EPA: Environmental Justice and Systemic Racism Speaker Series, Session One
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is launching the Environmental Justice (EJ) and Systemic Racism Speaker Series by featuring The Mapping Inequality Project on March 4, 2021 at 12:00 – 1:00 pm EST. This unique collaboration created a foundational resource for unprecedented research, education, organizing, and policy advocacy on redlining and current environmental challenges. It provides publicly accessible digitized versions of redlining maps for about 200 cities. This has already generated an explosion of trailblazing work in the area of EJ and systemic racism. Project co-founders Robert Nelson, University of Richmond, and LaDale Winling, Virginia Tech, will discuss the genesis, philosophy, methodology, and impact of this game changing project. REGISTER HERE
We begin this series with a set of five sessions that thoroughly examines the relationship of redlining and current environmental disparities. The recent National Center for Civil and Human Rights webinar on EJ, redlining and the climate crisis provides a good overview of this subject.
The objectives of this speaker series are:
Provide information on groundbreaking, cutting-edge work in science, policy and practice to strengthen the evidentiary link between historical inequities and current environmental conditions;
Inspire leaders and staff in communities, academia, business and industry, and civil society to think about how systemic racism relates to their own work by hearing from leading national policy experts, researchers and practitioners;
Align government leaders and staff with the leading work taking place in this area and create a cohesive environment for fruitful partnerships; and
Create intellectual ferment about dealing with systemic racism in a rigorous manner so that EPA and other environmental agencies can overcome their historical aversion to talking about race and systemic racism.
Future speakers:
Dr. Jeremy Hoffman, Science Museum of Virginia, and Dr. Vivek Shandas, Portland State University, on a study correlating redlining maps with current location of urban heat islands (April 2021)
Cate Mingoya, Groundwork USA, Victor Medina, Groundwork Hudson Valley, and Melissa Guevara, Groundwork Richmond, Virginia, on application of this information in community organizing and policy advocacy (May 2021)
Yana Garcia and Jaimie Huynh, California EPA, on CalEPA’s work on redlining and pollution (June 2021)
Roundtable Discussion: Enhancing multi-disciplinary and multi-sector collaboration to address redlining and current environmental disparities (July 2021)
Future topics will include:
Title VI and civil rights program, EJ research and analysis, rural inequities, and others. Suggestions are welcomed. Registration information for each session forthcoming. For information, contact Charles Lee (lee.charles@epa.gov) or Sabrina Johnson (johnson.sabrina@epa.gov).
