Shades of Green: Community Conservation & Environmental Justice

What is environmentalism? What do we mean when we talk about “the environment” here on unceded Mi’kmaq territory? Who defines what’s included in that meaning, and what’s left out?  At Shades of Green, these juicy questions have led to… well, more questions. Tune in and listen to various perspectives on environmentalism and environmental justice.

For more information about this episode, visit: https://shadesofgreenweb.wordpress.com/2018/02/01/season2ep1/

Why are there so many garbage dumps close to African Nova Scotian communities? Why do Mi’kmaq communities experience food insecurity on their unceded territory? Who defines what counts as environmental racism?

The roots of environmental racism run pretty deep in Nova Scotia.  About 500 years deep. On this episode of Shades of Green, we get curious about the forces that have shaped how we relate to the land and to each other here in unceded Mi’kmaq territory. Colonization has wrapped the histories of Mi’kmaq rights holders up with communities of Acadians, Scots, Black Loyalists, Maroons, Planters, and more recent immigrant communities. These displacements and migrations set the scene for the environmental racism that we see here today.

For more information about this episode, visit: https://shadesofgreenweb.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/s2ep2/

In this episode of Shades of Green, we spend time with frontline Water Protectors resisting the Alton Gas project at the Truckhouse and Treaty Camp along the banks of the Sipekne’katik River. Alton Gas is proposing to dump massive quantities of mined salt waste into the river, which would pose serious risks to the river ecosystem along with the health, livelihoods and rights of Mi’kmaw communities.

Join us at the Treaty Camp to get a taste of what it’s like on the front lines of a movement that is so much bigger than stopping a single project. Let’s listen and reflect on what stopping a natural gas storage project has to do with Indigenous self-determination, how the Peace and Friendship Treaties might help us understand how to build just relationships with the land and each other, and what it means to be a treaty person.

Note: explicit language

For more information about the episode, Visit: https://shadesofgreenweb.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/peace-friendship-and-environmental-justice/

When it comes to environmental justice, are environmental organizations listening? Are we willing to change in the ways that we are being asked?

Environmental justice movements define our environment more broadly than the mainstream environmental movement, recognizing the interconnectedness of the social and ecological crises we are facing. Centering the voices of Black, Indigenous and people of colour, environmental justice works to resist and reshape the ways that race, space and power intersect. These grassroots advocates have also repeatedly called on mainstream environmental organizations to address environmental racism, elitism in the movement, and lack of diverse representation on our staffs and boards.

In this episode we’re going to explore some of the ways that the environmental movement has responded to the challenges presented by environmental justice, including some stories of Ecology Action Centre’s own journey here in unceded Mi’kmaq territory.  We’ll be asking some uncomfortable questions as part of this work to explore our complicity with the oppressive systems we are fighting. We’ll be practicing listening to environmental perspectives from outside of our bubble. And we’ll be wondering about our own roles and responsibilities when it comes to a just future here in Mi’kma’ki and beyond.

For more information on this episode, visit: https://shadesofgreenweb.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/listen-up-building-relationships-across-difference-in-the-environmental-movement/ 

What will Mi’kma’ki look and feel like when environmental justice is achieved?

Over the last couple of years, we’ve asked this question to dozens of people working on the front lines of these movements. Because it turns out that environmental justice is not just about dismantling systems of oppression like colonial and white supremacy. It definitely IS about those things, but it’s also about imagining and shaping futures where we can all safely live, work and play together on these unceded lands, humans and non-humans alike.

In today’s episode we’ll be exploring how tools and frameworks from reparations and reconciliation to decolonization and afrofuturism can help us to envision and shape futures where we don’t have to fight for environmental justice any longer. We all have roles to play in imagining and shaping just futures on these lands.  For many of us, it begins with learning to listen. And as we’ve heard throughout this podcast series, many of us need to be willing to let go and allow environmental justice movements to change everything.  In Mi’kma’ki, it turns out that our ancestors made treaties that lay out a relationship framework that can help show us the way.

