About the talk:

Environmental justice struggles, which involve local communities fighting against the unequal distribution of environmental harms, emerged in the 1980s from Civil Rights activism in the US South. In the 1990s, activists and scholars articulated ‘environmental racism’ and ‘environmental justice’, eventually contributing to what is now known as ‘environmental justice studies.’ Decades later, a new field, global environmental justice studies, is slowly cohering around climate change, extractivism, the pollution of oceans, and a myriad of other issues that are problematic for the planet. Why should many local environmental struggles be considered ‘global’? And, vice versa, what are the local dimensions of global environmental concerns? This presentation explores those questions through an overview of two publications that Huezo is currently working on. These publications, the products of ethnographic research, illustrate what environmental justice studies is and why it is increasingly global.

About the speaker:
Alexander Huezo is beginning his first year in the Department of Global & International Studies at UCI. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and has travelled extensively throughout Latin America. He is interested in the composition of ecological communities resisting violence and pollution, particularly the global and more-than-human dimensions of such communities.