Clare Cannon
Description: Clare Cannon is an Associate Professor of Social and Environmental Justice at UC Davis. Her research explores the connections between environmental justice, climate change, and health disparities. We discuss her journey, the importance of collaborating across disciplines, and how critical environmental justice theory has evolved. We also dive into her research into Kettleman, a rural Californian town, where community-led efforts are tackling the health impacts of pollution, and discuss why policy changes are needed to address systemic inequities. Finally, Clare offers advice for students interested in community-engaged research, emphasizing the value of building real relationships and following your passion to create meaningful change.
Website:
Publications:
Resources:
What is Critical Environmental Justice? - Book
National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences
Show Notes:
[0:03] Introduction to Professor Clare Cannon
[1:35] Education and Research Journey
[4:00] Transdisciplinary Approach to Research
[7:42] Main Focuses of Research
[8:22] Critical Environmental Justice Theory
[12:17] Kettleman City Case Study
[16:54] Community Engagement in Research
[22:38] Academia and Community Needs
[26:43] Regaining Trust in Communities
[33:07] Climate Change and Marginalized Communities
[36:03] Models for Addressing Injustices
[38:58] Moving from Participation to Action
[47:17] Multi-Species Justice
[53:31] Health Disparities and Intimate Partner Violence
[59:31] Advice for Students Making an Impact
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:00] Welcome, Professor Clare Cannon. Thank you for coming on today.
Clare:
[0:03] Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here with you.
Keller:
[0:06] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about your story. What got you interested in environmental and social justice and how you ended up at UC Davis?
Clare:
[0:13] Yeah, this is a great question. So I think even from when I was really little, I was very interested in kind of the idea of justice and thinking about, you know, what's fair and how do people get treated fairly and unfairly? And then it wasn't until later college, but really after college when I did my master's and certainly my PhD that I started to become really interested in environmental justice. Or really, you know, that everyone has the right to an environment free from harm. You know, kind of at its heart, environmentalist is a lot of things, but when we think about it, it's really thinking about the ways that people can interact, they can live, work, and play in the environment in a way that's not harmful, you know, that's fun, that's meaningful. And so I really became more interested in that when I did my master's and my PhD as, you know, kind of an expression of this larger interest in social justice. And that really led me to here at UC Davis. So I did my PhD at Tulane University in New Orleans, focusing on sociology, urban studies and social work. And my research really began there, looking at environmental justice and health disparities. And from there, I was lucky enough to get a job here at UC Davis, and I've been here ever since.
Brent:
[1:35] And then when you were doing your PhD or master's, were you always taking a pretty transdisciplinary approach to how you looked at environmental justice?
Clare:
[1:43] Yeah. So I've been both lucky and unlucky in the sense that I've always done interdisciplinary and then more recently transdisciplinary work. So I went to college at Scripps College in Southern California, and I got a bachelor's in American studies. And that is incredibly disciplinary. And that's what drew me to it, right? I got to take literature classes. I got to take religious studies classes. I could take history classes. So I got to take a lot of different things I was interested in. And so I did my master's at Union Theological Seminary. It's part of Columbia University in New York and really focused on social ethics. So again, And that was super interdisciplinary. There was religious studies, there was history, there were ethics classes, there were psychology courses. And then, as I mentioned, my PhD program really uniquely was this transdisciplinary setup and infrastructure. And so I got to learn in a lot of different spaces.
Clare:
[2:41] So in a lot of ways, I'm uniquely trained in the sense that I've never had a discipline home, right? So we think of disciplines like sociology or economics, and I've never been just in one of those kinds of places. And so my work has always been interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary. And the reason I say I'm lucky is I've gotten to explore and learn a lot of things from a lot of different groups and people and fields and schools of thought and methods. And it's unlucky in the sense that doing interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary work is incredibly challenging. It's challenging for several reasons. It's challenging structurally, right? So our universities, our whole kind of research production is built across these disciplines, these departments, these fields. And so structurally, it can be really hard to navigate and get resources or get buy-in to get credibility. It can be really hard to get funded. It can be really challenging to, you know, pull it off, basically. To take insights from different places and to weave them together in such a way that you're adding to new knowledge, that you're adding to both fields, it's a really tricky balance. And so I've always done it and I'm lucky to do it. And I, you know, that's not without its challenges.
Brent:
[4:00] Certainly.
Keller:
[4:00] When you're conducting transdisciplinary research, how do you or do you have a method to thinking about where you're going to put your focus across disciplines? Or is it obviously, does it go with the project specifically? And also with that, when you're doing research, do you curate your team specifically to kind of have people that are disciplinary to kind of support the overall spread across disciplines?
Clare:
[4:26] I love this question. That is a really, really insightful question. So there are a few different ways I'm going to kind of think about or take this question. And one is absolutely. So I've been working with a number of scientists at UC Davis Health and Public Health Sciences, and they're incredible at assembling these very multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary teams, right? Because if we think about something like climate change and increased wildfire smoke from climate change and then the health impacts of that, right, you need a lot of experts that cover, you know, quite a bit of landscape across disciplines. And so they're just fantastic at bringing people together who know about, you know, doing surveys, survey methodology, about people who can, you know, take health endpoint data, about people who can...
Clare:
[5:26] Think about climate change and model wildfire smoke and people who can model climate change effects, right? And so, you know, when we have a specific problem or interest, like what are the health effects of wildfire smoke, right? We think that's a pretty straightforward question. But in order to answer that question, right, we have teams of 10, 15, 20 different experts with different methodological expertise, experiences that they bring to the table to try to answer that question, you know, holistically from, you know, climate change impacts to wildfires, to wildfire smoke, to exposure, to, you know, measuring health endpoints. That said, you know, something, and this for me has really been a product of the pandemic, is I've just started working a lot with my friends, right? So academics also have friends.
