In most states, people of color and low-income communities are far less likely to have places to get outdoors near where they live. New data from the Center for American Progress and the Hispanic Access Foundation confirms what many have long suspected or known through experience: not everyone has equal access to nature’s benefits. The “nature gap” is real and it is wide. Nationwide, communities of color are three times more likely than mostly white ones to be deprived of nearby nature—in the Northeast, it’s nine times.

These disparities are not a coincidence, but rather the result of a long history of environmental racism, from the original dispossession of lands from Native Americans through years of forced migration, the discriminatory practice of denying financial services based on race or ethnicity known as “redlining”, segregation, violence, intimidation and exclusion from the decision-making table that continues in the conservation movement to this day. People of color and low-income communities are being both subject to the worst of nature destruction and locked out of efforts to undo it. This webinar will look at recent research that affirms this and at how the conservation and outdoors movement can rethink and remake itself to be more just, inclusive and effective at guaranteeing nature as a right to all.

This important webinar is co-sponsored by the Bangor law firm of Gross, Minsky & Mogul, P.A., and by the Maine Lakes Environmental Justice Committee.