By Julian Agyeman, Photo: The Guardian, The Guardian, October 6, 2022
“Equity is not an issue for us. We’re here to save the world.”
From 1986 to 1990, I worked in an inner London borough as an environmental policy adviser. I worked on raising awareness of local environmental issues, paying special attention to those affecting the borough’s lower-income residents. There were very few jobs such as this in local government, and I was the only Black person employed in one.
Unlike the US, in Britain there was no policy discourse or social movement tackling environmental or climate justice at that time. Yet it was obvious to me through my work, and to a growing number of other activists of colour, that the poorest residents in urban Britain, many of whom were Black and Brown, lived in the most deprived areas in terms of proximity to large polluting roads, poor or unaffordable housing stock, social exclusion, lack of educational and economic opportunity, disinvestment and lack of green and play spaces.
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