Experiences of Environmental Justice and Injustice in Communities of People Experiencing Homelessness

Abstract

People experiencing homelessness have a particular vulnerability to environmental hazards, yet there is little attention paid to the issue of homelessness in environmental justice literature. The current study is a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of environmental justice and injustice in a community of people who are experiencing homelessness. To understand how people who experience homelessness in the Waterloo Region, Ontario, community conceptualize and experience their environment in terms of cleanliness, healthfulness, safety, and justice, 12 semi-structured interviews were conducted with people experiencing absolute homelessness in Kitchener and Cambridge, Ontario. Analysis shows that although knowledge of systemic environmental injustices is all but absent in this community, particular phenomena do stand out as critical issues, such as substandard rooming houses, drugs and alcohol, litter and pollution, and the behavior of police officers and city officials. Analysis also unveiled a significant dissatisfaction with municipal decision-making processes.

As our global climate changes in ways that climatologists have been predicting for years (IPCC, 1990, 1995, 2001), the lifestyles, experiences, and social and physical environments of people across the world are also changing (IPCC, 2007; Kass, 2009). Many of the effects of global climate change critically impact people's lives both locally and internationally, including the effects of water scarcity, decreasing air quality, deforestation leading to conflicts over resources, increasing energy costs, food deficiency, displacement due to natural disaster, and increased risk of airborne diseases (IPCC, 2007; Kass, 2009). Partially due to these changes, environmentalists have increasingly been shifting their focus away from an eco-centric (i.e., centered around the protection of nature) perspective to one that is homocentric (i.e., centered around the way that humans are impacted by environmental change) (Switzer, 2003, p. 13). Although there is much debate about whether this shift is good for the environmental movement as a whole (e.g., Cronon, 1995; DeLuca, 2007), there is no denying that the effects of global climate change have significant impacts on human populations, and these impacts ought to be explored and addressed. Due to this shifting focus, issues of environmental risk and harm are becoming more and more relevant to psychologists, as scientists who study humans and as social change agents who seek to promote personal and community well-being. These issues are particularly relevant to community psychologists due to our social justice lens; since the early 1980s, people have been realizing and becoming alarmed by the fact that not only are all humans seriously impacted by environmental issues, but also there is, in fact, a significant disparity in the distribution of environmental hazards and benefits among social groups already experiencing systemic inequalities (such as racialized, indigenous, or low-income communities), at both local and global scales (Stein, 2004, p. 2).

In fact, there is an entire community of activists, policy-makers, academics, and concerned citizens who have dedicated their time and energy to combating these injustices by participating in the “Environmental Justice” movement (Gosine & Teelucksingh, 2008, p. 9). Although there are many definitions of environmental justice, the one we use in this study describes it as “those cultural norms and values, rules, regulations, behaviors, policies, and decisions that support sustainable communities where people can interact with confidence that their environment is safe, nurturing, and productive” (Adamson et al., 2002, p. 4). Further, an environmentally just community is one where

1. Everyone has the right to a healthy and safe environment and has the responsibility to maintain it.

2. Everyone has a right to a fair share of natural resources and the right to not suffer disproportionately from environmental policies, regulations, or laws.

3. Everyone has a civil right to be able to access environmental information and participate in decision making.

4. The most vulnerable in society, in particular the poorest, should not suffer the disproportionate, negative effects of environmental omissions, actions, policy, or law. (Roundtable on Climate Change and Poverty in the UK, 2008, p. 4).

In this article, we will explore how environmental injustice impacts one group of 12 people in a community experiencing homelessness in southern Ontario; the perspectives of people experiencing homelessness are largely missing from our discussions of environmental injustices, which makes it difficult to account for these marginalized experiences in our activism, our research, and our understanding of “the environment.”