Clare:
[6:16] And so we've built, so another answer to that question that I've done, is we've built these transdisciplinary teams because, for instance, my best friend is a wildlife ecologist. And we connected with an environmental historian and environmental studies sociologist. And so now we've been writing on environmental justice, critical environmental justice, and wildlife conservation. And what does that mean for marginalized, disenfranchised people? And what does that mean for vulnerable wildlife? life. And so that's an example of kind of a more bottom-up approach, right, of, hey, these are my connections or these are the people who I think are brilliant and I want to work with. And so what can we come up with that we bring our different expertise together and answer questions that are meaningful to us and to a larger society? So I've done it both kind of top-down. What are the needs if we're exploring this question, how do we look across disciplines, to really work together to answer those questions? And then I've also done a kind of bottom up, who, who's really exciting that I think is brilliant that I want to work with and, and what can we do? How can we bring our, um, skills and our interests together to, to make something, um, really awesome.
Brent:
[7:33] Yeah. And then you started to touch on environmental justice there, but before we dive like deeper into that one specifically, could you briefly like highlight the three main focuses of your research?
Clare:
[7:42] Yeah, I'm happy to. So, um, the three main kind of arms of my, my research are, um, environmental justice, which we talked a little bit about, climate change and disasters, which is related, and then health disparities. And so some of the stuff I've looked at with health disparities have to do with resilience, post-traumatic stress disorder, stress, vulnerability and resilience to and from disasters.
Brent:
[8:09] Yeah.
Keller:
[8:11] And then with environmental justice, could you, before we go into the background on Kettleman City, Could you give a background on critical environmental justice theory and how that plays into the perspective?
Clare:
[8:23] Happy to, yeah. So environmental justice, as I've talked about, is, you know, kind of, it's a lot of things, right? It's both a social movement with activists, but it's also research and a research field and a very interdisciplinary research field. And has been around, you know, now 30, 40 years in some instances as we kind of think about it. Although certainly people were concerned about the environment, certainly there was activism before that. Certainly environment informed different people's kinds of sociological imaginations or thinking. And out of environmental justice, kind of a more recent turn in the past, you know, five, six, seven years has been critical environmental justice. And critical environmental justice is kind of as two main elements.
Clare:
[9:15] Ways of thinking about it. So one comes out of Professor Laura Polluto's work, really questioning, you know, can the state be an ally when it comes to righting the wrongs of environmental injustice? And really tries to focus on, you know, we've had 20, 30, 40 years of environmental justice activism, and we still have polluted lands. We still have marginalized communities that experience it's greater environmental inequality. Some examples of this are, you know, more air pollution, living closer to landfills. These sorts of things have been tied to higher rates of asthma, more mental distress, higher rates of cancer, etc. So that's kind of what we mean when we talk about environmental inequality, environmental justice. Those are just some of the examples. And then some of the work that we've used more in our research has been on David Pello's work on critical environmental justice, which really relies on four pillars that he writes about in his.
Clare:
[10:17] Book, What is Critical Environmental Justice? It's a really good, really short book. I definitely recommend. But he talks about these four pillars as environmental justice needs to be intersectional. And so by that, we're talking about the interlocking axes of social location. So we can think of this as not just gender or race or class, but we can think about this as gender and race, gender and race and class, right? So these different social intersections, we need to be thinking about environmental justice or environmental injustice as multi-scaler, so operating across scales, right? Pollution doesn't really care where your neighborhood begins and ends, we need to think about whether organizations and institutions, such as government institutions or agencies.
Clare:
[11:08] Are transformative or not. And this kind of ties more closely to what Professor Paluto is talking about when she's talking about, you know, is, can the state really be an ally when we're talking about advancing environmental justice aims and goals and achieving environmental justice? And so Professor Pello writes about, you know, maybe these institutions, maybe we can transform these institutions or maybe not. Maybe we have to come up with some other framework or structure to, And then the last thing he says, which really struck me, is that, you know, marginalized groups who've experienced environmental injustice have been treated as dispensable. They've been treated as disposable and dispensable. And so our environmental justice research and our activism has to really treat them as indispensable, right? As meaningful, you know, full humans with dignity in the ways that we treat them and the ways that they live in society and their opportunity and access to improve their life chances. So those are the four pillars of critical environmental justice and some of
Clare:
[12:15] the kind of players within that.
Brent:
[12:17] Yeah. And I think your work at Kettleman City is probably a really good example of a lot of these different ideas. Could you start going in and explaining what occurred there and how your team responded to it?
Clare:
[12:30] Yeah. So and we have a couple of papers on this and other folks have have written on this. So Kettleman City is a small rural farmworker community. It's about 1500 people located on I-5 and halfway between L.A. And San Francisco. And it's kind of famous because there's an in and out there and there's a Tesla supercharger. And so a lot of people stopped there, right? Because it's this kind of midway point.
Clare:
[13:01] But it's this really small community. And it's been instrumental in kind of both leading the fight in environmental justice in terms of activism, as well as, you know, being a really important site for environmental justice research. Starting from, you know, the 1980s, they host a Class 1 hazardous waste landfill there. It's the largest landfill west of the Mississippi. Class 1 hazardous waste landfills take in, you know, kind of the worst of the worst. So it's a lot of stuff that comes off of fracking that needs to be disposed of. It's a lot of stuff that comes out of oil refinery, as well as PCBs and some other stuff um and so this landfill's been there i think since maybe the late 60s or 70s and in the in the 80s um they wanted to site an incinerator there and the community really pushed back and won um and so the incinerator wasn't wasn't cited there and so that's part of um.
