Green Space and Environmental Justice

In fall 2020, I started thinking more about cities from an environmentally conscious perspective, which led me to take an Environmental Justice class. In particular, I was curious about city parks and green amenities, their distribution, and their impact on health and well-being across the cityscape. Prior to delving deep into this issue, I had my intuitions that there existed deep inequities along race and class lines in terms of who has access to green spaces. I learned that the presence or absence of high-quality green spaces has significantly disparate impacts on different communities, and it is Black and Latinx communities in particular who bear the brunt of the negative impacts of the lack of green spaces. I compiled a "curated resource" for the class about the positive impacts of green space and the myriad of ways that nonwhite communities are denied them.