In New York, the environmental justice advocacy group WE ACT works to inform, educate, train and mobilize the predominantly African-American and Latino residents of Northern Manhattan on issues that affect their quality of life--air, water, indoor pollution, toxins, land use and open space, waterfront development and usage, sanitation, transportation, historic preservation, regulatory enforcement, and citizen participation in public policy making.
The organization with a 13-member staff is led by Peggy Shepard, co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in West Harlem. Shepard has been invited to Western Michigan University to speak on environmental protection for all Americans.
Shepard's organization has a 24-year history of engaging residents in community planning and campaigns to bring about environmental protection and health policy.
WE ACT's first campaign achieved the retrofit of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant and a lawsuit settlement of $1.1 million. A 10-year campaign spurred by a community-based planning process has resulted in the construction of the Harlem Piers at 125th Street on the Hudson River, which opened in 2010.
The environmental justice movement has worked over the past 20 years to influence environmental policy to improve environmental health and protection in communities of color and low income. In her visit to WMU, Shepard will define environmental justice and discuss its challenges and achievements through the years.
She also will highlight WE ACT's work in northern Manhattan neighborhoods as well as the evolution, research, and policy processes and outcomes of a community-based participatory research partnership that has had an impact on air quality and related environmental justice concerns.
WE ACT's advocacy and research contributed to the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority retrofitting its entire diesel bus fleet. The organization also hosts the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum on Climate Change.
As part of the Changing Climates Series, WMU's Center for the Humanities is bringing together scientists and humanists to consider how the world's temperature, environmental and social climates are changing and what the earth's inhabitants need to know and do about it. The series is exploring how scientific research is defining issues that concern everybody, including the warming of the globe, the toxicity of the environment and the fundamental changes mankind is making to the natural world. The intersection of these and other issues provides both an opportunity and a necessity to talk across the usual boundaries within academia and beyond.
Source: Mark Schwerin, Western Michigan University
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