This guide was written for distribution at the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Conference, hosted by Santa Clara University’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education in May 2019. The conference convened representatives from Jesuit and other universities with a broad range of community organizations to strengthen our common understanding and advancement of community-engaged scholarship for environmental justice (EJ). Given its immediate audience, the guide focuses primarily on the U.S. context, although it also discusses the major global causes and impacts of EJ, and how Americans have been inspired by engaged scholars around the world, from whom we have much to learn.
The conference emerged from the Ignatian Center’s 2016-2018 Bannan Institute, Is There a Common Good in Our Common Home? A Summons to Solidarity. The Institute was motivated in part by Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’, in which the Pope called on people of all faiths to recognize that care for the environment is inextricably linked to care for people in poverty, and to work together to create a more just and sustainable world
