I recently published a book chapter for The Delaware Naturalist, edited by McKay Jenkins and Sue Barton at UD. The chapter, titled “Environmental Justice,” is an introduction to the field and focuses on environmental injustice issues in New Castle County, DE. It is a unique introduction of a social and environmental justice perspective to the master naturalist curriculum. I hope that it helps to serve those students, as well as the local public, to integrate a social justice lens into their work on environmental issues in the state.

Citation:

Perez, Victor W. 2020. “Environmental Justice.” Pages 291-310 (Chapter 13) in The Delaware Naturalist Handbook, edited by McKay Jenkins and Susan Barton. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Distributed by the University of Virginia Press.

Find it on Amazon and see a video on the overall effort in a recent UDaily article.

A series of recent WDDE articles by Sophia Schmidt highlight the ongoing environmental justice struggles of two New Castle County communities – Eden Park and Hamilton Park – and some of the research that I have been doing in these communities. Check out the stories here:

Residents Take Environmental Perceptions and Relocation Survey

State Collects More Data on Eden Park Fugitive Dust

Environmental Survey Shows Some Residents Likely to Move Out

In my classes, I strive to incorporate technology to teach sociological concepts, such as environmental equity and environmental racism, in innovative and insightful ways.  I often use PolicyMap to demonstrate the utility of sociological concepts and get students started down a path of richer, more in-depth, and nuanced analysis for the issues they are passionate about. Not only can students “see” the utility of sociological concepts through maps, but how these maps provide a penetrating analytical lens on important social, and local, issues that play out in “space.”

Here’s a bit more on PolicyMap:

“PolicyMap is currently being used in over 90 universities across the country to produce research insights, to serve as a supplemental resource for students and to facilitate learning in the classroom. As data and data visualization become increasingly important in decision-making, it is more critical than ever that students in a variety of fields understand how to work with data and analytical tools.”

The film series Lights, Camera, Earth! is in full swing.  On March 22nd, I’ll be the discussion leader for the film Two Square Miles. “Residents of the historic town of Hudson, New York, take sides when a multinational company expresses interest in building a large cement plant near the town.”  In sociology, we refer to these critical divisions in communities as “blue-green” issues, where environmental preservation and economic development are seen as at odds by community members, resulting in internal conflicts.  Come out to the film March 22nd!

Two Square Miles

All films are free and open to the public. The Lights, Camera, EARTH! film series is co-sponsored by the Delaware Environmental Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences Environmental Humanities Program. For more information, visit the film series webpage.

It was my pleasure to interview Dr. Adam Rome on Campus Voices to promote the third annual Lights, Camera, Earth! film festival.  Our interview was full of intriguing questions about climate change, resilience, and how each of the films touched on numerous themes related to climate change and the impact of carbon emissions on the planet.  Listen to the interview here, and be sure to catch all of the films this weekend!  The films are free and open to the public, and all have prominent moderators who will guide audience discussion after each film.  See you there!

Recent work on Internet “echo chambers” shows how an individual’s beliefs about science, valid or invalid, are reinforced due to the way that social media works (e.g., Facebook).  In short, as Andrews notes, echo chambers describe online media as virtual spaces “wherein information or beliefs are reinforced by repetitive transmission inside an enclosed virtual space. These spaces, which also serve to keep contrasting views at bay, may explain why there are so many groups of people online – particularly on Facebook – that steadfastly believe information that is demonstrably nonsensical.”

My work on how the Internet functions to facilitate online social movements that resist scientific consensus, such as the vaccine-autism movement, touched on a similar idea a few years ago.  I emphasized how websites link together to form an “echo chamber” of sorts.  I have reproduced the chapter’s synopsis here:

“This chapter explores how the Internet emerged as an invaluable resource for a populist social movement that challenged scientific consensus and framed autism as an instance of medically induced harm. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence debunking the vaccine-autism link, how do claims that vaccines cause autism persist and what is the role of the Internet in their perseverance? I argue that the networking capacity of the Internet allows unbridled, unfiltered claimsmaking across websites (Maratea 2009) and allows parents to validate their experiences with the onset of autism by sharing their stories online with others. The Internet serves as a venue for vaccine-critical parent organizations and nonexpert claimsmakers, who function as ‘movement entrepreneurs’ (Earl and Schussman 2003, p. 157), to catalyze and sustain opposition to scientific consensus with their own forms of evidence supporting their claims that vaccines cause autism.”

The moral of the story: be wary of your social media feed because it might not allow you many alternative perspectives on an issue, and take note of how websites that you use for scientific information make claims and link to one another. Read both the Andrews story and my chapter for more food for thought!

Perez, Victor W. 2012. “The Movement Linking Vaccines to Autism: Parents and the Internet.” Pp. 71-89 in Making Sense of Social Problems: New Images, New Issues, edited by Joel Best and Scott R. Harris. Boulder. CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Andrews, Robin. 2016. “How Misinformation Spreads on the Internet.” IFL Science, January 6. Viewed January 7 at: http://www.iflscience.com/technology/facebook-echo-chambers-help-spread-and-reinforce-misinformation.