Building Relationships with Fenceline Communities and Change Agents to Build Capacity for Ethical Earth Science

Resource extractive industries - including mining, oil/gas wells, and pipelines - disproportionately impact communities that live on the fenceline adjacent to hazardous areas that impact the safety and viability of soil, water, and air. Environmental justice considers harms disproportionately enacted on some communities and not others to be the result of an inequitable system. In Michigan, Communities of Color (i.e., Tribes, Latinx, Black, etc.) and low-income communities experience health hazards and environmental harm as a result of extractive industries. Building relationships between earth scientists and fenceline communities can reduce harm by changing the way in which earth scientists think about their ethical obligations. In this work, we present initial results from a new initiative to build relationships and communication around ethical norms. While earth scientists typically engage in ethics from a responsible conduct of research perspective, our community partners consider ethics of care for individuals, communities, and the planet as central to all decision-making. Using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach, we met with multiple partners over a six-month period to build trusting relationships, identify ethical norms within partner communities, and generate guidance for ethical training needed by earth scientists. We found that communities house a rich knowledge base that can and should influence decision-making around earth-related industries. The building of trust allows the formation of collaborative teams for future development of training and education programs where stakeholders can communicate perspectives and values for extraction practices aligned with community ethical norms.