An Intersectional Multispecies Equity for Environmental Education

• In Event: Education and Multispecies Equity: Collective Understandings Toward Transformations

Abstract

Pomona, California, the city where I am an activist-scholar, grapples viscerally with the legacies of structurally discriminatory policies and practices, particularly those relating to the interactions of race with nature, environment, and space. After colonization and the forced removal of the Indigneous Tongva peoples the region, like many locales in southern California, was repopulated with miles of profitable citrus groves that exploited migrant labor. White settlers obliterated most of the local flora and fauna, turning the region into a financial powerhouse for themselves. The native western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus) for example, has all but disappeared in the area, only surviving in pockets of the foothills where native oaks and pines still thrive (Cooper & Muchilinski, 2015). When land became cheaper in California’s Central Valley in the 1950s and ‘60s, the “citrus belt” gradually disappeared and the Pomona Valley turned into a paved suburban dream–mostly for Whites (Davis, 1998; Garcia, 2001). Beginning in the 1970s, as Black Americans began to move into the city of Pomona, Whites fled, leaving a wake of destructive policies and practices in place. As Carpio (2019) notes these changes, fueled by racist ideals, mitigated the “inroads into suburban property ownership and schooling” made by people of color as “white flight, fiscal abandonment, and exclusion from municipal resources” wreaked havoc on the city (pp. 206-207). Today, Pomona is predominantly Latinx, has a median household income of nearly $20,000 less than that of the entire state (US Census Quick Facts, 2022), and scores in the 19th percentile for the Los Angeles County Healthy Places Index score. As one can imagine, this community has not experienced much equity, multispecies or otherwise.

I open this paper with a historical sketch of the place I work because the session provocation, “How can education better (critically) attend to knowledge claims and postulates about who or what matters in our communities?” immediately inspired me to reflect on my own community-based research in urban agriculture, as well as animal-focused education research (e.g., Spannring, 2017) and critical human-animal studies scholarship in other fields (e.g., Deckha, 2012) that collectively roots equity in intersectional multispecies frameworks (e.g., Lloro, 2020; Russell, 2020). In this paper, I thus explicitly conceptualize an intersectional multispecies framework as one that attends to the multiplicity of difference across more-than-human species and gives analytic attention to human social categories of difference that indelibly shape lived experience, like class, gender, race, and sexuality. Drawing on prior research and an ecofeminist (feminist posthumanist) theoretical perspective, I analyze and interpret participatory ethnographic data (interviews, fieldnotes) I have collected at urban agriculture sites in the city of Pomona for the last 6 years. The objective of the paper is to begin to elucidate one kind of multispecies equity that will contribute to a wider conversation in this symposium (and in the field of EE) related to crafting a collective understanding of multispecies equity.

Author

• Teresa Lloro, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona
  Presenting Author