We will explore how environmental justice scholarship is needed to create just, ethical, and resilient solutions for sustainability for the world’s most challenging social-environmental problems.

Historically disenfranchised communities have been on the frontlines of the challenges of the Anthropocene, with disproportionality in two major dimensions. On the one hand, global environmental change — the combined negative effects of land use change, over-exploitation, pollution, and climate change — has a disproportionately negative impact on the sectors of society that contribute the least to it. On the other hand, those communities that have historically been suppressed and marginalized also receive the lesser share of nature’s ecosystem services — the once bountiful resources of Mother Earth’s life-supporting systems.  

This conference will examine the variety of mechanisms that underlie such duality and provide a forum to discuss how the development of a strong environmental justice culture and scholarship can help us to close the gap knowledge-to-action to create ethical, just, and resilient solutions for local, regional, and global sustainability.