Summer 2026 SOWK 588 Week 06 - Social Work, Policy Practice, and Environmental Justice

title: Summer 2026 SOWK 588 Week 06 - Social Work, Policy Practice, and Environmental Justice
date: 2026-06-30 15:53:55
location: Heritage University
tags:

Heritage University
MSW Program
SOWK 588
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Week six is asynchronous. In Edin and Shaefer (2016), you will read about the challenges faced by communities and families in extreme poverty, and there is a forum to share additional examples. The reading by Linquiti (2022) presents two lenses for analyzing policy: equity and economics. There are forums to discuss the content of the textbook and consider how you can apply the content to your policy analysis. Students submit one of the key assignments for SOWK 588, the policy analysis paper, providing an opportunity for you to demonstrate skill at assessing policy. Students have a lecture video to watch about giving some information about environmental justice.

Some of the learning objectives this week include:

Describe the lived experiences of individuals and families facing extreme poverty.
Apply the equity and economic lenses from Linquiti’s policy framework to analyze social policies affecting marginalized populations.
Critically examine policy issues using ethical and human rights standards, including the NASW Code of Ethics and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Demonstrate competency in policy analysis by completing and submitting the Policy Analysis Paper, integrating theory, values, research, and practice to assess real-world policies.

Week Six Tasks

Content

Read Edin and Shafer (2016) Chapter 5: A World Apart
Read Linquiti (2022) Chapter 8: The Equity Lens
Read Linquiti (2022) Chapter 9: The Economic Lens
Watch my lecture video

W-06 A-01 Asynchronous Participation and Engagement

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and provide meaningful perspectives, contributing to the forum’s conversation and scholarship. They can be related to the prompts or building on conversations shared by peers. There are five forums for this week, and you are expected to make at least 4 replies across any of the forums. There are less required replies to give space for you to focus on your policy papers. These forums include the following:

Glimpses of a World Apart invites you to share stories or media that depict people living in deep poverty, helping us consider lives vastly different from our own.
In Chapter Eight Discussion Questions, you’ll respond to one or more prompts focused on equity, justice, and the real-world implications of public policy.
The Lens of Equity and Reflecting on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights forum offers a space to connect your policy topic to ethical and human rights frameworks.
In Chapter Nine Discussion Questions, you’ll weigh in on economic concepts like market power, efficiency, and cost-benefit analysis in the context of public policy.
Economic Lens and Policy Analysis gives you the chance to examine your policy topic through an economic lens, while also considering the limitations of efficiency-based approaches.

This week students will submit the first part of the Assignment 03: Policy Analysis Advocacy Project.

The Policy Analysis Advocacy Project is the Key Assignment¹ for SOWK 588 and is used to assess CSWE (2022) competencies two and five. It includes two linked assignments, which guide students through the process of policy analysis and advocacy. First, students will critically examine a current social issue and related policy in a comprehensive written analysis. Then, building on that work, students will create a video presentation that translates their findings into a strategic, justice-focused advocacy plan.

Assignment 03a Policy Analysis Paper

Heritage University’s social work program selects assignments across the curriculum for students to demonstrate the CSWE competencies and each practice behavior defined by the MSW program to act as key assignments. These assignments are submitted to Heritage’s online portfolio, Anthology, and given to all students at each site using the same grading rubric. Student scores help provide data for faculty to self-evaluate the program. ↩

The Need for Environmental Justice

In Edin and Sheafer (2016), they describe Martha living so close to the the fields she works in that they get sprayed by the pestisides and the physical health issues they experience.

I wanted to spend some time today talking about the intersection of social work, policy practice, and environmental justice.

