Environmental & Social Justice

This in-depth conversation with Dr. Brittani Orona (Hupa, Hoopa Valley Tribe) on the Cal Ag Roots WELL podcast digs into the concept and practice of the Landback movement in California, including the deep history of Native resistance in the state. It also explores Brittani’s background and new role at San Diego State University.

Luis Alexis Rodríguez Cruz writes about how in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, activists have turned abandoned land into a community garden. They say El Huerto is only the beginning.

As a child José regularly visited family in Mexico, where they had abundant natural space to explore, but he was disappointed in the lack of safe parks to play in when he would return to Los Angeles. As a community organizer, he saw the value of quality greenspace to working class communities. These experiences ultimately led him to pursue a career as a landscape architect working to advance park equity.

This spring, Zully Jaurez took a deeper dive into how frontline communities in Los Angeles, a city built on the world’s largest urban oil field, mobilized and ultimately won a ban on new oil drilling and begin phasing out existing wells in their city.

The study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods, and an op-ed argues for considering this history in policy decisions about siting and leasing of new oil and gas drilling.

“When you look at roadway density and proximity to roadways, there’s the highest density in non-white and low-income communities, which leads to disproportionate exposures and consequently disparate health impacts."

Salmon, sturgeon, lamprey and other fish have been keystone cultural species for Native American tribes of the Klamath River Basin for thousands of years. Keith's work merges the paradigms of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and western ecological knowledge to manage these species.

The Adaptive Land Lab aims to reveal how current institutions contribute to unjust and unsustainable adaptation to enable policy reforms that redress underlying causes of societal vulnerability to climate change.

"Inequity is a choice that we make as a global society through the economic systems that we hold up as legitimate," Paloma Henriques argues in her articles for Spire's 2022 issue on minimum and maximum economic thresholds.