Project Title: Central Park Environmental Justice Field Trip

Professor: Jerald Isseks, PhD

Class: Intro to Social Justice (AMST103)

Modality: In person

Assignment:

Environmental-Justice-Scavenger-Hunt

The tool used to assess environmental justice conceptual understandings was a scavenger hunt that required students to work together in teams, be creative about how they interpreted everyday urban park features, apply terminology to a real-life context, explore on foot, read a map.

In the classes leading up to the trip students evaluated the following texts to inform conversations about local environmental justice movements and how climate change affects politics.

1. “How a Utility Giant Tried (and Failed) to Build a Pipeline Under Brooklyn: https://inthesetimes.com/article/fracking-brooklyn-new-york-pipeline-environmental-justice-pollution
2. No North Brooklyn Pipeline organization webpage: https://www.nonorthbrooklynpipeline.org/
3. Climate Migration / Climate Refugees: https://education.cfr.org/learn/reading/migration-displacement-climate-change 

Example of student work:

Pollution

Cars in central park pollute the air by releasing harmful gases like carbon monoxide,nitrogen oxides, and carbon dioxide from their engines.while walking our group passed by a car running which contributes to damage to the park’s natural environment.

Decarbonization

 Reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Bike lanes around Central Park South have been created for people to ride along the park. This promotes biking or EV which reduces emissions and supports a low-carbon future.

Anthropocentric 

A human centered place or things designed for human benefit over nature. In the picture below our group stumbled upon the tennis club they have on 95th street. This large space was created for human enjoyment and nature is destroyed for human use rather than being left untouched.

DEFORESTATION:

In the photo above you can see a pathway which people had to cut down trees and reconstruct for human use which I guess is not a bad idea to use now but imagine how many trees would have been there normally.