Environmental Justice in California

I just heard on the radio about Invisible 5, an audio tour you take in your own car while driving down California’s I-5 from San Francisco to LA. The tour describes environmental justice struggles being fought along the way:

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

The first stop, in San Francisco, is the Bayview/Hunters’ Point district where the city’s power plant, a contaminated former Navy shipyard, a sewage treatment plant, superfund sites, many hazardous waste sites, as well as pollution from the highway corridor create the city’s highest rates of cervical and breast cancer and asthma. These neighborhoods are home to a large number of Urban Sprouts students.

Visit the website and download the audio tour, and you can listen to it the next time you take the drive, all the way to LA or just back and forth across the Bay Bridge! Meanwhile I’ll work on getting this into our Urban Sprouts curriculum.

environmental justice
interstate 5
California
oral history