Environmental Justice and Homelessness

One of the most monumental contributions of environmental justice discourse to mainstream environmentalism is the constant redefinition of “the environment” and “environmental issues” (as well as the redefinition of “social justice”). For example, although “the environment” has long been thought of as being synonymous with “nature,” that is, human-free wilderness (Gosine & Teelucksingh, 2008, p. 93), environmental justice scholars and activists have reshaped this understanding and encouraged others to adopt a more holistic take, as Bullard notes,

The environmental justice movement has basically redefined what environmentalism is all about. It basically says that the environment is everything. … We can't separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do (as cited in Schweizer, 1999).

The more perspectives that are added to the cultural narrative of “environmentalism,” the clearer it is that the definition should change. Many emerging environmental justice issues (such as reproductive justice and food security) are not immediately apparent to the uninitiated as environmental issues, just as many emerging social justice issues (such as climate justice) are not immediately identified by many as “social” in nature. Combating homogeneity in a social movement, and resisting complacency in our identification of concerns and emancipatory tactics involves understanding the artificiality of the boundaries that we have drawn between “environmental” and “social” issues.

For example, people who experience homelessness have a particular vulnerability to environmental hazards, experienced through an extremely “social” lens; this vulnerability sets them apart from low-income people who are housed, and confronts these individuals with a unique set of challenges not only to health and well-being but also to simple survival. Those experiencing absolute homelessness are at greater risk for experiencing a diverse array of health issues, including asthma (Rauh et al., 2008), infectious disease, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, air-pollution-related illnesses, depression and anxiety, vector-borne diseases (Ramin & Svoboda, 2009), and gastrointestinal disease (Donovan et al., 2008). This increased vulnerability to environmental hazards due to this group's marginalized position in society makes homelessness a clear environmental justice issue. Despite some research done on homeless political mobilization, as well as on the effects of environmental hazards on people experiencing homelessness, there continue to be significant gaps remaining on the subject of environmental justice and homelessness. People experiencing homelessness are extraordinarily underrepresented in discussions of environmental justice, and we could not find any literature about the involvement of people experiencing homelessness as activists and agents of social change in the environmental justice movement literature. In addition, in the literature surrounding homeless political mobilization, there is little to no discussion of homeless political engagement surrounding issues that affect those who are experiencing homelessness beyond poverty and housing rights. Why do these gaps exist? Could it be because there is no known record of people experiencing homelessness engaging in this way? Is it simply that we have not yet turned to intersectional understanding of marginalization and resistance in our research on homelessness? If homeless political mobilization and collective action exists, then why are we seeing none of it in environmental justice literature? It is also possible that homeless mobilization is absent from the environmental justice literature, because issues of environmental justice are simply not the most pressing issues in communities of people experiencing homelessness. We conducted a phenomenological study in the summer of 2009 to find out more from those community members who have experienced homelessness in Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada.

The research questions we used aimed at elucidating how the participants made sense of and perceived environmental justice and injustice in their communities, in their own words. They were as follows: How do people experiencing homelessness in our community experience their personal environments, the spaces where they live, work, and play? Do they feel that access to a clean, healthful, safe environment should be a right or something to be earned? Who do they feel is asked to the table when it comes to making change in our community? In order to find answers to these questions, we added a series of questions to interviews that had been conducted in the context of another research project in Waterloo Region on homelessness and climate change. This project was done in formal partnership with two researchers from the University of Waterloo Environmental Studies Department and the Region of Waterloo Social Planning, Policy, and Program Administration Division, with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Centre for Urban Health Initiatives, and with the support of 10 social service agencies and two peer interviewers who have past experience with homelessness (Wandel et al., 2010).

Design and Methodology

This study is a cross-sectional qualitative applied research design (the purpose being to better understand a social problem so that others can then intervene) from a phenomenological perspective (which involves focusing on how human beings make sense of an experience and transform that experience into consciousness) (Patton, 2002, p. 217). This research also takes many principles from participatory action research, in that it encouraged “joint collaboration within a mutually acceptable ethical framework to understand and/or solve organizational or community problems” (Patton, 2002, p. 183).