Slide contains:

“The fields that Martha gazes out on are those where her father spent his lifetime as a farmhand. Martha’s front porch is so close to these fields, in fact, that on days when the fluorescent-yellow-and-black planes come at dawn to dust the crops with pesticides, they shower her building, too. On those mornings, the sky remains dark long after sunrise. On some early summer days like today, she can sometimes see dirty plumes of smoke rising from red flames all across the horizon as planters burn their fields in preparation for crop rotation. All through the growing season, Martha, her two daughters, and their neighbors complain of a unique local ailment—an upper-respiratory condition folks refer to as ‘Delta crud,’ which many believe is brought on by these farming practices. The symptoms are wheezing and nausea, sometimes followed by chronic congestion.” (Emphises added, Edin & Shaefer, 2016, pp. 129-130)

Reference

Delta Flight Museum. (n.d.). Huff-Daland Duster, 1925–ca. 1948. https://www.deltamuseum.org/research/history/aircraft/crop-dusters/crop-dusters/huff-daland-duster-1925-ca.1948

What Is Environmental Justice?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in (2020) used the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, and there have been various executive orders enacting different activities related to environmental justice (EJ).

They defined it as:

the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2020, para. 1)

They go on to define that “fair treatment means no group of people should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, governmental and commercial operations or policies” (para. 2).

This idea that that there shouldn’t be a disproportionate share of environmental harm on people based on race, income, or geography and that they should be included in the decision making process is what we should be striving for. Martha’s story is one example of a pattern that shows up again and again: the people who experience the cost of an environmental decision are rarely the people who made it, or who benefit from it.

We can use their definition as a starting place, but it is helpful for us to also recognize that in 2025, EPA dismantled its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, laid off roughly 280 staff, and took down its front-facing environmental justice content (Bogardus, 2025).

We can think about this these costs and benefits falling on different people as externalitities that we might explore or considder in using the economic lens that Linquity talks.

Reference

Bogardus, K. (2025, February 7). EPA’s environmental justice office in tatters. E&E News by POLITICO. https://www.eenews.net/articles/epas-environmental-justice-office-in-tatters/

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2020, September 24). Learn about environmental justice. https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/learn-about-environmental-justice_.html

A Landscape of Environmental Justice Problems

There are a great deal of different issues we could consider in thinking about EJ.

Pesticide drift (the Delta): what we just talked about with Martha’s story. Williams (2018) frames this directly as “agro-environmental racism”: by 1972 Mississippi applied more insecticides than any other state, concentrated in a majority-Black region shaped by plantation history.
Food deserts: communities, often urban and often communities of color, where access to affordable, nutritious food is limited. Food justice organizer Karen Washington rejects the term “food desert” itself, arguing it implies an empty, naturally occurring place. She prefers “food apartheid” because it names the issue as a human-made system built on race, class, and geography, not a natural absence (Washington, as cited in Brones, 2018).
AI data centers — a very current example. Pam (2025) argues the AI data center boom is “repeating historical patterns of environmental racism,” pointing to Memphis’s Boxtown neighborhood — more than 90% Black, median household income about $36,000 — where an xAI data center has reportedly run gas turbines without proper permits or required pollution controls.
Water Crises (Flint) — Robert D. Bullard, widely regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement, called Flint “a blatant example of environmental injustice,” arguing that “state regulators and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency… would have acted differently if this water crisis had taken place in a white suburb of Detroit” (Bullard, 2016).
Puerto Rico beaches: Beaches are legally public in Puerto Rico, protected as public domain since 1979, but tax incentives (Act 22, now Act 60) have drawn wealthy outside investors who privatize beachfront access and displace local communities (Atiles, 2025). Bad Bunny’s song “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (“What Happened to Hawaii”) explicitly uses Hawaii’s history of land loss and displacement as a warning for Puerto Rico — “the main message of the song is not to let what happened to Hawaiʻi happen to Puerto Rico.”
“Cancer Alley,” Louisiana: An 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, home to over 200 petrochemical plants with some of the highest cancer risk in the country. Many of these plants sit directly on former plantation land and even retain the plantation names; “Free Towns” founded by formerly enslaved people were bought out or forced out to make way for industry, and many current residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked those same lands (Human Rights Watch, 2024). Sharon Lavigne, founder of RISE St. James, put it bluntly: “We’re dying from inhaling the industries’ pollution. I feel like it’s a death sentence. Like we are getting cremated, but not getting burnt” (as cited in Human Rights Watch, 2024). Same plantation-to-pollution throughline as the Delta, different toxin.

