August 11, 2024 | Sermon audio

𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗵𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗜𝗻𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗨𝗦-𝗠𝗲́𝘅𝗶𝗰𝗼 𝗕𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱𝘀

Presenter: Juanita Sundberg, Ph.D., Associate Professor Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

The US border policies since 1994 have generated various forms of environmental injustice in the US-México borderlands. Specifically, the 1994 border strategy enlisted rivers, mountains, and deserts as natural barriers in order to push people seeking to enter the US without inspection into areas deemed remote, harsh and difficult to cross. This strategy has led to the deaths of thousands of migrants seeking to join or support family members. Likewise, the strategy has destroyed other-than-human life-worlds by tearing up ecologies and enclosing animals in ever smaller enclosures. Addressing these intertwined forms of environmental injustice requires we attend to the way anthropocentrism upholds racism.

Bio of Dr. Sundberg:  Dr. Juanita Sundberg is Associate Professor of Geography and Latin American Studies at the University of British Columbia.  She got her PhD from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1999, which was also the year she moved to Vancouver to work at UBC.  Dr. Sundberg’s work seeks to foster conversations between feminist political ecology, critical Indigenous studies and anti-colonial approaches to examine environmental change in settler colonial societies in the Americas.  Dr. Sundberg is the daughter of Jim Sundberg who is a new member of the First UU Church of Wausau.