The interview guide was designed by the researchers, with input subsequently sought from stakeholders from three major groups: representatives from the Region of Waterloo Social Planning Division; representatives from various social service agencies that address homelessness in the region; and two peer interviewers (people who have experienced homelessness in the past and who were brought onto our team as interviewers), Craig and Sonia. This consultation process was to ensure that all our questions were relevant to the lived experience of homelessness.

The interview guide (along with the scope of the project) was drastically revised several times, and some revisions came after we had already begun the interviewing process. The initial scope of the project was to solely look at how the effects of global climate change are experienced as justice issues, but it became clear after a few interviews that we would be limiting the relevance of the study if we continued on with that approach; the participants knew what global warming was and read about it in the newspaper, but it was clearly not a major issue in their lives. Luckily, several of the first participants brought up issues of littering without being prompted to do so; thus, we decided to broaden the scope of the research to include all environmental issues, in order to ensure that participants would feel engaged and in control of the way their concerns were framed. This is consistent with the iterative process of qualitative inquiry (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Representatives from at least 10 social service agencies in Kitchener and Cambridge recruited several participants from their service population. Rather than using one emergency shelter as “home base” for all interviews, we sought out a variety in order to avoid missing women, youth (16 years and older), tenters, and individuals who disliked that particular shelter. Under the direction of the peer interviewers, participants were also recruited “in the field” (in parks, at malls, downtown, and next to a river), because we knew that the region already had difficulty accounting for those who prefer not to use social services (Regional Municipality of Waterloo, 2007, p. 191). This purposive, maximum variation sampling strategy (Patton, 2002, p. 234) was selected in the hope that selecting from a wide range of venues would provide us with a diversity of perspectives and also give us access to more “hard-to-reach” members of the population.

At local social service agencies in Cambridge and Kitchener, as well as “in the field,” we conducted 48 semistructured qualitative interviews with people who had been experiencing absolute homelessness (or who had experienced absolute homelessness within the last 2 years). Participants were given the option to choose between being assigned a pseudonym and remaining anonymous, or identifying themselves by having their given or chosen name used; all chose to have their real name used. It should be noted that there are two people named Craig involved in this project, a participant and a peer interviewer; the Craig who is quoted next is the participant.

Interviews were co-facilitated by one of two university researchers (Kate, the first author of this article, or Wendy) and one of two peer interviewers (Craig or Sonia). Unfortunately, it was not until the interview process was complete that Kate was able to listen to the interviews that she had not been present for, and it was clear that there were significant differences between the interviewers. She was the only interviewer familiar with the details of the project and with the concept of environmental justice, and since the interview guide was not a script, we could not garner much usable data from the interviews where she was not present. There were also some interviews that had been conducted before the final revision of the interview guide which were interesting but not the same as the others. Due to internal validity concerns, we decided to use a subsample of 12 out of 48 interviews conducted; interviews were selected based on whether or not Kate was present to help facilitate and whether or not they were conducted after the final revision of the interview guide. All other interviews were used as a validity sample to confirm the findings from the 12 selected interviews.

Of the 12 participants selected for this study, all are currently living in the Kitchener area. Two were women, and three were 21 years of age or younger. All had experienced absolute homelessness within the past 2 years; out of all the participants, four spent their nights in tents or in other outdoor places, and the rest accessed emergency shelters in the area. This was slightly different from the whole sample of 48, where there was a higher proportion of campers (since many unused interviews were conducted in Cambridge, which has a big tenting community), but fewer youth and women.

Results

The themes from the interviews are organized into three sections: “Assessment of Personal Environments,” “Personal Environment as a Justice Issue,” and “Representation and Decision-Making.” The first section focuses on how the participants view their personal environments and describes four environmental justice issues that were raised throughout the interview process. The second section focuses on how the participants feel about their personal environments and whether or not they think access to a clean, healthful, safe environment should be a basic human right. The third section details participants' opinions on who should be making decisions regarding the environment and homelessness, whether or not the right people are currently making decisions, and what some of the barriers are to getting involved in municipal decision-making processes.

