages women to use walking as a practical first step to inspire healthy living, families, and communities. As women organize walking teams, they mobilize community members to support monthly advocacy efforts and lead a civil rights-inspired health movement.

• Beyond walking, GirlTrek’s active members support local and national policy to increase physical activity through walking, improve access to safe places to walk, protect and reclaim green spaces, and improve the walkability and built environments of 50 high-need communities across the United States. I mean, what’s not to love?

• Another important one to note is Inclusive Journeys, which aims to create a digital version of the Green Book we mentioned earlier in this episode. As co-founder Parker McMullen Bushman states, “As a Black woman, I never know if the service I receive is going to be tainted by someone’s conscious or unconscious bias. It’s always hit or miss… When we’ve traveled, we’ve had experiences where we’ve been discriminated against or made to feel unwelcome. The ability to look ahead of time and know what businesses are inclusive, where we will be welcome, is a valuable tool.”

• Looking for what you can do? Certainly, Scott and I can do a lot more to be anti-racist, but our best advice - start learning, and never stop! We’ll be right there with you since we have a lot to learn. We’ve compiled a huge list of environmental justice resources on our website, which you’ll find on this episode’s webpage that also includes these intro notes.

  • And tell us what we’re missing. We’ve already received some helpful suggestions from listeners and added them to the resources.

• You can also tell the environmental groups you’re a member of that you expect the organization to be inclusive in its hiring and leadership and address issues that impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities.

  • As noted above in the quote from Peggy Shepard, it’s important to support community groups, not just environmental groups, that advocate for environmental justice. One place to look for such groups is the membership of the Climate Justice Alliance.

• If you self-identify as a person of color and an environmentalist, you can consider becoming a member of Environmentalists of Color at no cost. EOC is working to catalyze racial equity in the environmental field and to address the current and historical inclusion of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

• Additionally, you can volunteer to help create outdoor experiences for those in underrepresented or low income communities. One group doing that is Sierra Club Inspiring Connections Outdoors, but you’re only a quick google away from others in your area as well.

• Oh, and finally, VOTE. We’re releasing this episode about a month before the US’s November elections. Listeners, this is another reminder to confirm where and how you’re voting. You can do so at iamavoter.com, which is a nonpartisan movement that aims to promote civic engagement by unifying around a central truth: our democracy works best when we all participate.

• We’d like to add that while neither candidate is perfect when it comes to racial and environmental justice, we believe it should go without saying that Biden is the clear better option here. The Sustainability Defined podcast officially endorses Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for President and Vice-President.

• We want to hear from you about the actions you’re taking to better understand racism and to combat it. Leave us a voicemail at (202) 670-7357. In a future episode we plan to play these snippets from listeners so we as a community can learn from each other.

Faith Briggs

• Faith Briggs is the Director of Development at Global Works Community Fund, where she is a leader in creating opportunities for young people from diverse economic backgrounds to travel the world and serve in global communities, and then return home to bring these skills to work in their own neighborhoods.

• She’s also a film producer and uber-runner extraordinaire.

  • I was introduced to Faith after watching “This Land” via the DC Environmental Film Festival. The film follows Faith and two friends as they run 150 miles through three US National Monuments, starting in Oregon and running though California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona before ending in New Mexico. 

• The film accomplishes two goals simultaneously: first, it draws attention to the current administration’s attempts to drastically curtail some of our most precious public lands. Second, it empowers people of color to explore America’s natural lands to develop their rightful sense of ownership over such beautiful geographies.

• You can watch the eleven minute film and many others for free via the DC Environmental Film Festival’s website. We’re excited to explore this project, as well as racism in the modern environmental movement with Faith coming up in a minute.