Clare:
[14:01] Why it's become so important, both in terms of activism and research, is because it's been this, you know, incredible success story in a lot of ways. Now, the landfill is still there and it's still operating. And so there are third generation environmental justice activists there are still, you know, pushing to get the landfill closed, to make sure that the landfill is in regulatory compliance, so as to reduce any possible kinds of exposure. And so kind of bringing us more to present day, in 2016, our community partners on this project, El Pueblo and Green Action for Health and Environmental Justice, won a landmark civil rights settlement from the state of California. There were no funds associated with this settlement. I always have to say that because we all assume when there's a settlement, there are probably funds. But the state committed to helping the community find resources to do further studies. And so we were connected through the UC Davis Environmental Health Sciences Center with community partners in Kettleman City to try to do this small-scale pilot environmental monitoring to figure out, you know, is something going on with the landfill?
Clare:
[15:25] There are other sources of pollution there. It's surrounded by industrial agriculture on three sides. So there's pesticides.
Clare:
[15:33] You know, there's social vulnerability. If you look at something like CalEnviroScreen, right, you see really high social vulnerability indices. And so we wanted to work with them to try to, you know, get some data to try to identify what their problems are and then use that right with a pilot study with pilot funding to leverage additional resources and funding to do a larger scale project.
Brent:
[15:59] And then real quick on pilot funding, what percent roughly would that be compared to what a full-scale project would be?
Clare:
[16:06] Yeah, great question. So this is funded. So the Environmental Health Sciences Center is a center that is funded by the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. And the National Institutes of Health, I think it's 11 institutes. And so this one is specifically from the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences. But so the center is funded, and it's an incredible resource. Definitely worth checking out their website and all the great stuff that they do. And this center specifically is focused on kind of community-engaged environmental health research. Each center across the country has kind of a different focus. And so they gave us $60,000. That's about pilot funding. Sometimes pilot funding is $10,000, right? It can really just depend on the scale. And then we were applying for grants that were about $1,000,000.
Brent:
[16:52] $1.25,000. Okay. Yeah.
Keller:
[16:54] And for the community-engaged aspect of the pilot program and the monitoring, how did you think about, or I guess, did you work with the community to do the monitoring itself in terms of when researchers weren't there, were community members still doing monitoring and keeping data ongoing? Or was it more of a, in the midst of the project, when researchers were able to come down, take samples and go back, or was it more continual?
Clare:
[17:19] Yeah, that's a great question. So I should say a couple of things is that one, people definitely, particularly like in health sciences, will have people collect their own data. So one of the things that's become really popular are things like wearables. For a long time, we've relied on things like diary and journal entries, right, to just keep track of, you know, what did someone do today? So as we're collecting data, you know, we can see we can try to link that up for this specific project. So part of how... Where the civil rights settlement came about was in the mid-2000s, so maybe between 2007 and 2010, there were a number of birth defects that were reported in Kettleman City, and it was elevated. So the state did a big kind of secondary data study.
Clare:
[18:13] California Department of Public Health and CalEPA did a study kind of after this to show, but it's such a small community. It's really hard to say anything statistically, right? But there was an elevated number of birth defects. It was really concerning and really worrying, rightfully so, for the folks who live there. And they were concerned that it was one of the many environmental stressors that they experienced. So it could be landfill. We know that PCBs, there are violations, right, of PCB storage at the landfill, and there were fines for that. We know that there's industrial agriculture. And so there's pesticide drift. We know that they're at the intersection of I-5 and California 41. So we know there are a lot of trucks, right? So there might be diesel particulates or different kinds of air pollutants coming from the increased traffic. And so because of this, you know, we worked with the community partners in this community-engaged research approach called Community-Based Participatory Action Research, or CBPAR, because it's a mouthful. And we said, you know, what what do you want to do? Like, what do you care about? What are you worried about? And they said, you know, we're worried about the pollution from the trucks. We're worried about what's going on in the landfill. We're worried about our water because up until this point, they actually had a grant to buy bottled water because the water you couldn't drink the water.
Brent:
[19:37] It wasn't safe to drink the water.
Clare:
[19:39] And so then I went to the Environmental Health Sciences Center and said, you know, hey, these are the things that they're worried about. And so the Environmental Health Sciences Center is a great example, and I have a paper on this, of facilitating transdisciplinary research. So we talked about some of the challenges. And so they really help kind of structurally address some of that. So they have public health scientists. They have exposure scientists. They are connected with all these centers on campus and off campus. And so I was able to go and say, hey, this is what they're worried about. And so from that, we designed a whole exposure plan. And so we took water samples from residents and kind of communal sources to try to see, you know, if something's going on in the water. And then we did some air quality monitoring. So we took what's called an improved monitor down from the Air Quality Research Center here on campus and did a couple weeks to try to see, like, you know, is there traffic? Is there other stuff that we can capture maybe coming off the landfill?
Clare:
[20:36] Pesticides are really hard to measure because you have to be there when they're coming off. And so, you know, we talked to one environmental justice group that have... Catchers where you can like set them up and they can catch stuff. But we weren't able to put those in the field. So that was an instance of, you know, residents are worried about this. They can smell it. They can kind of see it. They can, you know, they feel itchy. But we weren't quite able with, you know, the limited kind of capacity and funds that we had to really try to address that. And then one of the things that really kind of surprised me is that residents really wanted to know what was in their bodies. So as we talked about, I'm a social scientist. And so I was new to environmental monitoring. And so, you know, I could not have done this work without these transdisciplinary scientists like teaching me and helping me and processing the samples. And then similarly, like what they really wanted, they're like, we know the environment is toxic, right? We know that there are these environmental stressors and these environmental pollutants, but we don't know what's in our bodies. And so we figured out a way to get a phlebotomist down to Kettleman City, and we did blood samples and analyzed them for PCBs, which was the main thing that folks are worried about to see if anything was kind of coming from the landfill, because we know there are PCBs at the landfill, and we know that there had been these violations.
Clare:
[22:01] In the past, and we know they're tied to a host of negative health outcomes. So we were able to do that. And so between the grad students, the undergrad students, and the transdisciplinary team of scientists and our community partners, we were able to do all of this environmental sampling, this biological monitoring, as well as doing interviews and survey data.
