The School of Global Environmental Sustainability‘s Global Challenges Research Team, “Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Anthropocene,” is hosting a two-day symposium April 24-25 in the Lory Student Center. Registration is free and open to the campus and broader community, however, the deadline to register is March 24, or until space fills up, so early registration is encouraged.

The symposium will bring together over 100 academics and practitioners from more than 30 countries. Environmental Justice is a central component of sustainability politics during the Anthropocene – the current geological age when human activity is the dominant influence on climate and environment.

The objective

The overarching goal is to build on several decades of environmental justice research and practice to address the seemingly intractable environmental and ecological problems unfolding in this era.

Questions that will be explored include:

• How can we explore environmental justice among humans and between nature and humans, within and across generations, in an age when humans dominate the landscape?
• How can we better understand collective human dominance without obscuring continuing power differentials and inequities within and between human societies?
• What institutional and governance innovations can we adopt to address existing challenges and to promote just transitions and futures?

From its origins as a U.S. movement against environmental racism and other inequities in the early 1980s, the scope of environmental justice as a field of research and as a movement has broadened enormously. Global environmental justice activism and research, in fact, is moving beyond demanding equity in the distribution of environmental harms and benefits to a call for the structural transformation of the economy and our relationship with nature as a means to address social, political, economic and environmental crises. The symposium will explore these transformations with a focus on multidisciplinary approaches for just transitions and other important directions of future environmental research.

About the team

The SoGES Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene Global Challenges Research Team consists of a multidisciplinary team spanning five departments: Ecosystem Science and Sustainability; Engineering, Environmental and Radiological Health Sciences; Political Science and Sociology. Principal investigators include Neil Grigg, Melinda Laituri, Sheryl Magzaman, Stephanie Malin, Stacia Ryder and Dimitris Stevis. Megan Demasters and Kathryn Powlen serve as graduate student coordinators. Together the team works on various facets of environmental justice in the U.S. and abroad.

The Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene Global Challenges Research Team is committed to rigorous research and public engagement.

To register, visit the conference website. For more information, contact the research team via email.

Adapting Canadian Work and Workplaces to Response to Climate Change at York University is among the sponsors for the event.

CSU sponsors include the College of Liberal Arts, Office of International Programs, Department of Philosophy, Office of the Vice President for Research and the Partnership for Air Quality, Climate & Health.

Additional sponsors include: Acknowl-EJ, Autonomous University of Barcelona, EnvJustice, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Additional CSU sponsors include the Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Future Earth, The Water Center, and Warner College of Natural Resources.