When it comes to water, Oregon is looking to the future. The State’s 100-Year Water Vision aims to ensure Oregon has “enough clean water for our people, our economy and our environment, now and for future generations.”
Portland State University is home to many scientists and engineers whose research interests include studying the State’s hydrological systems and the communities that depend on them. Melissa Haeffner is one of those researchers. Haeffner is an assistant professor in the Environmental Science and Management department at PSU, where she studies how social, political, and biophysical factors affect access to water.
“My background is in sociology,” Haeffner said. “The research I do focuses on human/environment interactions through a lens of environmental justice values.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, environmental justice is “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” (EPA, 2016b). As Haeffner notes, environmental justice values are threefold. The first is distributive justice--the equitable distribution of environmental risks, impacts, and benefits. The second is procedural justice, which incorporates fairness in processes that involve natural resources. Then there is recognition justice, the acknowledgment of past and systemic inequalities.
Haeffner and several of her students on the Oregon Water Stories team recently stressed the critical importance of these values in a recent policy paper. The paper encourages leaders of the State’s 100-Year Water Vision plan to “further intentionally incorporate equity” into their work and suggests the development of “criteria for the evaluation of equity in water issues and decision-making.”
In addition to this work, and with the support of the Willamette Partnership and the Nature Conservancy, Haeffner is developing a tool to track water issues across the state. According to Haeffner, newspapers are one of the best sources of information on these issues and when examined in aggregate and over time, they may provide insights into the future of water-based environmental injustices.
“What we’re doing is pulling data from newspapers from across the state from the last five years,” Haeffner said. “With this data, we can get a sense of what peoples’ water issues are, the distribution of those issues and how things are changing over time. So, for instance, where are we seeing occurrences of arsenic in the water, in what areas are water systems becoming more prone to flooding, or surface water supplies becoming more susceptible to dangerous algal blooms.”
With time and the incorporation of more data from additional sources, Haeffner hopes the database will function as an early detection water injustice tool that can help decision-makers address issues of environmental injustice across the state.
Addressing those issues in the long-term, however, will require a workforce versed in environmental justice and the values behind it. To ensure that workforce exists, Haeffner and other PSU faculty members are working on developing an environmental justice minor at Portland State and furthering the university’s commitment to “let knowledge serve.”