Environmental justice (EJ) means ensuring equal access to environmental benefits and preventing the disproportionate impacts of environmental harms for all communities—regardless of gender, class, race, ethnicity or other social positions. EJ is a powerful framework at the nexus of social movements and research that centers the leadership and expertise of BIPOC voices as it makes intersectional connections between painful histories of environmental racism and processes and practices of rebuilding a more equitable, healthy and safer world.
The teaching and curriculum materials included on this site are meant to be used as a meaningful resource and provide guidance for teaching environmental justice in impactful and respectful ways. We ask that you always credit the people who developed the original material if you share it in your classes.
The creation of this site is a grassroots effort with contributions from teachers and community leaders all over the country including universities, colleges, community organizations, NGOs, and primary and secondary schools.
We would especially like to thank students Neha Patkar and Keoni Rodriguez for their hard work gathering initial resources for this site. Thank you to co-organizers for the National EJ Education and Teaching Workshop for their leadership inspiring this project, especially collaborators from Stanford University’s Environmental Justice Working Group, San Jose State, the Northern California Environmental Justice Network for Community-Academic Partnerships, and the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative at Santa Clara University. We are grateful to Kevin Vreeburg for his talent, kindness and patience in helping us to design and create the site.
We hope anybody with an interest in environmental justice will be able to have access to these materials, which include syllabi, lesson plans, case studies, and best practices, and we hope that if you are teaching EJ, you will consider sharing your own work (with credit) here.