According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “[e]nvironmental justice is 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.” However, not all places are equal. Some neighborhoods have more environmental burdens than others. These neighborhoods may be closer to heavy traffic routes and other sources of noise and compounds that may have negative impacts on health, further from parks and programs for outdoor recreation, or where fewer plants and street trees can help to make the air cleaner and the experience of outdoor places more enriching.
Equity presents a challenge and an opportunity for greening work. A responsibility to ensure that more investments go to those that have been least served, but also strategies at different scales accessible to different levels of skill and influence. Habitat, Parks, and Open Space and Programming Amenities can be planned and implemented through policy makers, planners, designers, community organization, and also by individuals planting food, native plants, trees, and rain with Water Capture. Such interventions could be at single family housing, multi-family housing, businesses, schools, or anywhere there may be space. Mulched, healthy soil by itself can potentially do even more than trees to clean air and absorb water. Every project of any size can add up and make positive change for both the places where we live and the people we serve.
Another challenge is to ensure that investments to bring equity to communities that have been historically underserved actually benefit those communities, and do not just replace them. According to the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project, gentrification is “a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood—by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in—as well as demographic change—not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of residents.” There is an imperative to support policies and programs that help and protect people of all income levels and backgrounds where they live, so that they can benefit from improvements intended for them and have more equity.
There are historic and systemic inequities in race, color, national origin, income, and other aspects of diverse bodies and selves, and particularly for intersectionality of these aspects. The places where we live and work are significant not just for quality of life, but also for such inequities themselves. Greening strategies, where we insist leaders invest, where we choose to invest, and the actions each of us choose to take can be hugely influential as part of our responses to realize equity.
