Depending on who you ask, citizen science has been around since Whewell’s Great Tide Experiments of the 1830s, or perhaps Audubon’s first Christmas Bird Count in 1900. However, it was not until 1989 that the term “citizen science” was first used, in an article in the MIT Technology Review, to describe partnerships between scientists and the public to conduct authentic research.

Around that same time, a different word was being coined for a very different sort of project. This was a project of resistance, a movement called environmental justice centered around the idea that exposure to environmental risk is disproportionately concentrated in low-income and minority communities. The word emerged out of a 1982 movement in a rural North Carolina county to resist the zoning of a toxic waste dump in their community.

Citizen science and environmental justice, words born seven years apart, came from very different families. Participants in the Christmas Bird Count, for instance, were largely white, well-to-do folks with the time and energy to spare counting birds for hours at a time over the holidays. Protestors from Warren County were mostly poor and Black, and were compelled to join the environmental justice movement because they felt they had no other choice– the environmental health of their community was literally on the line.

Yet despite these differences, both citizen scientists and environmental justice advocates have a lot in common. For one, they share a concern for the environment. Citizen scientists tend to think about the environment in terms of how anthropogenic changes might be impacting wildlife and wild landscapes, and how citizen science can be used to measure this change in order, ultimately, to stop it. For instance, fully 70% of the 1,300 citizen science projects hosted on SciStarter, the world’ largest repository of citizen science projects, are concerned with either measuring pollution or documenting natural aspects of the environment like bird migrations or hermit crab populations. Meanwhile, environmental justice is invested in documenting how environmental change is impacting people and how those people can organize to resist these negative impacts. In doing so environmental justice effectively bridged, for the first time, the environmental movement and the justice movement.

Further, both citizen science and environmental justice are invested in using tools to report on the impact of environmental problems. Citizen science tends to come at this from a scientific perspective, using scientific data collection tools to quantify, document, and report back on what is being found. For instance, the Wrightsville Beach Cleanup project gathers trash found on a beach every day and documents what kinds of trash are found and how much. This data is shared with participants through a public online database and participants can explore trends in this beach pollution over time through interactive graphs and tables. Environmental justice reports on the impact of environmental problems more through advocacy and litigation. For instance, in New Orleans, in response to highly elevated lead levels found in children living in government housing, multiple protests were staged, articles were written, and lawyers were hired to investigate whether city officials were neglecting their duty in dealing with environmental contamination. Citizen science also tends to have a more global perspective– even local projects often report their data in public spaces online that anyone can access– while environmental justice is often a more local, community-level movement.

I believe that the similarities and differences I have outlined between citizen science and environmental justice present a unique opportunity for the different pursuits to connect. Today, I think we are on the cusp of a really positive intersection that draws on the strengths of each pursuit to build new knowledge and justice systems.

Now, this is not a new proposal– in fact ever since their emergence in the 1980s, citizen science and environmental justice have been on a collision course. While early resistance to environmental injustices focused on protests and boycotts, much like the social justice and civil rights movements that it grew out of, it later included a more citizen science-like focus on actually documenting exposure to environmental harms in order to demonstrate scientifically how communities were being polluted. For instance, a community in Tonawanda, New York, fed up with health effects they were seeing in their community that they blamed on local polluting factories, began measuring their air quality through simple five-gallon buckets used to capture and measure air pollution. This community eventually found that local factories were illegally polluting the air. The CEO of one of these companies was later sent to prison in one of the biggest victories ever for the environmental justice movement (it should be noted that the Tonawanda community was whiter and wealthier than many other environmental justice communities).

Likewise, citizen science has increasingly drawn on the tools and tactics used by environmental justice to increase community relevance and involvement in project design. While most early citizen science projects only allowed public participation in data collection, more recent thinkers in citizen science have decided a continuum should exist from “contributory” style projects to projects that truly partner with communities at every step in the research process to produce results that are beneficial and relevant to the community. This community-driven approach was born of increasing understanding of the importance of community involvement in scientific and research decision-making wrought in no small part by the environmental justice movement.

Perhaps the best demonstration of this sort of community and justice-informed citizen science project occurred in Eastern North Carolina, in communities living in some of the densest concentrations of hog farms in the country. These poor, largely minority communities struggled for years with health problems they blamed on pollution created by these hog farms (namely, the air pollution caused by spraying gallons and gallons of hog feces into the air, or storing it in open pits. A research team at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led by the late Dr. Steve Wing worked directly with community groups like the Concerned Citizens of Tillery to understand how his research could answer questions for the community members that might lead to improved health outcomes. This sort of practice in epidemiology has been known for decades as community-based participatory research (CBPR), and is largely identical to community-driven citizen science. This practice has only grown more common. Eventually, the team decided to analyze air pollution all around these hog farms while at the same time asking residents to measure the health effects they felt while standing outside their homes for a set amount of time every week. Wing was eventually able to correlate elevated air pollution levels as measured from his sensors with worsened health complaints by study participants, leading to new legislation limiting this sort of pollution.

Now we are at a point where this overlap between citizen science and environmental justice is truly beginning to blossom. Both practices are drawing on the strengths of one another in a really productive way that is leading to better-organized justice movements and more community engaged and community relevant citizen science. This is important for two reasons. First, more privilege tends to reside among citizen science practitioners who tend to be whiter, more educated, and wealthier than the country as a whole. By engaging this audience not only with bird-mapping projects and galaxy-finding adventures, but also with projects that are meant to improve outcomes for marginalized communities and give them more access to agents of change, citizen science can empower the environmental justice with an increased ability to resist. This is particularly true because citizen science tends to have a more global focus than environmental justice, which allows for greater access to power through greater access to crowds. While these characteristics have their own strengths and weaknesses generally, one specific weakness of a local focus is that it limits the audience of people that are engaged with an issue. By drawing on the tools of citizen science, environmental justice might be able to build a more global action network that is more effective in rallying for change.

Bridging the gap between citizen science and environmental justice could also have important benefits for the environmental movement. Traditionally, the environmental movement is essentially a white construct structured and organized largely by white people to achieve the goals of white people. This is problematic. For instance, while saving endangered species through setting aside land for habitats is a good thing, a myopic focus on that sort of environmental protection without also investing in protecting humans that are likewise suffering from environmental degradation is hypocritical at best and racist at worst. Environmental justice getting more fully inserted into the world of citizen science might be a means of bringing positive change to the environmental movement that better acknowledges human suffering wrought by environmental contamination.

Together, citizen science and environmental justice are tackling really important problems in our world today. The local, community-level, community-informed focus of environmental justice has huge benefits to communities that are suffering from environmental degradation. Likewise, the global scale and scientifically-informed process of citizen science enables massive research projects to better understand the world around us while at the same time providing access to scientific tools for the community. Moving forward, both these communities have tremendous potential if they partner together to effect change, from the community to the world. If citizen scientists use the tools available to them and the training they have developed in order to not only document the natural environment, but also the built environment and the impact of environmental change on people, we have the opportunity to make positive changes in our world on a massive scale.