HERstory of environmental activism includes 'unknowns', historical figures and many contemporaries. To help our History majors and students in courses linked to the Campus Explorations theme Environment and Sustainable Living: Global Crises and Solutions the Escondido Center Library decided to profile a few women environmentalists on the EJA blog.
Elva Yañez
The 2008 winner of the Planning and Conservation League's (PCL) Environmental Justice Advocate of the Year award, Elva Yanez became an environmental activist by just doing her job. As Director of the Audubon Center's Debs Park in East L.A. from 2005-2008 Yañez focused on creating parks for people, running them and campaigning for environmental legislation. She used her extensive experience with coalition building, community organizing, and public policy to help lay “… a foundation of inclusiveness with a constituency [Hispanic Americans] the [Audubon] society had all but ignored in the past.” In 2008, she organized Los Angeles area leaders and residents to advocate on behalf of a bill to improve transparency in the environmental review process, leading local workshops and bringing teams of activists to lobby in Sacramento.
Currently Yañez works as a Project Director for the California Community Foundation (CCF) El Monte Community Building Initiative (CBI). The Initiative is a 10-year pilot project to revitalize targeted neighborhoods through improvements to the physical and social services environment anchored by resident engagement and leadership development.
Adapted using information the PCL archive, a Dec 30 2007 L.A. Times article and the CCF staff biographies page.
Lois Gibbs
In the spring of 1978, a 27 year-old housewife named Lois Gibbs discovered that her child was attending an elementary school built on a 20,000 ton, toxic-chemical dump in Niagara Falls, New York. Desperate to do something about it, she organized her neighbors into the Love Canal Homeowners Association, struggling for more than 2 years to gain funding for the relocation for the Love Canal families. Opposing the group’s efforts were the chemical manufacturer, Occidental Petroleum, as well as local, state and federal government officials. Two years later President Jimmy Carter delivered an Emergency Declaration which moved 900 families from this hazardous area. The 'Love Canal' relocation was a landmark victory for a grassroots environmental rights groups in the United States.
In 1981, Lois created the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, (CHEJ) (formerly Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste), an organization that has assisted over 10,000 grassroots groups with organizing, technical, and general information nationwide. Among the many awards she received are the 1990 Goldman Environmental Prize, the world's largest prize honoring grassroots environmentalists. Ms. Mills was also a 2003 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Adapted from the CHEJ biography page for Ms. Gibbs
Wangari Muta Maathai
Dr. Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya (Africa) in 1940 and in 1971 she became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree. She went on to teach veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi, her alma mater.
In 1976 while serving on the National Council of Women she introduced the idea of planting trees and continued to develop it into a broad-based, grassroots organization whose main focus is the planting of trees with women groups in order to conserve the environment and improve their quality of life. Through this Green Belt Movement she has assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds. In 1986, the Movement established a Pan African Green Belt Network which has since helped 40+ other African countries to successfully adopt this approach to conservation.
Adapted from the official Nobel Peace Prize biography.
Mary Walton
One of the pioneers in the fight against pollution, especially in large cities, was the independent inventor Mary Walton. While biographical information about her is not readily available we know she invented developed and patented several devices that solved environmental hazards created by the transportation developments of the Industrial Revolution
As early as 1879, Walton developed a method for minimizing the environmental hazards of the smoke that up until then was pouring unchecked from factories all over the country. Walton's system (patent #221,880) deflected the emissions being produced into water tanks, where the pollutants were retained and then flushed into the city sewage system.
A resident of Manhattan, NY Walton set up a model railroad track in her basement to test solutions to the noise problems for the elevated train systems pioneered in her city. She developed, tested and patented a sound-dampening apparatus. Walton later sold the rights to New York City's Metropolitan Railroad.
Adapted from a Lemelson-MIT Program November 1996 Inventor of the Week article.
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