An ongoing discussion of United States laws and legislation with regards to the Environmental Justice Movement

Monday, September 6, 2010

Recess is over!

It's been a long time since I last updated this blog. I had started it as a response to my enrollment in an introductory course on environmental justice, but started paying less attention to it once my partner who had committed to joint ownership and operation of the project pulled a disappearing act, and as summer approached, I switched from being a full-time student/lacrosse player, to a fixed-hour wage earner at my summer job. But enough with the excuses! Environmental justice waits for no one!

I have decided to revamp the blog and actually start posting a lot more often. Also, I would like to broaden the scope of this blog...although doing so wouldn't require much stretching of the imagination. In choosing topics related to law, legislation, and environmental justice, I found that the problem was always having too many things to write about. Part of the appeal of law and legislation is its omnipresence in the lives of the people to whom it applies. Part of the appeal of the environmental justice movement is its permeation through society as a social movement, set of legislative reforms, large-scale values shift, and as a catalyst to change whose effects are often taken for grated. These qualities of law and the environmental justice not only make the two inextricably linked, but also demonstrate the connectivity between them and innumerable amounts of other disciplines. What the introductory course taught me, perhaps most usefully, is how to look at the ways in which this movement has grown and progressed and shaped issues of legal and social importance. Therefore, I believe I'd be hard-pressed NOT to find a connection between the law, environmental justice, and any given issue that I encounter throughout my life, my education, and my focus on ecology and the environment. With this in mind, I hope to bring more issues to the table, even if this blog is never read, so that I can have my ideas collected and documented. I am interested in seeing how, if at all, they change.

That's all for this (brief) post. I'm about to start another on one of the issues that came up that inspired me to re-commit myself to sharing my voice...or at least identifying it.