Centering Environmental Justice in the Climate Conversation

The GSB’s 3rd Annual Climate, Business & Innovation Summit: What we learned and what the GSB should do next

Photo by Victoria Wills

On February 10th, over 700 people from 37 countries attended the GSB’s Climate Summit. The event represented not only the cumulation of a year’s work for our organizing team, but the achievement of the event organizers before us — who founded the conference in 2019 to create space for the climate conversations they saw as essential to a comprehensive business education.

Much was uncertain in March 2020, when fellow MBAs Sophie Janaskie, Joanna Klitzke, and I kicked off conference planning in earnest. Business school classes had just moved online due to COVID-19, and we knew that the Summit, slated for a year later, would look very different if it could take place at all. Over the next few months, the pandemic and protests that followed the killing of George Floyd continued to expose the disturbing inequalities in American society.

Even then, the theme of this year’s Summit appeared self-evident: we wanted to highlight intersections between racial equity and climate change while elevating voices of color in the conversation. This intersection — broadly understood as environmental justice (“EJ”) — is increasingly central to mainstream climate conversations. A new talking point for public figures like Joe Biden and Larry Fink, EJ has long been ignored or relegated to secondary status by the environmental movement.

An EJ framework recognizes the historical disparities perpetuated by both polluting industries and the solutions replacing them. Much has been written about the disparate impact that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, for example, have had on communities of color — both through the direct effects of the pollution and the domino effects of global warming. The UN estimates that controlling for other factors, climate change has already increased income inequality between the world’s top and bottom deciles by 25%. The US represents a microcosm of this effect: one study (published in Science) found that whereas the richest counties in America may even benefit from climate change, the poorest decile will experience a decrease in income of 5.5 to 27.8%.

The discrimination doesn’t end with these polluting industries, but is rather perpetuated in their replacements: studies have found that lower-to-middle income communities have worse access to rooftop solar, plug-in vehicle charging and high efficiency lighting. A 2019 study found that even after controlling for income, households in majority-Black communities are 69% less likely to have rooftop solar than communities with no racial or ethnic majority. These disparities have implications for those communities’ health and financial wellness as well as our ability to scale the energy transition. We wanted this year’s Climate Summit to send a clear message: any honest conversation about the problems and solutions presented by climate change needs to start with equity.

Our organizing team was therefore thrilled when Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker. In conversation with Dr. Anthony Kinslow II, Lecturer in Stanford’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department, Ms. Flowers shared insights from her career as an educator, organizer and activist in her home state of Alabama and beyond. Ms. Flowers referenced Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” perhaps the most notorious US example of industry’s debilitating environmental effects on a predominantly Black community. But she also made clear that environmental racism isn’t just a Southern issue. Closer to home, residents of the East Bay city of Richmond are 1.5 times more likely than those elsewhere in the county to go to hospital emergency departments for asthma attacks — just one facet of the toxic toll of the petrochemical industry on a predominantly Black community.

Following Ms. Flowers’s keynote remarks, the Summit continued with an EJ panel highlighting organizers from Memphis, Los Angeles and Central Florida. From there, environmental justice issues stretched into more “traditional” panels, where investors and entrepreneurs insisted that we must consider the equity of the climate solutions we design — not just their efficacy. Indeed, as Dr. Kinslow pointed out during the keynote, a just transition is a fast transition; the two are inextricably linked.

The event demonstrated the increased demand for these conversations — both within the GSB and more broadly. The majority of the Summit’s over 700 participants tuned in for multiple sessions, demonstrating a sustained interest in the day’s programming. I was particularly struck by the number of young people — many of them college students around the country — who shared that the conference was their first real introduction to environmental justice and that they were eager to contribute to the movement.

There were also some frustrating aspects of planning the conference. I grew up in Vancouver, where nearly every formal event begins with a land acknowledgment: a formal statement that recognizes the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories on which the event takes place. The practice not only acknowledges our history, but recognizes that colonialism is an ongoing process that shapes our present. At Stanford and across the U.S., land acknowledgements are increasingly becoming the norm rather than the exception, especially at climate- and equity-focused events. For our organizing team, it was clear that a Climate Summit focused on environmental justice should begin with an acknowledgment that Stanford sits on the unceded territory of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe. We thought it would be particularly salient if read by Dean Levin, who, as leader of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, would introduce the event and our keynote speaker.

Unfortunately, that did not happen; encouraged not to reach out to Dean Levin directly on this topic, I engaged with an intermediary, who told me that the Dean was open to the idea, but didn’t necessarily see the connection between the land acknowledgment and the event.