Brent:
[22:23] It seems like a great project that can kind of act like a case study for others around like the country or world, even from the standpoint of the fact that like you started at the community level and address their needs.
Brent:
[22:35] And then you use the toolkit that UC Davis and your team and friends provided. Do you think academia as a whole is doing that well enough where you start with the need of the public or the community and then figure out how our resources can then address it?
Clare:
[22:50] I love this question. And I think it's I think it's spot on. So I think a couple of things. And I do want to say, like, I don't think we addressed their issues. We were able to get a little bit of data and, you know, tried to leverage to get, you know, more funding to get more data with the idea, and particularly in California that, you know, a lot of policymakers, regulators are trying to use data. They're trying to use research or trying to use science to make good decisions. And so we were hoping that, you know, if we had enough good data, we could try to persuade them to, you know, do what the community kind of needed or felt was right or, you know, what would be beneficial for them. So I just wanted to say that. Yeah, in terms of your question, you know, I think it's changing and I think it is moving in that direction. And I think it's changing for a couple of reasons is one, there is a huge emphasis. So the National Science Foundation, the NSF and the NIH fund the majority of research in the U.S.
Clare:
[23:58] And they are really saying, you know, you have to have some kind of community engaged element that we don't want you just, you know, kind of doing science for science sake, right? These are public dollars. We really want to see, even if you're doing your bench science, even if, you know, you're building your AI models or you're looking, you're discovering like CRISPR and you're doing all this stuff, like we want to know what the implications are for communities and the public. And so... They're in a lot of ways driving that. And they're also saying you can't just, and I think this is to varying effect, but they're trying. You can't just say, okay, I checked that box. Yes, we have a community engaged element. They're really saying like, okay, what's your plan? How are you going to bring them in as partners?
Clare:
[24:44] Do not tokenize communities. We want to really see how they're going to be engaged. And they're both going to be, they're going to have a seat at that table. And so I think the funders are doing that. I think universities are picking up on that. So here at Davis, I think is an excellent example. We have the Office of Public Scholarship and Community Engagement, which I think is maybe five or six years old. And so they're really trying to build the structure. You know, we talked about that as one of the barriers to transdisciplinary research. It can also be a barrier to community engaged research. And so they're really trying to build the structure across the university. And they're trying to say, you know, this is really important. This is why it's important. This is how you can do it and we can help you do it. Because similar to transdisciplinary research, community-engaged research, there are a lot of barriers. It is really time intensive. It takes a lot of time to do it. It's hard to do it well. It takes a lot of building trust. Like we're doing this air quality project now with communities across the state. And, you know, we spent a year and a half building relationships and showing up to meetings and talking and hearing about what people needed and saying, here's what we can do. And, you know, does that align? And how do we make this happen before we even got the monitors into the field? So it takes a lot of time. And I think the other piece of that, because that project is funded by the UC Office of the President.
Clare:
[26:07] Is for funders to know like, okay, we're not going to have results year one, right? Like, and having that expectation set and understood that you're going to have results later. It's going to be very time intensive. But that hopefully, right, it's more responsive to the community's needs and the communities have buy-in in the research that you're doing and they're building their capacity and their agency to advocate for the change that they need.
Keller:
[26:33] And then another player in this dynamic is government bodies, and I think particularly regulators.
Keller:
[26:40] And you kind of mentioned earlier whether the state could be an ally. And so we're kind of curious, what can the state do, and again, particularly within the regulation, not necessarily the funders, to regain their trust in communities, especially in the period where there might not really be a tangible outcome, there might not be funding that they're able to provide or a fine that they're able to rebate back to the city, but there's kind of just an issue that can be blamed on regulators, but not a direct action. Like what are some of the things that can be done to try to mend that relationship that you've seen work?
Clare:
[27:16] Yeah. Y'all are asking great questions. Thank you. Yeah. It's a great question. So I guess the first, the first I'll answer this is folks like Jonathan London here at UC Davis and Jill Harrison, have written in the past couple of years about kind of taking a different approach to Professor Pluto and saying, look, like we kind of need government, right? Like we kind of need regulators to really advance environmental justice. So then the question is, you know, if that's the case, then how do we do it? And so they've written about like kind of, I can't remember exactly their term, but basically like insider allies.
Clare:
[27:59] So, increasingly in California, and we've seen this move, particularly in the past five or 10 years, is we'll have environmental justice activists become regulators. They'll go work for places like the Department of Toxics of Substance Control that regulates landfills. They'll go work for places like Air Resources Board, which is the state agency for air quality. They'll go work for places like Department of Pesticide Regulation, which focuses on pesticides. And so they're trying to create this kind of insider allyship of saying, OK.
Clare:
[28:31] Let's be a part of these institutions and these regulating bodies to try to make meaningful change and try to really address environmental inequality. And so, you know, I think that's one thing folks are doing in terms of what regulators can do. You know, I think there are a few different things. And I really appreciate your insight that, you know, sometimes regulators like can't do stuff. Right. Like sometimes and we meet with agencies and regulators and policy makers all the time. And they're kind of like, my job is to enforce the laws on the books. And that's not a law on the book, you know, like, so part of it is, you know, understanding and being connected and coordinated. And so I think the more of these agencies like ARB, like State Water Board, right, we have so many agencies here in California, that's at the state level. And then you go down and then there's the local level, the regional levels. And so the ways things kind of get governed and regulated becomes really fragmented across scale. It becomes fragmented across different agencies. And so the more they can be coordinated and collaborative, even if that's just knowing, you know, what someone else at a different agency is doing or working on or what their program is, particularly when we think about climate change and reducing climate emissions and adaptation and these sorts of things, becomes really important. And I do think climate change has kind of incentivized or forced these agencies to be a bit more coordinated because they have to be coordinated to try to get emissions, right, to get carbon neutral by 2030.
