Old School Tools

Keywords: Environmental justice, field observations, ground truthing, practitioner research, community engagement, applied geography
Abstract Type: Lightning Paper Abstract

Abstract

The Biden Harris Administration’s recent bolstering of the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental justice by mechanisms such as Executive Order 13985, Executive Order 14008, and Justice40 has created a flurry of activity around identifying underserved communities. While EJ Screen has been in the public domain since 2015 and the White House recently launched the Climate Justice Screening Tool, there are many conversations about state level mapping tools as these federal tools frequently have data gaps.
Documenting the landscape via maps has historically been within the domain of geography, thus geographic knowledge will be at the center of this national quest to identify underserved communities. However, geography is also the discipline of exploration and discovery, thus geographic methods lend themselves to ground truthing these communities.
The window of opportunity to implement these groundbreaking environmental justice initiatives is slim. Recent history has demonstrated that a change in the executive branch can have dramatic impacts on environmental and social safeguards. As a public sector employee charged with engaging communities, I have leaned heavily on my training as a critical geographer, dusted off the fieldwork tool, observation, rather than waiting for the perfect desktop tool. Using a mixed methods approach, I have traversed the state of Delaware to both identify and connect with underserved communities so that the environmental justice work can begin.