A Critical Analysis of Environmentalist Organizations’ Engagement with Environmental Injustice

Voiceover

Presenter(s)

Aidan Warner

Abstract or Description

  Environmentalist organizations represent efforts of social groups to engage with their everyday environments, either to alter them or in response to ecological degradation. However, environmental historians have documented that popular manifestations of environmentalism–such as, nature conservation and sustainable development–reflect cultural and ideological sensibilities of an affluent and more privileged minority of human beings. Environmentalism in global majority settings, diverging from mainstream sensibilities, reflects organized movements that occur in response to historic and ongoing climate degradation, that is contingent on colonial development along racial lines: environmental justice (EJ). A question we explore in this project is the extent to which environmentalist organizations in America represent mainstream and EJ in their concept of environmentalism. We conducted a thematic coding analysis of a subset of environmentalist organizations’ about me section on their websites (N=104). Results revealed that only 48% mention EJ (e.g. race and pollution) and 26% mention climate change. Meanwhile, 59% of the websites exhibit a conservationist approach, 20% emphasize sustainability, and 40% portray a nationalistic orientation. Although most approaches to environmentalism are seemingly beneficial, we contend that the neglect for climate change and environmental justice is a cause for concerns—especially how it is detrimental for future generations and the habitability of our ecologies.

Mentor

Trevor Lies