For more information on this episode, visit: https://shadesofgreenweb.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/justice-in-public-reconciliation-reparations-and-the-decolonized-future/

In this episode Sadie Beaton was invited to visit active human rights consultant and historian, elder Alan Knockwood in Sipeknekatik. Alan’s brother Wallace Nevin, who is also a historian, joined them for the interview.  In this episode listeners learn about what is happening in Sipeknekatik, including the imposition of the proposed storage project in the Shubenacadie River and how that relates to the struggle to even conceive of a concept of environmental justice.

In this episode listeners will hear from Tayla Paul and Dylan Letendre, two participants in a project exploring urban Aboriginal identity called “This is What I Wish you Knew.” For this project fifty community members carved and painted their personal stories onto rectangular clay tiles that are now displayed at the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre in Halifax. This project was conducted to build on the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

In addition to listening to this episode we recommend going to the Friendship Centre on Gottingen Street in Halifax, and spend some time with these beautiful and important tiles.

In this episode Sadie Beaton interviews Sudha Nandagopal, program director for Seattle’s new environmental justice initiative, one of the only examples of its kind in the country. Sudha Nandagopal convenes a working group that represents the interests of people of color, immigrants, refugees, and low-income and limited-English individuals in the face of environmental decision-making. Part of this work has been the creation and implementation of the Seattle Equity and Environment Agenda, a groundbreaking new document outlining the ways in which Seattle can begin to pair equity and environment in its work.

In this episode of Shades of green, Sadie Beaton speaks with Randolph Haluza-Delay a sociology professor at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada). For the past twelve years, he has published over 40 academic journal articles and book chapters, and occasional items for magazines and newspapers. This includes two co-edited books: Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada (The University of British Columbia Press, 2009), and the recently released How the World’s Religions are Responding to Climate Change: Social Science Investigations (Routledge, 2014). His PhD is in Education from the University of Western Ontario. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Zoology and Master’s in Recreation. As a social scientist, his research focuses on social movements, religion and the environment, environmental education, and the cultural politics of sustainability. As a citizen, he is active in peace and anti-racism initiatives, and interfaith dialogue.

In this episode of Shades of Green, Sadie Beaton interviews Dr. Wanda Thomas Bernard, a professor at the Dalhousie School of Social Work since 1990, where she held the position of Director from 2001- 2011. She teaches in the area of anti-oppression at the graduate level and cultural diversity in the undergraduate program. She also teaches an elective course entitled Africentric Perspectives in Social Work, the only one of its kind. Besides this, she finds time to Chair the Health and Wellness Ministry at the East Preston United Baptist Church, through which she has been involved in a Mobile Food Market pilot project.

Dr. Bernard has received numerous awards and honours, most notably, her appointment to the Order of Canada in 2005 for her work on racism. Wanda is a founding member, and past president of the Association of Black Social Workers. She is the first African Nova Scotian to hold a tenure track position at Dalhousie University and to be promoted to Full Professor. She is a community-engaged scholar who actively links her research, teaching, practice and community activism.

In this episode of Shades of Green Sadie Beaton Interviews Dr. Silver Donald Cameron, the host and executive producer of TheGreenInterview.com, an environmental website devoted to in-depth conversations with thinkers and activists who are leading the way to a sustainable future. Dr. Cameron is also the writer and narrator of GreenRights.com, a multimedia project exploring the idea of incorporating rights for the natural world, and a healthy environment, into our constitution.

In this episode Sadie Beaton speaks with the members of the North End Community Action Committee which is composed of young adults from Halifax’s North End. The North End Community Action Committee is working to ensure that the concerns of their North End community are adequately heard and addressed by municipal planning processes, including the Centre plan. The Centre Plan is an effort to update the municipal planning strategies for communities within Halifax’s Regional Centre, which includes Dartmouth within the Circumferential Highway and Peninsular Halifax. These strategies are broad planning documents that establish policies concerning land development- and its effects, – as well as policies to provide a framework for environmental, social and economic development.

