Morgan Gardner - Linking Activism: Ecology, Social Justice, and Education for Social Change

Morgan Gardner

Routledge
New York & London

2005 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group.

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97459-3 (Hardcover)
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97459-2 (Hardcover)
Library of Congress Card Number 2005011677

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My warm thanks are extended to family, friends, and colleagues who have given in direct and indirect ways to this project. Thanks to Michelle Meyer who has given invaluable forms of care, encouragement, and feedback since the inception of this work. Thanks to friends and colleagues Kathleen Cooper, Sobia Shaikh, Diana Gustafson, Nancy Quinn, and Si Transken for their insights, listening, and counsel at different stages of this project. I am also indebted to Margrit Eichler, Ardra Cole, and Budd Hall for their encouragement and review of my work. I am deeply appreciative to each activist who participated in this study for the sharing of their experiences and insights. My thanks to Frank Williams for his research assistance support; Alfred Dyck for his work on contained in this book; and Roberta Hammett for helping me navigate resources. To family members Mary Gardner, Mikeala Clark Gardner, Stephen Clark, and Hugh Clark thank you for your care, encouragement, and love of learningall qualities which have enriched my work on this project. Thanks to both long time and recent friends who are here for the richness of the journeyCatherine, Sobia, Alf, Mary Lou, Alan, Rita, Clar, Bobbi, Ursula, and the Green Amazons. Thanks to Memorial University and to my colleagues in the Faculty of Education who provide a vibrant place to pursue research, scholarship, and teaching.

Journal note: Looking back I realize I witnessed the links between social justice and environmental protection from a young age. As a child I remember noticing that the air was dirtier in the poor parts of town. I recall a family friend's husband sick and dying with a lung disease from years of working unprotected in the mines. I saw First Nations communities living adjacent to waste dumps. And I have seen many homeless men, women, and children sleeping in filthy urban streets. These experiences haunted me as a child, and as I grew older they became buried inside me, as if, in some respects, they never existed. And in a way, this was true, because the societal culture around me was not recognizing or acting on these forms of social and ecological oppression. The dominant culture around me treated these injustices as if they were invisible.

I didn't begin to truly confront my own collusion with these forms of socially constructed invisibility until my early twenties when I became involved in environmental advocacy. I started catching myself in one instance, and then in another, unwittingly living my activism in ways which isolated rather than linked social justice and environmental practice. I began realizing that many of my activist assumptions, standpoints, and practices needed re-examination. From the outside, this awareness of fragmentation challenged me to open myself to the complex dimensions and layers of social change work. For instance, I began asking, how would workers and communities impacted by environmental reforms be dealt with justly? Do our environmental efforts resonate with minoritized individuals? As activists, are we aware of the ways our social locationality frames our environmental work? What blocks environmental activists from asking certain kinds of socially related questions?