Clare:
[29:59] And so that has kind of been this issue that's really brought people together. So I think that's one thing. I think, you know, in terms of regaining trust, and I really appreciate that you bring up trust because it's incredibly important, right? We've seen in polls that trust in institutions, trust in science, trust in each other is like at an all-time low. And I think we see pretty clearly the effects of that, right? And the body politic. We see the effects of that when we're having conversations with people. We see the effects of that across communities. And so I think rebuilding trust is incredibly important, not just for the specific issue, right, if we're talking about landfills or we're talking about environmental injustice, but more broadly for, you know, kind of a healthy, working, peaceful society. So I think some things that regulators can do is listen. And I think, you know, not all agencies in California are the same, but I think a number of them take this very seriously and are working hard. You know, we don't always get it right. We don't always get it right in research or science and certainly on the regulatory side. But I do think folks are working hard to take seriously, you know, how can we listen to communities? How can we bring communities on board as a partner?
Clare:
[31:12] And thinking about, you know, whether it's applying regulations or saying, you know, that's really for the legislature and these different community groups or community based organizations or activist organizations working with the legislature to design policy.
Clare:
[31:29] Um, that, that then, you know, regulators can, can enforce and address. I think also like, um, and I just, uh, was on a call the other day talking about this in terms of our research, but, you know, I think there's a hesitancy, like you mentioned, if I can't do something about it, then I'm just, I'm not going to say anything. I'm going to kind of disengage, right? I feel like in some ways that's like, uh, you know, uh, uh, uh, a human response that we can all understand. But similarly, when we're doing community engaged research, um, No news is still news. And so, you know, one of the things we advocate for is just staying in touch with our community partners and saying, hey, like, we're still waiting on this lab, right? Like, for that Kettleman City project, it took us two years to get our samples analyzed, in part because of COVID, in part because we had to find someone with the technology who could do it, and that would do it at a price that we could afford.
Clare:
[32:22] But you know I didn't wait two years right to tell my community partner that I was I was talking with them every month every two months and saying hey I'm still I'm working on this I'm still waiting on it and so I think regulators can do something like that of just saying both explaining like that's not my purview and and not in a way that's defensive or you know oh that's not my responsibility but in a way that explains how complicated and fragmented the landscape is so that people can go to where they need to go to, to get their questions answered and, and to, and to share their experiences and their feedback. Um, but also I think just staying in touch and saying, yes, I, I hear you and we're working on it or here are the things that were funded or here are the programs that are funded and let me connect you with other folks,
Clare:
[33:03] um, who are working on similar issues are all ways of regaining trust.
Brent:
[33:08] Yeah. I definitely see how transparency could really help like regain trust and also like limit the apathy that I think a lot of people are currently feeling, especially within politics and government bodies but um you started to touch on it a bit there like i think it'd be a good transition point now to get to the climate adaptation and uh just to at a high level like how are marginalized communities like more impacted by climate change.
Clare:
[33:31] Yeah so um climate uh change basically um is going to exacerbate the inequalities and vulnerabilities that people already feel so a great example um that kind of comes up again and again in our work on climate adaptation and planning um is is the example of redlining right so redlining was kind of the official sanctioning of um segregating communities um by race uh and and as you can imagine black people in the u.s were kind of um put in places that um.
Clare:
[34:10] That weren't as nice as white people. So what do I mean by that? Less trees, less parks, closer to landfills, you know, closer to highways and traffics, etc. And then if people try to move out, right, there are these official sanctioning that didn't let them, didn't let them buy houses in other places. So that's redlining. And so we can see, particularly in urban areas, but not exclusively in urban areas, map after map, where, for example, extreme heat is the worst in places.
Clare:
[34:41] Is those red line neighborhoods, right? They're the black neighborhoods where there's been, you know, disinvestment over and over again. There's been urban renewal, right? So cut up to make way for highways, et cetera, intentionally, right? By design. And so we see again and again that these places that have been disinvested in, which makes sense, right? If you're not investing in a place, it's going to be more vulnerable and it's going to be more vulnerable to climate impacts. And one of the things I think is, you know, really interesting about that is regardless of the climate threat, we find that marginalized communities are there. So that's extreme heat in places like Phoenix, LA, Sacramento. That's flooding in places like New Orleans, which our research has looked into, right? That's true of places, you know, where flooding, hurricanes happen. That's true of Tornado Alley in the South where I grew up in the Midwest, right? We kind of see it across the board that communities that have been marginalized have been marginalized environmentally in terms of neighborhood inequality. Those places then are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. And we are seeing, and we will see as it as climate change kind of accelerates the intensity and frequency and severity of disasters and events that we experience, that these communities will suffer more.
Keller:
[36:03] And for the communities that are trying to make changes to these injustices, what are some of the models that you've seen done to do that? And what, I guess, are the different effectiveness between them?
Clare:
[36:16] Yeah, so I will talk about some of our research on climate adaptation and planning. And so I'll add, within environmental justice, folks tend to, although not exclusively, talk about participatory, distributive, and recognizable justice. And so just really briefly, participatory is showing up, is being counted. Do you have a seat at the table? What is the quality of your seat at the table? Distributive are more like, we can think about that as like tree canopy, right? How are trees distributed across the city? Well, I just mentioned, right, that there are fewer trees in Black neighborhoods and city after city after city in the US. So that would be distributive injustice. And then recognition of injustice is really recognizing this history, like recognizing the ways that people have been disenfranchised historically and contemporarily. And so one example from our research on climate adaptation planning and equity has looked at some models around community engagement and climate adaptation. And so climate adaptation, right, mitigation is kind of reducing carbon emissions. How do we mitigate the impacts of climate change? How do we not reach one and a half degrees Celsius increase in global temperature?
