Robin Morris Collin

Collin outlines strategies to heal climate injustice

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How can centuries of environmental exploitation and social injustice in the U.S. be unraveled? Robin Robin Morris CollinMorris Collin, the Norma Paulus Professor of Law at Willamette University College of Law, will share her passion for creating solutions to remedy environmental injustice. She will deliver the 2020-21 Colin Ruagh O’Fallon Memorial lecture “The Geography of Injustice and the Ecology of Reparations” on Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 5 p.m. via Zoom.  

Collin asserts that, driven by the legacies of colonialism and slavery, U.S. public policy has deliberately subordinated nature and people in pursuit of profit by discounting the value of people and places into commodities for transactional exchange. Our economy, which relies on patterns of extraction, consumption, and pollution, has deeply harmed the earth and its people. Poor communities, especially communities of color, are disproportionately impacted by pollution, waste disposal, hazardous sites, resource depletion, and disasters in the natural and built environment.  

To visualize how people and places are affected by environmental injustice, Collin has been utilizing the EPA’s EJSCREEN: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which collects and analyzes information to assess and compare environmental and human health risks borne by populations identified by race, national origin, or income. Injustice has literally been mapped. 

Beyond defining the problems, Collin will outline key strategies that can lead to healing. She contends that in order to heal we must reestablish a reciprocity between ourselves and nature, and we need to center environmental justice in the heart of sustainability. To that end, Collin maintains that environmental justice must be included in the core curriculum so all will understand why equity matters. We must reexamine our shared histories and recognize the truth of where we are now—not try to deny or disguise it. She also believes that injured communities and damaged places need to be reconnected, one by one.  

young African American female farmerCollin believes that reparations can change the ecology of subordination, but not with payments—payments will not change systems. Sustainable community-based projects create new systems that bolster relationships between people and the land—like the Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network which is committed to culturally relevant, ancestrally guided, and ecologically sustainable, agricultural-based living. Healing entails a community-by-community focus on restorations, reparations, and re-creations. 

Collin, the first U.S. law professor to teach sustainability courses in a U.S. law school, currently teaches Global Sustainability. Prior to her tenure at Willamette University, she was a professor at the University of Oregon’s Law School from 1993 to 2003. While at the UO, she cofounded the Coalition Against Environmental Racism’s Environmental Justice conference and the Sustainable Business Symposium, both of which continue into their second decade. 

She has been awarded the David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award from the UO’s Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, the 2012 Oregon Woman of Achievement Award, the Leadership in Sustainability Award from the Oregon State Bar, the Campus Compact Faculty Award for Civic Engagement in Sustainability, and the national Environmental Justice Achievement Award from the Environmental Protection Agency for her work with the Oregon Environmental Justice Task Force. She was a founding board member of the Environmental Justice Action Group of Portland, and a founding member of Lawyers for a Sustainable Future. 

Collin’s talk is free and open to the public. Registration is required to participate in the live Zoom event. Register at: ohc.uoregon.edu. The talk will be recorded and available for viewing on the OHC’s YouTube channel. For more information contact ohc@uoregon.edu