Ep 77: Environmental justice tactics, strategies, and institutions

A conversation with Professor Tracy Perkins (Arizona State University) about the history of the environmental justice movement in California and different types of environmental action and activism. Released November 7, 2025.

Transcript

Samuel Sandoval: 0:09

Bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episode, we're gonna be talking with Dr. Tracy Perkins. She is a scholar that has studied environmental justice and all the movements. And I was really interested because of her book, Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism.

Mallika Nocco: 0:29

We've done a lot of episodes about environmental justice on this podcast where we've talked to kind of folks who are in the middle or leading even certain movements around specific topics.

Samuel Sandoval: 0:42

Some of the episodes that come to mind that we've done are, you know, in the Central Valley when we talked to Naameen Martinez, and then Pablo Ortiz, and Angel Fernandez, and Christine Dobbin, Linda Mendez. A lot of people.

Mallika Nocco: 1:02

So I guess this topic is kind of where we're thinking about it more broadly. And Sam, I'm curious, like what was it about this book and it's a scholarly take that drew you in and made you want to kind of think about these issues in a more historical context?

Samuel Sandoval: 1:21

I think the evolution and the tactics that have been used. So tactics in the beginning started more as an outsider, more kind of on this protest and trying to disrupt some of the processes so voices can be heard. And then how those tactics ultimately evolve into the more institutionalized tactic. And that was within the government in this now NGOs movement and some of the pros and cons. So something that our audience should be looking for is how the different tactics occur and some of that put it into a bigger perspective, not that much of an especial of a special case.

Mallika Nocco: 2:03

Right. Even though we are gonna be thinking about California specifically and environmental justice in places like the Central Valley and thinking about farm workers.

Samuel Sandoval: 2:12

And I think that yes, also for our audience, while this she uh Tracy's uh explaining us in California, think of it more on a national audience in terms of how tactics have been used and can be used in in other places.

Mallika Nocco: 2:28

Anything to add, Faith?

Faith Kearns: 2:30

Yeah, I mean I think it's a really interesting time for this topic because lots of people are increasingly interested in organizing and all sorts of things. And I think particularly for academics who maybe haven't really done that kind of thing quite as much, it's just interesting to go back to a sort of more theoretical framework about what kind of tactics are available to people, why they go through periods where they're popular and not. So yeah, I think that that part of things is really relevant for a lot of our listeners.

Mallika Nocco: 3:00

Also, even just how avenues of communication have impacted activism so much in terms of different groups being able to communicate with each other across the country. I think it's interesting how communities, when they are getting together, organizing, may not have had access to what others have done before. And now we're kind of living in a time where you almost have too much access to everything that's going on all the time everywhere in the world. And it's hard to just sift and winnow and think about what types of things and tactics could be effective.

Faith Kearns: 3:37

Yeah, I mean, I'll just say the other thing I thought was really interesting was her point about the fact that as things changed, in some ways people who had been parts of these movements became part of institutions and it also speaks a little bit to like shifting power and what happens when you have a successful movement, right? So, yeah, lots of interesting things.

Samuel Sandoval: 4:02

So without further ado, let's talk with Tracy Perkins. In today's episode, we're talking about environmental justice, activism, and water with Dr. Tracy Perkins. She is an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, and a scholar specializing in social inequality, social movements, and the environment, with a particular focus on environmental justice activism. In 2022, she published her book, Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism, where she examines the political evolution of California's environmental justice movement from the 1980s to the mid-2010s. Tracy also documents environmental justice activism for the public through oral history, photography, news archives, and digital collections. Examples of her works include Voices from the Valley, Environmental Justice in California's San Joaquin Valley, and, in her own words, Remembering Teresa de Anda, pesticide activist, 1959, 2014. Just to mention a few. Rain. H If you can please tell us about a pivotal moment that led you on your professional path.

