2023 — This is a motion toward reconsidering the importance of the Environmental Justice Principles in my engagement with issues that impact our children. At the time of writing, between 2010 and 2012, I was a new parent and struggling to dance between my contrarian stance, the need to feed a kid, and Detroit’s political and economic climate. These Michigan Citizen columns were written while we were homeless, crashing in community spaces and spare rooms, with a baby and an axe to grind. The US Social Forum had just rolled through town and Occupy was on the rise. It was post-Kwame pre-Bankruptcy Detroit and the city was very different. The rhythms were different than they are today. More so than any of what we see today, there was a great potential for transformation. Power and opportunity were held differently by Black hands that knew how to protect people, how to say ‘no’ to greedy bastards and how to stand against the missionary economic strategies rampant until emergency management. I’m learning how to organize publications in medium and will be attempting to upload each of the columns with new commentary on a regular basis. I’d also like to reach out to other Communicating Justice contributors to possibly include their efforts in this here. The column benefited from three distinct voices. ~E
Learning Environmental Justice Principles
In 2011, as part of my work with the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, I cowrote a weekly column in the now infamous and deeply missed Michigan Citizen newspaper. My co-columnists/co-conspirators were Lottie Spady, Patrick Geans Ali atcfirst and then S.A., between the three of us, we would attempt to send in a new column every week.
This project was part of our work for the Detroit Food Justice Task Force where I cocoordinated with Lottie, Adrienne Marie Brown and Charity Hicks, rest in power. Each week one of us would write on one of the 17 Environmental Justice Principles through the lens of Food and Media Justice in the context of pre-Emergency Management in Detroit. This produced a large body of work around each principle with each of us taking the time to bring our unique analysis. Sometimes we would respond to and expand on each other’s work within the columns.
This is a quickly put together collection of my efforts and contributions to the project. Over the years, we have discussed putting all of our columns together in a book project and maybe reconsidering these pieces will encourage that effort.