This explanation was particularly troubling because the Summit was meant to highlight how American colonialism and racism had led to our present predicament — and that even the environmental movement had often failed to do right by the people with the greatest stake in its success. In a recent interview with GSB Professor Brian Lowery, the Sierra Club’s Leslie Field described how the modern environmental movement’s ties to structural racism begin with its very inception; indeed, as she points out, her organization was founded by white people who successfully evicted Native Americans from Yosemite to found a national park. Knowing this history, it is difficult to imagine an event more deserving of a land acknowledgment than a climate conference focused on environmental justice. But even this is somewhat beside the point. A land acknowledgment belongs at any event at Stanford, as the institution’s Native Business Student Association itself has pointed out. I shared some of this context with the Dean’s office, but did not receive a response.

Ultimately, I began the Summit by giving a land acknowledgment. When I was told that the Dean preferred this outcome, I honestly felt relieved. After all of the back and forth, I far preferred to give the acknowledgment than to cede it to someone who wasn’t sure of its relevance.

My co-organizers and I poured our hearts into this conference: dreaming up speakers, working through technical challenges and mentoring the students who will inherit these responsibilities next year. We did this because we wanted to create opportunities for ourselves and our climate-focused peers, but we were also motivated by the fact that the GSB lacks a comprehensive approach to educating future leaders about both the climate and racial equity. I am proud that we filled one slice of that gap on February 10th. I hope our event will serve as a demonstration of how central topics of racial equity and climate are to each other, and to the broader business education. I also hope that the demand for these topics will stand as a testament to the changing needs of students at the GSB, who no longer see “social issues” as an occasional detriment to profitable operations, but as a core part of what it means to succeed.

What are some first steps for the GSB? I highlight three ideas here:

1. The GSB has much to acknowledge in its history of perpetuating racial injustice. As other departments at Stanford have acknowledged and as our own Native Business Student Association has demonstrated, it could acknowledge that our education depends on the continued use of land that was taken from the Muwekma Ohlone peoples. To be clear: The GSB should open each major event with a meaningful and well-researched land acknowledgment in recognition of that history and present. This acknowledgment is most powerful when it comes from those with power — rather than coming from a program or from a student leader.
2. The GSB should amend its blanket policy of not paying guest speakers for their time. Neither the Stanford Law School nor the undergraduate schools impose this restriction on their clubs, which has prevented not only the Climate Summit but also other student groups (including the Black Business Students Association) from attracting their desired speakers. I imagine that this policy was developed when the GSB assumed that guests would be “business people’’ who made their money in their day jobs. Nobody thinks the GSB needs to pay Larry Ellison to speak to students; but for activists and educators, speaking is their life’s work. If the GSB wants to better educate future leaders on social issues, it must start by paying the guest speakers it wants to carry out this work on its behalf.¹
3. The GSB must fully integrate topics of racial equity and climate change into its core curriculum — a campaign my classmates have been waging since our first year at this institution.² While we have the student-led Climate Summit and electives in both topics, neither option ensures that every GSB student has a fundamental understanding of the structural racism and environmental degradation that underpin our modern economy — a prerequisite to reforming those structures or even just succeeding within them. Having a keen awareness of these issues and a framework for addressing them should not be something that a GSB student can opt out of. The survival of our fragile planet and democracy depend on the next generation of business leaders tackling these existential threats.

The GSB could implement the first two recommendations tomorrow. The third one, I acknowledge, is more complicated. The GSB redesigns its curriculum every five years or so, a timeline that results in the majority of GSB students who come through the institution having little say in any changes. The Class of 2021 was supposed to be one of the lucky years, contributing to the new vision when the administration met with the Academic Committee in the Spring of 2020, which became the Fall of 2020 given the challenges of Covid-19 and will now occur long after we have graduated.

When curriculum reform finally takes place, I hope that this article as well as the tireless work of my classmates on these topics will serve as ammunition for future classes. We have taken small steps to highlight these issues at the GSB, but I am optimistic that the students who carry on from here will succeed in moving climate change and racial justice — and the intersections of the two — from the periphery of the GSB experience to its center.

Footnotes

1. It is indeed troubling that this GSB policy mirrors a long legacy of businesses failing to pay women and people of color for their labor, which was recently addressed in Fast Company.
2. In their largely-ignored recommendations to the GSB in June 2020, the BBSA called for a required course on Equity in the core curriculum. In the October 2020 issue of nondisclosure, Lola Damski (GSB ‘21) crystallized the arguments for a better climate education at the GSB.