By Gabriel, 2024 Climate Corps Member
It is easy for people to get the impression that the climate crisis is purely an environmental issue, confined to the fields of “hard science”. Reports on climate change tend to emphasize data related to Earth’s systems, with statistics and charts about temperatures, emissions, sea levels, and more. While these numbers are important in understanding the climate crisis, they do not tell the whole story; rather than being purely objective or inevitable, they are the result of specific social, political, and economic forces. Therefore, we must also try to understand the context behind these statistics: which existing systems and policies are contributing to the climate crisis, and which ones can be changed to address it? Which people are most responsible for emissions, and which ones will be impacted the most? How do people’s attitudes, knowledge, and values inform the actions they take – or don’t take – in creating a more sustainable world? This is where the importance of social science comes in, allowing us to explore why the climate crisis is occurring at all, and what can be done to change it.
During my time with Eastie Farm’s Climate Corps fellowship program, I was able to learn about social science and the roles it can play in promoting environmental justice. Through a partnership with Northeastern University, we worked with professors who taught us about the ethics, methods, and significance of social science. We received lectures on the systems, industries, and countries that have propelled the climate crisis, and efforts that people are taking to combat it. By researching the geography, history, demographics, and economics of East Boston, we gained insight into why it was particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We learned that as a historically immigrant, working class, coastal community, it had been underserved and actively harmed by the construction of Logan Airport as well as a large highway that tore through the middle of a neighborhood. Today, East Boston exists as a majority Latino environmental justice community that faces threats of air pollution, sea level rise, economic insecurity, and food scarcity.
After establishing a context for East Boston’s experience of the climate crisis, we learned about various eco-social benefit programs that are available to community members including Boston Community Choice Electricity, Mass Save, and Boston Composting that can promote sustainability while saving money for participants. We then received lectures and workshops on surveying methods, became IRB certified, and eventually designed a survey about people’s attitudes regarding climate change, as well as their knowledge of eco-social benefit programs. The goal of this was to understand the experiences and perspectives of those living in an environmental justice community, and to gain insight into potential barriers to enrollment and participation in these programs.
Once we had our survey, we got the opportunity to go around East Boston and actually conduct the survey with community members. To be honest, I was pretty ambivalent and anxious when we first started. I hadn’t done much direct community engagement like this, and I felt uncomfortable and awkward asking strangers to take a survey; however, the more I did it the more confident I became. One of my managers described it as “rejection therapy” which it certainly was – I got much more comfortable with people saying “no” or simply ignoring me – and the experiences I had with people who did take it were really positive. It felt meaningful to interact with strangers with the goal of helping both them and our planet.
The experience of surveying and the results that we received taught me a lot; something that particularly stood out to me was the lack of knowledge residents had about the eco-social benefit programs that were available to them. I can’t imagine how much advocating, policy work, logistical planning, overcoming political barriers, and other challenging work must have gone into making these programs available. And yet, now that they exist, many people who could greatly benefit from them are not enrolled simply because they don’t know about them. This deepened my appreciation for the importance of social science and community engagement; while policy writers, economic planners, and politicians are necessary to make these programs possible in the first place, we need people who are on the ground and interacting directly with community members in order to learn about their experiences, understand what barriers they may be facing, and find out ways to best support and inform them as we work towards a green transition.