“Buddy, it's not like it's the Ritz in here”: an assessment of personal environments

Critical environmental justice issues in the Region of Waterloo

Overall, four issues emerged as being critical issues of environmental justice in this region. On the surface, some of the themes diverge from typical topics of conversation within environmentalism and even within environmental justice; it is only after understanding the relationships between environmental and social factors that it becomes apparent that these are, in fact, environmental justice issues.

Rooming houses: Two out of 12 participants identified that their experiences living in rooming houses (short-term low-income housing) revealed extremely substandard conditions that made it difficult for them to remain steadily housed. One participant, when asked about his experience of finding a clean living environment replied:

Well, put it this way, they can't expect you to live in a one-bedroom apartment. And so, if you are on welfare you have to move into a rooming house, and a lot of those houses are crack houses and full of drug addicts and crack heads. […] If you have been involved in that you don't want to be around it (Cutler).

Drugs and alcohol: Almost half (5 out of 12) of the participants mentioned that drugs and alcohol contributed to their feeling that the cleanliness, healthfulness, and safety of their environment were being degraded. A part of this was the “aftermath” of people's drug use:

Well what I have noticed is that there is a lot of drug use, discarded needles […] that's a big problem because a lot of places where people pitch a tent the IV users will just throw their needles and syringes in the bush not thinking that a year later, they may think that this is a place where I can put a tent up (Craig).

Another element was more a factor of the social environment; many participants described the actual experience of being around people who are “using” to be quite difficult for them, particularly if they had a history of substance use or abuse:

Like, I can walk into the bathroom, not like 2 years ago, but today, there is a needle dispenser, […] especially if I used to be a user, and I am clean, you are seeing it again. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. […] It is just a drug haven (Dave).

Litter and pollution: Several (4 out of 12) of the participants found littering to be a particularly prevalent issue in their community, particularly due the behavior of people who are housed.

I have seen guys in $2000 suits drop their coffee cups on the ground, even though they are ten feet away from the garbage can, but what they don't see is that guy on the street who goes over and picks up the coffee cup and puts it in the garbage and gives him a dirty look, flipping him off. People think that that guy is just spouting off. He is not spouting off. The guy threw garbage down on the street which is his home. That's his home, and they throw garbage down on the street like it is nothing (Mark).

Police officers and city officials: Almost half (5 out of 12) of participants (all people who chose to camp in tents instead of sleeping in shelters) told stories of either having their tent taken by the police (contributing to an unstable shelter situation) or being pushed to less acceptable or more remote tenting locations due to police surveillance of the “good spots.” One participant described the difficulty of coming home to find all of his personal belongings being confiscated:

Two years ago, I had my tent taken by the City. [Interviewer: Oh, really.] Yeah, and I watched them pick it up with my stuff in it. They just grabbed it, crumpled it all up, and threw it in a garbage bag. You know, the stuff was given to me by [social service worker's name], the community health guy, and the city workers just come and, it's like garbage to them, but that was my home, you know, watching them take my home and crush it up (Darrell).

Another participant talked about the environmental compromises he and his peers would make in order to avoid being arrested for sleeping in a public place:

Yeah, over the years a lot of the places that we used to tent 20 years ago, the police have learned that people spend more time there and camp out there, so the police patrol over there more so you wouldn't be able to camp in certain spots, which were probably good areas to camp in (Craig).

“Even homeless people have standards”: personal environment as a justice issue

Feelings about personal environments: Many participants mentioned that cleanliness is not the most important thing to them when it comes to finding a place to spend time. When asked whether or not it was difficult to find an acceptable place to stay, “low standards” was a theme that came up frequently; in reference to his own personal standards, one participant said: “For me, personally, I just need someplace to throw down a pack or a sleeping bag or something […] you know, with the garbage or whatever, syringes or food wrappers or whatever” (Craig). Another participant mentioned that when it comes to the priorities that he would like to see municipalities take in their planning, “cleanliness” is not one of them: “Yeah, like cleaning the city is nice, don't get me wrong, but what's the point of spending three million dollars to clean up King Street, when there are shelters that need that money?” (Jodie Lee).

