The Office of Sustainability has launched a new portion of our website: the WashU Environmental Justice Initiative. The St. Louis region is home to some of the most egregious social and environmental disparities in the nation, from deep-seeded issues of prejudice to concentrated patterns of air pollution, asthma, and lead poisoning. The Office of Sustainability recognizes the WashU community’s potential to research, teach, and collaborate with each other and the broader community in attempts to combat these disparities and work toward a healthier, more unified region. “Environmental Justice” represents one term used to describe a movement to help ensure a better and more sustainable quality of life for the present and future generations in a just and equitable manner. Through the WashU Environmental Justice Initiative, we seek to join this movement and help leave a lasting, positive impact for future generations.
We invite students, staff, and faculty to visit the website and learn more about our objectives and resources for possible collaborations. The website features a definition of environmental justice and what the initiative seeks to accomplish. It also contains a link to academic courses, where we have added a concentration column within the master list of sustainability course document to identify the courses with environmental justice components. Additionally, the website contains a list of faculty collaborators and their current projects and a link to campus projects with environmental justice components. We hope to gain more collaborators as we spread the word about the website and initiative. Faculty members can submit project information here. Lastly, we are speaking with student organizations in attempts to identify organizations that already are or interested to be involved in some aspect of environmental justice on campus.
We look forward to continuing to grow this website over the next semester. If you have any suggestions or additions, please feel free to contact our Environmental Justice Team associate, Amber Krisp, at akrisp@wustl.edu.
This article was written by Amber Krisp and Annalise Wagner, Environmental Justice Associates.