U Of I Environmental Conference Focuses On “Sustainability Justice”

Coming on the heels of Monday’s United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York City, the University of Illinois will host its annual iSEE Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 24-25 at the Illini Union on the Urbana-Champaign campus. More information is available at the iSEE website.

Gillen Wood, with iSEE (the university’s Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment) talked with Illinois Public Media’s Jim Meadows about the Congress and this year’s theme --- Sustainability Justice, or, how social justice and environmental issues intersect. (The interview, which is longer than the version broadcast on WILL Radio, has been edited for time and clarity).

GILLEN WOOD: I think we are accustomed to viewing environmental issues and social justice issues as separate from each other. But the truth is, if we consider an example, like the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, we can see that environmental issues have deep social impacts that often affect communities disproportionately. In the case of Flint, we have low income and minority neighborhoods who are suffering, most acutely, from the crisis. So the purpose of the conference is to bring a lot of these issues out in the open, where we can think about environmental sustainability and conservation as we normally do, but also in the context of its complex social dimensions.

JIM MEADOWS: Are these issues ones that you think people in the sustainability movement are still learning about as far as their full implications?

WOOD: I think so. It's the beginning of an interdisciplinary crossover between issues more connected to politics and social history, crossing over toward fields that more have to do with, let's say, energy infrastructure, or water systems or food systems and food security. We're now, in the 21st century, beginning to see how water quality is a deeply social and political issue; or how food security can affect different communities disproportionately. And we need to understand the politics and the history behind that.

MEADOWS: Are there particular issues within that set that are going to be taken up in the Congress?

WOOD: Yes. We have half a dozen panels. The opening roundtable has to do with water security. It's called “Flint And Beyond”. So we'll be looking at issues of water availability and fresh water, toxic effects of water in different communities, particularly in the United States. Sticking with the urban theme, we have a panel called "Green Spaces, Just Places", which focuses on greening our urban environments, creating parks, recreational spaces, planting trees, what have you. And this panel will discuss how important it is for us to green urban spaces and make them more environmentally friendly and sustainable, but also to make sure that we don't gentrify these neighborhoods or exclude certain communities from the benefits of a greener urban environment.

MEADOWS: And that brings up the question: when you're talking about different issues of sustainability or environmental justice, is there the possibility of conflict when people are figuring out priorities, or what the impact of doing one thing has somewhere else?

WOOD: I think that environmental justice, or as we're terming it in this conference, sustainability justice, can pit two deeply held socially progressive ideals at each other. That is to say, environmental conservation and sustainability, and social justice and social improvement. And often these two things can be seen to be mutually exclusive. It can seem to be a binary choice between one or the other. So the intellectual work of this conference will be to think: how can we advance both projects together?

MEADOWS: Who's been coming to the iSEE Congress, people from what backgrounds? Who would you like to see there?

WOOD: Oh, to come to the audience? It's very much intended to be an open facing, community facing event. We ask our speakers in particular to write their talks with a view to a general audience, speaking across disciplines, to a broad campus audience, but also to the community. It's not intended at all to be a kind of scholarly, high minded event that is exclusively for professors and doctoral students, quite the opposite. We're asking our speakers to think of communicating to as large a general audience as possible, and gearing their talks in that spirit. So we're hoping to get hundreds of people coming through the Congress to see different panels and our keynote speakers, trusting that they'll hear talks and lectures that will communicate the issues in this as clear and stimulating a way as possible.

Our two keynote speakers are Kimberly Wasserman and John Knox. Wasserman (who will speak on Wednesday afternoon) is the executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, and a leading social activist in sustainability in Chicago. Knox, our keynote speaker for Wednesday evening, is a law professor from Wake Forest University, and a U.N. Human Rights Council special ambassador on climate justice and human rights. And he'll be giving a very interesting keynote lecture on the issue of environmental security and human rights. The fact is, we live in a world where environmental security is yet to be declared a kind of human right. And John Knox is very much an advocate for that.

MEADOWS: The iSEE Congress will be taking place one day after the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City. Is this by design?

WOOD: Well, it's a happy accident, let's call it. We certainly feature climate and climate change in the conference. Climate justice is perhaps a term that is, less familiar to the listeners, but it's become increasingly important in conversations about environmental sustainability. For instance, think of an event like Hurricane Harvey in Houston (a category 4 hurricane that struck Texas and Louisiana in 2014-JM), where the impacts of a large scale hurricane on our coastal communities can impact less resilient portions of that community. And then how do we go about planning for future resilience against such hurricanes or in extreme cases of relocating certain communities away from vulnerable coastlines? That's just one instance of the way in which climate change and social justice intersect.

MEADOWS: I'm wondering, what part of the discussions at the iSEE Congress focus on just what should be done to directly address the problems you bring up, and what is done in terms of how to get these practices in place, when you may face other forces that are either apathetic, or just directly opposed, because their feelings about what causes climate change and how dangerous it is, are not yours.

WOOD: A very specific focus of a lot of our speakers' talks will be on the question you raise, about decision making and policy. How are the best policies to be created to to build a community resilience against, say, climate change, or to build food security and protect our water systems? But also, who decides? Who decides who should be protected first, and what the priority should be, and how we can best and most democratically and most justly come make these decisions? This is all important. It's not simply a laying out a set of problems and a set of goals. But the idea of a decision-making process, and what that should look like to ensure the most just, the most sustainable future for all of us, that's going to be at the forefront of the conference.

MEADOWS: Looking at these Congresses over the past few years, have you seen things that are productive, that people bring from the Congress, that they can work on and in the days and months that follow?

WOOD: I think the best value of a Congress like this is, it creates a kind of hub of information sharing and brainstorming. So in a way that can't necessarily be strictly measured, we think that bringing together a group of expert speakers, and members of the community, the campus and beyond, to focus for two days on specific issues to do with sustainability can have a profound effect on conversations moving forward. And it's not only the community that attends, of course, it's our undergraduate students, and even high school students come to the iSEE Congress. So we like to think intergenerationally when we think about sustainability. So this is a kind of orchestrated moment, where we can talk about the sustainability message and the sustainability imperative in a way that reaches a lot of different groups of people across the community, at different stages of their thinking and their experiencing, of issues of sustainability, all the way from high school to full professors and everybody in between.