Maps and Environmental Equity

Catalog description

Environmental justice ensures the right to a safe, healthy, productive and sustainable environment for everyone, regardless of income, race, color, origin or income. Maps have become critical tools in environmental justice because maps bring visibility and definition to social-environmental problems. As diagrams – or representations of data – showing distributions over space and time, maps orient us, steer us, and make meaning of complex information. We trust them in depictions of, for example, cancer clusters or contaminated water. Yet maps are also capable of creating environmental injustice. Historical redlining, for example, used maps to limit financial services in certain neighborhoods in the 1930s-50s with long-term environmental impacts into the 2020s. Maps are not simply good or bad. This course thus explores environmental justice and injustice as depicted on maps, but also as embedded in the maps themselves. Who chooses their boundaries, for what purpose, and what consequence? How do maps make meaning and construct knowledge and to what social and political ends? What power dynamics do maps reflect and how do they become powerful themselves? Whose space and time do maps employ? Over the semester, we will make our own maps and bring awareness to the maps we create, including their values and assumptions, how they reflect and exercise power, and their potentials to create change. The goals of the course are to 1) bring a greater awareness to environmental justice and injustice in the maps we use and, 2) to create just maps.