Tracy Perkins: 6:32

Yeah, I mean, there's been so many. I grew up in a very kind of environmentally privileged San Francisco Bay Area suburb. So, you know, I got to tromp up streams and wander around open lands by myself and not worry about my safety and not worry too much about my safety even when I was trespassing on grazing lands. And also got taken out backpacking and camping and to the beach and to all the beautiful places that California has to offer. I didn't really understand what a privilege that was at that age, but I reveled in it. And so it really wasn't until I was a teenager when I was spending my summers volunteering in Mexico and in Brazil that I was getting much more exposure to poverty, to the health outcomes that can come with poverty, and to some of those same problems related to environmental degradation. So that those kind of high school years in Latin America were really important for my learning experience. Then in college, I majored in development studies at UC Berkeley, which was a very critical take on mainstream development, and worked during and after college at a NGO in Berkeley now called Hesperian Health Guides. And they write community health guides for use all around the world. And I got to be involved with their book, Community Guide to Environmental Health, which is now out in the world in many different places. So I had all these different moments that kind of pushed me in the path I'm on. And ultimately I went to a master's degree at UC Davis, and I was in a really interesting praxis-oriented community development program where people gave me a lot of support to do kind of a two-pronged project that was interview-based for a thesis and a journal article, but also the interviews were being used to kind of tell a broader story to a public without as much of my intellectual interpretation. And that side of the project became Voices from the Valley, and it has photography and oral history and some theater events. And so kind of one thing has led to the next. And that project really gave me a sense that academia could be a good place for me if I could do it on some of my own terms. And some parts of my career I've been able to do it more on my own terms and others less. But I do appreciate the kind of flexibility that I've been given on this path.

Mallika Nocco: 9:07

Yeah, absolutely. You know that that makes sense. And I appreciate that additional nuance, and I'm sure our listeners do too. So can you share with us some of the early days or the origin story of the environmental justice movement in California specifically, which is kind of where you've focused a lot of your work? What are some of the key issues and then also the tactics that were used back then?

Tracy Perkins: 9:33

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because nationally the the predominant origin story of the environmental justice movement is in North Carolina in Warren County in 1982. And those were very important protests for a lot of different reasons, but they're not really the appropriate origin story for the whole country, right? So in California, activists were already doing things of a similar nature, kind of before and after that particular protest in North Carolina. And the ones who came after didn't necessarily even know about those protests on the other side of the country because the networks just weren't there yet. So what I saw in California was a very sort of grassroots trickling up from the bottom movement that was responding to real problems on the ground. People drinking contaminated drinking water and the health problems associated with that. People living in or working in environments with lots and lots of air pollution and the health problems associated with that, lots of asthma, for example. People living right on the edge of vast acreages of industrial agriculture, in which the pesticides applied on the fields, even though they're not meant to, they're meant to just be on the fields, but they inevitably drift off of the fields and into residential areas and poison people who live nearby. So, on one level, the basic problems that people were experiencing, and these were, of course, as this whole field has helped us better recognize problems that were happening a lot worse and a lot more often in poor communities and communities of color and indigenous communities. Often people would then turn to local government for help, typically got shut down at that point, often treated very badly, you know, in very racist and sexist and anti-immigrant ways. And so with without really finding any entree into, you know, the world of environmental decision making or policy or local government help, or in many cases, no real support from the existing environmental movement infrastructure, which wasn't looking specifically at low-income communities or communities of color for the most part at that time. This kind of pushed them into a much more oppositional role and a protest-based role, where they were sort of trying to educate themselves, educate the people around them about what the threats were and what was coming, and then protests to pre often prevent the construction of new hazardous infrastructure near where they lived. Sometimes that was also about other things like pesticide drift, you know, trying to get different kinds of pesticides banned or trying to get protections for workers or for residents who lived near those places. But yeah, they they went this more oppositional route. So there was lots of protests. There were, you know, blocking, I wembered one case, in Kettleman City, which hosts the one of three hazardous waste landfills in California, all of which are located in non-white communities. They blockaded the entrance to the dump for a day. Um, so definitely a greater degree of direct action kind of tactics. In Ward Valley and the Mojave Desert, all through the 90s, and especially in the late 90s, there was a land occupation of the federally owned land where a low-level nuclear waste landfill was going to be built on historic tribal lands that still had a great deal of cultural and spiritual relevance. And so, there too, again, you had a really interesting multiracial mix of the five tribes of the lower Colorado River, environmental justice activists, environmental anti-toxics activists, anti-nuclear activists, workers, all really working together on that issue. And it did ultimately take an occupation and a blockade that could have gotten very ugly and at the last minute didn't. So, yeah, it's interesting to see from those early years how much that generation of activists was shut out from any place where they could try to get their concerns dealt with, and how instead they had to go typically kind of case by case, like here's a problem, there's a problem, there's a problem, and try and work on those problems one by one, even as they were sort of growing their own movement infrastructure in community groups and small NGOs and linking up nationally, you know, as they met their counterparts around the country, especially at the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. And I want to say too, some of those of those things were successful. The section of my book that talks about anti-incinerator organizing in particular does an incomplete count of all the incinerator proposals in California that I came across and how many of them were built. And almost all of them were blocked successfully by activists. We now have two, as I understand it, in the state of California still operating, you know, at the sort of commercial level. And, you know, if those activists hadn't been blocking those site after site after site after site, we could have something like 70, you know, right now peppered across the state. It could be a very different landscape. So yeah, some successes, a lot of challenges, and a lot of sacrifice among that generation of activists.

