We are going to talk about environmental justice at the border,
focusing on the San Diego-Tijuana earthquake scenario and the model
for meaningful inclusion that we think can really travel.
My name is Elizabeth Reddy. I am an assistant professor
of engineering design and society and geophysics
at Colorado School of Mines.
My colleague is Gloria Muñoz, and she is working on her Ph.D. in planning
and environmental management at the University of Manchester.
So, this – I want to start off with this lovely image.
This is a photo by the artist Ana Teresa Fernández.
It’s called Borrada. And it really highlights
something about the U.S.-Mexico border, especially in San Diego
and Tijuana, the region we’re going to be talking about.
You can see here an effort to erase the border.
Fernández’s point, though, of this work is to really highlight
just how unerasable the border is and how, at the same time,
how absolutely contiguous both sides of it are.
So today we are going to be talking about an earthquake scenario that
was developed between 2015 and 2019 in the San Diego-Tijuana region.
And we are basing our talk on a paper that’s currently under review that we
hope we get to share with you soon, but the key thing we want you to
focus on and start thinking about is the nature of environmental justice in,
not just scenario concepts, but in scenario building.
- So, as my colleague Beth was saying before, this idea about the border is
something that really permeates our thinking and inspired our reflection
upon the work that was done by the San Diego-Tijuana scenario earthquake.
And especially, again, because it was such an interesting and unique project
stemming from an interest of understanding the complexity of a
region that is, in some – in some ways, so different, but also, as Beth stated,
is so interconnected by many other – by many others reasons and situations
and variables and factors.
So, again, our paper is mostly focused on the concept of environmental justice.
So the first thing to do is talk about that definition.
We use a definition proposed by Schlosberg, which defines
and explains environmental justice as a social practice.
So what does this mean? It’s a way of doing things.
So it’s a way of doing things. In this case, it’s a way of engaging
with each other. It’s a way of researching and understanding
environmental problems and environmental challenges
from a standpoint, from a perspective, of equity.
So, first of all, equitable distribution, as this literature on environmental
justice has been going on, or has been developing for over the last 40 or 50
years, one of the main areas of interest was actually understanding how goods –
society’s goods and society’s and environmental’s risks are distributed.
Because we are standing from a – we are coming from an understanding
that there is an equal distribution of goods and risks.
Not everybody gets to benefit from environmental resources.
And, in that same way, affectations and harm is not equally distributed.
There are people who are most exposed than others.
So, again, in this 40, 50 years of work from different scholars around
environmental justice, things have developed, not only to think about
how and why these goods and these risks and these hazards are distributed
differently within society, but also starting to think about,
what are the outcomes of that? What are the result?
What does that mean for people, for persons, for groups?
And, in that sense, now, or more recent work on environmental justice is
not only focused on distribution but also inclusion, also on procedures,
also on recognition. So, in this conversation being had, participation
takes a strong – an important role. I must correct myself.
Understanding that, if we want to really understand the complexity about this
unjust distribution of hazard and of environmental benefits or resources,
we also have to take into account the persons, the groups, ideas,
and livelihoods and stories and life stories, specifically, and their
ideas on how this can be resolved. So environmental justice work more
recently has developed various mechanisms and methodologies
to include these communities that are most affected by hazard –
by environmental hazards. And you can imagine that
means minorities, minority groups,
and marginalized or economically disadvantaged groups.
In this sense, again, to understand the full scope about a problem,
we have to go into those communities. We already know how to do that, right?
But, thinking about this – and, again, how the idea about environmental
justice has progressed, we have started to see that one of the main things –
or, one of the first steps to take in order to get better results in
our research, is to reflect upon how we define participation.
What do we want to get out of it? How do we engage with each other
when we are set in those – in those platforms, where we can see each other
eye to eye and have a conversation. And it can be a conversation, or it can
be an interview, a questionnaire, where we only get the ideas that
we need to answer the questions that we already have and that we
constructed in our research team. Or it can – it can be more of a
collaborative process where we do engage in a conversation,
but we also try to have, like, a brainstorm about what the
solutions might be. What can the other side of the coin look like if we –
if we attempted to solve the issues that we’re looking upon.
So, in this sense – and, as you can see here in the slide, participation
takes different views. It takes [speaking Spanish].
You can look at it differently depending on how you define it.
And, again, participation for what.
Next slide, please, Beth. So, in our work, again, thinking about
the scenario – this bi-national scenario for the – for the earthquake
in the U.S.-Tijuana border region, we touched upon, again, this debate
and these ideas of environmental justice, but we touched upon a really particular
constant that’s more recent and has been developed [inaudible],
for example, for – for example, by Schlosberg, but also other scholars
like Nancy Fraser or Marion in 2016 that is one of the main authors
that we were using to develop our thinking about the scenario.
So recognitional justice, this is a really important concept that will help us
think about our work as researchers in collaborative process, not only with
the communities that we want to study, those communities that we already
know are at risk or that are, again, highly impacted by certain types of
hazards, but also while we – while we are in these platforms
that I’ve talked about where we can get – we get to engage with each other
and look at each other eye to eye. So recognitional justice, in this sense,
means acknowledging that there are differences within us, among us,
between different groups, between different persons, that we come from
different contexts, we come from different life stories, and that,
if we want to engage with each other in a way that there’s an equal capability
of participating and that all the voices are heard and acknowledged
in the same way, then we have to acknowledge those differences.
