ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE TOURS: USING LOCAL CASE STUDIES FOR TEACHING ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY

Environmental geology, as the topic of an undergraduate course, is flexible in terms of course design and content. For example, environmental geology courses could be designed as a survey of global environmental and geological systems, or around the topic of sustainability, or even as an exploration of the many intersections between geology and society. Regardless of the design, environmental geology courses greatly benefit from the use of case studies. A very effective and experiential way to incorporate case studies is through an environmental justice tour where local sites of environmental importance are visited and analyzed for their impact on the local community. An environmental justice tour involves visiting a series of sites in a single afternoon that depict the intersection of environmental geology and society on a local level. As an example, the sites visited as a part of the author’s upper-level environmental geology course based out of Louisville, Kentucky include a Superfund site, a levee system, combined sewer overflow sites, channelized streams, an industrial chemical park, and heavily polluted lakes. Each site is paired with a driving tour of the surrounding neighborhood in order to contextualize the impact on the surrounding community. The tour is introduced early in the semester, which allows students to develop first-hand connections to the topics that will be explored in lectures, labs, and additional field trips throughout the rest of the course.

Tours like this would vary by region based on what kinds of resources and hazards are located nearby, but could be adapted for rural, suburban and urban environments by visiting landfills, industrial farm complexes, power plants, waste treatment plants, factories and quarries among many other options. Regardless of the specific locations visited, the environmental justice tour experience acts as a touchstone for how the course unfolds. Each location visited functions as a local case study, where students are able to analyze the environmental issue at hand and more directly relate it to their own community.