Embedded Files
Here you will find supplementary texts, videos, podcasts, and other resources that can enhance teaching and learning around the Theology First Year Experience shared text. Thank you to the faculty who contributed their time and expertise to this effort.
Resources
Video: The 2022 Theology 1000 Plenary Lecture
Video: The 2022 Theology 1000 Plenary Lecture
First Year Experience Shared Text
First Year Experience Shared Text
Additional Texts
Additional Texts
In this article, Robert Bullard, the "father of environmental justice," briefly analyzes the United States' history of environmental racism as reinforced by political, legal, and economic institutions. Bullard encourages the collaboration of environmental and civil rights grassroots movements.
This is a more in-depth examination of the environmental justice framework and the movement's history and impact. Bullard also stresses the continued collaboration of grassroots groups, environmental justice leaders, and public policy makers in identifying "at-risk" populations and research gaps.
"This essay describes what is at stake through the lens of two water-based intersectional activisms that have surfaced into public consciousness since 2014. Identifying key problems and patterns in Flint and Standing Rock, this essay concludes that Trump's rise to power is--among many other things--an opportunity to foreground long-simmering questions of racialized histories, colonial legacies, and the ongoing struggle for resource equity."
LaDuke discusses the difference between religious colonialism and Native spiritual practices and the grave ecological consequences of this difference in the Americas.
In this essay, Harris provides an introduction to ecowomanist discourse, engaging with the perspectives of Alice Walker, Karen Baker Fletcher, Delores S. Williams, Shamara Shantu Riley, and Mercy Amba Oduyoye.
Ranganathan examines the impact of racialized property dispossession on Flint's infrastructure, emphasizing the role of "racial liberalism's illiberal legacies" in the formation of the water crisis.
This definition of environmental justice, drafted at the First National People of Color Leadership Summit in 1991, includes worker safety, public health, housing, and transportation. It continues to set the stage for intersectional environmental justice work and guides many grassroots campaigns.
This document, which emphasizes the intricate interconnectedness of everything on Earth, was drafted in 2010 during the World People's Conference on Climate Change, which brought together around 30,000 people from over 100 countries.
An overview of the impact of polluting facilities on Black communities, including case studies, statistics, and possible next steps for combating this form of environmental racism.
In this article, Villarosa describes the formation of a grassroots environmental justice movement in Grays Ferry, South Philadelphia. In telling the stories of Grays Ferry residents, she notes the racial disparities that have exposed Black Americans to a disproportionate share of air pollution, and COVID-19 has only increased the danger for the high number of patients with cancer or asthma in the neighborhood.
Darryl Fears gives a brief history of what is now considered by many to be the beginning of the environmental justice movement--the 1982 Warren County protests over North Carolina’s decision to dump soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a low-income Black farming community. An accompanying podcast with interviews and soundbites is linked in the section below. If students are unable to access the original article due to the paywall, here is a downloadable PDF which unfortunately does not include any images.
In the summer of 2015, a contractor on a federal cleanup accidentally dug a hole in the wall of the abandoned Gold King Mine in Colorado. Three million gallons of sludge poured out of the site into the Animas River, eventually moving south into New Mexico and flowing through the Navajo Nation into the San Juan River. In this article, Sanchez describes the impact of the environmental disaster on the people of Shiprock, the second-largest city in the Navajo Nation.
Anna Clark, “’Nothing to worry about. The water is fine’: how Flint poisoned its people,” The Guardian (July 3, 2018)
In this brief depiction of Flint's water crisis, Clark focuses on the tireless work of local activists and the dismissive inaction of state officials.
"The city’s schools, stretched even before the lead crisis, are struggling with demands for individualized education programs and behavioral interventions for children with high lead exposure." A PDF is linked above. View the original article, including photos, here (may be behind a paywall).
Newkirk describes how Black landowners in the Mississippi Delta, through sometimes legal and often coercive means, have been dispossessed of thousands of acres since World War II. This article is accompanied by the video linked below, "How Black Americans Were Robbed of Their Land."
This article reconstructs the millions of acres taken by violence-backed land cessions from nearly 250 Indigenous tribes, bands and communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education... with a footprint broken up into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible."
This article exposes the labor conditions in a Florida lead smelter, where over 300 employees (many of them Black or immigrants) have worked for years inhaling levels of lead that were hundreds of times higher than the federal limit. This article is also available in Spanish.
Videos & Audio
Videos & Audio
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This Post Reports Podcast episode, which includes interviews and soundbites on the beginning of the environmental justice movement, accompanies Darryl Fear's Washington Post article linked above, “‘This is environmental racism:’ How a protest in a North Carolina farming town sparked a national movement.” Length of Podcast Episode: 25:37
This short video from The Atlantic gives a brief overview of the mass land dispossession of Black Americans in the 20th century. It accompanies Van Newkirk's article “This Land was Our Land: How Nearly 1 Million Black Farmers Were Robbed of Their Livelihood” (PDF above). Length of Video: 15:04
In this NPR podcast, reporters Ese Olumhense and Anjali Tsui discuss the difficulties that polluted air presents for Bronx families, particularly in the time of COVID-19. This podcast is also available on Apple or Spotify. Length of Podcast Episode: 28:42
In this brief introductory video, Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch discusses how housing segregation has impacted the education, health, and income of Black Americans. Length of Video: 6:36
Learn more about Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. This can expand class discussions of decolonial relationships to the land and labor in conversation with the Movement for Black Lives. Length of Video: 8:30
This video is explicit about the legacy of Black relationships to the land, both in devastating colonial terms and in empowering decolonial terms, as well as historical background to Black leadership in the organic, farm-to-table, and sustainable food movements. Length of Video: 6:07
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