Clare:
[37:35] Adaptation is, OK, climate change is already here. How are we going to adapt to it? And so frequently there are things that might have co-benefits for both, but generally we're kind of looking at them separate but related. And so when we're thinking about climate adaptation, some of the models we've seen are these kind of consultative partnerships. So in our analysis of the climate action or adaptation plans across the 25 largest cities in the U.S., we saw, you know, one model was just, you know, kind of one way consulting with, you know, community groups, kind of telling them this is what we're doing. And then kind of the next level up were these strategic collaborations. And so that's we're working with environmental justice groups. We're working across departments in a city to really build up our climate adaptation planning. And then kind of at the end of that spectrum, we found these kind of co-governance arrangements. And so that was bringing in environmental justice groups, bringing in public health groups, bringing in racial equity advocacy groups, and sitting down and doing the plan together, right, of saying, here's what we're going to do to adapt to plants. We're going to plant X number of trees and take care of them. Um, we're going to hold racial equity town halls because we understand, um, that, you know, racial, uh, inequity plays a part in climate vulnerability, um, et cetera. So those are some of the models that we saw in that one specific set of studies.
Brent:
[38:59] And then how do we think about moving beyond just some of these statements that we make or like, oh, we host a town hall, we hear the voices of the community. What's the next step? How do we go from just hearing them to actually acting on some of the concerns that they're voicing?
Clare:
[39:15] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we have this paper out on participatory justice that outlined those models, right? So how can we increase participatory justice? With the kind of assumption that if we increase participatory justice, we'll be able to increase distributive and recognitional justice and equity. And so I feel like your question is kind of getting at this distributive question of, okay, how do we kind of move from, you have a seat at the table, maybe we're co-governing this adaptation planning process together, but then how does it get implemented?
Brent:
[39:50] And what are.
Clare:
[39:51] The distributive outcomes of that? And so we're actually working on a paper right now using the same data set and sample that's looking at distributional equity. And so one of the ways that this kind of translates, and I find this too, it's amazing. I've been doing this work for so long and I'm still like surprised sometimes because I'm like, oh yeah. Like if you, like if I go into a community and I'm like, well, I see that like you don't have enough trees. So I'm going to decide that you need to plant more trees. Right. And then we plant a bunch of trees. Maybe we plant more than we can take care of. So they die. But then, you know, I'm walking down the street and I'm talking to somebody who lives there. And they're like, we didn't want trees. Right. We wanted whatever solar panels or we wanted, you know, some kind of bus structure to shade us because we have to wait for the bus. Right. And so I'm always struck again and again that like we can go into a place and we make a set of assumptions that might be a good set of assumptions in the sense that, you know, there are more trees and we know about the urban heat island effect and all of this stuff. But that, you know, communities live there, you know, day in and day out and they can tell us, you know, what that's communities are not homogenous, right? Different residents might want different things. But again and again, we find that what they want and what they say can sometimes be really different from what we assume. And we come with good intentions and we're trying to improve the health and well-being of the community.
Clare:
[41:20] And so I think that just underlies, that anecdote underlies the importance of the community engaged work. You know, whether that's regulators engaging communities, whether that's researchers engaging communities is incredibly important. And so what does that have to do with distributive justice? Well, when we have those folks at the table, right, they can tell us more, they can direct more of what the needs are. So I can tell you in terms of what cities are doing, they tend to be doing the same kinds of things when it comes to distributive equity. And I think right there to me shows that there is a gap between the participatory justice and the distributive justice, because we're not seeing the specificity, right? We're not seeing the context of this particular neighborhood, you know, in Sacramento has these kinds of climate threats and these kinds of social vulnerability. And these are the sorts of things they need. We're really seeing one size fits all. So that's telling me that even though Sacramento, for example, has great, they score really high in the participatory equity marks, the distributive part isn't quite there. There's a gap there. And so that's something that I think we can go back to cities, we can go back to community groups and say, hey, there's a gap here. We need to figure out how to bridge this. Because what we're seeing is that cities are taking equity seriously in adaptation planning.
Clare:
[42:36] In a lot of places, the language is there, right? It's kind of throughout. They really want to, they see climate change as an opportunity to address these longstanding inequities. But the strategies that they're employing really tend to be one size fits all.
Clare:
[42:52] That's retrofits, right, for apartment buildings to weatherize them, make them more energy efficient. That's putting EV chargers in marginalized neighborhoods, which, you know, I don't know how much that's going to do for the grid as an EV owner or for marginalized communities, right? Right. There's stuff around planting trees, but there isn't always stuff around. Are you planting trees that are going to be taken care of? Right.
Clare:
[43:18] Is there going to be enough water? Are there going to be enough people? There's stuff around kind of health and urban farming and these sorts of things. But for the most part, with a few exceptions, we're kind of seeing this one size fits all for distributive equity. And we're not seeing the kind of meaningful impact that we would expect from someone from a neighborhood to say, hey, this is what my neighborhood needs, right? There could be an issue of scale, right? We're talking about cities. We're talking about cities as big as New York.
Brent:
[43:48] Right?
Clare:
[43:49] We're talking about cities as medium-sized as Memphis and other places. But there's a disconnect there that I think is really important for us to interrogate this assumption that increasing participatory equity is going to increase distributive equity because we're not quite seen that.
Keller:
[44:05] Imagine one way to kind of bridge that gap is through data. Because like you mentioned earlier, the regulatory bodies want data to see, to kind of guide their decision making. And obviously working with the community, you want to try to collect data from them. What are some of the metrics you've seen that are either successful or that you would like to see in the participation ideation stage to kind of guide how they're going to move through and actually track these equity plans?
Clare:
[44:32] Yeah, yeah. So that's, I mean, that's really kind of one of the questions that we ask is that these places, particularly cities, really like data. A lot of them have data dashboards. NOAA has supported kind of helping cities create their own dashboards of data. But then that, again, that gap between data and then metrics, right? So some cities will have metrics, but they don't necessarily have equity metrics. And so we've been, as an extension of this project, been talking with planners kind of about their planning and we asked this very question. And folks are kind of like.
