While many people only consider sustainability in terms of the environment, social justice and equity is actually a large and integral element of sustainable living, according to a Tufts University professor.
Julian Agyeman, an urban and environmental policy and planning professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts, spoke as part of ASU’s School of Sustainability’s Wrigley Lecture Series. Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton kicked off the event and spoke in a positive light about the strides Phoenix can make in a sustainable future.
“We are still a young city. We have grown incredibly fast,” Stanton said. “I am a huge optimist about where we are going as a city.”
Agyeman connected the concepts of social justice and environmental sustainability, saying they are “inextricably interlinked.” He used examples such as Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where there is a higher degree of social justice – for example, greater women’s empowerment, higher numbers of kids going to school and greater access to medical care – as well as a greater environmental consciousness.
“There’s a link between how we treat each other and how we treat the environment,” Agyeman said. “Often countries that are trashing their environments are trashing their people as well.”
In 1988, Agyeman said he first considered a link between social justice and sustainability, despite the lack of evidence. What has developed since is the idea of “just sustainabilities,” or preserving the environment in ways that support and increase social justice.
Agyeman continually returned to the idea that sustainable groups and places have to represent their communities.
As part of the Massachusetts Audubon, Agyeman said he could see the need for social justice simply in who was represented in the group.
“We’ve been around for 100 years,” he said. “If we want to be around for another 100 years, we have to look at the new Massachusetts. If you want to be successful, your organization should look like the community you’re serving.”
This concept of organizations built to represent the communities they serve was a theme in Agyeman’s lecture.
Coalition-building, which is creating groups of people to support a certain cause, is one way to develop a just sustainability, he said. One example he used was Clean Buses for Boston, which helped replace many of the city’s diesel buses with cleaner alternatives. Coalitions such as this one attract a greater and more representative diversity of people, Agyeman said.
“Pick an issue that everybody agrees with. Don’t deal with something you disagree on,” Agyeman said. “Even in these short-term marriage-of-convenience coalitions, maybe we learn something from each other.”
Public spaces, parks in particular, are another area where representing the community is important, Agyeman said. Many parks are designed around the “transcendentalist ideal of wandering” and are somewhat solitary, with seats and gathering areas only designed for small groups of people. This isolates cultures in which large families and social groups are common.
Another issue Agyeman illustrated was the problem of resource consumption in the United States. Americans constitute about 5 percent of the world’s population, but use around 22 to 25 percent of the world’s resources. Emerging countries are following the US model of resource consumption, making the future uncertain.
“We’re going to have to get real,” Agyeman said. “Some president along the line is going to have to help us wind back the American dream.”
Agyeman covered a variety of other topics, from the lack of cultural competency classes in urban planning schools to food justice to how education systems often fail to help students achieve what they’re capable of.
After Agyeman opened the floor to questions, health sciences sophomore Ama Owusu-Darko, from Ghana, asked how just sustainabilities might be applied to developing countries such as hers. Agyeman said greater development of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind is one of the largest ways to implement just sustainabilities in such countries.
Owusu-Darko said Agyeman’s answer resonated with her.
“He hit right on the dot for one thing: renewable energy,” she said. “There’s a lot of opportunities for solar energy in Ghana … we haven’t had electricity. There’s been so much power outages.”
Stacey Champion, a downtown-based advocate for sustainability and social justice who attended the lecture, said Agyeman’s ideas spoke to her.
“It’s something that I talk about a lot but don’t often hear other people talk about,” Champion said. “I don’t often get dorky excited, and I’m dorky excited. I thought he was spot-on.”
As for developing more sustainable living, Agyeman said, the problem isn’t that people don’t know the science.
“We have the science of sustainability, but we don’t have the social science,” he said. “We know what to do, but we’re not doing it.”
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu
