Tides of Change: Rethinking Environmental Justice on the Coast

• In Event: Environmental Justice, DEI, and Threats to Equity Work

Abstract

With nearly forty percent of the global population living within one hundred kilometers of a shoreline, coastal areas have become key sites in which climate policy and environmental justice (EJ) intersect across dynamic marine-terrestrial ecologies. As EJ becomes embedded in state-led climate adaptation efforts, narrow interpretations of what constitutes an “EJ community” constrain how vulnerability and harm are understood. Despite the limitations of state institutions, including the dilution of EJ language, the risk of greenwashing, and the political pressures shaping climate policy, state level guidance remains a crucial arena for embedding critical EJ values that recognize the broad range of social, historical, cultural, and ecological realities that shape coastal change. To promote EJ as a goal and process, we must question whether official and institutionalized models of participation truly foster EJ or whether these models reinforce existing power imbalances. Using a reflexive, practice-informed methodology grounded in our participation in the California Beach Resiliency Plan (CBRP), we analyze the conceptual and practical tensions of integrating EJ into statewide adaptation planning. We find that beaches and shoreline publics rarely fit within conventional definitions of community or vulnerability and argue for more participatory and ecocultural EJ frameworks that can better account for coastal dynamics and confront the challenges of representation and legibility that current policy discourse too often narrows or obscures.

Authors

• Summer Marie Gray, University of California-Santa Barbara

• José Castro-Sotomayor, CSU Channel Islands