In this two part episode of Shades of Green, Sadie Beaton interviews Catherine Martin and her daughter Natalie Clifford. Catherine Martin is a member of the Millbrook First Nation in Truro, an independent film producer, director, writer, facilitator, communications consultant, community activist, teacher, drummer, and the first female Mi’kmaw filmmaker from the Atlantic region. Catherine also holds the Nancy’s Chair in Women’s Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. Natalie Clifford is a lawyer with a specific passion for Aboriginal Law, and the rights and future of First Nations in Canada. She has opened her own firm with a colleague Clifford Sheils.

In this Episode Sadie Beaton Interviews El Jones and Rebecca Thomas.

El Jones is a spoken word activist and teacher who was Poet Laureate in Halifax between 2013 and 2015. She was the captain of the back-to-back national championship Halifax slam team in 2007 and 2008. She is dedicated to using poetry in prison outreach and youth engagement, including on a weekly radio show at CKDU called Black Power Hour. Rebecca Thomas is Halifax’s new Poet Laureate – and the first Indigenous Poet Laureate in Atlantic Canada. Along with being the current Halifax Slam Master, she also holds the position of Coordinator of Aboriginal Student Services at the Nova Scotia Community College.

In this episode Sadie Beaton Speaks with Dr. Mark Leeming a historian, who was born in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. Mark holds degrees from St. Francis Xavier University, McMaster University, and Dalhousie University. He is a recent SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) postdoctoral fellow through Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he studied the intellectual history of radical environmental ethics. He has published on the history of environmental protest music, on anti-nuclear activism and worked for several years as a freelance journalist exploring questions around environmental activism and ethics.

In this episode, Sadie Beaton interviews James Desmond who lives in the small African Nova Scotian Community of Lincolnville and is a founding member of the Lincollnville Reserve Land Voice Council. James has been fighting on behalf of his community for over forty years, ever since an unlined and unwanted dump was sited there without community consent back in the early 1970s. In 2006, a 2nd landfill was added and the community’s concerns are still being ignored.

In this episode, Sadie Beaton speaks with Mi’kmaq land defender Michelle Paul, Sipekne’katik Warrior Chief Jim Maloney and treaty defender Kevin Christmas. They’ve all been involved in the fight to stop a natural gas storage project that threatens the health of the Shubenacadie River.

In this episode of Shades of Green Sadie Beaton interviews Aaron Ward, who holds a law degree from Dalhousie’s Schulich School of Law, sits on the board of the Ecology Action Centre, and also sat on the board of directors of the East Coast Environmental Law Association until 2015, after which he took on a staff role.

The East Coast Environmental Law Association, or ECELAW, is Atlantic Canada’s only environmental law charity, established in 2007 as a non-profit organization. ECELAW responds to community inquiries, carries out legal and policy research and presents educational resources and opportunities to increase public awareness of environmental laws in Atlantic Canada. Aaron has been working with ECELAW on many things, including an environmental bill of rights.

In this episode Sadie Beaton interviews Dr. Ingrid Waldron, who holds a PhD from the Sociology & Equity Studies in Education Department at the University of Toronto, a MA in Intercultural Education: Race, Ethnicity and Culture from the University of London (England) and a BA in Psychology from McGill University. Her scholarship focuses specifically on the impact of inequality and discrimination on the health and mental health of African Nova Scotian, African Canadian, Mi’kmaw, immigrant and refugee communities in Canada. Dr. Waldron’s recent research projects focus on the health effects of environmental racism in African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities and the social determinants of health in African Nova Scotian and immigrant communities in Halifax.

Dr. Waldron is the director of the ENRICH project (which stands for Environmental Noxiousness, Racial Inequities and Community Health) and is an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at Dalhousie University. She was recently named the Advocate of the Year at the Better Politics Awards for her work fighting environmental racism in Nova Scotia.