Jacqueline (Jacqui) Patterson is founder of The Shirley Chisholm Legacy Project and former director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program, which are dedicated to addressing the intersecting issues of environmental and social justice. Her work focuses on empowering marginalized communities, particularly Black women, by providing resources and advocating for systemic change towards a sustainable and equitable future.
Jaqui Patterson grew up near coal-fired power plants on the south side of Chicago. Her mother moved to Chicago through the Great Migration and her father was from Jamaica. [1] Although she knew kids in her class who had asthma, people in her church who needed respirators, and her father had died from pulmonary fibrosis even though he'd never smoked, she didn't initially make the connection between the air pollution in her neighborhood and these health consequences. [2] Her mother passed away at age 73 from colon cancer, her brother at age 56 from bile duct cancer, and childhood friends also died prematurely. Patterson decided to work to try to remove toxin exposure from neighborhoods like the one she grew up in. [2]
She served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica and holds a Master of Social Work (MSW) from University of Maryland and Master of Public Health (MPH) from Johns Hopkins University. [3]
Patterson began her career aspiring to be a special education teacher. However, her experience in the Peace Corps revealed the systemic issues affecting education and healthcare, driven by broader systems of extraction and domination, e.g. Shell Oil contaminating community water supplies in Jamaica. This realization about the interplay of political and economic systems in compromising human rights led her to pursue a path in social justice work. [1] [4]
After obtaining her master's degrees, Patterson took on the role of Research Coordinator at Johns Hopkins University, getting into public health and policy research. She continued her advocacy as an Outreach Project Associate for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, focusing on social justice issues, and later served as the Assistant Vice-president of HIV/AIDS Programs for IMA World Health, addressing public health crises in marginalized communities. Her social justice orientation led her to become the Senior Women's Rights Policy Analyst for ActionAid, where she worked towards global gender equality. [3] [5] It was these experiences that led Patterson to examine intersectional approaches to systems change. [3] [6]
From 2009 to 2021, she served as the founding director of the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program (ECJP), organizing communities and NAACP chapters to combat environmental injustices impacting communities of color and low-income populations. Under her leadership, the ECJP tackled issues like clean water, carbon impacts, and land equity. [7] She co-authored the Coal Blooded report, which highlighted the health impacts of emissions from coal-fired power plants on nearby communities with a disproportionate negative impact on Black and Latin American communities. [8] She also led efforts to spread the message of these impacts. [9]
In 2021, she founded and became the executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project, a resource hub for Black frontline climate justice leadership. Rooted in the Just Transition Framework, the project advocates for systemic change driven by those most affected by environmental and social injustices. [3] Unlike larger nonprofits that typically focus on single issues, The Chisholm Legacy Project addresses environmental issues, poverty, racial discrimination, and gender inequality collectively. [6] For this work she was honored with the Earth Award at the 2024 TIME Women of the year gala. [6] [10]
Shirley Anita Chisholm was an American politician who, in 1968, became the first black woman to be elected to the United States Congress. Chisholm represented New York's 12th congressional district, a district centered in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Throughout her career, she was known for taking "a resolute stand against economic, social, and political injustices," as well as being a strong supporter of black civil rights and women's rights.
Environmental racism, ecological racism, or ecological apartheid is a form of racism leading to negative environmental outcomes such as landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal disproportionately impacting communities of color, violating substantive equality. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.
Lois Marie Gibbs is an American environmental activist. As a primary organizer of the Love Canal Homeowners Association, Lois Gibbs brought wide public attention to the environmental crisis in Love Canal. Her actions resulted in the evacuation of over 800 families. She founded the non-profit Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste in 1981 to help train and support local activists with their environmental work. She continues to work with the organization, renamed the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice (CHEJ).
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
The Earth Institute is a research institute at Columbia University created in 1995 for addressing complex issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, with a focus on sustainable development. With an interdisciplinary approach, this includes research in climate change, geology, global health, economics, management, agriculture, ecosystems, urbanization, energy, hazards, and water. The Earth Institute's activities are guided by the idea that science and technological tools that already exist could be applied to greatly improve conditions for the world's poor, while preserving the natural systems that support life on Earth.
“Feminist political ecology” examines how power,gender, class, race, and ethnicity intersect with environmental ‘crises’, environmental change and human-environmental relations. Feminist political ecology emerged in the 1990s, drawing on theories from ecofeminism, feminist environmentalism, feminist critiques of development, postcolonial feminism, and post-structural critiques of political ecology. Specific areas in which feminist political ecology is focused are development, landscape, resource use, agrarian reconstruction, rural-urban transformation, intersectionality, subjectivities, embodiment, emotions, communication, situated knowledge, posthumanism, deconstructing theory-practice dichotomies, ethics of care and decolonial feminist political ecology. Feminist political ecologists suggest gender is a crucial variable – in relation to class, race and other relevant dimensions of political ecological life – in constituting access to, control over, and knowledge of natural resources.
In the early 1960s, an interest in women and their connection with the environment was sparked largely by Ester Boserup's book Woman's Role in Economic Development. Starting in the 1980s, policy makers and governments became more mindful of the connection between the environment and gender issues. Changes regarding natural resource and environmental management were made with the specific role of women in mind. According to the World Bank in 1991, "Women play an essential role in the management of natural resources, including soil, water, forests and energy...and often have a profound traditional and contemporary knowledge of the natural world around them". Whereas women were previously neglected or ignored, there was increasing attention to the impact of women on the natural environment and, in return, the effects the environment has on the health and well-being of women. The gender-environment relations have ramifications in regard to the understanding of nature between men and women, the management and distribution of resources and responsibilities, and the day-to-day life and well-being of people.
Friends of the Earth (FoE) Australia is a federation of independent local groups working for a socially equitable and environmentally sustainable future. It believes that pursuing environmental protection is inseparable from broader social concerns, and as a result uses an environmental justice perspective in its campaigning. It was founded in 1974 and is the Australian member of Friends of the Earth International.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.
Climate Justice Now! (CJN!) is a global coalition of networks and organizations campaigning for climate justice.
Sustainability studies is an academic discipline that focuses on the interdisciplinary perspective of the concept of sustainability. Programs include instruction in sustainable development, geography, environmental policies, ethics, ecology, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, economics, natural resources, sociology, and anthropology. Sustainability studies also focuses on the importance of climate change, poverty, social justice and environmental justice. More recently, many studies have explored a certain blending of theories to address sustainability issues. Among these concepts, the definition of social learning for sustainability stands out. Many universities across the world currently offer sustainability studies as a degree program. The main goal of sustainability studies is for students to find ways to develop novel solutions to environmental problems.
Bali White is a researcher and writer interested in African, environmental, and gender studies. She is currently a Research Fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As trans woman, she is also a community organizer and advocate addressing transgender identity, legal, health care and social concerns at the national, state and local levels. Her research and activist work around transgender advocacy and ballroom community youth has been influential in the field of public health. She previously served on the National Advisory Board for the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health and managed the CDC-funded initiatives for young trans women and MSM in the ballroom community at the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
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Climate change vulnerability is a concept that describes how strongly people or ecosystems are likely to be affected by climate change. Its formal definition is the "propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected" by climate change. It can apply to humans and also to natural systems. Issues around the capacity to cope and adapt are also part of this concept. Vulnerability is a component of climate risk. Vulnerability differs within communities and also across societies, regions, and countries. It can increase or decrease over time.
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