Faith Kearns: 15:18

Thank you so much, Tracy. I am really interested in this topic at this particular moment because it sounds like from your work that things moved in sort of a more institutionalized direction as far as like environmental government and NGOs went. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about kind of how and why that happened, but also if you're seeing a different trend now just because of some of the stuff that we've even been talking about this season on Water Talk, like data center activism. Yeah, and just a different day again now. So, you know, are our groups returning to some of these more, you know, grassroots efforts or more disruptive approaches?

Tracy Perkins: 15:57

Yeah. I mean, yeah, I did in the book talk about a sort of general trend toward institutionalization, not that everybody followed it and it, there were lots of different opinions about it. But yeah, that as I understand it, that took place because of a couple of different reasons. You know, one was some of the activists were always trying to work with government from the beginning anyway. They just were getting shut out. And so as those doors started opening, there were some people that were very happy to walk in them, right? And go take a seat on XYZ committee or become an elected official or an appointed official. Others saw that the sort of site-by-site organizing that they had been doing was just very hard, very time-intensive, very resource-intensive, and felt like if they could scale up a bit into influencing policy and its implementation, instead, that they could have more reach, right? And potentially stronger impact, more, you know, getting more towards that structural change thing that they want. But then I think there are also things going on sort of in the background environment that funnel a little bit in the professionalization direction. You know, as you are increasingly in nonprofit structures, you're usually depending more and more on funders to pay people to do the work, right? The earlier activists, some of them were paid organizers, but a lot of them were just volunteers or maybe volunteers getting little stipends, you know, on top of the regular life. That ultimately isn't sustainable forever. And so a lot of people did try to move into these more professional NGO spaces where people could actually do the work for a living. And that has a lot of benefits, but it also does mean that you are now sort of beholden to your funders a little bit. Funders in the US fund lots of different things. Um, so there are certainly outliers to the trends I'm talking about, but most of them are interested in not supporting necessarily like radical direct action work. They're more interested in maneuvering within the existing political landscape, education projects, you know, how do you be a good person on a waterboard, et cetera. So, you know, I think there were a couple of things moving in moving in the same direction. Another one was California's demographic change, you know, it became, I forget what year exactly, but it's been a while now since white people have been the single largest racialized group, right? And it's also been a while since, you know, if you put all people of color categories together, there are more of them than there are of white people. So, you know, those changing demographics are being felt in the political environment too. And that's not automatic. That takes a lot of work. In California, that demographic change and all the organizing that was coming along with it was starting to change the face of who was in governance, some. And with that, and with all of the work that the early generation of activists had been doing, even just convincing people that there was a problem at all, that there was environmental inequality, that there was environmental racism, these things were hotly contested in the early years. Um, but the work they did, you know, opened some doors for more sympathetic people to get into government, or people who might not have been more sympathetic necessarily, but activists could say, look, you represent a Latino base in X-neighborhood, and they care about having clean drinking water, and we need you to, you know, vote yes on Bill, whatever. So trying to really bring the politicians along towards more pro-environmental justice stances was another, another place where the kind of there became these little openings for people who came out of activist backgrounds to go into government or to work with the people who were already there. Um that's some of the some of the story that I tell in the book about how that transition happened and what led to it.

Mallika Nocco: 20:11

Yeah. So you touched on this a little bit already, but I wanted to spend a little bit more time on it. We do have a national audience, and I'm wondering if you could share a little bit more about how the environmental justice movement in California was related or not related to the environmental justice movement across the United States. And you mentioned that it almost seemed like there were different constellations doing things at the same time and not as much communication between movements, which makes sense, pre-social media and all of this kind of stuff. But yeah, can you share a little bit about where it fits into the national context?