We have to recognize them, reflect upon them, and try to
balance out that difference. As Schlosberg put it – puts it,
part of the problem of injustice is actually a lack of recognition
of those group differences. And, again, taking back some
of Marion’s work, when we don’t recognize those differences,
then we fail to see that we may be privileging one set of voices.
And, in that same way, or at that same time, when we
privilege one, we erase another. We displace some other voices.
And that has consequences – consequences that you, yourself,
have made, probably have seen in your own research, but also that we –
as we develop our work as researchers, we can also see happening in knowledge
production – who gets to say what through what eyes.
Next slide, please.
- Okay, so let’s come back to the San Diego-Tijuana earthquake scenario
and the Rose Canyon Fault, which is right here.
So San Diego and Tijuana are incredibly closely connected as a set of cities,
and when the Rose Canyon Fault was newly kind of characterized, we started
to better understand that a rupture along this fault, which kind of stretches from
La Jolla along the I-5 corridor, downtown San Diego, and then kind of
splinters into San Diego Bay, Coronado, and the Silver Strand, when we started
to understand that this could cause significant harm in the whole region,
it really provoked a lot of interest in developing a scenario,
in this case, for a magnitude 6.8 quake.
So I want to talk a little bit about the kinds of effects that this earthquake
could have for people and then the kinds of ways that the scenario
played out. So you see here a picture of San Diego and Tijuana.
It’s from 2007, but it’s still – still tells a story, right?
Tijuana is on my right side. San Diego is on my left side.
And these cities have really – they share a great deal, right?
Physically, they share certain kinds of soils.
They share certain kinds of – certainly seismic motion can
move through them quite easily, right?
They also share steep slopes and proximity to fault lines, right?
And really big risks of landslides and liquefactions.
In Tijuana, though, risks might be slightly greater than those in San Diego
due to steeper slopes, urban expansion, and aggravated soil stability.
In the event of an earthquake, both cities are going to have effects.
And, if we’re thinking about how those harms are going to be distributed,
we have to understand that, while there are – I mean, at most recent
count, 6,000 to 8,000 people living without homes in San Diego, in Tijuana,
53% of people, as of 2018, were living in informal settlements on slopes
in flood zones and likely to suffer tremendously from quakes.
So those harms, then, are unequally distributed.
Further, these people are less likely than those of us with homes, with resources,
to be able to bounce back from an earthquake, to recover.
Unequal distribution of harms, right?
But we have to understand that these cities are mutually dependent.
They’ve grown up together.
So San Diego and Tijuana might – we might call their populations different,
but the harms that affect Tijuana affect San Diego, and vice versa.
Where San Diego has expensive rents, Tijuana has cheaper rents.
Where Tijuana has a thriving maquiladora industry, San Diego
has a powerful tourist industry and tech industry.
And all of these depend on the movement of goods and people
back and forth and back and forth.
So, when we talked about the San Diego-Tijuana earthquake scenario,
when we began to talk in 2015, there was interest from Mexicans
and U.S. Americans, right? People were excited about this.
The plan was to make – to do an Earth science assessment, to do
an engineering assessment based on that Earth science, to use that data to ask
questions of social science, and to turn that into policy recommendations.
Unfortunately, this plan didn’t work out in the ways we might have anticipated.
While the Earth science working group got up and running,
no problems, engineering faltered. They were using a tool called Hazus,
which many of you are going to be familiar with, right, that does
great estimation work for losses based on a database that
already exists for the U.S. Mexico doesn’t have anything like that.
So, while the Mexican team, the team responsible for taking on the Mexican
data, was still scrambling to pull together databases and analyze things,
the social science team, in the – in working on the scenario,
was already taking the data they had, well, only to San Diegan stakeholders
to talk about the potential effects that they might
see for damages as projected by Hazus.
So – whoo. [laughs]
Some participants in our research described Tijuana as simply more
remote from the epicenter of the study than San Diego was.
And, by that, it didn’t just mean where the earthquake was –
the hypothetical earthquake was starting.
They meant where meetings were taking place, where funding was being
distributed, and where decisions – key decisions about technology used –
were happening.
And this had implications, right? Because the differences between
San Diegan and Tijuanan researchers and participants weren’t acknowledged
as part of our planning, in the end, our planning only –
our scenario only included San Diego.
And thus – I mean, if you reflect back on what I was saying earlier,
a whole bunch of the issues that affected San Diego were also totally excised.
From this – I mean, this situation is totally specific to the San Diego-Tijuana
border, right, but there are some kinds of insights that travel.
And we want to emphasize those here. Environmental injustices are embedded
in extant social systems and power structures, right? We know that.
But those same systemic equalities, like differences in income levels, resources,
access, can have effects for those of us who produce knowledge too.
Political and economic factors need to be taken on as collective challenges if
we mean to be inclusive in our planning, produce good knowledge, and engage
with unequal distribution of hazards in the world.
And we need to think about what kinds of advocacy for change
within the systems we’re part we’re up for. So we want to advocate for
equitable participation and really thinking about what that means.