The Connection Between Rural and Urban
Dr. Leslie King will speak at the UNWC Annual Meeting on how environmental injustice is interwoven with rural issues
By Scott Laird
Published by Vernonia’s Voice on Apr 18, 2024.
What would it be like if, instead of seeing a divide between rural and urban issues, we tried to find the connections between them?
That will be a question Dr. Leslie King will address as the keynote speaker at the Upper Nehalem Watershed Council’s Annual Meeting.
Dr. King will speak on Thursday, April 25, 2024 at 5:30 pm at the Vernonia Grange. She brings a decades-long career in rural medicine to the topic of environmental justice.
Her work in environmental justice focuses on how poor or marginalized communities are harmed by resource extraction, hazardous waste, and land uses from which they do not benefit, and demonstrates how exposure to environmental harm is not distributed equitably in our communities.
She currently teaches environmental justice at Portland State University to environmental professionals and undergraduate students, while staying involved in rural medicine. She also serves on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.
Dr. King says her work in both fields show it’s important to make the connection between rural and urban issues. “For me, it’s not about the rural/urban divide. It’s about how we’re connected. It’s about how we’re united. How there are so many of the same problems. Even though they are such disparate places, they have, very much, the same underlying social issues.”
What is most important about environmental justice is who is impacted by it and where it occurs, Dr. King says.
“I think it’s important to define ‘environmental justice,’ and make sure people understand what it is, even though it’s been around for over 30 years,” Dr. King says. “There’s an entire division within the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] but people still don’t know what it is.”
Dr. King is familiar with the Coast Range region of Oregon after working here extensively and recreating here, so she understands the issues facing communities like Vernonia.
“Almost my entire medical career was in remote and rural places,” says Dr. King. “I worked in Seaside for years and all over the coast north of Newport. I’ve hunted all around Vernonia during elk season. I’ve always been working in underserved communities, including Alaskan Native villages, Indian reservations. And in central Oregon in places like Hermiston and Madras.”
Dr. King says the presentation she will make at the UNWC Annual Meeting is a talk she has given previously to several other watershed councils. She says, while poor neighborhoods are often the victims in environmental justice issues, it’s not just an urban issue.
“Environmental justice is also a rural issue,” she says, and points to examples along Oregon’s coast and in Hood River where communities have been systemically impacted. “In Hood River, the fancy kite surfing places have all sorts of new, pretty, shiny things, but in the poor migrant communities there’s flooding and things that have been neglected for a half century.”
She says she uses examples in her talks and her classes that show the difference between the types of environmental restoration projects that occur in affluent neighborhoods versus the lack of restoration in poorer places. “It’s really quite clear and you start to see what environmental justice is and what it means. Whose river gets restored? Who has the funding and who gets the grants?”
She also uses salmon declines in the Pacific Northwest as an example that we often don’t connect to environmental injustice.
“People don’t get what environmental justice and disparity have to do with salmon declines,” said Dr. King. “They just don’t make the connection. People don’t understand that the systemic problems that detached people from nature are the same systemic problems that are wrecking our environment. They are all in one loop.”
She notes that a recent visit to Madras reminded her that gentrification, where the character of a place is changed when wealthier people move in and the current poorer population is replaced, is also not just an urban issue. “I’m wondering where those broke people went? The phenomenon of gentrification is happening everywhere. It’s the same thing in Roseburg. This is a county with a fifty percent poverty rate, but where are those people? They are not in the new wine bar.”
She likens it to the early days of white settlement. “I call it the ‘New Homesteader Phenomenon’. People are being displaced all over again.”
Dr. King says she believes some people are looking at it from their one point of view and just don’t understand the imbalances that occur in our society, especially when it pertains to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). “There are people having knee jerk reactions and are saying they are sick of DEI. How about the DEI people who are sick of the dominant culture always squashing them down? What if that’s how it’s been for your entire lifetime?”
She says she sees people get enraged who think they’re being cheated by the inclusion of groups who have historically been excluded; they’re not looking at the entire scope of the issues. She says a shift in mindset needs to happen – that diversity isn’t just people. It’s related to the environment and related to salmon and beavers and trees.
“It’s important to talk about things like environmental justice in the context of salmon, because it really is all connected. It’s a societal problem. It’s structural. Until you start to see it in that way, you’ll continue to ask questions about how they’re related. Because you’ve got to see the bigger, broader patterns.”
The Upper Nehalem Watershed Council Annual Meeting will be held Thursday, April 25, 5:30 pm at the Vernonia Grange, 375 North St.