Interview and introduction by Karen Nordstrom, Program Policy Co-director, Food Solutions New England
Environmental justice (EJ) is a fundamental movement that strives to address the disparities in the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits, ensuring that all individuals have access to a safe and healthy environment. As Food Solutions New England works toward a New England Food Vision, with the network grounding its work in the values of democratic empowerment, racial equity and dignity for all, trust, and sustainability, there is much to be learned and done in concert with the movement for environmental justice. In fact, there is no sustainable, just, and equitable food system future without the pursuit of environmental justice.
“The environmental justice movement itself has grown from attending specifically to hazardous waste issues to much broader issues dealing with food and housing and climate. It’s broadened into this bigger umbrella with different niches within it. So when you talk about environmental justice, it’s important to have an operational place-based understanding of what aspect of environmental justice you are talking about.”
– Dr. Bindu Panikkar, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Natural Resources, University of Vermont
Below we hear from Dr. Bindu Panikkar, associate professor of environmental studies and natural resources at the University of Vermont. Dr. Panikkar is a research expert who has been actively involved in bridging environmental justice research and policy action in Vermont. This discussion is grounded in the research-to-policy pathway exemplified by Dr. Panikkar’s work, which centers community-engaged research that involves co-creative, community-led elements. Her research has influenced the development, passage, and implementation of Vermont’s Environmental Justice Act (S.148 (Act 154) of 2022), which stems from the mandate of the Justice40 Initiative. The policy intends “to address environmental health disparities and improve the health and well-being of all Vermont residents.” This interview took place following the 2023 Environmental Justice Summit: Community Wellness, which focused on visioning for the future of environmental justice in Vermont following the passage of the Environmental Justice Act. The law creates an Envrionmental Justice Advisory Council and an Interagency Environmental Justice Committee. In this discussion, we briefly explore the concept of environmental justice broadly, before delving into the critical intersections of environmental justice, engaged research, and policy.
This interview transcript below has been edited for conciseness and clarity. Click here to listen to the full interview – Environmental Justice: An Interview with Dr. Bindu Panikkar.
Environmental Justice: An Interview with Dr. Bindu Panikkar
Karen Nordstrom
I’m wondering if you can remind me and share a little bit about your background experience, your understanding of environmental justice from your perspective and how that experience has then been expanded upon through your research.
Bindu Panikkar
It’s really hard to define environmental justice, right? Because the key goal is to personalize environmental justice to the place that you’re working with it. Because what environmental justice means for a community living close to an industrial waste site is different from what environmental justice would mean in a place like Vermont. So we even did a workshop on environmental justice here in Burlington (Vt.) and it especially depends on who you talk to.
We talked to some of the people who were from refugee communities and they actually struggled with it. And so, at times, even when we went around the state talking to people, people identified some of the environmental justice issues in different ways. They don’t see the intersectionality, the connection between environmental and social justice, and how some of these issues are inseparable.
The environmental justice movement itself has grown from attending specifically to hazardous waste issues to much broader issues dealing with food and housing, climate, all of that. It’s broadened into this bigger umbrella with different niches within it. So when you talk about environmental justice, it’s important to have an operational place-based understanding of what aspect of environmental justice you are talking about. Because environment by itself is a broad term.
How you define environment is also something that we talk a great deal about in the school of environment. Is it wilderness that you’re talking about? Or is it anything around you? That would be the environmental health definition, anything that’s surrounding–the air you breathe–all of that is the environment. The food you eat, the place you work, live, play, eat and die. Like one of the community members really emphasized the aspect of dying and having rights to be able to live in a clean, safe, healthy environment; to live, play, pray and die–including all aspects of the lifecycle and to have healthy equitable access to these basic environmental services, prevention from harm and access to environmental benefits. That could be the broader definition that encompasses environmental justice. But it, by itself cannot have a simple definition, right? So one key example is Sarika Tandon’s talk about “What is environmental justice?” You can fit it into a narrow definition that is framed by the EPA. But when you talk to people–including people who coined this field, the social movement group that coined this term, they have a bigger, a different vision of what environmental justice is, different from an institutional definition. That’s important.
Karen Nordstrom
How does that play out within your work located in the academy? This is engaged research. How do you navigate and make connections between research and this sort of activism and community organizing?
