Engaging the Empathic Imagination to Explore Environmental Justice

Abstract

Environmental justice refers to the fair treatment of individuals across sociodemographic categories with regard to exposure to environmental pollution and equal involvement in determining environmental policies. The global environmental justice movement has become a significant area for environmental activism, policy, and development in the early twenty-first century, but individual college students may sometimes struggle to fully understand the impacts of pollution and other environmental challenges far from their own experiences. This activity is designed to help students empathetically encounter individuals experiencing different levels of environmental injustice by considering the stories of others. In this exercise, students attempt (as much as possible) to imagine themselves in the embodied, lived experiences of persons different from themselves by reading biographies of others struggling with environmental injustices and evaluating a given issue from that perspective. Students engage their empathetic imagination to step out of their own assumptions, lived experiences, and worldviews and imagine new perspectives, narratives, and experiences surrounding issues of environmental justice. After completing this activity, students should be able to (1) describe an environmental issue from a perspective different from their own, (2) analyze the influences of sociodemographic factors such as race, gender, class, and ability (among others) on the experiences of environmental harms and benefits among diverse individuals, and (3) assess the value of empathizing with the experiences of others to develop solutions to problems of environmental injustice.