Clare:
[45:13] Do you have any metrics for us? They're like, equity is really important to us. It's relatively new and being included in this, right? Participatory equity is further along than distributive equity. Recognitional equity kind of lags behind both of those. But they're like, we don't know how to necessarily measure this, right? So we're really good. Data has really helped us with problem identification. We can look at, you know, the urban tree canopy and we can see where there are not enough trees, right? We can measure urban heat island effect. We can see where it's getting really hot. We can see where to put those trees. And I think that's part of why cities are focused so much on trees is, one, they have really good data. Two, you know, it has a lot of co-benefits. And three, it's something that they can do, right, within their jurisdiction. They can spend money. They have a lot of added effect to it. But, you know, in terms of reducing inequity and addressing climate adaptation.
Clare:
[46:08] You know, planting trees might not be kind of the most important thing, but it's something, right, that kind of checks all of these boxes. And I think part of it is driven by data. So I think the metrics question is totally unanswered. And I think cities care about it and they're interested in it because they're increasingly having metrics for adaptation. And remember, a lot of these plans are just going, they're being implemented now. And so we have to wait and see kind of what the evaluation is. And I think that's the next thing is, you know, cities are saying, oh, we have these adaptation planning is relatively new. Equity is relatively new. We don't have metrics. Do you have metrics for us? We're like, I don't know. That's a good question. Like, maybe that's what I should be doing. And then how are we going to evaluate this? And I know cities haven't most cities haven't quite gotten to that evaluation question. They know it's important. They haven't quite figured out. They don't quite have the resources for how are we going to evaluate the implementation of this plan to then inform the next planning and implementation process.
Brent:
[47:06] Yeah. And then I know another part of your research has also looked at like
Brent:
[47:11] the stakeholders at the table not being just humans, like other species and all that. How does like if we look at environmental justice and we take into account the communities like the humans that we are used to focusing on, how does also focus on the animals and the other populations living in our communities benefit both them and the overall larger community? Yeah.
Clare:
[47:35] So this is kind of tying into my environmental justice and critical environmental justice work. We talked about with this kind of bottom-up transdisciplinary approach. And so one of the things that we've taken critical environmental justice to mean when we think about intersectional, multiscalar, transformative, and indispensable pillars is to expand that beyond our own species and really to think about other species. And what does that mean for us as a society to think about justice for other species? And so a new kind of turn in environmental justice is around multi-species justice. So David Schlossberg and others have written very eloquently on this. Definitely something worth checking out. But the idea is that environmental justice shouldn't just be about humans and justice for humans, but it should be about across species. And so what does that mean and what does that look like? And there are folks within social sciences and environmental justice who are looking at this, and there are folks in conservation biology coming to this, or folks in wildlife ecology coming to this. So it's interesting to see how it's kind of popping up or seated in these very different disciplines that don't, you know, normally necessarily talk to each other.
Clare:
[48:50] And so, you know, I think some of the stuff that it does and one of the things that we're very mindful of is to say that we need... Environmental justice, we need climate justice for multi-species or cross-species is not to say, is not to take away from the justice and equity that we need for marginalized human communities, right? That's not to take away from, you know, communities of color.
Clare:
[49:20] Poor communities, under-resourced, over-policed communities, right? And so that's a tension that we're constantly trying to make clear in our work on this, because I think the temptation is to say, okay, now you're calling for, you know, all these species to have justice, but what about us, right? Shouldn't we get justice for humans first and this kind of ordering? And so, you know, we really find in our work and some of our work building on Chrishell and others on, for instance, urban coyotes, so coyotes living in urban systems, has really, you know, tried to build case studies and try to build insights around, you know, how we treat animals is similar to how we treat certain human communities. And so if we can treat everyone, um, indispensably, um, right through our structures, transforming our structures through our institutions, through our regulations, um.
Clare:
[50:22] Then we'll, we'll really, you know, work towards and hopefully be able to achieve something like environmental justice.
Keller:
[50:29] And what are some of the biggest roadblocks you see in healthy human and wildlife relationships? Is it a lot of perception or are there other factors that are going into play?
Clare:
[50:38] That's a great question. And there are whole like fields that look at kind of human perceptions or human wildlife dimensions coming more from like the ecology side. You know, I think some of the biggest roadblocks that I've seen in doing this work and talking to folks has been fear, right? And fear also, you know, works to subjugate marginalized communities. Uh but fear right um and uh uh economic loss right so fear of coyote and whether that's you know because i'm in golden gate park in san francisco or because a coyote killed you know a cow a pack of coyotes killed cow or wolf um you know killed some kind of livestock or something we see this this this real um frequently not always but this like revenge uh modality, this revenge mentality of, well, we're going to kill all the wolves because, you know, this one livestock.
Clare:
[51:41] So that's one of the things that we see is fear. We see kind of threat to economic livelihood or perceived threat to economic livelihood. We see identity politics, right? We see, well, they want to bring back the grizzly. And so we want an opposition to that, you know, not to do that and these sorts of things. So those are some of the biggest roadblocks. Sometimes it's policy. The only real tool that we have in terms of wildlife conservation is the Endangered Species Act. And so we do all of this trying to fit a square peg in a round hole because it's literally our only tool. And so we try all of these kind of gymnastics to get things to fit into that framework, because it's the only way that we can protect species. So that's not always the right tool, but it's the only one we have.
