Students help bring environmental justice course to Chapman

A coalition of students and alumni worked with Jason Keller, the program director of Chapman’s environmental science and policy major, to add an environmental justice course to the curriculum. Unsplash

Following the murder of George Floyd and several other Black citizens at the hands of police, last summer’s surge of Black Lives Matter protests caused many to examine the racism and injustice present in their daily lives. 

For Lexi Hernandez, a junior student at Chapman University and sociology and environmental science and policy double major, the movement reinforced the need to address intersectionality within Chapman’s environmental science program.

“I had a big moment of frustration with seeing so many people in environmental spaces not say a single word about everything that was going on in regards to police brutality and racial discrimination,” Hernandez said. “In my mind (environmentalism and racism) are the same issue, and that’s why I got into environmental science in the first place, so it was disheartening.”

After holding a mixer over Zoom this past summer with fellow Chapman students and alumni, Hernandez received demonstrated interest in helping to start an environmental justice class or club on campus. And this spring, that interest is becoming a reality with a course in environmental justice being taught by Angela Mooney D’Arcy, an Indigenous Tongva who has worked in environmental justice spaces for years as an activist, a professor and a lawyer. 

“The realization that intersectional environmentalism is so needed came from attending a private white university,” Hernandez said. “I live in a personal echo chamber, in that I grew up with environmental injustices in my community and that was the only reason I got into environmentalism. Then I see that disconnect coming into a private white university, and it’s like, ‘OK, we’re still not on the same page.’”

Hernandez said she was grateful for the help of Jason Keller, the director of Chapman’s Environmental Science and Policy program, who enjoyed working with students on bringing the course to Chapman.

“There are definitely clear connections between environmentalism and social justice,” Keller said. “This is a class I’d been thinking about, and I definitely give the students a lot of credit for helping to catalyze how quickly we were able to get this course added to the curriculum.”

Hernandez said these conversations had to come from the ground up, not for lack of support from professors at Chapman, but because prejudice has been ingrained into the broader environmental movement for decades.

“Environmentalism has been white for so long,” Hernandez said. “That’s the dominant structure of everything. Within academia we don’t have these conversations. We claim to be interdisciplinary, but we’re not talking about justice; we’re not talking about the real world implications of environmentalism or the real people behind the environmental movement.”

Almost a month into Mooney D’Arcy’s course, these conversations are underway. Mallory Warhurst, a senior and political science and environmental science and policy double major at Chapman, said the class provides an opportunity to see environmentalism through a new lens.

“Professor Mooney D’Arcy has been emphasizing that people often start talking about environmental history in the 1800s or so, when really all of this started way before that,” Warhurst said. “(The class) has a big focus on anti-colonial efforts, anti-capitalist efforts and uncovering the lies and misconceptions within the environmental movement. It’s been a lot of unlearning so far.”

Warhurst said she feels grateful for having the opportunity to take the class before she graduates this May.

“This class, in my opinion, needs to be a required class for every environmental science major,” Warhurst said. “Environmental justice fits into a lot of the other classes I’ve taken and it’s just not explicitly named.”

Hernandez agreed, and said she hopes the program will focus on implementing tenets of environmental justice into all courses being taught in the major. 

“(In other classes) we’ll tiptoe around redlining and the connections of racial discrimination and oppression with environmentalism, but we don’t name it. I need (professors) to name the system that degraded this ecosystem in the first place,” Hernandez said. “Was it racism? Was it classism? What is it that made this happen?”