So there I was, feeling pretty good about our family’s environmental progress. Solar panels on the roof, composting bin humming along in the backyard, kids finally remembering to turn off lights without being nagged. We’d been doing this whole sustainable living thing for a few years, and honestly? I thought we had it figured out.
Then my middle daughter Emma – she’s nine and has this way of asking questions that stop you dead in your tracks – came home from school last month with a story that completely changed how I think about environmental solutions. Her class had been learning about climate change, and apparently one of her classmates, Jayden, mentioned that his family couldn’t afford solar panels like ours, even though they lived closer to the highway and his little sister had asthma from all the truck exhaust.
“Dad,” Emma said, looking genuinely confused, “why do the families who need clean air the most not get to have the solar panels?”
I opened my mouth to answer and… nothing. I mean, I started to say something about tax credits and upfront costs, but even as the words were coming out, I realized how hollow they sounded. Here I was, this guy who’d been writing blog posts about our family’s environmental wins, and my nine-year-old had just pointed out a massive blind spot I’d somehow completely missed.
The thing is, I’d been approaching our whole environmental journey from this really narrow perspective. What can we do to reduce our carbon footprint? How can we teach our kids to be more sustainable? All good questions, but I’d never seriously considered who gets left behind when families like mine make these changes, or whose voices aren’t being heard when environmental solutions get developed.
That conversation with Emma sent me down this rabbit hole of research that honestly made me pretty uncomfortable. I started looking into who lives near pollution sources in Charlotte, who can access programs for energy efficiency improvements, whose neighborhoods get prioritized for environmental cleanups. The patterns were pretty stark, and they weren’t random.
Take our own area. We live in this nice suburban neighborhood where the biggest environmental concern is whether the HOA will approve our rain barrels. Twenty minutes south, there’s a community called Sunset Park where families deal with air pollution from nearby industrial facilities, plus they’re in a food desert where fresh produce is hard to come by. Guess which neighborhood has more solar installations and electric vehicle charging stations?
I started wondering: when we talk about environmental solutions, are we actually talking about solutions for everyone, or just for people with the resources and political power to access them?
This question was really bugging me, so I did something I probably should’ve done years ago – I reached out to some environmental justice organizations in Charlotte to see if I could learn more. That’s how I connected with Maria, who works with a group called Communities for Clean Air. She agreed to meet me for coffee, probably taking pity on this suburban dad having his delayed environmental awakening.
Maria told me about the community she works in, where residents had been complaining about odors and health problems from a nearby chemical plant for over a decade. They’d sent letters, attended city council meetings, documented their concerns with photos and health records. Most of the time, they were ignored or told the facility was operating within legal limits.
“The thing that frustrates me most,” Maria said, “is when environmental groups show up wanting to ‘help’ our community, but they’ve already decided what the problem is and what the solution should be, without actually asking us what we think.” She described well-meaning activists arriving with petitions to shut down the plant entirely, not realizing that many community members worked there and wanted better safety measures, not job losses.
I had to ask myself: in all my blogging about our family’s environmental efforts, had I ever considered how those efforts connected to broader questions of who gets access to clean air, clean water, and healthy communities? Had I thought about whose voices were missing from the conversation?
The honest answer was no. I’d been focused on what my family could do within our bubble, which isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s incomplete. And that incompleteness matters because environmental problems don’t exist in isolation – they’re connected to economic inequality, racial segregation, political power, and who gets heard when decisions are made.
I started noticing this everywhere once I knew to look for it. The new bike lanes in Charlotte – great for reducing emissions – were mostly built in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. The electric vehicle rebates that helped make our neighbor’s Tesla purchase more affordable? Not so helpful if you’re working two jobs just to afford a used gas car, much less a new electric one.
Even our beloved farmers market, which I’d always thought of as this great sustainable option, was in a part of town that required a car to reach and charged prices that put it out of reach for a lot of families. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods with the most fast food chains and corner stores had the least access to fresh, local produce.
None of this is necessarily intentional, but the impact is the same: environmental benefits flow to people who already have advantages, while environmental harms get concentrated in communities with less political and economic power.
I brought these observations back to my family, and we had some really interesting dinner table conversations. My oldest, Sarah, immediately connected it to things they’d been learning about in her social studies class about housing discrimination and how neighborhoods developed their current demographics. “So environmental racism is like a real thing?” she asked. Yeah, kiddo, it really is.
We started talking about how our family’s environmental efforts fit into this bigger picture. The solar panels are great, but what about advocating for policies that would make clean energy accessible to more families? Composting helps reduce our waste, but what about supporting better recycling programs in underserved neighborhoods? Growing vegetables is fun, but what about food justice for communities without access to fresh produce?
I don’t want to give the impression that I suddenly became some kind of environmental justice expert. I’m still figuring this out, making mistakes, learning as I go. But I realized that if I was going to keep writing about environmental issues, I needed to expand my perspective beyond just what works for suburban families like mine.