Reference

Atiles, J. (2025). Who owns Puerto Rico’s beaches? Law, extractivism, and the political economy of paradise. Third World Quarterly. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2025.2549362

Bender, M. (2025, January 22). Bad Bunny song about Hawaiʻi sparks conversation about displacement, overtourism. Hawaiʻi Public Radio. https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/the-conversation/2025-01-22/new-bad-bunny-song-about-hawaii-sparks-conversation-about-displacement-of-locals-and-over-tourism

Brones, A. (2018, May 15). Karen Washington: It’s not a food desert, it’s food apartheid. Guernica. https://www.guernicamag.com/karen-washington-its-not-a-food-desert-its-food-apartheid/

Bullard, R. D. (2016, January 22). Flint’s water crisis is a blatant example of environmental injustice. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/flints-water-crisis-is-a-blatant-example-of-environmental-injustice-53553

Human Rights Watch. (2024, January 25). “We’re dying here”: The fight for life in a Louisiana fossil fuel sacrifice zone. https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/01/25/were-dying-here/fight-life-louisiana-fossil-fuel-sacrifice-zone

Pam, E. (2025, July 29). How AI is fueling a new wave of environmental racism. Feminist Majority Foundation. https://feminist.org/news/how-ai-is-fueling-a-new-wave-of-environmental-racism/

Williams, B. (2018). “That we may live”: Pesticides, plantations, and environmental racism in the United States South. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2514848618778085

Further Resources

NASW page resources on Environmental Justice and Climate Change

Hosted by Louanne Bakk, PhD, Environmental Justice (inSocialWork, Ep. 189) features guests Rachel Forbes, Andrea Nesmith, Meredith Powers, and Cathryne Schmitz discussing the Flint water crisis and expanding the person-in-environment framework to physical environments. Listen on Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Overcast

Hosted by Peter Sobota, Green Social Work and Environmental Justice (inSocialWork, Ep. 325) features MSW student Alisa Chirico discussing how social workers can bring environmental consciousness into clinical practice. Listen on Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Overcast

Data Tools like the rebuilt EJScreen (an unofficial reconstruction by Public Environmental Data Partners, since EPA’s original was taken down) let you look up environmental burden by address
Climate Justice Alliance

Reference

Bakk, L. (Host). (2016, April 11). Environmental justice (No. 189) [Audio podcast episode]. In inSocialWork. University at Buffalo School of Social Work. https://www.insocialwork.org/episode.asp?ep=189

Bogardus, K. (2025, February 7). EPA’s environmental justice office in tatters. E&E News by POLITICO. https://www.eenews.net/articles/epas-environmental-justice-office-in-tatters/

Brones, A. (2018, May 15). Karen Washington: It’s not a food desert, it’s food apartheid. Guernica. https://www.guernicamag.com/karen-washington-its-not-a-food-desert-its-food-apartheid/

Delta Flight Museum. (n.d.). Huff-Daland Duster, 1925–ca. 1948. https://www.deltamuseum.org/research/history/aircraft/crop-dusters/crop-dusters/huff-daland-duster-1925-ca.1948

Edin, K. J., & Shaefer, H. L. (2016). $2.00 A Day: Living on almost nothing in America. HarperCollins.

Linquiti, P. D. (2022). Rebooting policy analysis: Strengthening the foundation, expanding the scope. CQ Press.

Pam, E. (2025, July 29). How AI is fueling a new wave of environmental racism. Feminist Majority Foundation. https://feminist.org/news/how-ai-is-fueling-a-new-wave-of-environmental-racism/

Sobota, P. (Host). (2024, February 20). Green social work and environmental justice (No. 325) [Audio podcast episode]. In inSocialWork. University at Buffalo School of Social Work. https://www.insocialwork.org/green-social-work-and-environmental-justice/

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2020, September 24). Learn about environmental justice. https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/learn-about-environmental-justice_.html