Welcome back to the Our City Forest blog. In my last post I outlined the issue of low visibility for People of Color in the sciences and within the environmental movement. I’m doing this because it’s Black History Month but really, Black History Month provides me with an excuse to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Before I came to Our City Forest I wrote for an LGBT blog as a hobbiest science reporter. While there I was struck by the lack of representation of POC and LGBT in science news and history. That isolation, made graduate school more difficult than it needed to be. Other students in my program dealt with similar issues based on race, ethnicity, gender and religion. Doing these posts is my way of fighting that isolation while promoting the values of Our City Forest.

We need diverse viewpoints in science, public policy and the environmental movement not only because to do include these viewpoints is more egalitarian. Environmental issues often affect minorities disproportionately. The water crisis in Flint Michigan isn’t the first time this has happened to a community of color. It’s happened time and time again, locally in Alviso, San Jose, on Native American Reservations and on the East Coast from Chester Pennsylvania to the South Bronx. On an organizational level, Our City Forest targets areas in San Jose that have been disproportionately impacted by freeway construction and air pollution and low-income, tree-denuded neighborhoods. We recognize that we cannot do this alone. We need to partner with and promote our natural allies and this includes people of color. To that end, here are two more African American environmentalists, ecologists and activists you should know.