Bindu Panikkar
It is constantly a negotiation to some extent, but that is a very technical term to use. There is no other way to do it rather than getting your hands dirty. And the problem with research is that we isolate ourselves a little bit too much and even getting good data depends on engagement to some extent.
For me, community engaged research is about getting out there and learning about your community, with what the community is seeing, through their lens and eyes, and allowing yourself to educate through those interactions and then collaboratively shaping things together. And it’s not easy because we have different needs, because what the community wants is certain kinds of engagement, certain kinds of action, whereas researchers need the papers or whatever the measurable outcomes are that they are going for, a certain way of collecting data.
Working together with all these different partners with different needs requires a lot of open dialogue and conversation, which is often not easy, right? Because if we are not very open and clear about it, it’s bound to create tensions. And if you don’t really talk about the tensions, then it’s a project that’s going to be difficult to push along.
And so it’s about communication, open communication, transparency, building trust. These are all important in terms of building good partnerships. Even then, it’s hard because it’s a lot of emotional work. To some extent there is a tension between research and engagement and policy making and community interventions because you can do all the research, and it never leads to anything. So people obviously ask, what is the benefit of doing this (research), right? So being able to chart the outcomes together is important.
In the beginning it was not easy. I started at a time when not many were talking about environmental justice, but the state was asked by the EPA to incorporate aspects of environmental justice as part of the Justice 40 initiative.
[…]
In the beginning the conversation was we were just going to adopt a policy from Massachusetts or California. Then, we insisted that if you’re really talking about environmental justice, you need to have it be built from the ground up. We don’t even know what environmental justice means in Vermont, because Vermont is unlike other states. It doesn’t have a lot of industries. So it’s important to craft a much more Vermont-based definition of what that means, by highlighting the issues that are relevant to Vermont. So that is something that was conveyed and they listened. So that was good.
I was able to get some external funding through a foundation and then started the research. Starting with the spatial research and then did a survey and interviews. And even with the crafting of the bill, we included the results of the research, and also workshopped the definitions and things like that. We made sure that elements that we thought we learned from the work had gone into building the policy.
Was it exactly how we wanted? No, it wasn’t. To some extent, once you start the process it just goes fast and then there’s not enough time. Every time a change is made, you don’t have control over those things–eg. what gets cut out. So there were a lot of things we knew that we wanted that were not part of it.
Karen Nordstrom
Can you briefly describe the key issues in Vermont related to environmental justice that arose? And you just said that you don’t get everything you want. Were there certain areas where the law or the policy does begin to address issues? Or are there gaps?
Bindu Panikkar
The key thing is that the state doesn’t have a way to even understand what the environmental justice issues are. So many other states have been insisting on having some kind of a tool to consistently monitor and understand what are the key equity issues within the state. So we know that there are environmental issues and key health issues, health inequities. But the key thing is we don’t know where these are concentrated. And we need to have a consistent way of gathering information in order to make sure that funds for justice, for the initiative, is actually flowing to the places that need it.
The key determination that needed to be made, if we are prioritizing environmental justice, was how do we understand key issues and make sure that the interventions that we want to make or the funds that you want to make available are going to the right place? That is something that was really taken up in a big way within policy-making to craft a process towards getting to that place of understanding.
The process of community engagement and the process of understanding, both of those are important issues. The EJ mapping is one of the key things that’s included in the policy itself, with a community based definition of environmental justice and information on key population impacts. It’s like a living document.
You have a policy now. You have something to start with, but how are you going to operationalize it? This is the next step. So, that’s why in the policy, they have a mapping component structure and an Environmental Justice Council. The council was established to be instrumental in determining many of the aspects of how you’re going to operationalize all that’s there.
Karen Nordstrom
Out of curiosity, in a meeting with Vermont Farm to Plate, I overheard talk about appropriations. This bill has been passed. Has the council been established? Are there funds allocated already to this work? And does that align then with, say, what was taking place in terms of community organizing around the Environmental Justice Summit? Is there a relationship there? Is this all part of the same body of work?
Bindu Panikkar
When the policy was passed, some amount of funding was made available to organize certain things, but not everything. So the EJ network kind of stemmed from earlier work. We wrote a grant to make that happen. And then we had a vision to hold an environmental justice summit and have an interagency environmental justice event where we were bringing in state and all these different people together to work on different issues.