So I started following community leaders and environmental justice organizations on social media. I began reading writers and activists who center the experiences of frontline communities – people who are most directly affected by pollution and climate change, often while having contributed least to causing these problems. I started paying attention to whose voices get quoted in environmental reporting and whose perspectives get left out.
One thing that really struck me was how much expertise exists in communities facing environmental challenges, but how rarely that expertise gets recognized or supported. Maria told me about residents in her neighborhood who had become incredibly knowledgeable about air quality monitoring, health impacts of industrial pollution, and regulatory processes – not because they wanted to become experts in these areas, but because they had to in order to protect their families.
“We know exactly when the plant increases production because we can smell it and our kids’ asthma gets worse,” one community member told me when Maria introduced me to some of her neighbors. “We’ve been tracking patterns for years, but when we bring this to officials, they want to see official monitoring data, not our lived experience.”
This made me think about how often solutions get developed by people who aren’t directly affected by the problems they’re trying to solve. It’s not that outside expertise doesn’t matter, but when it’s not combined with community knowledge and leadership, solutions often miss the mark or even create new problems.
I’ve been trying to apply this thinking to how I approach environmental issues in my own community. Instead of just focusing on what my family can do, I’m asking questions about what barriers exist for other families to make similar changes. Instead of assuming everyone shares my priorities, I’m trying to listen to what environmental concerns matter most to different communities.
This led me to get involved with our school district’s sustainability committee, where we’re working on issues like reducing waste from school lunches and improving air quality around schools. But I’m trying to approach it differently than I might have before – making sure we’re hearing from families across different income levels and neighborhoods, not just the parents who have time to attend evening meetings.
One thing we discovered is that several schools in lower-income areas have been dealing with indoor air quality issues for years, but those concerns hadn’t made it to the district-level sustainability discussions that focused more on things like solar panels and electric buses. Important issues, sure, but maybe not the most pressing environmental concerns for kids who are spending eight hours a day in buildings with poor ventilation.
I’m also trying to be more thoughtful about the content I create. Instead of just sharing what’s working for our family, I want to highlight community-led environmental initiatives and lift up voices of people who are often left out of mainstream environmental conversations. This means doing more research, conducting interviews with community leaders, and being willing to step back and amplify others rather than always centering my own experience.
It’s been humbling, honestly. There’s so much I didn’t know about environmental justice, and so many assumptions I’d made about how environmental problems affect different communities. I’ve had to confront the reality that some of the environmental benefits my family enjoys – like living in a neighborhood with good air quality and access to green spaces – aren’t just the result of our choices, but also our privileges.
But here’s what I’ve learned: recognizing these inequities doesn’t mean we should stop making environmental improvements in our own lives. It means we should think about how to make those improvements accessible to more people, and how to support community-led efforts to address environmental injustices.
For our family, this has meant getting involved in advocacy for policies that go beyond individual action. Supporting candidates who prioritize environmental justice. Backing initiatives for better public transit that could reduce pollution in everyone’s neighborhoods, not just ours. Contributing to organizations led by frontline communities rather than just mainstream environmental groups.
My kids are picking up on this too. Emma now asks questions about fairness when we talk about environmental issues. Sarah is doing a school project on environmental racism in Charlotte. Even our youngest has started noticing which playgrounds have more trees and cleaner air.
I think this broader perspective has actually made our family’s environmental efforts feel more meaningful, not less. When we reduce our energy use, we’re not just lowering our carbon footprint – we’re reducing demand that affects everyone, especially communities near power plants. When we support local food systems, we’re backing alternatives that could improve food access for everyone, not just families who can afford farmers market prices.
The truth is, environmental problems and climate change affect everyone, but they don’t affect everyone equally. The communities that have contributed least to creating these problems often face the worst impacts, while having the least resources to adapt. Any environmental solutions that ignore these realities aren’t really solutions at all – they’re just ways for privileged people to feel better while systemic problems persist.
I’m still learning how to be a better ally and advocate. I make mistakes, say the wrong thing sometimes, probably still center my own perspective more than I should. But I’m committed to this learning process because my kids deserve a future where environmental benefits and burdens are shared fairly, where everyone has access to clean air and water and healthy communities.
That conversation with Emma about solar panels and fairness opened up something important for our family. We’re still composting and conserving energy and growing vegetables, but now we’re also talking about justice and equity and how environmental solutions need to work for everyone. It’s a bigger, more complex conversation, but it’s also more honest about the world we’re actually living in and the one we want to create for our kids.
Because at the end of the day, there’s no such thing as environmental protection that leaves some people behind. There’s just justice or injustice, solutions that include everyone or benefit some at the expense of others. And if we’re serious about creating a sustainable future, we need to make sure it’s a future that works for all our kids, not just the ones whose families can afford solar panels.
