Overview
It is widely recognized that the environmental justice movement first gained traction in 1982 in a predominately African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina. University of Michigan professors Bunyan Bryant (a graduate of EMU) and Paul Mohai were pioneers in the movement. Bunyan Bryant who in 1972 had become the first African American to join the SNRE faculty attended a meeting at the Federation of Southern Cooperative in Sumter County. Shortly after, he joined with Professor Mohai in Ann Arbor.
In the early 1990s, during the Clinton years, it was the period when the environmental justice concept “hit the radar” of the EPA and federal government. Professors Byrant and Mohai led a team of academics and activists to advise the U.S. EPA on environmental justice policy. Drs. Bryant and Mohai published
Opinion: Environmental justice must be foundational to the new School of Sustainability
Artwork created to support the first comprehensive Intro to Environmental Justice course at Stanford, first offered in fall 2018. By Stephanie Muscat, used with permission.
on January 27, 2021
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
– Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
We are writing as a diverse group of Stanford staff, students, and faculty committed to Environmental Justice for Sustainability at Stanford. This weekend, faculty will gather for a deliberative democracy process guiding plans for the new School of Sustainability and Climate (SoSaC). We strongly encourage serious discussion on this vital question: how will Stanford build a truly innovative institution that addresses the most importan