Flint's Water Crisis and Beyond: An Introduction to Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is the principle that all people, regardless of race, income, or background, deserve equal protection from environmental hazards and equal access to healthy environments. In practice, those protections are distributed anything but equally.

Mona Shomali, an Iranian American author, visual artist, and former adjunct faculty professor, has spent years working at the intersection of environmental justice and human rights, including with Communities for a Better Environment and Pesticide Action Network.

In this lecture, Mona introduces the history and importance of environmental justice by examining how environmental burdens fall disproportionately on marginalized communities. She walks through three case studies. The Flint water crisis, Latino farmworkers in California's San Joaquin Valley, and the Sarayaku Indigenous tribe's landmark case against Ecuador in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Together these stories reveal both the scale of the problem and the power of communities fighting back.