IonE Collaborative Environmental Justice Summit with BF50 & PSP
IonE Collaborative Environmental Justice Summit with BF50 & PSP
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About
About
The Environmental Justice Summit's purpose is to connect university students with community members and organizations within the greater Twin Cities area and foster conversations about environmental justice and climate action.
2024 Environmental Justice Summit Banner
The Goals of the Summit
The Goals of the Summit
To offer university students and members of the community a platform for building connections and fostering relationships that contribute to student interests and further the goals of community organizations.
Facilitating conversations among members about the various opportunities within the broader Twin Cities community aimed at addressing environmental justice and climate-related issues.
What Macalester Students Did At The Summit
What Macalester Students Did At The Summit
For the summit, we (Alyxis, Kate and Vi) were tasked to analyze a white board poster from last year’s Environmental Justice Summit that had many sticky notes from the community that answered BF50's main question: How Has Global Warming Impacted Your Community?
From the community’s answers, we singled out 4 main themes:
Unpredictable weather affecting outdoor activities
Loss of biodiversity
Negative affects on Emotional Wellbeing and Physical Health
Harms of Climate Change on Farming and Gardening due to flash floods and droughts
From these themes, we wanted to include what we have been doing in class and analyzed the climate change issue through David Pellow’s Critical Environmental Justice pillars and Kyle Whyte’s framework of collective continuance.
Voices From the Community
Voices From the Community
At the end of our presentation, we posed the same question as our analysis and started a conversation with everyone who came to attended our talk. Collectively, many community members had witnessed the impacts of climate change around them on multiple scales. They discussed how different groups are impacted by climate, like farmers, immigrants, people with disabilities to people working outside for their jobs. In addition, they also mentioned how groups can react to the climate change crisis differently like the idea of climate anxiety from college students. They also emphasized the need for everyone to be invested in EJ efforts because climate change affects everyone in one way or another, but marginalized groups and frontline communties are at the most risk of impact.
David Pellow's Critical Environmental Justice Pillars & Kyle Whyte's Collective Continuance
David Pellow's Critical Environmental Justice Pillars & Kyle Whyte's Collective Continuance
David Pellow is a Environmental Justice Scholar who proposed four pillars that distinguishes Critical Environmental Justice from traditional Environmental Justice approaches. These pillars are: Intersectionality, Scale, Embeddedness and Indispensibility. All definitions can be found in our Google Slides Presentation. Through these pillars, the understandings and solutions to Environmental Justice issues are more profound and open a broader conversation of what needs to be done and how it can be done as community members and allies combat Environmental Injustices.
Kyle Whyte is an Indigenous Scholar and Environmental Justice Scholar who extended David Pellow's ideas of pillars with his framework of Collective Continuance. Collective continuance refers to a group's capacity to adapt to external forces [like climate change] to continue to exist and evolve over time. However, these adaptations should not interfere or erase another society’s way of collective continuance. His focus advocates for Indigenous communities and acknowledges the harms done by the effects of settler colonialism. This is a pillar that centers around Indigenous communities and their collective continuance on the issues of climate change.
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