Karen Nordstrom
Can you share a little bit more about the role that your work played in the passage of the law, your testimony, or you said you were involved in some way in some writing of the policy as well?
Bindu Panikkar
I’m not a lawyer, so that’s not my expertise. So when you are dealing with something like this, you rely on the expertise of a group of people. So we relied on the expertise of the law school because they know how to do this. And I cannot write something that is not my expertise.
It has to be done in a certain way. So that was the beauty of it. And in a sense, what we wanted to capture was to incorporate what we learned from the groundwork and incorporate that within the policy that we were writing. So, they wrote, and we added and workshopped it together. There were elements that we added to the policy.
We kind of co-created aspects of it to some extent, but of course there were things that were taken out. I mean at that level, the final level, there were some concerns that we didn’t actually get (what we wanted), based on what got passed and what was taken out, (that) we didn’t have a voice in what was taken out and what remained.
Karen Nordstrom
I heard you mention at the summit, when we were talking about positives and challenges associated with environmental justice broadly, what I thought was about the bill because you said, “now we have a legal language in place.” And I’m wondering if you can expand on either that (statement) or the positives of what has emerged from the passage of the law, and/or concerns around things that were really important that didn’t make it in there.
Bindu Panikkar
Funding, yes.
Karen Nordstrom
Funding is the big thing?
Bindu Panikkar
Yes, funding is big. And there were other aspects that we really wanted to incorporate that were being introduced in Massachusetts. We were working with the Conservation Law Foundation on the bill. I don’t really remember all of the details, but as part of the Justice 40 initiative, 40% of the funding should flow to these underserved communities.
What we got passed was just the beginning of the initial stages, to just get started. So it’s very much focused on establishing the council, creating a base within ANR to start the Vermont EJ mapping base to some extent, and then tasking the council with building things forward but without sufficient funding. So you have a council, but then it’s short. I mean, it’s not funded to actually do things like community engagement, without assigning funding to it. Initially we had all of that, but all of that got taken out.
The other thing was there was language about how the communities that are overburdened should not be further burdened, so taking into consideration the cumulative impacts. I think, in the end, that was taken out. So, I think in other places like New Jersey and Massachusetts, they were actually incorporating that into their bills, the need to look into cumulative impacts within these communities.
Karen Nordstrom
What I’d like us to turn toward is forward thinking. I have a couple areas of curiosity. One is what is your role now? And also what are some of the key intersecting policy issues that you think this law could or should address?
Bindu Panikkar
So when you bring a body of people together, you work together to identify the next steps. So, I think the council is such a body. Alongside this summit where we did an EJ visioning process on the second day which created a blueprint of where we want to be in three years, I would think that some of the activities that we did can be instrumental in shaping the conversations that the council themselves are going to be having, because many of the council members were there at that meeting.
So, they’re obviously going to be bringing some of those issues up. But the thing is, it’s about community. How do you engage people? How do you come up with the next steps? How do you identify things to focus on and how do you prioritize them? These are difficult questions. And, for me, I kind of sit back a little bit. I am not like someone who’s saying, this is the way to go. I can sit back and see where things are going and see if there is anything I can add to it. I did research, but then I stepped back to see where it goes. And now I’m trying to see what else they need. I mean, is there anything I can do? And I said, I’m happy to do this and this and this and just let me know. And, I can do the next round of research.
Karen Nordstrom
Can you share a couple of the key priorities that were identified in the visioning session?
Bindu Panikkar
Definitely housing and food and land access and sovereignty are the key things. Youth engagement was another key issue. And disaster resilience. There are always going to be certain communities that are going to be impacted more than others. And so ways to work with them and how to elevate their concerns and their voice and to have them speak for themselves, because these are people who have a voice. And so, these were all things that were the key focus.
Karen Nordstrom
Do you think there will be more research that will be posed moving forward?
Bindu Panikkar
Yes, I think so. I think ANR might be issuing some funding. I don’t know what it’s going to be for, but I think there is always room for inquiry for sure. But the key thing is working with a group to shape the research itself. So I am not imposing my research agenda on them.
I mean I could. But it kind of comes back to bite you a little bit and so the process is key. Process is important and they’re taking aspects of collaboration. Co-creation is important in this work.
Karen Nordstrom
Thank you for sharing.