Other participants found access to a clean, healthful, and safe environment to be important and stated that due to this importance, they work hard to find an acceptable place if and when it is not readily provided to them. One tenter talked about the distance he would walk into the forest to find a good spot: “Yeah, you may have to clear a little bit of brush, but if you make your own trail nobody knows where your spot is, so you keep it clean as long as you have garbage bags and stuff” (Shane).

Access to a clean, healthful, safe environment as a basic human right: Participants were divided over whether or not they believed access to a clean, healthful, safe environment to be something one should earn or something that should be provided to everybody. Those who believed environmental issues to be justice issues were quick to point out that there were direct barriers to equality of access. One participant stated,

Yeah, I definitely feel that you should have the right to a cleaner city. I don't know why, but I feel like you should have a clean city, you know, 'cause if you have a clean city, you have clean people and you have everything, but let's face the facts, it is never going to be a clean city. There is always going to be some dirt bag who is polluting our city, taking crack and cocaine in their veins and everything, it is always going to be a dirty city, it is never going to be clean. But you shouldn't have to work hard to have a clean city (Jodie Lee).

Many of those who believed that access to a clean, healthful, and safe environment should be earned emphasized the concept of who is “deserving.” One participant was quite clear on what that means to him:

I don't think you should have places given to you if you don't deserve and you are not working for a place. […] What I don't consider working is just sitting around doing nothing, just expecting everything to be a hand out. […] But if you are trying and you are actually making attempts in your life, it is kind of a reward type thing (Jodie Lee).

“Somebody has to speak up for us down here”: representation and decision-making

Who should be making decisions? Four participants replied that they felt the best people to make decisions in a municipal context are people who have experience in the issue at hand. When asked who should be making decisions, one participant said:

Not businessmen, not businessmen or politicians. People who have actually lived in this situation and dealt with it, and got on their feet and got out of it. People who know what it is like to be on the bottom of the ladder and have clawed their way up to the top (Eric).

Another participant described how he felt his peers would benefit from being involved in decision making; when asked who should be “at the table” to make decisions, he replied:

I think us, the homeless people should be at the table to discuss, put in our own views, you know what I mean? A lot of these guys would love to be there to talk about employment insurance and have a role in it and feel that they are involved (Jodie Lee).

The rest of the answers were quite diverse. One participant said, “To be quite honest, I think it should be everybody. […] This is everybody's world and we all share it” (Chantel). Another participant did not care who was making decisions, as long as they acted on their ideas: “It's not so much the qualifications, it is just talking, just do it. Nothing is getting done. Everyone has all these big ideas, but they are not doing it. […] Nothing is changing” (Valerie).

Are the right people making the decisions right now? When asked whether the people currently making decisions on relevant issues were appropriate or effective, however, the answer was a resounding no. One participant felt that the skewed representation was reflected in the way the city was run. When asked whether the right people were being represented in municipal decision-making processes, he said:

Hell no. Hell no. [Interviewer: Why do you think that is?] Look at the city, you just take a look around at St. John's [local soup kitchen] and the hostels and that, the people who are in that situation are not making the decisions, if people were to make those decisions, things would change a lot (Eric).

Another participant felt that skewed representation is based in unfounded stereotypes: “The environment and homelessness, those are two that walk hand in hand. You folks are bigger pigs than all of us homeless people. So yeah, the wrong people are sitting on the boards” (Mark).

Those who did not answer no (29%) said that they were unsure, mostly because they were not aware of who was making the decisions: “I don't exactly know because I don't know who is making the decisions” (Chantel).

Barriers to participation: During the interviews, a few participants brought up specific barriers they felt were preventing people experiencing homelessness from participating in decision-making processes that impact their lives. One participant mentioned competing survival needs. When asked why he thought there were no people experiencing homelessness on municipal committees, he replied:

I think they are more concerned with surviving than actually changing things […] like survival is a big part too, right? It's kind of hard to answer that in 5 minutes. I think that takes a little bit of deliberation, I guess you would say (Eric).

