Throwing everything at the wall: Fighting Environmental Racism Through a Diversity of Tactics

Résumé analytique

In this interview, Hannah Tollefson speaks with researcher and activist Ingrid Waldron about how she came to environmental racism work in Canada and what her experience teaches about effective advocacy. A health researcher by training, Waldron was recruited into the field by an activist despite having no background in environmental science. Working in Nova Scotia, she came to see environmental racism and climate change as fundamentally health issues affecting the most vulnerable communities, especially African Nova Scotian and Mi'kmaq communities, and argues that solutions must be interdisciplinary and grounded in ethical, trust-based community-based research.

Waldron's central argument is that there is no single way to fight environmental racism. Through her ENRICH Project she pursued policy (Nova Scotia's Bill 111 and later the federal environmental racism bill, Bill C-266), community water-testing projects in Lincolnville and Shelburne that became the NGO Rural Water Watch, mapping of waste sites, knowledge-sharing events, and the Netflix documentary "There's Something in the Water." She describes this as "throwing everything at the wall," an approach that in hindsight formed a coherent model. Co-founding the Canadian Coalition for Environmental Justice with Naolo Charles in 2020, she stresses partnerships, awareness-raising, and youth engagement (sending three young Black interns to COP in 2021), and urges newcomers not to wait until they know everything before acting.