Tracy Perkins: 20:53

Yeah, I mean, I think what's so interesting about this movement is that it doesn't have any one single origin point. It's really bubbling up all over the places, you know, and certainly some places have particular influence. You know, I think California has been very influential. Certainly the Southeast has been influential, the Southwest, those are some of the areas I know best. But yeah, what I find really kind of beautiful about the more I learn about the environmental justice movement is that pretty much everywhere I've looked has really strong ties to movements that came before it. So in California, there is a really strong pathway from the United Farm Workers of America and the farm workers movement in general into the California environmental justice movement, especially in the agricultural regions of the state where the UFW is the strongest. And you would see that through some of the UFW leaders, you know, would then switch over to be staff in EJ organizations. You would see that through some of the kind of cultural organizing being done. So a number of the San Joaquin Valley environmental justice events would end or begin with somebody playing De Colores and all of us singing De Colores, which was kind of a farm worker song among many. So movement songs, um, the the UFW flag shows up in a lot of different ways. So yeah, we in California, the UFW is certainly a big influence, black civil rights, but also black power, which often gets left out of that conversation. Both were influential in different times and places, Asian American organizing, in, for example, San Francisco's Chinatown, and certainly Indigenous organizing. Each of these were drawing on, to some extent, culturally specific organizing traditions that then merged forward and were either then more of the EJ angle gets added on, or then they some of their traditions get sort of passed into the broader environmental justice movement. It kind of went in a bunch of different directions. But I find that very encouraging, and I encourage my students to see see it as hopeful as well, to the extent that, you know, the work you're doing now, you don't know how far it will take you or others, right? Even if it's not getting you the whole thing you want right now. Being part of these organizing lineages is something that gives people energy, a sense of possibility, a sense of pride, a sense of like that you're standing on somebody's shoulders, which is really different than just feeling completely alone.

Faith Kearns: 23:45

Thank you, Tracy. You sound super busy, and it sounds like you've got another book coming. Can you tell us about

Tracy Perkins: 23:54

Yeah. So the book I pivoted. I'm gonna do my next book on this Ward Valley campaign, partly because I already did all the interviews in 2017 and 2018, so and the digital archive. So, but also just because it's an amazing story. It's a longer than a decade long story about how a whole bunch of people figure out how to work together across all their, you know, race, class, culture, sex, sexuality, potential divides, and stop this dump from being built that really looked impossible to stop for a while. So it's a success story. I think success stories are important to document. And I'm using it as a chance to both just kind of document this particular movement, but also to explore, you know, a little bit of what I spoke about before about how movements have genealogies and to trace some of the particular genealogies of this movement. So, you know, the indigenous participants, many of their stories go back to the damage that the boarding schools did on them and their family members and their sort of need to survive and reclaim culture and space and protect their nations in ways that connect intimately to the protection of this particular space where the landfill was to be built. The American Indian Movement, Arizona chapter, also participated, so that connects back to all the kind of land occupations of the 70s, for example. The nuclear workers are bringing in all of these connectivities to nuclear weapons testing around the world. There are some radical direct action environmentalists that are connected through Greenpeace and its history of putting people's bodies and boats on little tiny ships in front of whalers to try and stop the harpoon from hitting the whale. So all these different traditions sort of end up in this one place, and those people have to figure out how to make it work. And by and large, they do. And so I'm really interested in that kind of multiracial, multicultural, uh, multi-class, multilingual piece, and how does that work? And situating that in the longer sort of US social movement narrative, where we had a lot of racially integrated social movement groups in the civil rights era of the 60s, some, not all, became still collaborated, but split into race-specific groups. So instead of being, for example, a black and white civil rights group, it would become a blacks-only civil rights group, but with a whites largely group in support with them. And that model of sort of what one scholar has called uh racially parallel organizing was sort of predominant for a while. And so I'm I'm interested in how by the 80s and 90s the environmental justice movement is back to largely integrated groups. So that's that's another piece that I'm I'm pulling through. And then just wanting to kind of add another story to the longer story of native-led land occupations that kind of connects the dots between you know Wounded Knee and Alcatraz, and more recently, Standing Rock.

Samuel Sandoval: 27:21

And I think this one is in the Colorado River, right?

Tracy Perkins: 27:25

It is, yes. It's right along the Lower Colorado River. Yeah, and that was part of what was at stake.