Eric's expressed need for more deliberation time was not isolated to his interview; it seemed that the prospect of people experiencing homelessness making decisions at a municipal level was not a regular topic of thought or conversation. Another participant refused to blame lack of homeless participation on the homeless population, saying that any lack of participation was not due to lack of interest:

Do you know why there is a city council meeting with relation to anything going on downtown, do you know why they call it a secret? Because they keep it a secret. We don't know when any of the meetings are. Because I can guarantee you when it comes to anyone on welfare coming to a meeting, I can guarantee you that they will be there. So they don't want us there. You know why? We are outspoken. You give us a forum to make our voice known, they won't, because they know we are outspoken and they don't like that. They want to be able to tell everyone that “I am on City Council,” it is like a pride thing for them. For us, it is a living requirement. I guarantee, you put me on that council I would be there, but I can't, I am banned. […] I will stand up anyways. Somebody has to speak up for us down here (Mark).

This desire for a space in which to “speak up” was not uncommon. Several participants identified that just having a space to express their opinions would be helpful in making change; when asked whether he would be interested in getting involved in local politics, one participant replied: “I am not a big public speaker, but I guess it wouldn't hurt, I do have definitely things to say and have a lot of experience in homelessness” (Shane). Another participant proposed a forum where the voices of people experiencing homelessness would actually be heard:

If there was a publicly held forum that was publicized properly, and in the right forums, I think you may see a huge turnout. We may not care who the Prime Minister is, but we care who is cleaning up our streets. […] Right now we are the unheard voice, so why should I even vote? Does anybody really care what I think? (Mark).

Another participant actually found being involved in the research process to be an empowering experience for him:

I would like to add that it is nice sitting and talking to you guys […] you girls […] because it is keeping me from walking around aimlessly. Somewhere to vent, without anger, just to sit and talk, like, I wouldn't be able to sit and talk because some of the guys would be sitting here, saying “Oh shut up.” (Cybulski).

Discussion

Interpretations

Is environmental justice experienced as an issue in this community of people experiencing homelessness? It is difficult to say; the answer varies, depending on the approach one takes to looking at it. If we compare the reported experiences and personal environments of the participants, regardless of their interpretation of them, with the definition of environmental justice, then yes, environmental justice is an issue in this community. There are critical environmental justice issues in this region that affect people experiencing homelessness more or differently than other citizens, and few to no perceived opportunities for people experiencing homelessness to engage or have a say in decision-making surrounding environmental concerns. The participants were, overall, quite dissatisfied with how they were being represented at a municipal level, and they expressed a sense of helplessness and skepticism when it came to the idea of their opinions actually leading to any sort of real and lasting change. Would this attitude change if economically marginalized people in this community were given the opportunity to enact the desired change themselves, without having to depend on people in charge? Quite possibly: the problem here does not seem to be a lack of motivation on the part of the participants but more a lack of social power.

However, if we use participants' interpretations and experiences of their environments as a measure for determining whether or not these issues are relevant, then the answer becomes less clear. There was little agreement among participants over whether or not access to a clean, healthful, safe environment was a social justice issue, or even whether it was important and worth talking about. Why is there such a disparity between how we interpret the participants' experiences and environments (as clear cases of environmental injustice) and how the participants interpret them (as par for the course)? After some reflection, I (Kate) have several construals, all of which have to do with privilege and none of which are mutually exclusive. The first is a case for internalized oppression. As a feminist, I have seen this argument made in horribly patronizing ways (“I know you're oppressed, and the only reason you don't is because you have been duped by the patriarchy!”), so I offer it as only one possibility out of many. It seems, however, that it would be reasonable to infer that if one is rarely given much, it would be disappointing and illogical to regularly expect and ask for more. If having “low standards” is what keeps one from being let down time and time again by our system of economic and social hierarchy, why would one think that having higher standards would be more ideal? Having high standards for the cleanliness, healthfulness, and safety of my environment is a privilege and also speaks to the social power that we have as researchers to envision avenues where we could incite some sort of social change.

