ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICEVolume 2, Number 1, 2009© Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.DOI: 10.1089/env.2009.0001

Where We Live, Work, Play . . . and Eat: Expanding the Environmental Justice Agenda

Robert Gottlieb

ABSTRACT

One crucial way to expand the reach and breadth of the environmental justice movement and environ-mental justice action and research agendas would be to extend the environmental justice slogan that theenvironment is “where we live, work, and play” to include “where, what, and how we eat.” The linkagesbetween an environmental justice and food justice approach can extend beyond traditional notions of en-vironmental or food issues to address issues of health, globalization, worker rights and working condi-tions, disparities regarding access to environmental (or food) goods, land use and respect for the land,and, ultimately, how our production, transportation, distribution, and consumption systems are orga-nized.

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IN 2000, THE environmental justice publication, Race,Poverty, and Environment, dedicated part of its winter

issue to a discussion of food and environment. One of thearticles in the publication that I co-authored sought toidentify parallels between environmental justice andsome of the new food movements that had emerged dur-ing the previous decade, particularly in how such move-ments focused on questions of daily life. The environ-mental justice slogan that the environment is “where welive, work, and play,” the article pointed out, could be ex-tended to include “where, what, and how we eat;” an ap-proach that in turn could address where, what, and howfood is grown, produced, sold, and consumed. Morespecifically, the new food movements were seeking to cre-ate linkages and expand the agendas of various food ad-vocates and to introduce the concepts of community foodsecurity and justice as part of the organizing frameworkand advocacy for a different kind of food system. Theseefforts paralleled the debates within the environmentaljustice movement regarding the challenge of expandingits frame of reference beyond the classic civil rights dis-course regarding environmental disparities and risk dis-crimination to capture the kinds of daily life issues asso-ciated with its “live, work, and play” slogan.

The article pointed to a number of similarities and par-allel trends between the two movements that were hap-

pening at the time and which, nearly a decade later, re-main central to movement definitions and agendas. Whileenvironmental justice groups continued to establishthemselves as an increasingly influential part of the en-vironmental movement, the food justice groups grappledwith core issues of equity, empowerment, and socialchange agendas in seeking to situate and better definetheir own place within a diverse and sometimes dividedset of food movements. What both set of movementsneeded was an approach that demonstrated how the con-cept of justice allowed the movements to stake their claimto being both universal in their goals yet directly reflect-ing on the issues people faced in their daily lives.

Today, both environmental justice and food justice havecome to represent powerful ideas. They continue to dem-onstrate the potential to resonate among multiple groupsand expand the support base for bringing about changeson the ground. Their focus extends beyond traditional no-tions of environmental or food issues to address issues ofhealth, globalization, worker rights and working condi-tions, disparities regarding access to environmental (orfood) goods, land use and respect for the land, and, ulti-mately, how our production, transportation, distribution,and consumption systems are organized.

For environmental justice advocates, it might be usefulto consider the ways in which a food justice agenda alsosheds light on how environmental justice enters into theequation and, as a consequence, helps establish its ca-pacity to function as rooted in daily life, yet universal inits aspirations. Some examples:

Dr. Gottlieb is professor of Urban and Environmental Plan-ning at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA.

FOOD JUSTICE � SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE �ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Small family farmers, farm workers, rural communi-ties, farms at the urban edge, are all potential constituentsof sustainable agriculture organizations. How food isgrown is critical to a food justice approach. Small, local,sustainable farms are a building block of any democraticand just food system. At the same time, this sustainableagriculture perspective necessarily has an environmentaljustice focus that addresses problems of land, water, andair contamination (and the justice implications often as-sociated with those impacts), rural economic develop-ment concerns, and occupational hazards for its enor-mously exploited work force of largely immigrantworkers.

FOOD JUSTICE � COMMUNITY HEALTH �ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Food justice can be associated with community health,including encouraging the consumption of healthy foods,such as fresh fruits and vegetables, and prevention of diet-related diseases. Advocacy around the kind of food thatis consumed is clearly a critical aspect of food justice. Foodjustice is the connection between what people eat, whatkind of food is produced, and how it is accessed. Theseissues are particularly pronounced in low income com-munities where lack of access to fresh, affordable, healthyfood has direct health and nutrition consequences. Thesefood justice/community health concerns resonate with anenvironmental justice approach that focuses on health dis-parities, prevention strategies, and the social rather thanexclusively medical determinants of health.

FOOD JUSTICE � LIVABILITY AND THE BUILTENVIRONMENT � ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Where we live—the environments around us—includesuch core factors as land use, transportation, housing,parking, and retail store locations. These are preeminentlyissues of the built environment which are powerful foodjustice and environmental justice issues. Supermarketabandonment of urban core communities parallels thedeindustrialization and loss of jobs in those same areas,resulting in land use problems such as brownfields andfood deserts. These are powerful environmental and foodjustice concerns and areas for mobilization.

These connections extend into other key arenas such aseconomic development, globalization, and, as a centralpart of the environmental justice and food justice dis-course—the questions of race, ethnicity, class, and gen-der. Indeed, the environmentalist mantra—act local, thinkglobal—is a food justice truism. When a food item trav-els an average of 1,400 miles from where it’s produced towhere it’s consumed, significant environmental, energy,and transportation issues come to the fore. When food isproduced for a long distance system, many of the inputsin food production as well as processing and shippinggenerate enormous environmental stresses, causing pol-lution of the land, the air, and rivers and streams, andplacing enormous health burdens on farm workers andother producers. When food is imported and exported,when it crosses borders and oceans, it significantly in-creases the food miles-related environmental footprint,which accounts for emissions from ships, trucks, and rail(which have become major environmental justice battle-grounds), as well as the fumigation facilities for food im-ports that utilize highly toxic substances and the cross-border pesticide treadmill effect where substances suchas DBCP that are banned in the U.S. end up on produceshipped here while also poisoning workers in the coun-tries where the pesticide is still used. And a food justiceperspective links loss of farmland with the pressures forurban sprawl which relates back to the abandonment ofinner city areas. When farms are turned into sprawlingdevelopments at the urban edge, the opportunities to cre-ate a viable regional food system and a sustainable urbanenvironment are that much further reduced.

Food justice thus extends the environmental justiceagenda by identifying alternative “pro-environment” sce-narios for farmers, workers, rivers and streams, and ur-ban residents alike. To make the environmental justiceand food justice link can be crucial for both movements,for policymakers coming at these issues from both ends,and for those who wish to change and enlarge the dis-course about what constitutes an environmental—as wellas a food systems—framework.

Address correspondence to:Robert Gottlieb

Urban & Environmental PlanningOccidental College

1600 Campus RoadLos Angeles, CA 90041

E-mail: gottlieb@oxy.edu

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