Clare:
[52:37] And so, you know, that's a roadblock. We see some management practices, although I think, you know, at least in California and the West Coast, there's concerted effort to do more co-management with tribes and tribal stewardship and these sorts of things to really rethink our relationship with species. And in rethinking our relationship with species develop policy and management practices that kind of honor those relations. And so it's a really great example, and we have a couple of papers on this, of how theory matters and how we conceptualize our relationships, whether that's with marginalized communities, whether that's with other species, whether it's with both, and the drivers of the roadblocks to those relationships and the impacts that we see from those, to action and management and policy and thinking about regulatory frameworks
Clare:
[53:26] and how we can adapt those using different kinds of theory.
Brent:
[53:31] Yeah. And I know we don't have a ton of time left here, but I want to make sure we can at least touch on some of the health disparities work and especially the focusing on intimate partner violence. How does intimate partner violence vary across different groups? And what has some of your work probably been in that area?
Clare:
[53:50] Yeah. So as I mentioned, one of the three arms of my research is health disparities. And so sometimes that's post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes that's resilience, sometimes that's intimate partner violence, you know, as something that, you know, is itself a health disparity and creates other kind of mental and social, and health disparities. And so, you know, some of the stuff that we've found is that, you know, intimate partner violence, I mean, it is a social epidemic. One in four women in the U.S. will experience some form of IPV in their life. One in five men will experience it. The most likely group is bisexual women, right? So 60% of bisexual women are likely to experience intimate partner violence.
Clare:
[54:36] It just we see it across the board, no matter your gender identity, no matter your sexual identity. We see IPV, you know, kind of at these really alarming rates. And we know that that they lead to adverse mental and health impacts and physical health impacts. And so some of the things that we found, right, is that particularly after disaster is that people who experience intimate partner violence are worse off, right? They have less resilience, they have more stress, they have more post-traumatic stress disorder. And so we kind of talk about this double or triple whammy when you're experiencing a disaster, whether that's the pandemic or a hurricane or flooding, is that you're a lot worse off. And so one of the things that we kind of talk about that folks can do is when you have something like a disaster and intimate partner violence and the kind of intersection of them is using something like FEMA or disaster relief as a way to connect people to resources. And so there are these validated IPV screening questions.
Clare:
[55:46] If you've ever gotten to the doctor, maybe you've been asked them. But it's just a way, right, if you show up. So one of our recommendations is if you show up for disaster assistance, right, that would be an opportunity to do some kind of IPV screening. And then if you find out someone has IPV, you can connect them to all sorts of other kind of IPV related resources, shelter, etc. Because, you know, we know that it kind of compounds the problem. And we know that the more problems people have, the slower recovery is. And there are implications of that, you know, economically, socially, etc. So those are some of the implications of IPV and disaster.
Keller:
[56:28] Within all this research, you're working with a wide variety of communities. What advice would you give students working with communities with which they might not identify with themselves and how to approach that relationship building differently? In a way that feels genuine and also gives enough time to build that relationship and build that dynamic?
Clare:
[56:49] Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think it can be hard as an undergraduate researcher to just go out on your own and do community-engaged research because it does take so much time. And undergrads don't have a lot of time. You know, I both mean that because undergrads tend to do so much in any given day or quarter. But also, you're not here for very long, Right. You're not doing like a five year concentrated, you know, PhD and you only have to take classes for two of those years. Right. You're not doing a master's or a master's thesis project. So it can take a lot of time. And so sometimes that time horizon doesn't doesn't line up. But there are certainly things that folks can do. And so one is getting connected with the Office of Public Scholarship and Community Engagement, right? That's a great resource. It could be finding labs or finding researchers on campus that are doing this kind of community engaged work. And so they already kind of have the relationships, they already have all that infrastructure built up, and then you can work on it. I'd also say you don't have to belong to a community to do research on it. That's something I hear from undergrads is, oh, I don't, you know, I'm not from there. I don't, I'm not part of that identity group. And it's like, no, you don't have to be from there. You might need to work, you know, harder if you're not from a place, you know, to build trust.
Clare:
[58:06] But that's okay. But yeah, absolutely. That's not a, you don't have to belong to a certain, to a certain group or a certain place to do, to do research there. I would say come with trust.
Clare:
[58:20] Practice what I preach. Come humbly to the communities. Be real about expectations. So expectation setting is incredibly important. You're not going to come in and fix all their problems. right you're gonna you're working on your honors thesis or you're working as part of this lab group and so really um not minimizing but really managing expectations because there's only so much you can do there's only so much any of us can do right um and so it's really important to do that um but i would say getting connected with university centers or structures that that are offices that do this getting connected with labs that do this taking classes that's some advice i have like i teach a research methods class. I'm teaching it this quarter. But take, you know, research methods classes, whether that's community engaged or, you know, some other kind of methods that then can be used. I know the School of Education also offers that might be more graduate level, they offer a number of kind of community-engaged classes. So those are just some things, you know, folks can do to try to, you know, get involved and do this work if they're interested.
Brent:
[59:28] Yeah. I think you've definitely given us a lot to think about throughout this hour. Do you have any other advice as we wrap up here to students, especially those looking to make an impact?
Clare:
[59:36] Yeah. I guess the only advice I have since you asked, although I always hesitate to give advice, is to find the thing that you're passionate about. So whatever that is, right, if that's rocket science, if that's chemistry, if that's sociology, if that's community regional development, you know, whatever whatever your passion is and follow that, because I think really the most important thing is doing something that you care about and that excites you. And you will find a way to make a difference doing that work, right? You will find a way to make meaningful change and to improve society and to make things better if you can connect it to something that you really, really care about and something that really inspires you. And so, you know, don't worry about doing the good work. Do what inspires you. Follow your passion and the good work will come, especially when you're really interested in, you know, transforming communities, transforming society and really advancing justice. Um you will be able to do that um and and no matter what you do there's a way to do that um and a way to get involved and so i would say um yeah follow your passion and and don't give up and and there'll be challenges um but ultimately it's worth it in the end um because you can have a real impact.
Brent:
[1:00:51] Amazing thank you Clare.
Clare:
[1:00:52] Thank you.