The second possible interpretation is one of competing survival priorities; as class-privileged persons in an academic context, we have the privilege to make our concerns long-term and broad in scope, because we are relatively unencumbered by daily concerns such as whether or not all our belongings will still be there when we return home at night or whether our addiction will be triggered by the people we are forced to be around in order to eat.

A third interpretation is about access to education (formal or informal); the ability to view social issues as systemic and not individual is not one that comes naturally and without a great deal of learning (and is something that even many university students graduate without). In Canada, almost all of us grew up hearing the same individualizing narratives about poverty. Being poor does not make one exempt from having internalized the idea that poverty is an individual failing; that getting out of negative circumstances is a matter of individual responsibility; and that those who have no formal education, no housing security, and personal environments that are not clean, healthful, or safe simply are not working hard enough.

Lastly, there is always the distinct possibility that a disparity exists between my views and those of the participants, because I am simply wrong and have imposed my worldview on the findings without making space for perspectives that are not my own. As a young person and a young researcher, I have learned a great deal simply from hearing the participants' stories, and the possibility is far from small that there is a great deal more learning I have left to do.

Implications and future directions for action

What is the significance of this study? Locally, we believe that having an awareness and understanding of the perspectives of people experiencing homelessness can help inform those individuals who are attempting to address the issue of environmental injustice in our community. In particular, looking at the barriers that prevent people experiencing homelessness from getting involved in both top-down and bottom-up political action will allow us to better remove or lessen these barriers, so that in the future the participants and their peers can be fully involved in decision-making processes that affect them the most. Concrete applications of this project include the third phase of the greater project of which this research is a part. This action project is a knowledge transfer and community engagement strategy, and its objectives are to (1) ensure that all stakeholders are aware and understand the results of the interviews and the climate and air quality forecasting through the creation of a community report, a policy brief, a scientific report, and a series of press releases; (2) ensure that those in positions with the capacity to make change take the results into account in their planning processes; and (3) ensure that members of the community of people experiencing homelessness have a voice and are meaningfully engaged in the relevant decision-making processes through the creation of a community reference group. The results of this research have also helped to inform the creation of a local climate change adaptation strategic planning process (led by a student-run public interest research group), which will attempt to incite both grassroots and governmental change on the issue, and we hope to see a strong space for leadership made for people who have lived an experience of homelessness in this initiative. More broadly, this research provides a starting point for future discussions about homeless mobilization surrounding environmental justice issues, discussions seriously lacking in academic environmental justice discourse.

There are a few limitations to this research. First, many of the issues presented are very region specific; thus, the findings are transferable but perhaps not generalizable. Second, the sample size is relatively small (particularly in comparison to the 48 interviews collected for the larger study), which makes it unlikely that a point of data saturation was reached in the analysis process. However, although these limitations may mean that we cannot make far-reaching claims about the state of homelessness and environmental justice in Canada, these findings will give other researchers a preliminary framework and starting point on which to build in the future.

Relating to research and action, there are a few directions that this research could take. One would be to try replicating it in a region that is faced with more pressing, harmful environmental justice concerns. The region of Waterloo has, in fact, quite comprehensive and effective social services for a city of its size and has not been impacted by any large-scale environmental injustices. It would be interesting to see this study implemented in cities such as Sarnia or Dryden, Ontario, which have historically been implicated in environmental injustices, to see how people experiencing homelessness might be differentially impacted by these concerns, and to see whether participants are more familiar with the concept of “environmental justice” based on their increased exposure to it. Another potential course of action on this issue would be to develop a consciousness-raising program on the topic of environmental justice specifically for people who have been faced with the experience of homelessness, to see whether attitudes and understanding change once they are exposed to a systemic understanding of these issues; this would allow us to determine whether a lack of interest in the topic reflects a true irrelevance or simply a lack of access to learning.