Samuel Sandoval: 27:31

Yeah. So, Tracy, this has been a great conversation, and uh we always like to ask our guests if there is anything else that you want to add that you think our audience should know, or how can we support your efforts?

Tracy Perkins: 27:45

Well, that's very nice. I mean, I do have a blog that I very infrequently post on. If people want to stay up to date with what I'm doing, that's one way. I love talking to people at conferences. Anyone who thinks their work might overlap in useful or synergistic ways, I'd love to be in communication, especially around these days, the Environmental Justice Legacy Initiative. So if you all know people that you think you know might like to know about that, please send them along.

Samuel Sandoval: 28:16

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Muchas gracias, Tracy. So let's go to our parting gifts. Malika Faith, any of the parting gifts that you want to share?

Mallika Nocco: 28:27

Yeah, I just want to point out for our listeners, we are aware that we did not talk very much about water in this episode. How can we apply what we heard about the history of environmental justice to water stories specifically and even the water stories that we've heard on the podcast, right? Of like how we've heard a lot of grassroots tactics. I think about Nayam Martinez specifically in episode 46, talking about just how it was such a personal story. And, you know, she in that episode, I'd encourage everyone to go back and listen to listen to that episode and think about tactics, right? Think about how they they had observations and experiences and that led to organizing. And I would say that to me, that was more of a grassroots effort. Would you agree, Sam?

Samuel Sandoval: 29:17

Yes, yes, yes, I do agree. I mean, uh all those grassroots movements, the same others that have been talking with us.

Mallika Nocco: 29:24

But then I think about episode 43, also in season four, when we talked to Letty and Victor Griego, and they saw issues, you know, they they they noticed that there was like a lack of representation and also wanting their elected officials to be more representative and to also know more about water. And then they they took action and they started a nonprofit organization, right? So that was more of a kind of organizing in in more of like a what would we call that? What did she call it? Like an insider kind of a way, I guess.

Samuel Sandoval: 29:58

Insider is institutionalized. The same with Mike Mendez that he also saw these kind of injustices throughout his transit towards the school. But also now he's, I think, one of the board members of the regional water quality control board in Southern California. So he went from one side to the other.

Mallika Nocco: 30:17

Yeah, yeah. That was episode 35 disasters and climate justice for listeners. But yeah, so those are some of my takeaways is just how can I think about tactics? And I think this is a time when some of us are thinking about different tactics around organization and activism and the environment.

Samuel Sandoval: 30:39

What about you, Faith?

Faith Kearns: 30:40

Yeah, I think it was a really it's an interesting topic. I I even was thinking a lot of our conversation just earlier this season with Mike Bogan from the University of Arizona and this conversation about what it means to sort of be a scholar who's also working on a very specific problem and work as a member of his community, right? And so I think there's it's just an interesting thing to think about what everybody's different skill sets and different places within different institutions allows them to do, because I think that's another big part of this conversation that we haven't really addressed is just that everybody has differential levels of risk and safety that they can take on. So I think we've had a lot of food for thought over many seasons on the topic of environmental justice, and it's run straight through into this season. And so it's interesting to hear a high-level scholarly take on that.

Mallika Nocco: 31:28

Yeah, that's also such a timely topic to consider the risk associated with your position and your identity and what you are able to do in your position.

Samuel Sandoval: 31:40

And in my case, my parting gift, well, they were two. One is the lineage, and she talks about lineage and how some being associated with a specific institution or being part for a long time on a given movement, how that can provide you a sense of community and belonging, and provide you kind of the spirit to continue on that specific movement. And also in another point, she talks about collaboration and how people from different identities come together that may not have happened in a different circumstance for an specific uh objective, and yeah, really looking forward for that other second book that she's working on.

Faith Kearns: 32:26

Thank you for listening to the Water Talk Podcast. I'm Faith Carnes and I'm the Director of Research Communications with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at Arizona State University.

Samuel Sandoval: 32:36

My name is Samuel Sandoval. I'm a professor at UC Davis and a cooperative extension specialist in water resources management at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Mallika Nocco: 32:48

I'm Mallika Nocco, Assistant Professor and State Extension Specialist in Agricultural Water Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. If you enjoy our show, please review, listen, like, and subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. Please find transcripts and additional content at WatertalkPodcast.com. Original music by Paloma Herrera Thomas.