The reality of environmental activism is that in a lot of ways it is a very exclusive business; in order to be truly effective in the face of the critical threats that issues such as global climate change pose, our strategies need to be deeply rooted in scientific understanding, which can truly limit who is able to be a leader in environmental social change and can force us to rely on “experts” for guidance (who are typically researchers and academics). Although this may appear to be a troubling limitation, we choose to see it as an opportunity for very interesting collaborations between researchers, social service providers, governmental representatives, and engaged citizens who are able to draw on their own experiences of homelessness to ensure the relevance of the work that is being done to less “powerful” stakeholders; engaging in these kinds of collaborations, however, requires us to make sure that we are not ignoring grassroots action as an important site of political mobilization (especially homeless political mobilization). Without essentializing a heterogeneous community of people by saying “this is what homeless people want and need when it comes to being engaged in social change,” research on homeless social movement organizations has indicated that

since groups like the homeless [sic] have only their bodies and time as resources and at least thus far, no national organization has come close to “organizing” this population […] most protests by the homeless are generally spontaneous and episodic, local in nature, and disruptive in strategy (Wagner & Cohen, 1991, p. 545).

Due to this general lack of resources and tendency toward spontaneity, focusing too heavily on institutional methods of change prevents most people who are experiencing homelessness from truly being able to take a leadership role in action.

Rather than viewing this as a weakness of this community or a reason for minimizing the involvement of people experiencing homelessness in our social change efforts, we encourage anyone interested in working in this area to challenge themselves to think outside the box a little bit and develop strategies that can make use of multiple strengths, resources, and areas of influence (remembering that institutional and grassroots change are not mutually exclusive and can actually happen simultaneously). For example, what if we started a grassroots network of people designed to rapidly transmit news of a pending storm through what is largely a small but socially fragmented community, while local bureaucrats worked on making more affordable housing available? What if we founded a skill-share collective that would allow people who have experience on the streets to swap tricks for building quick shelter or rain-proofing shoes, while the local emergency shelter worked on getting the funding required to be open 7 days a week? What if we collaborated with local anarchist groups to start “Know Your Rights” consciousness-raising workshops for people experiencing homelessness, while the local police force provided training to their staff in how to avoid perpetuating classist appression in their work? The possibilities for mutual solidarity and collaboration are endless, but harnessing these possibilities requires getting a little more creative in our strategies for change.

Adding the perspectives of people experiencing homelessness into our environmental justice discourse brings new issues into the mix. For example, perhaps we can now begin to see issues such as police harassment, drug and alcohol use, and free use of public space as “environmental issues.” It takes social power to make issues from the margins a part of the mainstream, a fact most environmental justice advocates know only too well (Gosine & Teelucksingh, 2008). Until these issues begin to be acknowledged as a part of a broader system of injustice, rather than as unfortunate by-products of an unfortunate lifestyle, people experiencing homelessness will continue to face disproportionate health impacts and will continue to be socially barred from public spheres that would enable them to have some influence. Ultimately, though there is continuing uncertainty about whether or not issues of environmental justice are important to people experiencing homelessness (whether due to lack of interest or competing priorities), this does not give us as academics and activists the prerogative to stop engaging in solutions to this issue. The question being posited here is not “Why are there no homeless activists?” or “Why don't people experiencing homelessness care?” but rather “Have we been denying a group of people space to talk about and act upon issues that are important to them?” Even if the answer is no, the onus remains on us to continue these conversations, continue to center marginalized voices and viewpoints in these discussions, and continue to use the privilege of our social positions to champion anti-oppression and ecological well-being in our communities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

This article is based on Kate Klein's honors thesis through Wilfrid Laurier University, which was supervised by Manuel Riemer. The authors would like to thank Johanna Wandel and Wendy de Gomez from the University of Waterloo; our two peer interviewers, Sonia Poirier and Craig Singleton; our partners Lynn Randall and Marie Morrison from the Region of Waterloo, Social Planning, Policy, and Program Administration Division; as well as the service agencies in Kitchener and Cambridge for their contributions to this research project. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (File # 820-2008-3017).

Author Disclosure Statement

No competing financial interests exist for either author.

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